WEBVTT 00:00:00.220 --> 00:00:05.751 I'm going to start, because we're starting this series about United Methodism with a United Methodist test. 00:00:05.751 --> 00:00:07.333 Are you ready? 00:00:07.333 --> 00:00:11.467 May the fourth be with you. 00:00:11.467 --> 00:00:22.664 I have exactly one Methodist in this room and it's Boyd, the appropriate Methodist response. 00:00:22.664 --> 00:00:25.932 May the fourth be with you and also with you. 00:00:25.932 --> 00:00:36.369 Ah see, that's us Methodists Adopting Star Wars mythology and not many people know this. 00:00:37.151 --> 00:00:39.755 John Wesley, a Jedi. 00:00:39.755 --> 00:00:47.268 Well, he had that kind of focus, laser focus. 00:00:47.268 --> 00:00:59.113 In fact he might have had too much laser focus, I tell you, last week I came in kind of mean, but this week I'm not going to be any less mean. 00:00:59.113 --> 00:01:01.482 I think I'm going to be tough on you again. 00:01:01.482 --> 00:01:05.168 We are doing something wrong. 00:01:05.168 --> 00:01:09.135 I'm going to invite you now to open your hymnal. 00:01:09.135 --> 00:01:10.762 I believe yours is red. 00:01:10.762 --> 00:01:18.694 It's the Roman numeral, kind of in the preface to our hymnal, page seven. 00:01:18.694 --> 00:01:31.811 John Wesley himself wanted to make sure that we were doing this correctly and I want to say maybe we aren't All right. 00:01:32.492 --> 00:01:37.659 Let's go through these Directions for singing, written by John Wesley himself. 00:01:37.659 --> 00:01:40.188 Learn these tunes before you learn any others. 00:01:40.188 --> 00:01:42.364 Afterwards, learn as many as you please. 00:01:42.364 --> 00:01:45.091 Okay, that one's all right. 00:01:45.091 --> 00:01:50.471 Sing them exactly as they are printed here, without altering or mending them at all. 00:01:50.471 --> 00:01:55.873 And if you have learned to sing them otherwise, unlearn it as soon as you can. 00:01:55.873 --> 00:02:02.206 Sing all. 00:02:02.206 --> 00:02:07.447 See that you join with the congregation as frequently as you can. 00:02:07.447 --> 00:02:11.105 Let not the slight degree of weakness or weariness hinder you. 00:02:11.105 --> 00:02:16.251 If it is a cross to you, take it up and you will find it a blessing. 00:02:16.251 --> 00:02:18.931 Are we living this? 00:02:18.931 --> 00:02:21.004 Are we living this truth? 00:02:21.004 --> 00:02:23.585 Sing all here. 00:02:23.585 --> 00:02:24.580 That's on the Sunday. 00:02:24.760 --> 00:02:27.481 I cut out one of the verses and only the choir was singing. 00:02:27.481 --> 00:02:29.003 Sing all right. 00:02:29.003 --> 00:02:30.586 All four verses, right, gloria? 00:02:30.586 --> 00:02:34.274 I should have told Gloria my fault. 00:02:34.274 --> 00:02:34.960 All right. 00:02:34.960 --> 00:02:37.164 Now I'm back into our lesson. 00:02:37.526 --> 00:02:39.409 Sing lustily, with good courage. 00:02:39.409 --> 00:02:45.412 Beware of singing as if you were half dead or half asleep, but lift up your voice with strength. 00:02:45.412 --> 00:02:54.790 Be no more afraid of your voice now, nor more ashamed of its being heard than when you sang the songs of Satan. 00:02:54.790 --> 00:03:01.150 We saw you the other day carousing. 00:03:01.150 --> 00:03:24.986 Sing modestly, do not baw ball so as to be heard above or distinct from the rest of the congregation, that you may destroy the harmony, but strive to unite your voices together so as to make one clear, melodious sound. 00:03:26.109 --> 00:03:26.871 Sing in time. 00:03:26.871 --> 00:03:29.063 Whatever time is sung, be sure to keep with it. 00:03:29.063 --> 00:03:39.735 Do not run before nor stay behind it, but attend close to the leading voices and move their width as exactly as you can, and take care not to sing too slow. 00:03:39.735 --> 00:03:51.209 This drawing way naturally steals on all who are lazy, and it is high time to drive it out from us and sing all our tunes just as quick as we did at first. 00:03:51.209 --> 00:03:52.893 Take note. 00:03:52.893 --> 00:03:56.669 Finally, above all, sing spiritually. 00:03:56.669 --> 00:03:59.247 Have an eye to God in every word you sing. 00:03:59.247 --> 00:04:03.731 Aim at pleasing Him more than yourself or any other creature. 00:04:03.731 --> 00:04:13.743 In order to do this, attend strictly to the sense of what you sing and see that your heart is not carried away with the sound, but offered to God continually. 00:04:13.743 --> 00:04:22.086 So shall your singing be such as the Lord will approve here and reward you when he cometh in the clouds of heaven. 00:04:22.086 --> 00:04:24.889 There endeth the lesson. 00:04:24.889 --> 00:04:28.173 The clouds of heaven, there endeth the lesson. 00:04:28.273 --> 00:04:42.125 Friends, we're talking about John Wesley today, and I could think of no better introduction than that list of rules that John Wesley wrote up for singing in church. 00:04:42.125 --> 00:04:51.144 I hope you enjoyed them and I hope you can see relatively clearly exactly the type of personality we are dealing with. 00:04:51.144 --> 00:04:56.113 This is not a light-hearted, take-it-as-it-comes kind of guy. 00:04:56.113 --> 00:04:58.824 He is pretty driven. 00:04:58.824 --> 00:05:03.574 He might even be OCD, right. 00:05:03.574 --> 00:05:14.411 I kind of wonder if he ticked off as many people as he brought to faith as he lived his time with this intensity. 00:05:14.411 --> 00:05:37.860 So today we're going to learn a little bit about this guy a little bit more, and I'm going to start mostly with his ministry today, because we'll learn a little bit more about his theology and what he believed in, tried to establish here in the United Methodist Church, but a little bit of his life journey, a part of what we know him for and what led to ultimately leading to creating a denomination. 00:05:37.860 --> 00:05:46.451 He was at Oxford and he starts what he calls holy clubs with his brother, charles. 00:05:46.451 --> 00:06:17.228 What he felt was that in the church they weren't quite disciplined enough for him and that he, along with his brother, needed to create this other form of discipline for people who really wanted to dig into the faith they were going to dig in with weekly practice of prayer, weekly study of scripture and weekly accountability a very big part of these meetings. 00:06:17.228 --> 00:06:23.387 They were so organized, you might even call them a kind of method. 00:06:23.387 --> 00:06:25.596 See what I did there. 00:06:25.596 --> 00:06:43.819 Ah, yes, yeah, that originally even was a little bit of a negative connotation and what they called this group of people, but now we've kind of claimed it and that is obviously a big part of our name and how we identify ourselves. 00:06:44.259 --> 00:06:48.088 Early in his career John Wesley heads to the US. 00:06:48.088 --> 00:06:53.146 He is going to bring people to faith in the new country there in the United States. 00:06:53.146 --> 00:06:58.423 And this was a significant time in John Wesley's life. 00:06:58.423 --> 00:07:01.468 This is a significant event in his life. 00:07:01.468 --> 00:07:20.567 There's this massive storm on his way over to the United States, so much so that people were fearing for their lives and you can imagine in a ship of 300 years ago that a storm would be quite threatening. 00:07:20.567 --> 00:07:28.182 And the water's coming over and everybody's doing their best to manage their fear. 00:07:28.382 --> 00:07:38.064 And Wesley notices this group of faith called Moravians and for some reason they don't seem to be as scared as everybody else. 00:07:38.064 --> 00:07:41.290 And this gets Wesley Remember, he's a little OCD. 00:07:41.290 --> 00:07:45.586 How do those guys have deeper faith than I have? 00:07:45.586 --> 00:07:48.059 Why am I scared? 00:07:48.059 --> 00:07:50.004 And they're not scared. 00:07:50.004 --> 00:07:52.564 So this marks him to a certain extent. 00:07:52.564 --> 00:07:57.235 He does work ministry in the United States for a while. 00:07:57.235 --> 00:08:00.886 We can only say he wasn't all that successful. 00:08:00.886 --> 00:08:07.762 He leaves relatively humbled with his efforts here in the United States. 00:08:08.276 --> 00:08:30.846 But back in England he has another experience again with a Moravian community at a church in Aldersgate and he is hearing the reading of the preface to the epistle to the Romans and he has his heart strangely warmed. 00:08:30.846 --> 00:08:44.539 Now some of you may be thinking he had the chili that night, because you have also had your heart strangely warmed In this context. 00:08:44.539 --> 00:08:48.842 It was a moment of faith, it was an epiphany for him. 00:08:48.842 --> 00:09:12.330 It was when you might say that the things that he had been preaching for his whole life, preaching intensely and intently finally started to take kind of hold inside of him, especially with this idea, this belief in grace, god's unconditional love for us. 00:09:12.330 --> 00:09:26.686 Listen to what he says as he's describing this moment, about a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I, wesley, felt my heart strangely warmed. 00:09:26.686 --> 00:09:43.523 I felt I did trust in Christ, christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death. 00:09:43.523 --> 00:09:50.056 For me, the key word is again grace. 00:09:50.056 --> 00:09:53.442 Grace had become real to him. 00:09:53.442 --> 00:10:15.346 God's unconditional love had become something he didn't just preach, but that something he had experienced in his heart, in his spirit, and it's possibly why grace is such a big part of our own theological understanding of United Methodism or Methodism in its time. 00:10:15.346 --> 00:10:19.426 We will talk a bit more about grace next week. 00:10:19.426 --> 00:10:27.522 We will talk a bit more about grace next week, but just know that it is a significant part of our understanding of faith as united methodists. 00:10:27.542 --> 00:10:30.168 So wesley continues his ministry in england. 00:10:30.168 --> 00:10:33.359 Just a few more facts about who he is. 00:10:33.359 --> 00:10:38.407 There's more to the story than I'm giving you, but I'm just kind of giving you an overview here. 00:10:38.407 --> 00:10:49.504 It is said he traveled 250,000 miles in his lifetime enough to go 10 times around the earth. 00:10:49.504 --> 00:10:53.650 So this is pre-planes, pre-cars. 00:10:53.650 --> 00:10:58.423 So that amount of travel is impressive. 00:10:58.423 --> 00:11:08.202 And he is known for constantly traveling, constantly going to communities, constantly preaching faith Before passing. 00:11:08.202 --> 00:11:19.764 In 1791, there were 132,000 Methodists and today there are about 10 million Methodists. 00:11:19.764 --> 00:11:22.469 So he hit into something. 00:11:22.469 --> 00:11:28.587 He hit into something back then that continues to resonate with many, many people in this world. 00:11:29.014 --> 00:11:36.149 Interestingly enough, wesley never advocated for leaving the Anglican church of which he was a part. 00:11:36.149 --> 00:11:55.196 He only really agreed to creating this new denomination or putting out some parameters for what it would be after the Revolutionary War, because we Americans, we from the United States, weren't really going to follow a church where the king was in charge anymore. 00:11:55.196 --> 00:11:59.403 So you can understand some of that revolt. 00:11:59.403 --> 00:12:13.875 And so it's that point that he starts defining what this church is going to be, and so that's kind of an overview of the story that leads to United Methodism from John Wesley. 00:12:13.875 --> 00:12:36.663 And so for today, I was looking for a scripture that I felt like kind of encapsulated in some meaningful way, this person, this presence that had the charisma and the vision that has led to this movement of United Methodism, and I landed on Ephesians 3. 00:12:37.946 --> 00:12:41.370 This was the passage that really kind of made me think of Wesley. 00:12:41.370 --> 00:12:54.664 This is Paul's letter to the church in Ephesus, Probably not actually written by Paul but by one of his disciples, and it is a visionary book. 00:12:54.664 --> 00:13:13.181 This letter is looking to a new future with God, a new future under Jesus Christ, in which we would be a society that were living in faith, living in faith together. 00:13:13.181 --> 00:13:16.653 The letter starts with doctrine. 00:13:16.653 --> 00:13:29.475 The first half is all about what we might believe and then the second half is about praxis, our fancy word for how you live out your faith. 00:13:29.475 --> 00:13:38.114 And our passage is a prayer that ends the first section, and you heard Candice read it earlier. 00:13:39.605 --> 00:13:45.317 Wesley being an intense guy, I could hear him praying this prayer. 00:13:45.317 --> 00:14:04.529 These phrases to me resonate with somebody who was so intent on his faith, so intent on following what God wants him to do, so intent in opening his heart to the presence of Christ. 00:14:04.529 --> 00:14:08.317 Grant that we're strengthened in our inner being. 00:14:08.317 --> 00:14:13.618 Christ may dwell in our hearts, rooted and grounded in love. 00:14:13.618 --> 00:14:25.174 I can hear Wesley praying these, himself comprehending the length, height and depth of Christ, filled with the fullness of Christ. 00:14:25.174 --> 00:14:45.895 You can imagine somebody as focused and as driven as the guy who would write rules for singing might zero in on faith, something that carries that huge significance to our lives, to the life of society, to the future of God's kingdom. 00:14:45.895 --> 00:15:08.913 Personally, as I read it, maybe why I land on this scripture is because I might have a bit of longing in my own heart for that deep, deep faith, the kind of faith that Wesley had, the kind of faith that the writer to the church in Ephesus had. 00:15:10.476 --> 00:15:11.178 I don't know about you. 00:15:11.178 --> 00:15:21.432 Do you ever feel like you are on, kind of feeling like Wesley on that ship to America when the storm hits? 00:15:21.432 --> 00:15:28.631 Maybe it's not always a massive storm, maybe it's a smaller storm, but you are sitting there going? 00:15:28.631 --> 00:15:31.433 Why am I so anxious? 00:15:31.433 --> 00:15:34.392 Where is God here? 00:15:34.392 --> 00:15:37.333 Why isn't God more fully in my heart. 00:15:37.333 --> 00:15:47.340 Why are other people able to stay centered while I live in my anxiety? 00:15:49.346 --> 00:16:00.451 We forget, I think, that many of our devout believers, our devout Christians in our times they had times of doubt. 00:16:00.451 --> 00:16:11.645 Mother Teresa, martin Luther King these are not people who were driving in the fullness of faith all of their lives. 00:16:11.645 --> 00:16:21.398 They were asking questions, they were wrestling, trying to understand if they were being who God wanted them to be, doing what God wanted them to do. 00:16:21.398 --> 00:16:51.307 I've come to learn that maybe doubt isn't really this bad thing that we tend to try to avoid, but maybe doubt is just a sign that we're growing, that we're asking the questions that we need to ask in order to understand how God's working in a complicated world in which not everything always adds up as much as we want it to add up. 00:16:51.307 --> 00:17:06.679 My question for us today, as we talk about Wesley and we're living into this passage from Ephesians, is that we might ask ourselves how we can live more deeply in that faith. 00:17:06.679 --> 00:17:11.896 How might we own that prayer in a more meaningful way? 00:17:11.896 --> 00:17:15.095 And I do that with some advice, actually, from Wesley. 00:17:16.384 --> 00:17:27.398 One of the things that he preached quite often came from a professor of his that taught it to him and it's a simple phrase preach faith until you have faith. 00:17:27.398 --> 00:17:39.096 Now, he didn't write theological treatises as much as he preached. 00:17:39.096 --> 00:17:42.320 Most of what we have from Wesley are his sermons. 00:17:42.320 --> 00:17:50.479 He did journal, but those weren't necessarily directed in the way the theological community would own them. 00:17:50.479 --> 00:18:10.115 But in that journey, in his preaching, in his journaling, he preached this frequently and it reminds me of the series we did last summer about hope, that sermon about how hope is something you hold but, maybe more importantly, something you live. 00:18:10.115 --> 00:18:16.597 And when you live that hope, that hope begins to grow. 00:18:16.597 --> 00:18:25.065 We give God a chance to actually respond to that hope, to actually fill our hearts with something meaningful. 00:18:25.065 --> 00:18:39.337 Perhaps that is an approach that we can use when we're talking about faith, that maybe we too should be preaching faith until we have faith. 00:18:39.337 --> 00:19:02.281 That in those times when you feel least like preaching, least like living out our faith, those might be the most critical times to preach that faith, to live that faith, to put a snack bag together for the Thrive community Plug, plug. 00:19:02.281 --> 00:19:16.126 Maybe, especially when we are feeling that lacking in our faith, that uncertain, is when we ought to be more intentional about living it and when we live it. 00:19:16.126 --> 00:19:20.796 Maybe that's how God gets a chance to work within us. 00:19:20.796 --> 00:19:29.759 God gets a chance to respond in meaningful ways that deepen our own faith and inspire our own journey. 00:19:31.747 --> 00:19:47.349 In closing, I rewrote the Bible, wrote the Bible, really just our scripture for today, but I shaped it into a prayer that we can pray together as a community here, 2025. 00:19:47.349 --> 00:19:48.914 Let's close in prayer. 00:19:48.914 --> 00:19:59.492 For this reason, god, we bow our knees before you, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. 00:19:59.492 --> 00:20:14.406 We pray that, according to the riches of his glory he may grant, that we may be strengthened in our inner being with power through his spirit, and that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith, as we are being rooted and grounded in love. 00:20:14.406 --> 00:20:40.825 I pray that we may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and the length, and the height and the depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that we may be filled with all of the fullness of God that to him, by the power at work within us, is able to accomplish abundantly, more than all we can ask or imagine. 00:20:40.825 --> 00:20:48.128 To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus, to all generations, for now and forever. 00:20:48.128 --> 00:20:50.009 Amen. 00:20:50.009 --> 00:20:51.830 Amen.