Pastor Darren: I'm going to start, because we're starting this series about United Methodism with a United Methodist test.
Pastor Darren: Are you ready?
Pastor Darren: May the fourth be with you.
Pastor Darren: I have exactly one Methodist in this room and it's Boyd, the appropriate Methodist response.
Pastor Darren: May the fourth be with you and also with you.
Pastor Darren: Ah see, that's us Methodists Adopting Star Wars mythology and not many people know this.
Pastor Darren: John Wesley, a Jedi.
Pastor Darren: Well, he had that kind of focus, laser focus.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: I think I'm going to be tough on you again.
Pastor Darren: We are doing something wrong.
Pastor Darren: I'm going to invite you now to open your hymnal.
Pastor Darren: I believe yours is red.
Pastor Darren: It's the Roman numeral, kind of in the preface to our hymnal, page seven.
Pastor Darren: John Wesley himself wanted to make sure that we were doing this correctly and I want to say maybe we aren't All right.
Pastor Darren: Let's go through these Directions for singing, written by John Wesley himself.
Pastor Darren: Learn these tunes before you learn any others.
Pastor Darren: Afterwards, learn as many as you please.
Pastor Darren: Okay, that one's all right.
Pastor Darren: Sing them exactly as they are printed here, without altering or mending them at all.
Pastor Darren: And if you have learned to sing them otherwise, unlearn it as soon as you can.
Pastor Darren: Sing all.
Pastor Darren: See that you join with the congregation as frequently as you can.
Pastor Darren: Let not the slight degree of weakness or weariness hinder you.
Pastor Darren: If it is a cross to you, take it up and you will find it a blessing.
Pastor Darren: Are we living this?
Pastor Darren: Are we living this truth?
Pastor Darren: Sing all here.
Pastor Darren: That's on the Sunday.
Pastor Darren: I cut out one of the verses and only the choir was singing.
Pastor Darren: Sing all right.
Pastor Darren: All four verses, right, gloria?
Pastor Darren: I should have told Gloria my fault.
Pastor Darren: All right.
Pastor Darren: Now I'm back into our lesson.
Pastor Darren: Sing lustily, with good courage.
Pastor Darren: Beware of singing as if you were half dead or half asleep, but lift up your voice with strength.
Pastor Darren: Be no more afraid of your voice now, nor more ashamed of its being heard than when you sang the songs of Satan.
Pastor Darren: We saw you the other day carousing.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: Sing in time.
Pastor Darren: Whatever time is sung, be sure to keep with it.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: Take note.
Pastor Darren: Finally, above all, sing spiritually.
Pastor Darren: Have an eye to God in every word you sing.
Pastor Darren: Aim at pleasing Him more than yourself or any other creature.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: So shall your singing be such as the Lord will approve here and reward you when he cometh in the clouds of heaven.
Pastor Darren: There endeth the lesson.
Pastor Darren: The clouds of heaven, there endeth the lesson.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: I hope you enjoyed them and I hope you can see relatively clearly exactly the type of personality we are dealing with.
Pastor Darren: This is not a light-hearted, take-it-as-it-comes kind of guy.
Pastor Darren: He is pretty driven.
Pastor Darren: He might even be OCD, right.
Pastor Darren: I kind of wonder if he ticked off as many people as he brought to faith as he lived his time with this intensity.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: He was at Oxford and he starts what he calls holy clubs with his brother, charles.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: They were so organized, you might even call them a kind of method.
Pastor Darren: See what I did there.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: Early in his career John Wesley heads to the US.
Pastor Darren: He is going to bring people to faith in the new country there in the United States.
Pastor Darren: And this was a significant time in John Wesley's life.
Pastor Darren: This is a significant event in his life.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: And the water's coming over and everybody's doing their best to manage their fear.
Pastor Darren: And Wesley notices this group of faith called Moravians and for some reason they don't seem to be as scared as everybody else.
Pastor Darren: And this gets Wesley Remember, he's a little OCD.
Pastor Darren: How do those guys have deeper faith than I have?
Pastor Darren: Why am I scared?
Pastor Darren: And they're not scared.
Pastor Darren: So this marks him to a certain extent.
Pastor Darren: He does work ministry in the United States for a while.
Pastor Darren: We can only say he wasn't all that successful.
Pastor Darren: He leaves relatively humbled with his efforts here in the United States.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: It was a moment of faith, it was an epiphany for him.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: For me, the key word is again grace.
Pastor Darren: Grace had become real to him.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: We will talk a bit more about grace next week.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: So wesley continues his ministry in england.
Pastor Darren: Just a few more facts about who he is.
Pastor Darren: There's more to the story than I'm giving you, but I'm just kind of giving you an overview here.
Pastor Darren: It is said he traveled 250,000 miles in his lifetime enough to go 10 times around the earth.
Pastor Darren: So this is pre-planes, pre-cars.
Pastor Darren: So that amount of travel is impressive.
Pastor Darren: And he is known for constantly traveling, constantly going to communities, constantly preaching faith Before passing.
Pastor Darren: In 1791, there were 132,000 Methodists and today there are about 10 million Methodists.
Pastor Darren: So he hit into something.
Pastor Darren: He hit into something back then that continues to resonate with many, many people in this world.
Pastor Darren: Interestingly enough, wesley never advocated for leaving the Anglican church of which he was a part.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: So you can understand some of that revolt.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: This was the passage that really kind of made me think of Wesley.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: The letter starts with doctrine.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: And our passage is a prayer that ends the first section, and you heard Candice read it earlier.
Pastor Darren: Wesley being an intense guy, I could hear him praying this prayer.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: Grant that we're strengthened in our inner being.
Pastor Darren: Christ may dwell in our hearts, rooted and grounded in love.
Pastor Darren: I can hear Wesley praying these, himself comprehending the length, height and depth of Christ, filled with the fullness of Christ.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: I don't know about you.
Pastor Darren: Do you ever feel like you are on, kind of feeling like Wesley on that ship to America when the storm hits?
Pastor Darren: Maybe it's not always a massive storm, maybe it's a smaller storm, but you are sitting there going?
Pastor Darren: Why am I so anxious?
Pastor Darren: Where is God here?
Pastor Darren: Why isn't God more fully in my heart.
Pastor Darren: Why are other people able to stay centered while I live in my anxiety?
Pastor Darren: We forget, I think, that many of our devout believers, our devout Christians in our times they had times of doubt.
Pastor Darren: Mother Teresa, martin Luther King these are not people who were driving in the fullness of faith all of their lives.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: How might we own that prayer in a more meaningful way?
Pastor Darren: And I do that with some advice, actually, from Wesley.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: Now, he didn't write theological treatises as much as he preached.
Pastor Darren: Most of what we have from Wesley are his sermons.
Pastor Darren: He did journal, but those weren't necessarily directed in the way the theological community would own them.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: And when you live that hope, that hope begins to grow.
Pastor Darren: We give God a chance to actually respond to that hope, to actually fill our hearts with something meaningful.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: Maybe that's how God gets a chance to work within us.
Pastor Darren: God gets a chance to respond in meaningful ways that deepen our own faith and inspire our own journey.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: Let's close in prayer.
Pastor Darren: For this reason, god, we bow our knees before you, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: 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.
Pastor Darren: To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus, to all generations, for now and forever.
Pastor Darren: Amen.