As if Wesley were speaking directly to our Biblically illiterate culture, and sadly our almost as Biblically illiterate church, he stresses that pure ignorance is a major cause of spiritual degeneration and apostasy.  Here is how he puts it…. Another general cause of this darkness is ignorance; which is likewise of various kinds.  If men…

JOHN WESLEY ON A KEMPIS’ ‘IMITATION OF CHRIST’             Perhaps more than any other devotional book of its time, John Wesley pointed his Methodists to a book he came to call ‘The Pattern of Christ’ by Thomas a Kempis.  A book originally written in Latin for the Brethren of the Common Life in about 1411,…

Sometimes spiritual formation literature can get pretty weird and demanding, especially if you are an ordinary Christian just trying to improve your Christian life. Sometimes it sounds like you are being called to be some sort of individualistic spiritual superman or superwoman.  John Wesley had a good deal to say about the wrong sort of…

John Wesley was getting aggravated with his Moravian friends because of their quietistic tendencies.   They were having some heated discussions in London about the means of grace, and there were some Moravians even arguing that ‘grace happens’ according to God’s preordained plan, and that there was nothing we humans could do to prod God into…

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