Reading different theological perspectives. Historical readings express their authors' perspectives, including Arminian and Reformed or Calvinist traditions. Inclusion does not make an author's position settled CTS doctrine. Read with Scripture and the assigned material. A supported answer from another evangelical perspective should be assessed on its reasoning, not penalized simply for differing from the author. If an automated score rejects such an answer, ask CTS for review.

Master’s Assigned Readings (all five)

M.Div. and Th.M. students read all five assigned selections and take their separate exam after activation. The test page states the current rule; valid earlier completions remain valid.

Optional Honors (choose three)

Honors is optional on every track. Certificate and Associate students may read three honors selections without a required-reading exam. Honors does not replace either master’s exam.

The Master's textbook test: read Sermons on Several Occasions (I–X) — John Wesley, then take its test: twenty fill-in-the-blank questions, drawn from forty; eighteen right passes. Each answer is marked right or wrong at once. Correct answers and explanations are available after the attempt passes. It is separate from the reading test on the five digests below: passing one does not pass the other. On the M.Div. and Th.M. tracks both tests are being introduced; each test's page says whether it is in force yet. Until then any student may take them, and a pass is kept in your record.

The Master's reading test: separate from the honors invitation below. Honors asks you to read any three of these digests; the Master's test covers all five. It has twenty fill-in-the-blank questions, four from each reading, drawn from forty; eighteen right passes. Each answer is marked right or wrong at once; correct answers and explanations are available after the attempt passes. You may try again after a short wait. The test is being introduced: its page says whether it is in force yet. Until then any student may take it, and a pass is kept in your record.

Honors option: Complete any three of the five readings below. These readings supplement the course and do not replace its units or examinations.

On this site: Each of the five readings is a Chapala Theological Seminary digest, written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French here on the site — every one opens directly from this page, with nothing to download. Each card names the work its digest is made from.

Selected: 0 of 3

Reading 1 · Grace and Genuine Faith

Grace the Source, Faith the Condition

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Sermons I–II (“Salvation by Faith”; “The Almost Christian”), The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. I (Bristol: William Pine, 1771)

Preached at Oxford eighteen days after Aldersgate, “Salvation by Faith” declares that grace is the source and faith the condition of a present salvation from guilt, fear and the power of sin. “The Almost Christian” then shows how honesty, outward godliness and even sincerity can fall short of love for God, love for neighbour and living faith.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Grace the Source, Faith the Condition: Salvation by Faith and The Almost Christian

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading on the first two sermons in Wesley’s collected Works: what saving faith is, what it saves us from, and why a sincere, religious person can still be only “almost” a Christian

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Sermon I, “Salvation by Faith” (Ephesians 2:8), and Sermon II, “The Almost Christian” (Acts 26:28), in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. I (Bristol: William Pine, 1771). The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Sermons I–II
Primary source
1738 and 1741
John Wesley

A word before you read. These two sermons were first preached to the University of Oxford, three years apart. The first announces the message Wesley had just received for himself: we are saved by grace, through faith. The second asks a hard question of every churchgoer: is my religion the real thing, or only very close to it? Read them as a pair. One describes the gift; the other describes what life looks like before and after the gift is received.

1.A Sermon Preached Eighteen Days After Aldersgate

John Wesley (1703–1791) was a priest of the Church of England and a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. In 1729 he and his brother Charles led a small group of students who met to pray, study the Scriptures, take Communion often and visit prisoners. Other students mocked them as the “Holy Club” and the “Methodists.” Wesley was serious and disciplined, yet he had no settled peace. After a painful mission to Georgia (1735–1737) and long conversations with Moravian Christians, he went on 24 May 1738 to a small meeting in Aldersgate Street, London. While someone read Luther’s preface to Romans, he felt his heart “strangely warmed” and received an assurance that Christ had taken away his sins. On 11 June 1738, only eighteen days later, he preached “Salvation by Faith” in St Mary’s Church before the University. When Wesley gathered his sermons for publication, he placed it first, and it still opens the first volume of his collected Works, printed in Bristol in 1771. These sermons were not just devotional writing. In 1763 Wesley’s legal “Model Deed” required Methodist preachers to teach nothing contrary to his Notes on the New Testament and his published sermons. Since then these “Standard Sermons” have served Methodists as doctrinal standards, a measure of what Methodist preaching should teach.

2.Grace Before Everything

Wesley begins not with human effort but with God’s generosity. Every blessing God has given is “of his mere grace,” his free and undeserved favour. Grace formed us from the dust, keeps us alive today, and works whatever good is found in us. A sinner therefore has nothing to bring. Even our best works need forgiveness, because they grow from a corrupt tree. Then comes the sentence that sums up the whole sermon: “Grace is the source, faith the condition, of salvation.” Notice the order. Faith is not a payment that earns grace; it is the open hand that receives it. Later Wesleyan teaching names one more part of this truth. Wesley spoke of “preventing grace,” using prevent in its old English sense of “going before.” We now usually call it prevenient grace: the grace of God that reaches every person before he or she seeks God. It awakens the conscience, draws the heart, and restores enough freedom for a person to respond. In Wesleyan theology nobody comes to God on his own; God has always moved first.

3.What Faith Is It That Saves?

Wesley clears the ground by saying what saving faith is not. It is not merely the faith of a “Heathen,” who believes that God exists and rewards those who seek him and that moral virtue matters. It is not the faith of a devil, who knows very well that Jesus is the Son of God and trembles. It is not even the faith the apostles had before the cross, when they had left everything to follow Jesus but did not yet understand his death and resurrection. Saving faith is faith in Christ, and in God through Christ. It is not “a cold, lifeless assent, a train of ideas in the head,” but “a disposition of the heart.” It trusts the merit of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. Wesley uses an old word, “recumbency,” for this: leaning one’s whole weight on Christ, the way a tired man rests his body on a bed. Faith is both believing that the gospel is true and resting on the One the gospel offers.

4.A Present Salvation from Guilt, Fear and Power

What does this faith save us from? Wesley’s answer is bold: it is a present salvation. Paul does not say “you shall be saved” but “you are saved.” In one word, we are saved from sin. First we are saved from the guilt of all past sin, because Christ has borne the curse for us and there is no condemnation for those who believe. Second, we are saved from fear. Wesley distinguishes a filial fear, the loving fear of a child who does not want to grieve a parent, from servile fear, the slave’s dread of punishment. Believers lose the second, not the first. They are saved from the fear of falling away, Wesley adds, though not from its possibility. Third, believers are saved from the power of sin. Using 1 John, Wesley says that one born of God does not commit habitual or wilful sin, and resists sinful desires “in the birth.” Here many Reformed Christians disagree on two points. They teach that true believers will certainly persevere, and they doubt that believers are ever free from sin in this life. Wesley himself will qualify his language in Reading 4. But the heart of his claim is clear. The gospel offers new birth now, not only pardon for later.

5.Answering the Objections

The last section of Sermon I answers critics. Does preaching faith alone undermine holiness? No, because the faith Wesley preaches produces good works. Does it make people proud? It may, but boasting is excluded, since both the faith and the salvation are “the gift of God.” Will people sin so that grace may abound? Some will, but the sincere will be led to repentance. Will it drive people to despair? Yes, to despair of their own merits, which is exactly where trust in Christ begins. Is it an uncomfortable doctrine? On the contrary, it is the only comforting one. Wesley names Zacchaeus, the dishonest tax collector, and Mary Magdalene, and hears a hearer say, “Then I, even I, may hope for mercy!” Finally, some said salvation by faith should not be preached to everyone. Whom should we leave out, Wesley asks? Not the poor, the unlearned, the young or sinners. He ends by linking his message to the Reformation. The Church of England’s own Homilies called this doctrine “the strong rock and foundation” of Christian religion, and Martin Luther had revived it.

6.The Almost Christian

Three years later, on 25 July 1741, Wesley preached again at St Mary’s, now on King Agrippa’s words to Paul: “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” Wesley lists what an almost Christian has. First, “heathen honesty”: justice, truthfulness and ordinary kindness, which even the ancient pagans expected. Second, the “form of godliness”: avoiding what the gospel forbids, doing good with real effort, attending worship reverently, receiving the Lord’s Supper, and praying with the family and in private. Third, and most surprising, sincerity: a real desire to please God. Can someone go this far and still be only almost a Christian? Wesley answers from his own life. He confesses that for many years he did all these things sincerely, and his conscience still told him he was “but almost a Christian.” An old saying warns that hell is paved with good intentions. What, then, makes a person altogether a Christian? Love of God that fills the whole heart; love of neighbour, enemies included, as Christ loved us; and, as the ground of both, faith. Quoting the Homilies again, Wesley defines this faith as “a sure trust and confidence” that through Christ’s merits my sins are forgiven. That faith, “working by love,” makes a person altogether a Christian.

7.What a Wesleyan Pastor Takes from It Today

These sermons stand at the head of a great family of churches. From Wesley’s societies came British and American Methodism. From the holiness revivals of the nineteenth century came the Church of the Nazarene, the Wesleyan Church and the Free Methodist Church. Today many of their members live in Latin America and Africa: Methodists in Mexico, Brazil and Chile, Nazarene congregations from Guatemala to Peru, and large Methodist and Wesleyan churches in Ghana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Mozambique. A pastor in any of these places can learn several lessons here. First, preach grace first. Everything good starts with God. Second, define faith carefully. Many people in our pews accept the creed but have never trusted Christ for themselves. Third, take “The Almost Christian” seriously, beginning with yourself. Wesley’s honesty about his own years of sincere but incomplete religion gives a pastor permission to say the same. Fourth, keep pardon and new life together, as Wesley did. Reformed and Lutheran Christians share Wesley’s joy in justification by faith alone. They differ over whether grace can be resisted, whether believers can fall away, and how much freedom from sin to expect in this life. These are real differences among brothers and sisters who agree on the foundation: by grace you are saved, through faith.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Is your faith a set of ideas in your head, or a trust that leans its whole weight on Christ? Look at Wesley’s three marks of the almost Christian: honesty, the form of godliness, and sincerity. Which of them could someone see in you? Which could hide the absence of love for God? And who in your congregation might be living “almost” a Christian life, waiting for someone to tell them gently that there is more?

Select

Reading 2 · Awakening and Scriptural Christianity

Awake, Thou That Sleepest

A CTS digest of Sermons III–IV (Charles Wesley, “Awake, Thou That Sleepest”; John Wesley, “Scriptural Christianity”), The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. I (Bristol: William Pine, 1771)

Two University sermons from the 1740s. Charles Wesley describes the respectable sleeper who has the form of godliness without its power and calls him to wake and receive the Holy Spirit. John Wesley traces Scriptural Christianity from one heart to the whole earth, then asks Oxford, and every reader, whether such Christianity can be found among them.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Awake, Thou That Sleepest: The Sleeper Awakened and Scriptural Christianity

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading on two sermons preached to the University of Oxford in the 1740s: a call to wake from spiritual sleep, and a portrait of the Christianity of the Bible held up as a mirror to a nominally Christian nation

A CTS digest of Sermon III, “Awake, Thou That Sleepest” (Ephesians 5:14), and Sermon IV, “Scriptural Christianity” (Acts 4:31), in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. I (Bristol: William Pine, 1771). The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Sermons III–IV
Primary source
1742 and 1744
Charles and John Wesley

A word before you read. These are the most urgent sermons in the collection. The first was written by John’s younger brother, Charles Wesley, the great hymn writer. The second is the sermon that closed the pulpit of St Mary’s, Oxford, to John for good. Both speak to people who were baptized, educated and respectable, and both insist that this is not the same as being alive to God. Read them slowly. They are meant to disturb before they comfort.

1.Two Sermons Preached to a University

By the early 1740s the Methodist revival was well under way. In April 1739, at George Whitefield’s urging, John Wesley had begun preaching in the open air near Bristol, to miners and labourers who seldom entered a parish church. Societies formed in Bristol and London, and Wesley organized them into small “classes” for weekly prayer and mutual care. Yet the Wesleys were still clergy of the Church of England, and Oxford fellows were expected to take turns preaching to the University. On 4 April 1742 Charles Wesley preached “Awake, Thou That Sleepest” at St Mary’s. John included it in his own collection, and it has been counted among the Standard Sermons ever since, so Methodists have long treated it as part of their doctrinal inheritance. On 24 August 1744 John preached “Scriptural Christianity” in the same pulpit. Its closing questions to the heads of colleges, the clergy and the students caused such offence that he was never invited to preach there again. These two sermons show the revival’s message in its plainest form: real Christianity is a new life given by the Holy Spirit, not merely a respectable religion.

2.The Sleeper: Our Natural State

Charles takes Paul’s image in Ephesians 5:14 and describes the sleeper. Sleep, he says, signifies “the natural state of man”: the deep sleep of the soul into which Adam’s sin has cast all his children. The sleeper does not know his real condition. Full of disease, he thinks himself healthy; chained, he dreams he is free. He does not see the need of the “one thing needful,” the inward change, the birth from above, without which no one shall see the Lord. Charles is careful to say that the deepest sleeper is often not a scandalous sinner. He may be a quiet, reasonable, good-natured churchgoer, or a zealous, orthodox Pharisee who fasts, gives and attends every service. Such a person has “a form of godliness” but denies its power. Christ compares him to a painted sepulchre: beautiful outside, dead within. Like the dry bones in Ezekiel, he has sinews and skin, but no breath. Worse, the sleeper has no spiritual senses. He cannot taste that the Lord is gracious, and so he treats spiritual experience as foolishness and asks, “How can these things be?”

3.“Awake!” and the Promise of Light

The second part is an urgent summons. Charles compares the sleeper to Peter in Herod’s prison, chained between soldiers on the night before his execution, and prays that the angel of the Lord will strike him awake. He echoes Augustine: God created us for himself, so we cannot rest until we rest in him. Then he presses a series of questions. Have you recovered the image of God? Is Christ formed in you? Above all, “Hast thou received the Holy Ghost?” A Christian, Charles insists, is one anointed with the Spirit. True religion is “the life of God in the soul of man” (a phrase borrowed from the Scottish writer Henry Scougal), heaven begun on earth, righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. He sharply rejects those who allow the Spirit’s quiet “assistance” but deny that a believer can feel or know his presence. The Church of England’s own prayers ask to be filled with the Spirit. The sermon ends with the promise of the text: “Christ shall give thee light.” Whoever wakes and rises will be forgiven, justified freely through faith, sanctified through faith, and made a dwelling place of God.

4.Scriptural Christianity Begins in a Person

John’s sermon starts from Acts 4:31: “they were all filled with the Holy Ghost.” He sets aside the question of the extraordinary gifts, such as healing, miracles and tongues. Even in the early church, he notes, God gave them “with a sparing hand,” perhaps to one in a thousand. The Spirit filled all believers for a greater purpose: to give them the mind of Christ and the fruit of the Spirit. Wesley then looks at Christianity “not as it implies a set of opinions,” but as it touches people’s hearts and lives. He traces it in three stages: beginning in individuals, spreading from one to another, and finally covering the earth. In the individual, it starts when a hearer of Peter is cut to the heart, repents, and believes. He receives the Spirit of adoption and cries “Abba, Father.” He has peace that drives out fear, even the fear of death, and joy in the witness of the Spirit. He loves God, and therefore loves every person, including his enemies. He becomes humble, gentle and truthful. He continues in the apostles’ teaching, in the breaking of bread and in prayer, and he spends himself doing good to the poor, the sick and the prisoner.

5.Spreading, Suffering and Covering the Earth

Such people cannot keep the light under a bushel. Love for those for whom Christ died sends them out to warn, invite and encourage. To the careless they cry, “Awake, thou that sleepest”; to the awakened they speak of Christ, our Advocate; and they urge believers on toward holiness. The result is both growth and opposition. Pleasure-seekers, the proud, tradesmen whose income is threatened and, most of all, the people of merely outward religion are offended. Persecution follows, yet the sufferings of the faithful speak louder than their words. Soon, Wesley admits, the weeds appeared among the wheat, and the church became corrupt. But he does not end in gloom. Drawing on Isaiah and Romans 11, he describes a coming “Christian world” in which wars cease, oppression ends, all love as brothers and sisters, and the earth is full of the knowledge of the Lord. This hope, sometimes called Wesley’s “optimism of grace,” runs through the whole Wesleyan tradition. God’s grace can change not only hearts but whole communities.

6.The Plain Application

Then Wesley turns the picture into a mirror. Where does this Christianity exist? Which country is filled with the Holy Spirit and lets no one lack anything? He concludes that “we have never yet seen a Christian country upon earth.” Next he asks whether Oxford itself is a Christian city. He begs his hearers to notice that he is not raising “peculiar notions” but the basics of common Christianity. He questions in turn the magistrates; the heads of colleges, responsible for forming the young; the fellows, often accused of pride and uselessness; the clergy, asking whether any souls have been brought to life through their preaching; and the students, many of whom swore to statutes they never read, and whom he calls a generation of “triflers.” He includes himself in that charge. Finally he asks who could possibly restore Scriptural Christianity, and ends with a prayer: “Lord, save or we perish!” The University heard the sermon as an insult. Wesley believed it was an act of love.

7.What a Wesleyan Pastor Takes from It Today

These sermons belong to a moment, but their questions travel well. Methodist, Nazarene, Wesleyan and Free Methodist churches across Latin America and Africa often minister in places where nearly everyone is baptized and many are only nominally Christian. In that setting Charles’s picture of the respectable sleeper is still painfully accurate. A pastor can take several lessons from these pages. First, preach for awakening, not only for information; people need to see their true condition. Second, never confuse religion with the new birth. Attendance, orthodoxy and good works are not the same as the life of God in the soul. Third, keep the focus on the fruit of the Spirit rather than on extraordinary gifts. Wesley neither denied the gifts nor made them the test of a Christian. Fourth, apply the gospel to the whole community, including leaders, teachers and clergy, and begin with yourself. Other Christians raise fair cautions. Many Anglicans of Wesley’s day, and Reformed believers since, have warned that emphasizing felt experience can lead to pride or to doubt in those who feel little. Wesley took this seriously, as Reading 5 will show, while still insisting that the Spirit can be known.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Charles Wesley says the deepest sleepers are often respectable church members. Where might you, or your congregation, have the form of godliness without its power? Can you answer his question, “Hast thou received the Holy Ghost?” And if John Wesley came to preach in your town, what questions would he put to its leaders, its teachers and its pastors?

Select

Reading 3 · Justification by Faith

God Justifies the Ungodly

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Sermons V–VI (“Justification by Faith”; “The Righteousness of Faith”), The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. I (Bristol: William Pine, 1771)

Wesley’s clearest teaching on justification: not being made righteous, but pardon, the forgiveness of sins, which God gives to the ungodly on the one condition of faith. He contrasts the covenant of works, “Do this and live,” with the covenant of grace, “Believe and live,” and urges seekers not to wait until they feel good enough.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

God Justifies the Ungodly: Justification by Faith and The Righteousness of Faith

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading on Wesley’s two most careful sermons on justification: what it is and is not, whom God justifies, the one condition on which he does it, and the difference between “Do this and live” and “Believe and live”

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Sermon V, “Justification by Faith” (Romans 4:5), and Sermon VI, “The Righteousness of Faith” (Romans 10:5–8), in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. I (Bristol: William Pine, 1771). The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Sermons V–VI
Primary source
Published 1746
John Wesley

A word before you read. In these sermons Wesley the evangelist becomes Wesley the teacher. He defines his terms, answers objections and even sets out a syllogism, an argument in three steps. Do not let the careful style hide the warmth underneath. Both sermons end by turning to the reader with an invitation: come to God just as you are, and believe.

1.The Question on Which All Hope Rests

“How a sinner may be justified before God” is, Wesley says, the foundation of all our hope. As long as we are at enmity with God, there can be no true peace or solid joy. Yet few questions have been so confused. Wesley wrote these sermons for the first volume of his Sermons on Several Occasions (1746). In its preface he said he wanted to give “plain truth for plain people,” avoiding learned display so that farmers, miners and servants could follow. These sermons became the core of the Methodist “Standard Sermons.” In 1763 Wesley’s Model Deed required every preacher in a Methodist chapel to teach nothing contrary to them and to his Notes on the New Testament. When American Methodism organized itself, it protected its “established standards of doctrine” in 1808 by a rule that the church cannot easily change. Many Methodist churches in Latin America and Africa received these standards through missionaries, and Nazarene and Wesleyan schools still teach them as classic statements of their heritage. In other words, what Wesley says about justification here is not one man’s opinion. It is the doctrine that whole churches promised to preach.

2.The General Ground: Two Representatives

Wesley begins with the big story. God made humanity in his image: holy, loving, and happy in him. To this upright creature he gave a perfect law, the law of love written on the heart, together with one command about the tree. Adam disobeyed, and in that day he died spiritually, separated from God, and became mortal. Because Adam was “the common father and representative of us all,” his fall brought sin and condemnation to the whole race. Then, in the fullness of time, God gave his Son as “another common head of mankind,” a second Adam. Christ bore our sins on the tree and made, in the words of the Prayer Book, a “full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice” for the sins of the whole world. Because of this, God has given all people a new covenant. Its plain condition, “which himself also enables us to perform,” is faith. Notice two Wesleyan emphases already present. Christ died for all, not only for some. And even the condition of faith is made possible by grace. This is where Wesley parts company with Reformed teaching on limited atonement, while sharing its belief that salvation is entirely God’s work.

3.What Justification Is, and Whom God Justifies

Wesley first says what justification is not. It is not being made actually righteous; that is sanctification, which follows as its fruit. In a famous contrast, justification is what God “does for us” through his Son; sanctification is what he “works in us” by his Spirit. Nor does justification mean that God is deceived, that he thinks us better than we are, or that he “confounds” us with Christ. What, then, is it? “The plain scriptural notion of justification is pardon, the forgiveness of sins.” For the sake of Christ’s atoning blood, God remits our past sins, will not hold them against us, and from that moment loves and blesses us as if we had never sinned. And whom does God justify? Paul’s answer is startling: “the ungodly.” Only sinners need pardon. Those who say we must be holy before we can be justified have the order backwards, for that would mean Christ takes away only sins already taken away. Wesley adds, following Article XIII of the Church of England, that works done before justification, however useful to others, are not truly good in God’s sight, because they do not spring from love to God as Father. He even sets this out as a three-step argument. The point is not to despise kindness, but to show that we bring God nothing of our own.

4.On What Terms? Faith Alone

On what condition is the ungodly person justified? On one alone: faith. Faith in general is a divine “evidence” or conviction of things not seen; Wesley uses Paul’s Greek word elenchos. Justifying faith adds “a sure trust and confidence” that Christ died for my sins and loved me. Wesley quotes the Church of England’s own Homilies to show that this is not a new teaching. Faith is the necessary condition, because without it no one is justified, whatever else he has. It is also the only necessary condition, because whoever has it is justified, whatever else he lacks. Picture a sinner, helpless and hopeless, who casts himself wholly on God’s mercy in Christ (which he can do only by grace). Who could doubt he is forgiven in that moment? Why did God choose faith? Wesley does not presume to question God, but suggests one reason: to “hide pride from man.” Pride ruined angels and Adam; faith brings nothing and pleads nothing but Christ. He adds a lovely line: whatever good a believer has after he first believes, faith does not find it but brings it. First the tree is made good, then the fruit.

5.Two Covenants: “Do This and Live” and “Believe and Live”

Sermon VI explains Romans 10. Paul is not setting Moses against Christ, since he quotes Moses for both parts of his argument. He is contrasting two covenants. The covenant of works was given not to Moses but to Adam in paradise. Its terms were “Do this and live”: perfect obedience, inward and outward, perfect in degree and never interrupted. The covenant of grace, which God has offered in every age from the first promise after the fall to the gospel, says “Believe and live.” The first assumed a person already holy and happy, and told him how to stay so. The second addresses someone unholy and unhappy, under God’s wrath, and tells him how to recover what he has lost: the favour and image of God, “the pearl he has lost.” The first required us to pay the price ourselves; in the second, God freely forgives because Christ has paid it. The first asks what is far away; the second offers what is near, “in thy mouth and in thy heart.” It is therefore foolish to seek life by our own righteousness, since one breach of the law ends that hope. It is wisdom to accept God’s way, because it tells the truth about our condition, because God has chosen it, and because it leads to the best end, happiness in God.

6.“First Believe”: No Waiting to Be Good Enough

Wesley closes with tender pastoral advice to seekers who keep postponing faith. Do not say, “I must first conquer every sin, go to church more, pray more.” That is still trying to build on your own righteousness. “Nay, but first believe.” Do not say, “I am not good enough.” Nobody ever was, and you are already bad enough to need a Saviour. Do not say, “I am not contrite enough.” Perhaps God will make you more contrite not before you believe, but by believing; those who are forgiven much love much. Do not say, “I must do something more first,” or wait for greater sincerity to make yourself worthy. Wesley quotes a line of hymn verse, “O Lamb of God, was ever pain, was ever love like thine!” and urges the reader to look at Christ until Christ’s love breaks the hard heart. The sermon ends with an invitation to come “just as thou art,” words that a later hymn, Charlotte Elliott’s “Just as I am” (1835), would make familiar to millions. In Wesleyan preaching, repentance and good works matter greatly, but they are never a toll we must pay before we may come to Christ.

7.What a Wesleyan Pastor Takes from It Today

Every pastor meets people who think they must clean up their lives before God will accept them, and others who think their good works have already earned heaven. These sermons answer both. A Wesleyan pastor can take away several lessons. First, keep justification and sanctification distinct but together: God forgives first and then makes new. Second, preach to the ungodly as ungodly. The gospel is for sinners, not for the already good. Third, call for faith now, not later. Fourth, present the cross as being for all, so that no hearer wonders whether Christ died for him. It is fair to note where others differ. Reformed and Lutheran theologians usually describe justification as both pardon and the imputation, or crediting, of Christ’s own righteousness to the believer. Wesley here was wary of language that seemed to make God “think” us righteous when we are not, fearing it could excuse careless living. In a later sermon, “The Lord Our Righteousness” (1765), he accepted the imputation of Christ’s righteousness in a careful sense, while still warning against misuse. Reformed Christians also hold that faith is given only to the elect, while Wesleyans believe grace enables every hearer to respond. Both traditions agree on the decisive point: God justifies the ungodly by grace through faith, for Christ’s sake alone.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Have you ever thought you had to become good enough before God would accept you? Which of Wesley’s excuses (“not good enough,” “not contrite enough,” “something more first”) do you hear most often in your ministry? How would you explain, in plain words to a plain person, the difference between what God does for us and what he works in us? And when did you last invite someone simply to believe, just as they are?

Select

Reading 4 · The Kingdom and the First Fruits

Righteousness, Peace and Joy

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Sermons VII–VIII (“The Way to the Kingdom”; “The First-Fruits of the Spirit”), The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. I (Bristol: William Pine, 1771)

True religion is not forms, outward deeds or right opinions, but righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, entered by repentance and faith. Wesley then explains why there is no condemnation for those in Christ: not for past sins, remaining inward sin, infirmities or things they cannot help, while weighing sins of surprise with pastoral care.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Righteousness, Peace and Joy: The Way to the Kingdom and The First-Fruits of the Spirit

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading on true religion as the reign of God in the heart, the way into it through repentance and faith, and the careful comfort Wesley gives to believers who still feel sin within

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Sermon VII, “The Way to the Kingdom” (Mark 1:15), and Sermon VIII, “The First-Fruits of the Spirit” (Romans 8:1), in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. I (Bristol: William Pine, 1771). The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Sermons VII–VIII
Primary source
1740s
John Wesley

A word before you read. The first sermon is an evangelist’s sermon: it tells seekers what true religion is and how to enter it. The second is a pastor’s sermon: it tells believers how to understand their failures without either excusing sin or losing heart. Together they show the balance that marks Wesleyan teaching on salvation: high hopes for what grace can do, joined to tender care for weak believers.

1.Sermons for the Field and for the Society

During the 1740s Wesley preached almost every day, often outdoors and often several times a day, riding thousands of miles on horseback each year. Jesus’ words in Mark 1:15, “The kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel,” were among his favourite texts for crowds who knew little of the faith. Those who responded were not left alone. They joined a Methodist society and met weekly in a class of about twelve, where a leader asked each one how his or her soul was prospering. In those classes Wesley met many sincere believers troubled by the sin they still found inside themselves. “The First-Fruits of the Spirit” was written for them. Both sermons belong to the first volume of Sermons on Several Occasions (1746), and both are part of the Standard Sermons, which Methodist preachers were bound by Wesley’s 1763 Model Deed to follow. Read together, they show Wesley moving from the open field, where the kingdom is announced, to the class meeting, where believers learn to walk in it.

2.True Religion: Not Forms, Not Deeds, Not Opinions

Wesley defines true religion with Paul’s words in Romans 14:17: “The kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.” First he clears away three mistakes. True religion does not consist in outward forms or ceremonies, even good ones. They are useful helps “in their place,” but they have no worth in themselves. Nor does it consist in outward actions. Two people may both feed the hungry, one from love of God and the other from love of praise; only the first is truly religious. Most strikingly, it does not consist in orthodoxy, or right opinions. A person may accept all three creeds and defend every doctrine, Wesley says, and be almost as orthodox as the devil, while remaining a stranger to the religion of the heart. This is not a rejection of doctrine; Wesley cared deeply about truth. It is a warning that correct ideas in the mind are not the same as a heart renewed by God. Religion lives in “the hidden man of the heart.”

3.Righteousness, Peace and Joy in the Holy Ghost

What, then, is true religion? First, righteousness, which Wesley defines by the two great commandments. We love God with all our heart, finding all our happiness in him, and we love our neighbour as ourselves. Wesley explains that “neighbour” means every human being, including strangers, the ungrateful and our persecutors. This love is “the fulfilling of the law” and the source of all inward and outward goodness. Second, peace: the peace of God that the world cannot give or take away. It removes doubt, because the Spirit bears witness that we are God’s children, and it removes tormenting fear, even the fear of death. Third, joy in the Holy Spirit: a calm, humble rejoicing in God for the reconciliation we have received, and hope of the glory to come. Wesley calls this “holiness and happiness joined in one.” It is called the kingdom of God because it is the fruit of God reigning in the soul, and the kingdom of heaven because it is, in a degree, “heaven opened in the soul.” He quotes his brother’s hymn: glory is on earth begun. And this kingdom is “at hand.” Wherever the gospel is preached, anyone may enter it this very hour.

4.The Way In: Repent and Believe

The way into the kingdom has two steps. The first is repentance, which Wesley defines simply: “know yourselves.” This first repentance, before faith, is conviction, or self-knowledge. It means seeing that one’s whole nature is corrupt: an understanding darkened, a will turned away from God, affections scattered over the earth. From this root grow unbelief, pride, anger and every evil word and deed. It means recognizing that the wages of sin is death, that we can do nothing to atone for even one sin, and that we cannot change our own hearts any more than we can raise the dead. Wesleyans are sometimes accused of thinking too well of human nature. These pages answer that charge. Wesley’s account of original sin is as dark as any Reformed preacher’s; his hope rests entirely on grace. When to this conviction are added sorrow, shame and an earnest desire to escape, the seeker is “not far from the kingdom of God.” Then comes the second step: “believe the gospel.” Faith is not bare assent to the Bible or the creed, which devils also have. It is a sure trust in God’s mercy through Christ, a conviction that the Son of God loved me and gave himself for me. With that faith comes peace, joy, love and the whole fruit of the Spirit.

5.Those Who Are in Christ Jesus

The second sermon begins with Romans 8:1, Paul’s promise of “no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus,” who walk by the Spirit rather than the flesh. Wesley notes that this verse had often been twisted by careless people to excuse sin, so he explains it carefully. Those “in Christ” are those who believe in him and are united to him as branches to a vine. “The flesh,” in Paul’s usage, means corrupt human nature. Those in Christ do not walk after it. Though they still feel “the root of bitterness” within, they have power from on high to keep trampling it down. Wesley even corrects the King James translation of Galatians 5:17. Paul does not say the flesh keeps believers from doing what they would, as if the flesh always won. The Spirit opposes the flesh so that believers need not do what the flesh desires. Those who walk after the Spirit are led into love for God and neighbour, gracious speech and the whole fruit of the Spirit.

6.No Condemnation: Wesley’s Careful Cases

How is there no condemnation for such believers? Wesley works through a series of cases with a pastor’s precision. There is no condemnation for past sins, which God has cast into the depths of the sea. There is none for present sins, because those who walk after the Spirit are not committing them. Next comes the important admission. There is no condemnation for inward sin that “does now remain,” such as seeds of pride, anger or self-will, as long as the believer does not yield to it. Paul called the Corinthians “babes in Christ”: truly in Christ, yet with much sin remaining. Nor are believers condemned when they find sin clinging to their best prayers and worship; this only drives them closer to their Advocate. They are not condemned for “sins of infirmity,” which Wesley would rather call infirmities: involuntary failings, such as saying something false that we believe true. Nor are they condemned for what they cannot help, such as missing the Lord’s Supper through sickness. Finally, “sins of surprise,” committed under sudden temptation, bring more or less guilt according to how far the will consents. If careless neglect left us open to the surprise, the fall is in effect wilful. Wesley closes by pointing believers beyond this mixed state: God has promised to “sanctify you wholly.”

7.What a Wesleyan Pastor Takes from It Today

These sermons give a pastor two tools. The first is a clear definition of true religion, to use against both empty ritual and dry orthodoxy. Many Christians in Latin America and Africa have grown up in churches full of ceremony, and others in churches full of argument; Wesley points both to the reign of God in the heart. The second tool is a careful pastoral theology of sin in believers. It guards against antinomianism, the idea that grace makes obedience unnecessary, and against scrupulosity, the anxious conscience that sees every weakness as damning. Wesley’s rule for one who falls through weakness is gentle and practical: do not lie there fretting; get up and keep running the race. Later Methodist, Nazarene and Wesleyan teaching on entire sanctification grew out of the hope expressed at the end of Sermon VIII. It is fair to note a real disagreement here. Reformed and Lutheran theology usually defines sin as any lack of conformity to God’s law, whether voluntary or not. Wesley, especially in his later writings, reserved the word “sin, properly so called” for a voluntary transgression of a known law, and called involuntary failings infirmities that still need Christ’s blood. Each side fears that the other’s definition may lead to either despair or complacency.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Wesley says a person can be almost as orthodox as the devil. Where might right opinions be standing in for a changed heart in your own life? Can you describe the kingdom of God as righteousness, peace and joy to someone who has only known religion as rules or rituals? And how would you counsel a believer who is discouraged by the sin he or she still finds within?

Select

Reading 5 · Adoption and Assurance

Abba, Father

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Sermons IX–X (“The Spirit of Bondage and of Adoption”; “The Witness of the Spirit, Discourse I”), The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. I (Bristol: William Pine, 1771)

Wesley maps three states of the soul: the natural man who neither fears nor loves God, the awakened soul under the law who fears, and the believer under grace who loves and cries “Abba, Father.” He then teaches the joint witness of God’s Spirit and our own, and gives scriptural tests that separate true assurance from presumption.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Abba, Father: The Spirit of Adoption and the Witness of the Spirit

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading on Wesley’s map of the soul’s three states, from sleep to fear to love, and on his teaching that God’s children may know they are his, with tests to tell the true witness from self-deception

A CTS digest of John Wesley, Sermon IX, “The Spirit of Bondage and of Adoption” (Romans 8:15), and Sermon X, “The Witness of the Spirit, Discourse I” (Romans 8:16), in The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. I (Bristol: William Pine, 1771). The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Sermons IX–X
Primary source
Published 1746
John Wesley

A word before you read. Assurance, the confidence that God has forgiven and adopted us, is one of the most precious and most argued-over parts of Wesley’s teaching. These sermons show both why he prized it and how carefully he guarded it. Notice how often Wesley warns against false assurance. He wants believers to have joy, but he wants their joy to be real, humble and fruitful.

1.Assurance at the Heart of the Revival

When Wesley described his experience at Aldersgate Street on 24 May 1738, he did not say only that he believed. He said “an assurance was given me” that Christ had taken away his sins. Before that night the Moravian Peter Böhler had told him that true faith brings a sure trust and peace, and Wesley, the disciplined Oxford scholar, realized he did not have it. After Aldersgate, assurance became a central theme of Methodist preaching in the 1740s. It also drew sharp criticism. Bishops and university men accused the Methodists of “enthusiasm,” a word that then meant fanatical claims to private revelations. Wesley published these two sermons in 1746 to set out his position clearly. He returned to the subject in a second discourse on the Witness of the Spirit in 1767. As part of the Standard Sermons, they shaped Methodist preaching everywhere the movement spread. In Methodist, Nazarene and Wesleyan congregations from Mexico to Mozambique, believers still give their “testimony” and sing Charles Wesley’s hymns of assurance. These sermons stand behind that practice.

2.Three States of the Soul

Sermon IX draws a map with three regions. There is the natural man, who neither fears nor loves God. There is the person under the law, who has received “the spirit of bondage unto fear.” And there is the person under grace, who has received “the Spirit of adoption.” Wesley later calls these the natural, the legal and the evangelical states. The natural man is asleep. His spiritual senses are closed, so he feels secure and even at peace. He imagines that God is merciful in a way that swallows up God’s holiness and justice. He expects to repent “by and by,” whenever he likes. If he is learned, he argues proudly for the freedom of his will. He thinks himself free from superstition and narrow religion. All the while he is a servant of sin, excusing himself with “Every man has his infirmity.” Wesley’s point is not that such people are always wicked by the world’s standards. Many are respectable. The point is that they are unawakened.

3.Under the Law: The Spirit of Bondage

Then God breaks in, “by some awful providence” or by his word applied by the Spirit. The sleeper wakes. He sees that God is holy and that the law reaches the heart: hatred is murder, a lustful look is adultery. Stripped of excuses, he sees his heart as it is and feels that he deserves God’s judgment. His false peace and worldly pleasures vanish. He feels sorrow, remorse and fear of God, of death and of judgment. Now he truly wants to be free from sin and struggles hard, but he cannot conquer. He resolves and falls, repents and sins again. Wesley reads Romans 7 as a portrait of this awakened person, under the law, who cries, “O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me?” Here many Reformed and Lutheran interpreters, following Augustine’s later view, disagree. They read Romans 7 as Paul’s description of the ongoing struggle of a mature Christian. Wesley reads it as the cry of someone not yet set free. Notice, too, a quiet point about grace. Wesley says that even this fear is received: “for this also is the gift of God.” The awakening itself is grace going before faith. This is what Wesleyans call prevenient grace.

4.Under Grace: The Spirit of Adoption

The answer to the wretched man’s cry is “the grace of God, through Jesus Christ.” Light breaks in, now healing rather than terrifying. He sees the love of God in the face of Jesus, sees his sins laid on the Lamb, and cries, “My Lord and my God!” Guilt and the power of sin are broken; fear of God, the devil, hell and death gives way. He knows God no longer as an angry judge but as a loving Father, and the Spirit within him cries “Abba, Father.” This liberty is freedom not only from guilt but from sin; he not only fights, but conquers. Wesley sums it all up in a memorable series of contrasts. The natural man neither fears nor loves God; the one under the law fears; the one under grace loves. The first has a false peace, the second none, the third true peace. Then he adds two pastoral warnings. Sincerity alone proves nothing, because one can be sincere in any of the three states. And the states are often mixed: sleepers have moments of fear, and those under the law receive glimmers of hope. The question is which spirit rules the heart.

5.Two Witnesses: Our Spirit and God’s Spirit

Sermon X begins by naming two dangers. On one side are “enthusiasts” who mistake their own imagination for God’s voice and call themselves God’s children while living in sin. On the other are reasonable people who, frightened by such delusions, deny that ordinary Christians can have any witness of the Spirit at all. Wesley asks whether we may “steer a middle course.” He finds two witnesses in Romans 8:16. The first is the witness of our own spirit: our conscience, applying the marks of God’s children found in Scripture, especially in 1 John. Do I love God? Do I love my brother? Do I keep his commandments? We know these things by immediate consciousness, just as we know we are alive. This is “rational evidence,” an argument from Scripture and experience. The second is the witness of God’s Spirit, which Wesley carefully describes as “an inward impression on the soul,” by which the Spirit directly tells me that Jesus loved me and gave himself for me, and that my sins are blotted out. He invites anyone taught by God to improve his wording. Which comes first? God’s witness must, says Wesley, because we cannot be holy without loving God, and “we love him, because he first loved us.” How the Spirit gives this witness, Wesley does not claim to explain. Like the wind, its sound is known, though not its course.

6.Testing the Witness

How can the true witness be told apart from presumption? Wesley gives scriptural marks before, during and after it. Before it comes repentance, a broken and contrite heart. Along with it comes a mighty change, a passing from death to life; the person who says he “always was a Christian” and never needed a change should take note. With it comes a humble joy that makes a pardoned sinner feel small, gentle and teachable. The presumptuous person, by contrast, grows more proud, impatient and harsh the more confident he becomes. After it follows obedience, because love rejoices to keep God’s commandments. The false witness, on the other hand, gives a feeling of “liberty” to disobey. How does a true believer know his witness is real? In the same way we tell daylight from a candle: the difference is obvious to healthy senses. And how does he know his spiritual senses are healthy? By the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, humility, gentleness, and a steady obedience to all God’s commandments. The devil cannot produce such fruit, for he does not destroy his own work. Wesley ends with praise and a call to holiness: let your life, not only your lips, show forth God’s praise.

7.What a Wesleyan Pastor Takes from It Today

Many Christians are told either that they can never be sure of salvation or that a single prayer guarantees heaven however they live. Wesley offers a third way. Assurance is the normal privilege of God’s children, and it is tested by its fruit. A pastor can take several lessons from this. First, encourage seekers to expect God to speak peace to their hearts, not only to agree with doctrines. Second, never let feelings stand alone; join the witness of the Spirit to the witness of a changed life. Third, be gentle with the doubting. Wesley himself grew gentler with time. In his later years he wrote that someone who fears God and works righteousness, though without a clear sense of pardon, is accepted with the “faith of a servant,” and should be encouraged toward the fuller “faith of a son.” It is fair to note where others differ. The Westminster Confession, a classic Reformed statement, teaches that assurance does not belong to the essence of faith; a true believer may wait long for it. Reformed writers also stress what they call the “practical syllogism”: reasoning from fruit to faith. That is close to Wesley’s witness of our own spirit, but they are cautious about any direct witness. Both traditions warn against presumption, and both want believers to rest in Christ rather than in their feelings.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Which of Wesley’s three states, natural, legal or evangelical, best describes where you have been, and where you are now? Have you known the Spirit’s witness that you are a child of God? If so, how have its fruits of humility, gentleness and obedience shown it to be real? And how might you help a believer in your church who is honest, faithful and still unsure, without either pushing them or leaving them alone?

Select

Record your reading

When you have read your three chosen readings in full, enter your name and affirm it below. This record is kept on your honor, in this browser; it shows on your certificate as with honors.

Your name

On my honor, I have read in full the three readings I selected above.

✓ Recorded — this class counts toward your With Honors progress. Reading With Honors ↗

Honors Reading — recorded

affirmed on to have read, in full:

Chapala Theological Seminary · Wesleyan Theology and the Doctrine of Salvation · present or print this page as your honors reading record.

Further Study: Seven Public-Domain Works

These seven works are for further study, for the student who wants to go on reading. They are not part of the honors reading above: that stays as it is — the five CTS digests, any three read in full and recorded on your honor. All seven are in the public domain; each link opens the work online, and most can also be found in the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg. Most are in English: the Chrome browser can translate a page (right-click, “Translate to…”; on a phone, the browser menu).

Further Sermons · Vol. I

1. The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. I

John Wesley · Bristol: William Pine, 1771

Read Sermons XI onward, beyond the assigned Sermons I–X. They extend the course’s foundational doctrinal sequence.

Open reading ↗

Inward Religion · Vol. II

2. The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, vol. II