Life & Letters: John Wesley

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Sad Errors

A letter from George Whitefield to the Welsh evangelist, Howell Harris. Whitefield was in Boston but expecting to return to England soon. He wrote of concerns with the theology of John Wesley and his influence on friends at Fetters Lane Society. The letter was written September 24, 1740.

And is dear Brother H[owell] H[arris] yet alive in body and soul? Blessed be God, who causes those that wait on him to renew their strength. I rejoice in your success; may you mount with wings like eagles, walk and not be weary, run and not be faint! You shall not be taken or hurt, till the appointed hour is come.

I hope your conversation was blessed to dear Mr. W[esley]. O that the LORD may batter down his freewill, and compel him to own his sovereignty and everlasting love! Some of F[etters] Lane society, I fear, are running into sad errors; but this happens for our trial, especially mine. Those that before, I suppose, would have plucked out their eyes for me, now I suspect, I shall see very shy, and avoiding me. This is my comfort, the LORD is a never-failing friend; his truth will make its way in spite of all carnal reasoning. O pray for me that I may have the spirit of judgment and a sound mind…

Letters of George Whitefield: For the Period 1734-1742, The Banner of Truth Trust, 1976, reprinted from The Works of George Whitefield, 1771, p. 210.

Friday, October 31, 2008

Till I Have These Marks I Am Not a Christian

A portion of a letter by John Wesley to John Bennet, a lay-preacher of the Methodist Societies. The letter was written in June 1744.

If the Bible be true, then none is a Christian who has not the marks of a Christian there laid down. One of these is the love of God, which must be felt (if it is in the soul) as much as fire upon the body. Another is the witness of God's Spirit with my spirit that I am a child of God. Till I have these marks I am not a Christian; and no power can give me these but that which made the world.

The Letters of John Wesley, edited by John Telford, Epworth Press, 1931, also online at www.wesley.nnu.edu/John_Wesley/letters/index.htm

Why Life & Letters?

Before e-mails, telephones and text-messaging, people wrote letters to one another. Letters are personal and thoughtful. We can be thankful that biographers have letters to and from the people they write about from generations gone by, for modern forms of commu-nication leave us in want. Letters have a quality about them not found in e-mails. Historian and biographer, David McCullough, says, “I think often of how little we will leave about ourselves and our time in our own words. Maybe some of the e-mail will survive, but I doubt it. How will future gen-erations ever come to know us? Historians and biographers a hundred or three hundred years hence will have almost nothing of a personal kind to work with. Our story, consequently, will be a lot less interesting, less human, per-haps even impossible to write.”

It is a shame that few of us today craft letters to our children and friends. Letter writing is a lost art. I hope this blog will inspire others to write letters. Letters are valuable. C. H. Spurgeon said, “A man’s private letters often let you into the secrets of the heart.

Most of what appears here are selections taken from letters of Evangelical Christians. There will also be occasional reviews of books of letters.

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

"In the nineteenth century, many biographers wrote books titled The Life and Letters of So-and-So. While this was not always an eloquent way of writing history, it speaks volumes about our cultural distance; if restricted to composing a narrative of someone’s life around his written correspondence today, we wouldn’t be able to write biographies, because people write too few letters to constitute the substance of a book. Further, if you read those nineteenth-century letters, you cannot fail to notice how articulate, thoughtful, and well composed they commonly are. A culture that was accustomed to thoughtful, well-composed letters produced remarkable significant letters, even among fairly common people. Today, we have become a culture of telephone babblers, unskilled at the most basic questions of composition…"

Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, by T. David Gordon, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 2009, pp. 66-67.

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Sad Errors

Friday, October 31, 2008

Till I Have These Marks I Am Not a Christian

About Me

Why Life & Letters?

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

A Sample Letter

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