Wesley for Today: Sermons on the Way of Salvation

John Wesley is preached every Sunday in tens of thousands of United Methodist congregations and read almost nowhere. The categorical vocabulary he forged - justification, sanctification, prevenient grace, the witness of the Spirit, the means of grace - survives in our prayers and our hymns. The sermons in which he actually taught that vocabulary do not. This book puts the spine of Wesley's pastoral theology back into the hands of the people for whom it was first preached: ordinary believers who want to know what their tradition actually teaches, in the words of the person who taught it. The sermons follow the order of salvation Wesley preached from his 1738 conversion to the end of his ministry - from the diagnostic of the almost-Christian, through justification and the new birth, into the witness of the Spirit and Christian perfection. Wesley's syntax has been opened up, his eighteenth-century vocabulary modernized, and his pulpit accumulations trimmed; his theology, his rhetorical edge, and his signature phrases are all here, in the places he placed them. Includes brief chapter summaries, a note on the editorial approach, the Charles Wesley hymn that originally closed the Christian Perfection sermon, and indexes of subjects and Scripture.