Notes:
Sermon 28: Upon Our Lord’s Sermon On The Mount, Discourse VIII
The unifying theme of these next thirteen ‘discourses’ on the Sermon on the Mount, with all their variations and nuancings, is the Christian life understood as the fruit of justifying faith. But given such faith, what follows? Wesley’s answer is given in this extended exposition of the Christian life based on the locus classicus of evangelical ethics, ‘The Sermon on the Mount’ (i.e., Matthew 5-7). Since Tyndale, this ‘sermon’ had been understood as ‘the epitome of God’s laws and promises’ for Christian believers; cf. Clebsch, England’s Earliest Protestants, p. 184; see also William Burkitt, Expository Notes…on the New Testament (eleven editions between 1700 and 1739), Preface to chapter 5: ‘Christ’s famous Sermon on the Mount comprehends the sum and substance of both the Old and New Testaments.’
Taken together, the following sermons are not a thirteen-part essay, tightly organized and argued. Instead, they are separate sermons, drawn from materials running back to 1725, arranged in a triadic pattern that seems to have been original with Wesley. Each is a discourse in its own right; yet the series is designed so that each appears as a part of a whole. This means that the sermons may be read singly or together, but with an eye on their shared aim: ‘to assert and prove every branch of gospel obedience as indispensably necessary to eternal salvation’; cf. Wesley’s open letter (Nov. 17, 1759) to John Downes in reply to the latter’s abusive Methodism Examined and Exposed (1759).
Many of the great and near-great commentators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had devoted their talents to the interpretation of Matthew 5-7 as the principal summary of Christian ethics, or, in Henry Hammond’s phrase, as ‘an abstract of Christian philosophy’; cf. his Practical Catechism (1st edn., c. 1644), II.1, in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology (1847), p. 83. Chief among these earlier works, in the order of their influences upon Wesley’s thought, were Bishop Offspring Blackall, ‘Eighty-Seven Practical Discourses Upon Our Saviour’s Sermon on the Mount’, Works, I.1-561; II.609-939; 01:467John Norris, Practical Discourses; the American, James Blair, Our Saviour’s Divine Sermon on the Mount in IV Volumes (1722; 2nd edn., 1740, with a preface by Daniel Waterland); John Cardinal Bona, Guide to Eternity… (six editions in English between 1672 and 1712); and Henry Hammond, op. cit. Echoes of all these are scattered along the way, together with lesser borrowings from Bengel, Poole, and Henry. This makes it all the more remarkable that Wesley came up with a model of his own, both inform and substance. This series thus reminds us, yet again, of Wesley’s ready appeal to tradition—even while he maintains his own originality and independence.
Benjamin Ingham records in his Journal that ‘during the voyage [to Georgia] Wesley went over our Saviour’s Sermon on the Mount’ with the ship’s company aboard the Simmonds. There are also other records of his preaching, very early on, from one or another text in Matthew 5-7. For example, his second sermon was preached at Binsey (near Oxford), November 21, 1725, on Matt. 6:33. A first draft of the sermon which appears here as ‘Discourse VIII’ seems to have been written out in 1736. Later, it was the example of the Sermon on the Mount that encouraged Wesley to break out of his High Church prejudices in Bristol, April 1, 1739: ‘In the evening (Mr. Whitefield being gone) I begun expounding our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount (one pretty remarkable precedent of field preaching, though I suppose there were churches at that time also) to a little society which was accustomed to meet once or twice a week in Nicholas Street;’ cf. Journal entries for this whole story of the unplanned outbreak of the Wesleyan Revival.
The records show that, between 1739 and 1746, Wesley preached more than one hundred sermons from separate texts in the Sermon on the Mount. There is, however, no recorded instance of his having treated that Sermon as a whole anywhere else. Evidently, he was prepared to allow this series, once published, to stand as his sufficient comment on the subject.
In his introduction to ‘Discourse X’, §§1-3, Wesley repeats his explanation (cf. ‘Discourse I’, Proem, §10) of how he had conceived the design of Matthew 5-7, according to its three unfolding themes: (1) ‘the sum of true religion’; (2) ‘rules touching that right intention which we are to preserve in all our outward actions’; and (3) ‘the main hindrances of this religion’. He then adds a clarifying summary: ‘In the fifth chapter [of St. Matthew] our great Teacher…has laid before us those dispositions of the soul which constitute real Christianity…. In the sixth [chapter] he has shown how all our actions…may be made holy, and good, and acceptable to God, by a pure and holy intention…. In 01:468the former part of [ch. 7] he points out the most common and fatal hindrances of this holiness; in the latter [part] he exhorts us, by various motives, to break through all [such hindrances] and secure that prize of our high calling [of God in Christ Jesus]’ (cf. Phil. 3:14).
The thirteen discourses are divided almost equally over the three chapters of St. Matthew: five for chapter five, four each for six and seven. Of the first five, Discourse I is devoted to the first two Beatitudes; Discourse II to Beatitudes three through five (with a hymn to love based on 1 Cor. 13); Discourse III to the remainder of the Beatitudes; Discourse IV turns to Christianity as ‘a social religion’ in which inward holiness (our love of God) prompts outward holiness (love of neighbour); Discourse V is a balancing of law and gospel. Discourses VI-IX are based on chapter six: VI to the problems of purity and holiness of intention (to the ‘works of piety and of mercy’); VII to fasting; VIII to a denunciation of greed and surplus accumulation; IX to the mutually exclusive services of God and Mammon. Discourses X-XIII turn to various hindrances to holy living and to their avoidance: X to ‘judging’ (contrary to love), ‘intemperate zeal’, ‘neglect of prayer’, ‘neglect of charity’; XI to the noxious influences of ill-example and ill-advice with which the world deludes us; XII to false prophets and unedifying preachers (and yet also our duties to attend church nonetheless and to avail ourselves of all means of grace); XIII is an inevitable comment on the parable of the houses built on sand and rock. Discourse XII was also published separately in the same year that it appeared in SOSO, III (1750), under the title, ‘A Caution Against False Prophets. A Sermon on Matt. vii. 15-20. Particularly recommended to the People Called Methodists’. This went through seven editions during Wesley’s lifetime. For a stemma delineating the publishing history of that sermon (‘collected’ and ‘separate’) and a list of variant readings, see Appendix, ‘Wesley’s Text’, Vol. IV, see also Bibliog, Nos. 130 and 13o.i.
Obviously there is no interest, in any of these sermons, in critical textual problems or in the historical context. Everywhere it is assumed that in St. Matthew’s text we are dealing with divine ipsissima verba—i.e., with a direct address from ὁ ὤν, ‘the self-existent, the Supreme, the God who is over all, blessed for ever’ (§9 below). The Sermon on the Mount, in Wesley’s view, is the only Gospel passage where Christ designed ‘to lay down at once the whole plan of his religion, to give us a full prospect of Christianity’. What matters most in our reading, therefore, is an awareness of Wesley’s sense of the wholeness of the message he is interpreting, of his conviction of the honest integration of an evangel profoundly ethical with an ethic that is also vividly 01:469evangelical. Maybe more than anywhere else in SOSO this particular bloc displays Wesley’s distinctive concern for integration and balance—between the faith that justifies and the faith that works by love.
01:612 Upon our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount,Discourse the Eighth
Matthew 6:19-23
Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal·
But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal;
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.
But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!
11. From those which are commonly termed ‘religious actions’, and which are real branches of true religion where they spring from a pure and holy intention and are performed in a manner suitable thereto, our Lord proceeds to the actions of ‘common life’, and shows that the same purity of intention is as indispensably required in our ordinary business as in giving alms, or fasting, or prayer.
And without question the same purity of intention ‘which makes our alms and devotions acceptable must also make our labour or employment a proper offering to God. If a man […] pursues his business that he may raise himself to a state of honour and riches in the world, he is no longer serving God in his employment, […] and has no more title to a reward from God than he who gives alms that he may be seen, or prays that he may be heard of men. For vain and earthly designs are no more allowable in our employments than in our alms and devotions. […] They are not only evil when they mix with our good works’, with our religious actions, ‘but they have the same evil nature […] when they enter into the common business of our employments. If it were allowable to pursue them in our worldly 01:613employments, it would be allowable to pursue them in our devotions. But as our alms and devotions are not an acceptable service but when they proceed from a pure intention, so our common employment cannot be reckoned a service to him but when it is performed with the same piety of heart.’
A quotation from Law’s Serious Call, (Works, IV.33); but note Wesley’s alterations (e.g., ‘earthly designs’ in place of ‘earthly desires’). Wesley had already published an abridged edn. of Serious Call in 1744 (cf. Bibliog, No. 86); here he abridges that abridgement still further.
22. This our blessed Lord declares in the liveliest manner in those strong and comprehensive words which he explains, enforces, and enlarges upon throughout this whole chapter. ‘The light of the body is the eye. If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light: but if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.’ The eye is the intention: what the eye is to the body, the intention is to the soul.
Cf. No. 12, ‘The Witness of Our Own Spirit’, §11 and n.
John 17:3.
See Mark 12:30.
33. ‘If thine eye be’ thus ‘single’, thus fixed on God, ‘thy whole body shall be full of light.’ ‘Thy whole body’—all that is guided by the intention, as the body is by the eye. All thou art, all thou dost: thy desires, tempers, affections; thy thoughts and words and actions. The whole of these ‘shall be full of light’; full of true, divine knowledge. This is the first thing we may here understand by light. ‘In his light thou shalt see light.’
Cf. Ps. 36:9.
Cf. 2 Cor. 4:6.
See Eph. 1:18.
See 1 Cor. 2:10.
Cf. 1 John 2:27.
How does experience confirm this? Even after God hath opened the eyes of our understanding, if we seek or desire anything else than God, how soon is our foolish heart darkened! Then clouds again rest upon our souls. Doubts and fears again overwhelm us. We are tossed to and fro, and know not what to do, or which is the path wherein we should go. But when we desire and seek nothing but God, clouds and doubts vanish away. We ‘who were sometime darkness are now light in the Lord’.
Cf. Eph. 5:8.
See Ps. 139:12.
Cf. Prov. 4:18.
Cf. Ps. 5:8 (BCP).
44. The second thing which we may here understand by ‘light’ is holiness. While thou seekest God in all things thou shalt find him in all, the fountain of all holiness, continually filling thee with his own likeness, with justice, mercy, and truth. While thou lookest unto Jesus and him alone thou shalt be filled with the mind that was in him.
See Phil. 2:5.
Cf. Heb. 11:27.
2 Cor. 3:18.
And it is also matter of daily experience that ‘by grace we are thus saved through faith.’
Cf. Eph. 2:8.
See 2 Cor. 5:19.
501:6155. This light which fills him who has a single eye implies, thirdly, happiness as well as holiness. Surely ‘light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is to see the sun.’
Cf. Eccles. 11:7. Cf. No. 91, ‘On Charity’, III.10, where Wesley relates an anecdote of a victim of the Inquisition brought out of prison to execution. Having not seen the sun in many years, looking up, he cried out in surprise, ‘O how can anyone who sees that glorious luminary worship any but the God that made it!’
Phil. 2:1.
See Phil. 4:7.
See Rom. 5:2.
Matt. 6:22.
See 1 John 1:7.
See 1 Thess. 5:16-18.
66. ‘But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.’
Matt. 6:23.
Cf. Titus 1:15. Cf. No. 125, ‘On a Single Eye’.
Our eye therefore is evil if in anything we do we aim at any other end than God; if we have any view but to know and to love God, to please and serve him in all things; if we have any other design than to enjoy God, to be happy in him both now and for ever.
Note the echo here of the answer to Q. 1 in the Westminster Shorter Catechism of 1647.
77. If thine eye be not singly fixed on God, ‘thy whole body shall be full of darkness.’ The veil shall still remain on thy heart. Thy mind shall be more and more blinded by ‘the God of this world, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ should shine upon thee’.
Cf. 2 Cor. 4:4.
01:616Yea, if thine eye be not single, if thou seek any of the things of earth, thou shalt be full of ungodliness and unrighteousness, thy desires, tempers, affections, being all out of course, being all dark, and vile, and vain. And thy conversation will be evil as well as thy heart, not ‘seasoned with salt’,
Col. 4:6.
Cf. Eph. 4:29.
88. Both ‘destruction and unhappiness are in thy ways;’ for ‘the way of peace hast thou not known.’
Cf. Rom. 3:16-17.
Eccles. 11:8.
Eccles. 1:14, etc.
See Ps. 39:6.
See Exod. 10:21.
Cf. Matt. 26:45.
‘If the light which is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!’ If the intention which ought to enlighten the whole soul, to fill it with knowledge, and love, and peace, and which in fact does so as long as it is single, as long as it aims at God alone—if this be darkness; if it aim at anything beside God, and consequently cover the soul with darkness instead of light, with ignorance and error, with sin and misery—O how great is that darkness! It is the very smoke which ascends out of the bottomless pit!
See Rev. 11:7; 17:8.
See Isa. 9:1-2; Matt. 4:16.
99. Therefore ‘lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.’
Matt. 6:19.
With regard to most of the commandments of God, whether 01:617relating to the heart or life, the heathens of Africa
Most of what Wesley knew of Africa came from the published accounts of travellers and was confined largely to the ‘dark continent’s’ southern tip. Cf. Peter Kolben, The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope (1731) and Thomas Salmon, Modern History. The general label at that time for the natives of the Cape Colony and its hinterlands was ‘Hottentots’, and they are described in quite various lights (as ‘noble savages’ by some and as uncivilized by others). Wesley’s concern here, however, is to use ‘the heathens of Africa or America’ as foils in his scornful comparisons between nominal Christians and so-called heathens. Cf. JWJ, Dec. 2, 1737 (§§21-28); and Nos. 69, ‘The Imperfection of Human Knowledge’, II.5; 105, ‘On Conscience’, §5. See also The Doctrine of Original Sin, Pt. II, II.1-10; Thoughts upon Slavery, II.1-2 (Bibliog, No. 350, Vol. 15); Survey, IV.109; and AM, 1789, 377-83. Wesley seems never to have used the name ‘Africa’, but always, as here, ‘Africk’ (1748) or ‘Afric’ (1771, 1787).
Wesley’s lifelong rejection of surplus accumulation as an economic moral principle would intensify in the last decade of his life; see below, No. 87, ‘The Danger of Riches’ (1781). Here, before Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) and in sharp contrast, he is suggesting that, in terms of freedom from the greed that expresses itself in ‘laying up treasures…’, the heathens are morally superior to European Christians who, long since, had lost their ‘natural’ scruples against hoarding and amassing wealth without stint. Cf. No. 50, ‘The Use of Money’, espec. I.8-9, III.1.
They do not start at disobeying Christ, but at a breach of heathen morality. So that even these honest men do no more obey this command than a highwayman or a housebreaker. Nay, they never designed to obey it. From their youth up it never entered into their thoughts. They were bred up by their Christian parents, masters, and friends, without any instruction at all concerning it; unless it were this, to break it as soon and as much as they could, and to continue breaking it to their life’s end.
1010. There is no one instance of spiritual infatuation in the world which is more amazing than this. Most of these very men read or hear the Bible read, many of them every Lord’s day. They have read or heard these words an hundred times, and yet never suspect that they are themselves condemned thereby, any more than by those which forbid parents to offer up their sons or daughters unto Moloch.
O that God would speak to these miserable self-deceivers with his own voice, his mighty voice! That they may at last awake out of the snare of the devil,
See 2 Tim. 2:26.
See Acts 9:18.
1111. Do you ask what it is to ‘lay up treasures on earth’? It will be needful to examine this thoroughly. And let us, first, observe what is not forbidden in this command, that we may then clearly discern what is.
We are not forbidden in this command, first, to ‘provide things honest in the sight of all men,’
Cf. 2 Cor. 8:21.
Cf. Rom. 13:7.
Rom. 13:8.
Matt. 5:17.
Neither, secondly, does he here forbid the providing for ourselves such things as are needful for the body; a sufficiency of plain, wholesome food to eat, and clean raiment to put on. Yea, it is our duty, so far as God puts it into our power, to provide these things also; to the end we may ‘eat our own bread’,
Cf. 2 Thess. 3:12.
Cf. 2 Cor. 11:9.
Nor yet are we forbidden, thirdly, to provide for our children and for those of our own household. This also it is our duty to do, even upon principles of heathen morality. Every man ought to provide the plain necessaries
Cf. No. 30, ‘Sermon on the Mount, X’, §26 and n.
Cf. 1 Tim. 5:3, 8.
1 Tim. 5:8.
Lastly, we are not forbidden in these words to lay up from time to time what is needful for the carrying on our worldly business in such a measure and degree as is sufficient to answer the foregoing purposes: in such a measure as, first, to ‘owe no man anything’;
Rom. 13:8.
1212. We may now clearly discern (unless we are unwilling to discern it) what that is which is forbidden here. It is the designedly procuring more of this world’s goods than will answer the foregoing purposes; the labouring after a larger measure of worldly substance, a larger increase of gold and silver; the laying up any more than these ends require is what is here expressly and absolutely forbidden. If the words have any meaning at all, it must 01:620be this, for they are capable of no other. Consequently whoever he is that, owing no man anything, and having food and raiment for himself and his household, together with a sufficiency to carry on his worldly business so far as answers these reasonable purposes—whosoever, I say, being already in these circumstances, seeks a still larger portion on earth—he lives in an open habitual denial of the Lord that bought him. He hath practically ‘denied the faith, and is worse than an’ African or American ‘infidel’.
1313. Hear ye this, all ye that dwell in the world, and love the world wherein ye dwell. Ye may be ‘highly esteemed of men’; but ye are an ‘abomination in the sight of God’.
Cf. Luke 16:15.
See Ps. 119:25.
See Hab. 2:6.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, had been Wesley’s undergraduate textbook in ethics, along with the ethical writings of Seneca and Cicero; with one voice they had condemned greed and covetousness.
See Luke 10:42.
Matt. 6:20.
Cf. Matt 6:19.
See Isa. 55:2.
BCP, Burial (477).
Matt. 6:21.
See Ps. 119:25.
See Col. 3:2.
1414. O ‘how hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!’
Mark 10:23.
Mark 10:25.
See 1 John 2:16. Cf. No. 7, ‘The Way to the Kingdom’, II.2 and n.
Matt. 23:33.
Matt. 19:26.
1515. And even if you do not succeed, what is the fruit of your endeavouring to lay up treasures on earth? ‘They that will be rich’ (οἱ βουλόμενοι πλουτεῖν, they that desire, that endeavour after it, whether they succeed or no) ‘fall into a temptation and a snare’, a gin, a trap of the devil, ‘and into many foolish and hurtful lusts’—ἐπιθυμίας [πολλὰς] ἀνοήτους, desires with which reason hath nothing to do, such as properly belong, not to rational and immortal beings, but only to the brute beasts which have no understanding; ‘which drown men in destruction and perdition’,
Cf. 1 Tim. 6:9.
Cf. 1 Tim. 6:10.
The cautiousness with which the Apostle here speaks is highly observable. He does not affirm this absolutely of the rich; for a man may possibly be rich without any fault of his, by an overruling providence, preventing his own choice. But he affirms it of οἱ βουλόμενοι πλουτεῖν, ‘those who desire’ or seek ‘to be rich’. Riches, dangerous as they are, do not always ‘drown men in destruction and perdition’. But the desire of riches does: those who calmly desire and deliberately seek to attain them, whether they do, in fact, gain the world or no, do infallibly lose their own souls. These are they that sell him who bought them with his blood, for a few pieces of gold or silver.
See Matt. 26:14-15.
Matt. 25:41.
1616. O who shall warn this generation of vipers to flee from the wrath to come!
See Matt. 3:7.
See Luke 16:20-21.
See Matt 10:28.
Isa. 58:1.
1717. And if it should be that one of these, by the mighty power of God, awoke and asked, What must I do to be saved?
Acts 16:30.
Luke 18:22.
Rom. 11:20.
Cf. 1 Sam. 16:7.
I.e., ‘in the balance of the sanctuary’; cf. No. 10, ‘The Witness of the Spirit, I’, II.8 and n.
Job 30:1.
See Luke 16:20.
1818. Secondly, ‘Trust not in uncertain riches.’
Cf. 1 Tim. 6:17.
First, trust not in them for help. Thou art miserably mistaken if thou lookest for this in gold or silver. These are no more able to set thee above the world than to set thee above the devil. Know that both the world and the prince of this world
John 14:30; 16:11.
Cf. Prov. 23:5.
See Ezek. 24:16, 21.
Prov. 5:18; Mal. 2:14.
Cf. Deut. 13:6; see also 1 Sam. 18:3.
See Ezek. 24:16.
Cf. Shakespeare, The Tempest, IV. i. 152—a conflation from memory of ‘The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces’.
Wesley seems to have held Horace in an especial contempt; cf., e.g., No. 2, The Almost Christian, III.9, where Wesley refers to him with two unflattering epithets (‘a heathen Epicurean poet’ and ‘this poor wretch’). The quotation here is from the Epistles, I. ii. 52-53, and speaks of ‘such pleasures as pictures can afford to weak eyes or bounty-laden tables to a man with gout’. Despite this disdain, however, Wesley quotes Horace at least twenty-nine times in the Sermons.
1901:62419. But there is at hand a greater trouble than all these. Thou art to die. Thou art to sink into dust; to return to the ground from which thou wast taken, to mix with common clay. Thy body is to go to the earth as it was, while thy spirit returns to God that gave it.
See Eccles. 12:7.
Cf. John’s later comment on his brother Charles’s death (Minutes of Conference, 1788): ‘He had no disease, but after a gradual decay of some months, “The weary wheels of life stood still at last”;’ the line of poetry is from John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee, Oedipus, Act IV, sc. 1.
Cf. Ecclus. 41:1.
Cf. Luke 12:20.
See Ps. 33:19 (AV).
See Job 1:21.
Horace, again; this time from the Odes, II. xiv. 21-24. The orig. reads colis (‘culture’) instead of Wesley’s seris (‘planting’) and, in l. 23, it reads invisas cupressos (i.e., the plural): ‘You must take leave of lands, home, winsome wife; and no tree whose culture had pleased shall survive your brief reign except those mournful cypresses.’ Cf. also, JWJ, July 4, 1756, and Oct. 13, 1779.
Surely, were not these truths too plain to be observed, because they are too plain to be denied, no man that is to die could possibly ‘trust’ for help ‘in uncertain riches’.
1 Tim. 6:17.
2020. And trust not in them for happiness. For here also they will be found ‘deceitful upon the weights’.
Ps. 62:9 (BCP).
Matthew Prior, Solomon, ii. 53-54 (the orig. uses the past tense). Cf. Wesley, Collection of Moral and Sacred Poems, II.129. Cf. Wesley’s ‘Thoughts on the Character and Writings of Mr. Prior’, where he asserts that Prior’s best passages ‘do not yield to anything that has been wrote by Pope, or Dryden, or any English poet, except Milton’ (AM 1782, 665).
Indeed experience is here so full, strong, and undeniable, that it makes all other arguments needless. Appeal we therefore to fact. Are the rich and great the only happy men? And is each of them more or less happy in proportion to his measure of riches? Are they happy at all? I had wellnigh said, they are of all men most miserable!
1 Cor. 15:19.
Matthew Prior, ‘The Ladle’, ll. 162, 164-66, with l. 163 omitted. See also No. 77, ‘Spiritual Worship’, III.1.
Yea, and so it will, till thy wearisome days of vanity are shut up in the night of death.
Surely then, to trust in riches for happiness is the greatest folly of all that are under the sun! Are you not convinced of this? Is it possible you should still expect to find happiness in money or all it can procure? What! Can silver and gold, and eating and drinking, and horses and servants, and glittering apparel, and diversions and pleasures (as they are called) make thee happy? They can as soon make thee immortal.
2121. These are all dead show. Regard them not. ‘Trust’ thou ‘in the living God;’
1 Tim. 4:10.
See Ps. 91:1.
Ps. 91:4 (BCP).
See Ps. 46:1.
Ps. 18:47 (BCP).
See Ps. 41:3 (BCP).
Ps. 60:11; 108:12.
Cf. Ps. 41:3.
See below, §26. Wesley’s thoroughgoing dualism is reflected in his oft-repeated metaphors about the earthly body as temporary lodgement far the soul. His biblical sources would include Job 4:19 (‘houses of clay’) and 2 Cor. 5:1 (‘the earthly house of this tabernacle’); and he uses one or another variant of the idea in other sermons (thirteen of them) and at least three letters, not to mention his early imitation of Horace (Odes I. xxiv), ver. 6, l. 4: ‘[The body’s] ancient tenement of clay’. The metaphor had come to be a cliché in English poetry, from Thomas Carew (‘On the Lady Mary Villiers’: ‘The purest soul that e’er was sent/Into a clayey tenement’) to John Dryden (‘Absalom and Achitophel’, I.144: ‘And o’er informed the tenement of clay’) to James Thomson (‘Upon Happiness’, l. 125: ‘cage of clay’), and many others.
1 Cor. 15:55-57.
O trust in him for happiness as well as for help. All the springs of happiness are in him. Trust in him ‘who giveth us all things richly to enjoy’, παρέχοντι [ἡμῖν] πλουσίως πάντα εἰς ἀπόλαυσιν;
A paraphrase of the meaning of 1 Tim. 6:17 in the TR; cf. the AV: ‘who giveth us richly all things to enjoy’.
Cf. No. 56, ‘God’s Approbation of His Works’, I.14 and n.
Cf. 1 John 1:3.
2222. Thirdly, seek not to increase in goods. ‘Lay not up for thyself treasures upon earth.’
Matt. 6:19.
Exod. 20:14.
Cf. Matt 6:19.
See Isa. 5:8.
Luke 6:46.
2323. If you ask, ‘But what must we do with our goods, seeing we have more than we have occasion to use, if we must not lay them up? Must we throw them away?’ I answer: if you threw them into the sea, if you were to cast them into the fire and consume them, they would be better bestowed than they are now.
But see No. 50, ‘The Use of Money’, §§2-3, where certain positive uses of money are acknowledged.
How pernicious to your own soul the latter of these is has been excellently shown by a late writer:
“If we waste our money we are not only guilty of wasting a talent which God has given us, […] but we do ourselves this farther harm: we turn this useful talent into a powerful means of corrupting ourselves; because so far as it is spent wrong, so far it is spent in the support of some wrong temper, in gratifying some vain and unreasonable desires, which as Christians we are obliged to renounce.” “As wit and fine parts cannot be only trifled away, but will expose those that have them to greater follies, so money cannot be only trifled away, but if it is not used according to reason and religion, will make people live a more silly and extravagant life than they would have done without it. If therefore you don’t spend your money in doing good to others, you must spend it to the hurt of yourself. You act like one that refuses the cordial to his sick friend which he cannot drink himself without inflaming his blood. For this is the case of superfluous money; if you give it to those who want it it is a cordial; if you spend it upon yourself in something that you do not want it only inflames and disorders your mind. […]” “01:628In using riches where they have no real use, nor we any real want, we only use them to our great hurt, in creating unreasonable desires, in nourishing ill tempers, in indulging in foolish passions, and supporting a vain turn of mind. For high eating and drinking, fine clothes and fine houses, state and equipage, gay pleasures and diversions, do all of them naturally hurt and disorder our heart. They are the food and nourishment of all the folly and weakness of our nature. […] They are all of them the support of something that ought not to be supported. They are contrary to that sobriety and piety of heart which relishes divine things. They are so many weights upon our mind, that makes us less able and less inclined to raise our thoughts and affections to things above.” “So that money thus spent is not merely wasted or lost, but it is spent to bad purposes and miserable effects; to the corruption and disorder of our hearts; to the making us unable to follow the sublime doctrines of the gospel. It is but like keeping money from the poor to buy poison for ourselves.Law, Serious Call (Works, IV.50-51); cf. above, §1 and n. See also No. 108, ‘On Riches’, II.3.
2424. Equally inexcusable are those who lay up what they do not need for any reasonable purposes:
“If a man had hands and eyes and feet that he could give to those that wanted them; if he should lock them up in a chest […] instead of giving them to his brethren that were blind and lame, should we not justly reckon him an inhuman wretch? If he should rather choose to amuse himself with hoarding them up than entitle himself to an eternal reward by giving them to those that wanted eyes and hands, might we not justly reckon him mad?” “Now money has very much the nature of eyes and feet. If therefore we lock it up in chests […] while the poor and distressed want it for their necessary uses […] we are not far from the cruelty of him that chooses rather to hoard up the hands and eyes than to give them to those that want them. If we choose to lay it up rather than to entitle ourselves to an eternal reward by disposing of our money well, we are guilty of his madness that rather chooses to lock up eyes and hands than to make himself for ever blessed by giving them to those that want them.More from Law; but note that Wesley reverses Law’s ordering of the ‘heads’ of his argument; cf. ibid., ch. vi; cf. §1, above, and n.
2525. May not this be another reason why rich men shall so hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven?
See Matt. 19:23.
See Gen. 4:10.
See 1 Pet. 4:5.
2626. The true way of employing what you do not want yourselves you may, fourthly, learn from those words of our Lord which are the counterpart of what went before: ‘Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal.’
Matt. 6:20.
Cf. Prov. 19:17.
Cf. Philem. 19.
Give to the poor with a single eye, with an upright heart, and write, ‘So much given to God.’ For ‘Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’
Cf. Matt. 25:40.
This is the part of a ‘faithful and wise steward’:
Luke 12:42.
See 2 Pet. 1:3.
Cf. Luke 16:9.
See above, §21 and n.
See Luke 16:22.
Cf. 2 Cor. 5:1.
01:63027. We ‘charge you’, therefore, ‘who are rich in this world’,
Cf. 1 Tim. 6:17.
1 Tim. 6:18.
Cf. Luke 6:36.
Cf. the General Rules, §5: ‘doing good, by being in every kind merciful after their power’.
Cf. 1 Tim. 6:17-18.
Matt. 10:8.
1 Tim. 6:18.
See Isa. 58:7.
See Ezek. 18:7.
See Heb. 13:2.
See Job 29:13.
Ibid.
2828. We exhort you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to be ‘willing to communicate’, κοινωνικοὺς εἴναι;
Cf. 1 Tim. 6:18, … εὐμετάδοτους εἴναι, κοινωνικούς, ….
Acts 2:42. Note Wesley’s ἐν for καὶ.
Cf. Acts 4:32.
Luke 12:42.
Cf. 1 Tim. 6:19.
1 Cor. 3:11.
See Gal. 1:8.
1 Cor. 3:8.
John 6:27.
Eccles. 9:10.
An adaptation from Samuel Wesley, Jun., ‘On the Death of Mr. Morgan…’; ll. 19-21, in Poems (1736), p. 108. Later, John will quote the first line here (with his own variations) in a letter to Ann Bolton, Nov. 28, 1772.
‘By patient continuance in well-doing, seek’ thou ‘for glory and honour and immortality.’
Rom. 2:7.
See Titus 2:14.
Matt. 25:34-36.
Cf. Matt 25:34. Cf. No. 51, The Good Steward, III and IV.
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Entry Title: Sermon 28: Upon Our Lord’s Sermon On The Mount, Discourse VIII