John Wesley, the father of the Methodist movement, is often described as being a champion of “Free will,” of the ability to choose God or sin. That is a bit of a simplification. It is definitely true in the sense that he absolutely rejected any kind of predestination that cuts some people off without even an opportunity to turn to God, but that is because he believed that God gave prevenient (or preventing) grace to every person.
However, Wesley’s biggest concern had to do with developing what he called holy tempers. That word “temper” doesn’t get used all the time today, except when we talk about someone losing their temper. In Wesley’s day, the term usually means something like “one’s abiding disposition.” He didn’t use these terms, but he was mostly interested in what we might call “character formation.”
One of the things we are trying to do within the Global Methodist Church is reclaim what it means to be a Methodist. Specifically, we want to be clear about what it means to be both Methodist and evangelical. This focus on holy tempers is a place where the Wesleyan/Methodist tradition has something to offer the larger evangelical world.
Most American evangelicalism is focused on the moment where someone makes a decision for Jesus. Clearly, this is important. We cannot follow Christ without coming to him. However, a decision for Christ that stops there, that does not continue into a life lived for him, every day, is something far short of how the New Testament describes the Christian life.
What Wesley taught relentlessly is that any faith that is real must also be alive, and a living faith cannot help but transform the life of the believer. In teaching Wesleyan theology to pastors in training, I compare the moment of “justification” or coming to Christ in the first place, to a birth certificate. It is important. We definitely need what it signifies, which is the new birth. However, the reason why we care that someone was born was not that we are obsessed with births, but that we care that they are alive. It might also be compared to a marriage certificate. I care that I have a marriage certificate and I am grateful for what it signifies, but I care far less about the certificate than I do about the marriage itself.
If you ask someone if they are married and the only thing they can point to is that they have a copy of their marriage certificate, you would wonder how important their marriage actually is. If someone has a certificate proclaiming they are married but they live their life as if they were not married, what good is the certificate? At that point, the fact that there is a certificate actually stands in judgement over the person’s life because they ought to know better and they ought to live differently.
The great insight of Methodism is that God doesn’t just want us to be born again, He wants us to live as those who belong to Him, which means that our lives, through the power of the Holy Spirit, begin to look more and more like the life of Christ. It isn’t about saying certain things. It isn’t even about doing certain things. It is about becoming a certain kind of person, someone whose life is “hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).
How are you not just choosing God once, but cultivating holy tempers, a life of holiness?
