Susanna Wesley

Susanna Wesley

Not a few professing Christians sometimes have doubts about their salvation. If you or someone you know fits in that category, perhaps you’ll be helped by considering the following narrative of how Susanna Wesley and her famous sons, John and Charles, came to gain an assurance of their personal salvation.

Susanna grew up in an era when it was quite common for even devoted Christians in various denominations not to have an absolute assurance of their personal salvation. That was true of both Nonconformists (among whom she was raised) and of Anglicans (with whom she fellowshipped and served as an adult). Both Anglicans and Dissenters taught salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. But there was also such a pronounced emphasis on living a life of good works that not a few professing believers mistakenly supposed their salvation was based at least in part on their own good deeds. That mistaken belief couldn’t help but leave many of them wondering if they were good enough to make it to heaven.

John and Charles Wesley were ordained ministers in the Church of England. In 1735 they accompanied Colonel James Oglethorpe, founding Governor of Georgia Colony, to America. John served as a chaplain and a missionary to the Indians while Charles was Oglethorpe’s personal secretary. While in America the Wesleys had considerable contact with a group of German Moravian Christians who emphasized (1) salvation through faith in Christ alone and (2) having an assurance of one’s salvation through the inner witness of God’s Spirit.

Young John Wesley

Young John Wesley

After returning to England in 1738, both John and Charles had conversion experiences in which they firmly laid hold of the doctrine of justification by faith for themselves, and thereby gained a settled assurance that they were truly saved. They immediately set about zealously proclaiming those doctrines. Along with fellow Anglican George Whitefield, another fervent evangelist who emphasized justification through faith in Christ alone, they became the primary human instruments used of God to bring about the Evangelical revival that swept across England at that time. Through their earnest preaching, hundreds or even thousands of people came under deep conviction and were converted.

A significant spiritual event took place in Susanna’s life in January, 1740, at a communion service led by her son-in-law Westley Hall. She afterward wrote of the incident: “While my son Hall was pronouncing these words in delivering the cup to me, ‘The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee,’ these words struck through my heart, and I knew that God for Christ’s sake had forgiven me all my sins.”

Charles Wesley

Charles Wesley

When Charles heard of this he wrote his mother a rather blunt letter in which he apparently declared that she had all along been trusting in her own good works to save her and had not been truly converted until that moment of realization during the recent communion service. But in answering his letter she referred back to a time during her teenage years when God had brought her through a period of serious doubting and had kept her Christian faith intact:

“I do not, I will not despair. For ever since my sad defection, when I was almost without hope, when I had forgotten God, yet I then found He had not forgotten me. Even then He did by His Spirit apply the merits of the great atonement to my soul, by telling me that Christ died for me. Shall the God of truth, the Almighty Savior, tell me that I am interested in [have a share in] His blood and righteousness, and shall I not believe Him? God forbid! I do, I will believe. And though I am the greatest of sinners, that does not discourage me. For all my transgressions are the sins of a finite person, but the merits of our Lord’s sufferings and righteousness are infinite!”

Susanna Wesley salvation quote

Susanna’s father, Samuel Annesley, was a prominent Nonconformist minister in London during her childhood and younger adult years. When she related to her son John the assurance that had recently come to her heart at the communion service, he queried her about Annesley:

“I asked whether her father had not the same faith, and whether she had not heard him preach it to others. She answered, he had it himself, and declared a little before his death that for more than forty years he had no darkness, no fear, no doubt at all of his being accepted in the Beloved [Christ]. But that, nevertheless, she did not remember to have heard him preach, no not once, explicitly upon it [such assurance of salvation]. Whence she supposed he also looked upon it as the peculiar blessing of a few, not as promised to all the people of God.”

Susanna’s own assurance was in evidence at the time of her death on July 23, 1742. According to John, who was at her bedside when she passed into eternity, at that time she expressed ‘no doubt or fear’. Her sole desire was ‘to depart and to be with Christ’ (Philippians 1:23). Such is the settled assurance of the Christian who has come to trust in Christ alone (rather than partly in one’s own good works) for salvation.

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You will find much more about Susanna Wesley’s interesting life and beneficial spiritual perspectives on a variety of issues in my book Women of Faith and Courage (Christian Focus, 2011). Two commendable full-length biographies on her life are: Susanna Wesley by Arnold Dallimore (Baker, 1993) and Susanna Wesley by Kathy McReynolds (Bethany, 1998).

Copyright 2017 by Vance E. Christie

 

 

 

Susanna Wesley

Susanna Wesley—the mother of John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism—was exemplary in the educating and spiritual training of all her children. Susanna bore nineteen children but only ten of them lived to adulthood. During her childrearing years, the training and educating of her children was her primary focus in life. Each detail of her parental methodology will not be adopted by every parent. But her example has much to teach all Christian parents who desire to do a great job of raising their kids.

In an age when many girls and women, even among the upper class, never learned to read and write, Susanna had the blessing of growing up in the home of a university-trained London minister who saw to it that she received a sound homeschool education. Extremely intelligent, Susanna gained not only an excellent command of the English language but also a remarkable grasp of biblical and theological knowledge. When not quite twenty years of age, Susanna married Samuel Wesley, who was an Oxford graduate and a Church of England minister. The bulk of their ministerial career was spent at Epworth, a modest market town in western Lincolnshire.

Susanna taught her children to recite the Lord’s Prayer when rising each morning and retiring each evening. She also led them in memorizing other short prayers, various portions of Scripture and a short catechism. As was more common for Christian families in that era, Sundays were devoted entirely to religious learning and activities rather than to secular focuses.

Susanna taught each of her children to read when they turned five years old. All but two of the children learned the entire alphabet, upper and lower case letters, in a single day. As soon as they knew their letters, they began reading from the first chapter of Genesis, spelling out and reading one word then verse at a time.

Artist depiction of Susanna Wesley with some of her children

Artist depiction of Susanna Wesley with some of her children

Loud talking or playing were not allowed during the six hours of homeschool that Susanna held each day. Nor were the children permitted to rise out of their places or leave the room unless they had a good reason for doing so.

Susanna later initiated the custom of their singing psalms at the beginning and ending of each school day. She also began pairing up older children with younger ones, and having them read some Psalms and a chapter from the Old Testament before breakfast as well as Psalms and a New Testament chapter at afternoon’s end. Between the morning Scripture reading and breakfast the children were sent to their rooms for a period of private prayer.

From the time they were just a year old (some even earlier), Susanna trained her children “to fear the rod and to cry softly, by which means they escaped abundance of correction which they might otherwise have had.” Susanna placed great stress on the importance of subduing a child’s will from an early age: “In order to form the minds of children, the first thing to be done is to conquer their will, and bring them to an obedient temper. To inform the understanding is a work of time and must with children proceed by slow degrees as they are able to bear it. But the subjecting of the will is a thing which must be done at once, and the sooner the better. For by neglecting timely correction, they will contract a stubbornness and obstinacy, which is hardly ever conquered, and never without using such severity as would be as painful to me as to the child.”

Epworth Parish Church

Epworth Parish Church

Susanna further advised with balance: “And when the will of a child is totally subdued, and it is brought to revere and stand in awe of the parents, then a great many childish follies and inadvertences may be passed by. Some should be overlooked and taken no notice of, and others mildly reproved. But no willful transgression ought ever be forgiven children, without chastisement less or more, as the nature and circumstances of the offense require.”

Samuel and Susanna Wesley saw to it that their three sons received a first-rate university education. The fact that their sons succeeded in doing so bears testimony to the quality of the foundational education they received from their mother.

Women did not pursue university education in that era. But Susanna took care that her daughters’ education, while confined to their home, was given top priority. She related one of her cardinal rules of education: “That no girl be taught to work till she can read very well. And then that she be kept to her work with the same application and for the same time that she was held to reading. This rule also is much to be observed, for putting children to learn sewing before they can read perfectly is the very reason why so few women can read fit to be heard, and never to be well understood.”

Eventually some of Susanna’s children left home to pursue further education or to live with other relatives for a time (as when the Wesleys’ rectory was destroyed by fire and needed to be rebuilt). Even then Susanna continued to look out for their welfare by writing them long letters full of instruction and advice concerning a variety of spiritual, moral and practical matters. Some of those letters were nothing less than theological treatises. In her first letter to her oldest son after he went to London to continue his education, she explained her motivation in writing him: “I shall be employing my thoughts on useful subjects for you when I have time, for I desire nothing in this world so much as to have my children well instructed in the principles of religion, that they may walk in the narrow way which alone leads to happiness.”

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Women of Faith and Courage by Vance ChristieYou will find much more about Susanna Wesley’s interesting life and remarkable ministry to her children in my book Women of Faith and Courage (Christian Focus, 2011). Two commendable full-length biographies on her life are: Susanna Wesley, by Arnold Dallimore (Baker, 1993) and Susanna Wesley, by Kathy McReynolds (Bethany, 1998).

Copyright 2017 by Vance E. Christie

 

 

Susanna Wesley

Susanna Wesley

Susanna Wesley (1669-1742) is best known as the godly mother of John and Charles Wesley, founders of the Methodist movement. Her husband, Samuel, was a Church of England minister for forty-five years, thirty-eight of those in the Lincolnshire market town of Epworth.

During 1711 and 1712 Samuel was assisted in the care of his parish by a curate named Inman. Once during that period, when Samuel was away fulfilling denominational duties in London, Susanna initiated a practice with her own household that, surprisingly, came to have a profound positive effect on the entire Epworth congregation.

Inman did not hold an afternoon church service. Ever a strong believer in devoting the Christian Sabbath to sacred focuses, Susanna concluded it was her duty to spend part of the day instructing her family since they had so much time available for such activities. She read them sermons from Samuel’s library and led them in a time of family prayer.

Shortly after she started doing so, others heard of the Sunday evening gatherings in Susanna’s kitchen and asked if they might attend as well. Soon between thirty and forty people were present each week.

Just then one of Susanna’s daughter’s, Emilia, discovered in her father’s study an account of Danish missionaries who had risked their lives and sacrificed all the world holds dear in order to advance the honor of Christ by taking His Gospel to foreign lands. Susanna was greatly inspired by their example and concluded, “ … if my heart were sincerely devoted to God, and if I were inspired with a true zeal for His glory, and did really desire the salvation of souls, I might do somewhat more than I do.”

She resolved to begin with her own children, and thereafter met with them individually once weekly to discuss each child’s spiritual condition and concerns.  Susanna also began discoursing more freely and fervently with the neighbors who attended the Sunday evening gatherings. The results were amazing, for in a short time over 200 people per week were attending the Sunday night readings, which had to be moved to a larger venue.

Inman became envious and annoyed because more people were attending Susanna’s evening readings than his own morning sermons. Early in 1712, he and two other men wrote Samuel, accusing his wife of holding a conventicle, an illegal religious meeting. Alarmed, Samuel wrote from London, asking Susanna to stop her meetings.

In her earnest but measured written response to her husband, Susanna pointed out her primary reasons for thinking the Sunday evening gatherings should continue. No more than three or four individuals were objecting to the meetings. Whereas twenty to twenty-five people used to attend evening services at the church, now between two and three hundred people were coming out for the readings. Some families who formerly seldom went to church were now attending church services regularly. Many people were “very much reformed in their behavior on the Lord’s Day.” Through this ministry Susanna had “an opportunity of exercising the greatest and noblest charity, that is, charity of their souls.”

Epworth Parish Church

Epworth Parish Church

She closed that letter with these compelling words: “If you do, after all, think fit to dissolve this assembly, do not tell me that you desire me to do it, for that will not satisfy my conscience; but send me your positive command, in such full and express terms as may absolve me from all guilt and punishment, for neglecting this opportunity of doing good, when you and I shall appear before the great and awful tribunal of our LORD JESUS CHRIST.”

Samuel raised no further objection, and the meetings continued till his return. At that time he found the moral and spiritual condition of his congregation remarkably improved. Through Susanna’s Spirit-led ministrations nothing less than a touch of revival had come to Epworth.

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A fuller account of Susanna Wesley’s life of devoted service to the Lord, her family and others is included in my book Women of Faith and Courage. May her example encourage us to “do somewhat more” in our own service of Jesus Christ, His people and those who still need Him as their Savior.

Copyright 2013 by Vance E. Christie