The Essential Works Of John Wesley

Want to know how to live the Christian life? Learn from one of the foremost authorities, John Wesley, in this single-volume library of journal selections, sermons, and other addresses, essays, and letters. Two and a half centuries ago, the great Methodist distinguished himself as one of the world’s greatest authorities on the committed Christian life. Now, his most powerful writings have been compiled under one cover, perfect for personal study, pastoral research, or Christian school use. Including sermons on conversion, growth in grace, and practical holiness; essays on theological questions; personal letters; even hymns written and translated by Wesley, this all-in-one resource has been lightly updated for ease of reading, featuring scripture from the New King James Version.

The works of John Wesley have been treasured for many years, and we are pleased to offer this 141-sermon set in three volumes. These sermons constitute the essential points of his beliefs. Many were published by Wesley himself while others were recovered from his manuscripts after his death. While reading these, you will find that his writings are never dry but maintain a vigor of life about them while maintaining a scriptural balance. He strived to reach the everyday man and bring him a living gospel, and this intent is spread throughout his sermons. While Wesley had originally intended to publish a three-volume series, he went on to add a fourth. He desired to reach a larger audience with these printed works than he could with his daily sermons in person, and there was also a particular demand for them. The four books are comprised of approximately 44 sermons and are contained in volume I of this printing. In 1746, he had published the first book of this projected work, entitled Sermons on Several Occasions. He later went on to add another nine sermons to the series. The subsequent books were released in 1748, 1750, and 1760, respectively. It is important to note that these are by no means the whole of Wesley's written sermons; they were merely selected by him for the Christian reader as a kind of standard for his belief of many of the principal points of Christian doctrine, and have since become known as the standard sermons. In his preface to volume I, Wesley himself wrote, "I have accordingly set down in the following sermons what I find in the Bible concerning the way to heaven; with a view to distinguish this way of God from all those which are the inventions of men. I have endeavored to describe the true, the scriptural, experimental religion, so as to omit nothing which is a real part thereof, and to add nothing thereto which is not." (Sermons on Several Occasions, Volume I, Preface) For fifty years, Wesley had also written numerous sermons and published them in local magazines, many of which were printed in cities across England such as London, Bristol, Dublin, and Newcastle upon Tyne. With these sermons being placed in the hands of so many printers, it was inevitable that they would be printed in a combined publication, which was often the case. Because of this, in his advancing age, Wesley decided that he should undertake a reprinting of all of his works, enabling him to revise all of his works carefully and also to correct any errors that had arisen. In his collected works he elected to print his sermons, commentaries, notes, journals, and more, producing an impressive thirty-two duodecimo volumes, the first being published in 1771 and the last in 1774. In the set of sermons that comprised those of the "model deed" included nine additional lectures that were not previously published, bringing the total to 53. These 53 lectures have are in the first volume of this series.

John Wesley Powell was an American original. He was the last of the nation's great continental explorers and the first of a new breed of public servant: part scientist, part social reformer, part institution builder. His work and life reveal an enduringly valuable way of thinking about land, water, and society as parts of an interconnected whole; he was America's first great bioregional thinker. Seeing Things Whole presents John Wesley Powell in the full diversity of his achievements and interests, bringing together in a single volume writings ranging from his gripping account of exploring the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon to his views on the evolution of civilization, along with the seminal writings in which he sets forth his ideas on western settlement and the allocation and management of western resources. The centerpiece of Seeing Things Whole is a series of selections from the famous 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region and related magazine articles in which Powell further develops the themes of the report. In those, he recommends organizing the Arid Lands into watershed commonwealths governed by resident citizens whose interlocking interests create the checks and balances essential to wise stewardship of the land. This was the central focus of John Wesley Powell's bioregional vision, and it remains a model for governance that many westerners see as a viable solution to the resource management conflicts that continue to bedevil the region. Throughout the collection, award-winning writer and historian William deBuys brilliantly sets the historical context for Powell's work. Section introductions and extensive descriptive notes take the reader through the evolution of John Wesley Powell's interests and ideas from his role as an officer in the Civil War through his critique of Social Darwinism and landmark categorization of Indian languages, to the climatic yet ultimately futile battles he fought to win adoption of his land-use proposals. Seeing Things Whole presents the essence of the extraordinary legacy that John Wesley Powell has left to the American people, and to people everywhere who strive to reconcile the demands of society with the imperatives of the land.

A Plain Account of Christian Perfection by John Wesley is about the theory of perfection according to Christian theology. Excerpt: "1. WHAT I purpose in the following pages is, to give a plain and distinct account of the steps by which I was led, during the course of many years, to embrace the doctrine of Christian Perfection. This I owe to the serious part of mankind; those who desire to know all the truth as it is in Jesus. And these only are concerned with questions of this kind. To these I would nakedly declare the thing as it is, endeavoring all along to show, from one period to another, both what I thought, and why I thought so."

Representing the culmination of years of exhaustive research, it is the purpose of these conclusive volumes to keep alive the growing interest in Wesleyan studies for the entire Christian church. -- Amazon.com.

The works of John Wesley have been treasured for many years, and we are pleased to offer this 141-sermon set in three volumes. These sermons constitute the essential points of his beliefs. Many were published by Wesley himself while others were recovered from his manuscripts after his death. While reading these, you will find that his writings are never dry but maintain a vigor of life about them while maintaining a scriptural balance. He strived to reach the everyday man and bring him a living gospel, and this intent is spread throughout his sermons.While Wesley had originally intended to publish a three-volume series, he went on to add a fourth. He desired to reach a larger audience with these printed works than he could with his daily sermons in person, and there was also a particular demand for them. The four books are comprised of approximately 44 sermons and are contained in volume I of this printing. In 1746, he had published the first book of this projected work, entitled Sermons on Several Occasions. He later went on to add another nine sermons to the series. The subsequent books were released in 1748, 1750, and 1760, respectively. It is important to note that these are by no means the whole of Wesley's written sermons; they were merely selected by him for the Christian reader as a kind of standard for his belief of many of the principal points of Christian doctrine, and have since become known as the standard sermons.In his preface to volume I, Wesley himself wrote, "I have accordingly set down in the following sermons what I find in the Bible concerning the way to heaven; with a view to distinguish this way of God from all those which are the inventions of men. I have endeavored to describe the true, the scriptural, experimental religion, so as to omit nothing which is a real part thereof, and to add nothing thereto which is not." (Sermons on Several Occasions, Volume I, Preface)

In a single, convenient volume, readers can now look up John Wesley's own statements of his theological beliefs. Reprinted from the 1954 work, A Compend of Wesley's Theology, the book includes Wesley's most significant statements on the essential questions of Christian doctrine, culled from over thirty of his works.

The experiential impulse of Protestant Christianity, often identified as Pietism, is one of the key driving forces in shaping the western world, as well as promoting the ethos of individualism and antipathy toward the larger society. As such, understanding the foundations of Pietism is an essential and overlooked aspect of Western Christianity. This work helps to address this gap in scholarship by addressing the first two centuries of Pietism. First, this work shows where the experiential impulse is found within medieval Christianity, specifically in mysticism. Following the Protestant Reformation, this experiential impulse is unmoored from church tradition but still finds confessional variants, including Lutheran, Reform, and Anglican. The work then focuses on six key figures in the development of Pietism, specifically William Perkins, Johann Arndt, Philip Spener, August Francke, Count Zinzendorf, and John Wesley, demonstrating that Pietism begins as a protest against institutional forms but then grows into institutional and denominational forms itself. These institutional forms include Moravians, Methodists, and Prussianism, which directly shaped Germany, England, and America, though the latter not until the nineteenth century. This work reveals the diverse impact Pietism had while remaining a cohesive yet contradictory movement.