'The Book that Changed John Wesley'

When John Wesley was a young man at Oxford, a book started making the rounds among a small circle of friends. It was called A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, written by a clergyman named William Law. Wesley didn't just read it and move on — in 1732, he traveled to Law's home in person just to sit with him and talk it through. Decades later, near the end of his life, Wesley was still recommending the book, calling it "a treatise which will hardly be excelled... either for beauty of expression or for justness and depth of thought." That's not casual praise. That's a man who built an entire movement — Methodism — naming the book that significantly shaped him.

Here's the line inside it that explains why. Law wrote that when people look honestly at their own lives — the compromises, the habits, the gap between who they are and who they want to be — they usually blame something. Weakness. Circumstances. Just being human. Law says no. Most of the time, people live the way they live "purely because" they never actually intended anything different. Not because they're evil. Because they never decided. That single idea reshaped how Wesley thought about holiness for the rest of his life — and it's the same idea sitting underneath the very first verse of the Psalms: "Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked" (Psalm 1:1). The word translated "blessed" is quietly tied, in the original language, to the word for steps — for walking. The blessed life isn't a mood. It's a direction, chosen on purpose.

That's the real question underneath a new school year, a new job, a new anything — not "am I doing okay," but which direction am I actually walking, and did I choose it. Nobody drifts into becoming like Christ. Nobody intends to live in chaos either — not really. Both take a decision somewhere back at the start, even if it didn't feel like one at the time. The blessed life this psalm describes isn't stumbled into by accident or earned through anxious effort. It's learned — one deliberate step at a time, walking toward the God who made you until your life is finally aligned with his.

Every good change is done so intentionally. We don't drift into it.

Where in your life have you been waiting for a feeling instead of making a decision?

Blessings,

Jonathan