It’s no secret that I am a bit of a John Wesley fan. He lived an amazing life of courage, taking the good news of Jesus to the working class people of his day, and seeing many thousands come to faith.
The traditional churches had little time for Wesley and his converts and so he took it on himself to teach his converts how to live an authentic Christian life. His collections of sermons are full of Godly wisdom, but to modern readers, quite hard going.
Somehow he managed to preach without cracking jokes or showing Pixar video clips: why did anyone listen?
Anyway, sometimes he produced simple -to-remember versions of his teaching, that are easy to grasp and memorable.
Like Jesus, who often taught about how to handle money in God’s Kingdom, Wesley taught his converts that following Jesus affected everything – including their wealth. In his sermon on ‘The Use of Money’, he offered three simple rules for handling finances.
Earn All You Can.
Save All You Can
Give All You Can
‘Earn all you can’, is an encouragement to fully use all of the gifts that God has given a person to earn a living and support their family. High earners are not immoral! Be a good worker or business person. Earn all you can!
‘Save all you can’, is NOT an encouragement to build up reserves in a bank account. Rather Wesley meant this to encourage frugal living. Live simply. Don’t waste your money on needless luxury. And don’t just keep banking it. (He said that if people found money in his bank account when he died, they should think of him as a thief and robber!).
‘Give All You Can’, does NOT mean give what is left over after you’ve feathered your own nest. It means that by living simply (Save All You Can) you have an increasing capacity to be generous. The less you spend on yourself, the more you can help and encourage others.
For Wesley, “money is an excellent gift of God, answering the noblest ends. In the hands of his children it is food for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, clothing for the naked.”
Wesley’s principle for giving was not based on what was left over after he’d developed the lifestyle he wanted. Rather he worked out what he needed to live on, and then gave everything else away. (If he lived today maybe he’d have used the Real Living Wage as a guide. In the UK experts calculate that you need to earn around £20,000 a year to live in the UK. On that basis Wesley would have given away everything he earned above that).
Perhaps to paraphrase his rules we might say:
Be industrious
Be frugal, so that you can…
Be radically generous.
Does that sound too hard to us? Who knows, Wesley’s ‘Three Simple Rules’ might move us in the direction of Jesus’ one simple rule!
“Sell your possessions and give to those in need. This will store up treasure for you in heaven! And the purses of heaven never get old or develop holes. Your treasure will be safe; no thief can steal it and no moth can destroy it.(Luke 12:33)
Our finances are of course just one way that we can be generous.
We can be generous with our time, setting aside something we’d planned to do to contact or help someone in need.
We can be generous with our skills, using our God-given gifts to serve others and meet their needs, or perhaps by serving on a ministry team at church.
We can be generous with our possessions, sharing and lending freely what God has allowed us to own.
The New Testament gives no rule, but does offer this advice: “You must each decide in your heart how much to give. And don’t give reluctantly or in response to pressure. “For God loves a person who gives cheerfully.” (2 Corinthians 9:7)