‘By Christian perfection,

I mean (1) loving God with all our heart. Do you object to this?

I mean (2) a heart and life devoted to God. Do you desire less?

I mean (3) regaining the whole image of God. What objection to this?

I mean (4) having all the mind that was in Christ. Is this going too far?

I mean (5) walking uniformly as Christ walked. And this surely no Christian will object to.

If anyone means anything more or anything else by perfection, I have no concern with it. But if this is wrong, yet what need of this heat about it, this violence, I had almost said, fury of opposition, carried so far as even not to lay out anything with this man, or that woman, who professes it?’

(John Wesley’s Journal, June 1769)

(This was not all he said on the subject, as one of his 44 Sermons addressed the issue. But if we are going to join this same debate 250 years on, we should look at the original sources if possible.)

The short book of Ruth is tender and precious. It is full of humanity and hope and, especially, grace.

Ruth was an outsider, a Moabite. In fact, the tribe of Moab was cursed (Deut 23.3-4). As late as Neh 13.23-27, some 600 years later, marriages to Moabites were strongly disapproved.

Yet, the story brings Ruth, a young Moabite widow, to the field of Boaz, a wealthy land-owner in Bethlehem. Boaz urged her to remain in his fields, gleaning amongst the crops; he provided that his young men would not ‘touch’ (abuse) her. She would enjoy safety among his servant girls.

As the story develops, Ruth, urged on by Naomi, her mother-in-law, seeks something more from Boaz. ‘Take your maidservant under your wing,’ she asks (Ruth 3.9, NKJV) Part of Boaz’s response was a generous portion of grain to take home!

Jewish inheritance laws meant that his estate (and reputation) would be endangered by marrying a Moabite (Deut 23.3). This was a huge decision. Yet this costly choice by Boaz pre-figures Christ’s death for Gentiles as well as Jews.

As a result, we find Ruth in the genealogical story of David and Christ. The widow becomes the ‘mother’ of royalty and deity.

John Wesley, writing in his Journal in November 1759, commented on ‘spiritual manifestations’ he observed during his meetings:

‘the danger was to regard extraordinary circumstances too much, such as outcries, convulsions, visions, trances; as if these were essential to inward work, so that it could not go on without them. Perhaps the danger is, to regard them too little; to condemn them altogether; to imagine they had nothing of God in them. And were a hindrance to His work.

Whereas the truth is

1. God suddenly and strongly convinced many that they were lost sinners; the natural consequence whereof were sudden outcries and strong bodily convulsions;
2. to strengthen and encourage them that believed, and to make his work more apparent, He favoured several of them with divine dreams, other with trances and visions;
3. in some of these instances, after a time, nature mixed with grace;
4. Satan likewise mimicked this work of God in order to discredit the whole work; and yet it is not wise to give up this part any more than to give up the whole.

At first, it was, doubtless, wholly from God. It is partly so at this day; and He will enable us to discern how far, in every case, the work is pure and where it mixes or degenerates.’