S9E21: Awake, Thou That Sleepest (Wesley’s Standard Sermons #3)

Considering this is the third installment of Wesley's Standard Sermons that I have posted, I decided to create a new Podcast wrapper for the Standard Sermons, and also set Saturdays as the day when I would post them.

Today's Standard Sermon is not by John Wesley, but instead by his younger brother Charles.  Charles Wesley is primarily known as a prolific hymn writer, having written over 4,000 hymns in his lifetime.  But he was also an ordained priest of the Anglican Church and a fellow of Oxford's Christ-Church, and so he was called upon to deliver the odd oratory.  Here he takes on the text from Ephesians and turns it into a clarion call for the Church.  We often forget that the Methodist movement was never intended by the Wesleys to be a new denomination, but rather a reformation, a revival within the Church of England.  And so Charles Wesley calls out those sleeping souls in the church to awaken from their spiritual slumber, and invites them into a new revitalized passion for Christ, in loving God and neighbor not as merely the form of religion only, but also the substance of the Holy Spirit living in them.  We in the church today would do well to heed this call in our own spiritual lives.

Ephesians 5:14

Recorded on January 25, 2022

Awake, Thou That Sleepest Full Sermon Text

S.D.G.