Charles Wesley
Posts in Comfortable Words tagged ‘Charles Wesley’
A song of praise celebrating God’s redemption of man through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
This was the very first hymn in the Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1779), edited by John Wesley. It had been written by his brother Charles, and expressed everything that was to follow: a book (as John put it) “for every truly pious reader, as a means of raising or quickening the spirit of devotion; of confirming his faith; of enlivening his hope; and of kindling and increasing his love to God and man.”
Charles Wesley pictures the communion service as the unfolding of the courts of heaven and the living presence of Jesus Christ.
In this poem, Charles Wesley turns to the Epistle to the Hebrews, where St Paul describes Christ as a sacrifice presented everlastingly before God in a heavenly Temple. In the communion service, says Wesley, we are admitted to that heavenly sanctuary for a blessed moment.
A hymn about free grace, based on St Peter’s release from prison by the hand of an angel.
This hymn is one of Charles Wesley’s finest. It draws on St Luke’s account, in the Acts of the Apostles, of St Peter’s release from prison by an angel sent from God, and relates it to the Christian who realises that Jesus Christ has torn up the indictment for sin that stood between them.
A short hymn inspired by some words from the Song of Songs, asking the Good Shepherd to lead his straying lamb back to the flock.
This hymn is part of a series of poems based on the Song of Songs in the Old Testament. Charles Wesley combines two Biblical images together: the Good Shepherd, which he takes from the Song and from St John’s Gospel; and Christ as the Rock where Moses was enabled to look upon God’s glory without being destroyed by the sight.
A hymn for those times when the Christian life seems like riding in a storm-tossed ship.
Jesu, Lover of My Soul begins with an image of the Christian life as a ship tossed upon the heaving waters of a storm at sea without, and ends with the image of a refreshing fountain of eternal youth welling up within.
A superlative Christian poem based on Righteous Jacob’s encounter with an angel.
The great English hymn-writer Isaac Watts said of this poem by his contemporary, Charles Wesley, that it was worth all that he himself had ever written. In Genesis 32, Jacob, whose family and friends have gone on ahead, is forced to spend a night wrestling with an angel. He yields after receiving a leg injury, and asks his opponent’s name. ‘Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?’ replies the angel — and is gone.