Happy Birthday, John Wesley. Two Silver Spoons.
And Thousands of Souls.

Thank you, John Wesley, for your practicing what you preached about money. John Wesley was born on this day 1703 (same year as Jonathan Edwards). He was one of the great evangelists of the 18th century. Today I want to celebrate his attitude toward money.

He is famous for saying: “Having, first, gained all you can, and, secondly saved all you can, then give all you can. (Sermon 50, "The Use of Money" in The Works of the Reverend John Wesley, 1840, edited by John Emory, Vol. I, 446). Here is how he lived this out.


This so baffled the English Tax Commissioners that they investigated him in 1776 insisting that for a man of his income he must have silver dishes that he was not paying excise tax on. He wrote them,


When he died in 1791 at the age of 87, the only money mentioned in his will was the coins to be found in his pockets and dresser. Most of the 30,000 pounds he had earned in his life had been given away. He wrote,


In other words, I will put a control on my spending myself, and I will go beyond the tithe for the sake of Christ and his kingdom. 
(Quotes from Mission Frontiers, Sept./Oct. 1994, nos. 9–10, pp. 23–24)