Sudden expired the legal strife,
‘Twas then I ceased to grieve;
My second, real, living life
I then began to live.

On Sunday, May 21, 1739, exactly one year after experiencing the liberating movement of the Spirit, Charles Wesley, in commemoration of the event, wrote the infamous hymn, “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing.” Charles went on to write an astounding 6,500 hymns over 17 years.

Religious striving produces death. Every soul that intends to climb the mountain of conscience through applied effort, seeking a remedy for internal strife, ends in defeat every time. The Wesley’s experienced this. Having already applied the mind to religious study, completed ordination as priests, and flung themselves into explorative world missions, the brothers returned home to England broken and despondent, having failed to reach anything close as the mountain’s peak.

In brokenness, in failure, and defeat, the heart awakens to new sensitivities. The strange gift of reaching our own end, of coming to terms with our frail limitations! Freedom, this illusive prize, lies on the other side of surrender.

“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery,” was Paul’s warning to the believers in Galatia. It’s our reminder too, for all those performance hungry, eager souls who hope to find freedom through our own victories. The gift of freedom, the gift of a second life as Charles Wesley notes, is a gift to be received through the love and mercy of Christ.

The rest, they say, is history as the brothers, both renewed by the same Spirit’s promise, stood up, now with the energies of the divine Creator’s life, entered a new way of being in the world. They would join the Spirit’s impulse, as a wave of new opportunities and culture making took place to their generation with the pioneering of the Methodist movement.

How many of us seek God’s freedom and the promise of continued filling, and blessedness? How many of us are receiving the continuous promise of abundant inner life.. the kind that carries us up the mountains of impossibility, and into the lives we were meant to really live.