A Brand Plucked Out Of The Burning

A Brand Plucked Out Of The Burning

He almost didn’t grow up.

ON FEBRUARY 9, 1709, John Wesley, then known as Jacky, was just five years old as he lay in his bed on the second floor of the rectory in Epworth, Lincolnshire, England.

Waking up, Jacky was puzzled to find the room filled with light, but the curtains on the four-poster bed were closed. He poked his head out and saw streaks of fire on the ceiling. Then he realized that his two sisters who shared the bed with him were gone. He looked over to the other bed, where the nurse slept with his sister Patty and baby Charles, and that, too, was empty. Jacky jumped out of bed and ran to the open door but found the floor in the hall on fire. He ran back into the room, climbed up on a chest of drawers, and opened the window latch so he could look out. Above him the thatched roof of the rectory was ablaze, fanned by a strong northeast wind. Below he could see a crowd of neighbors throwing buckets of water at the burning building with little effect. One of the men looked up and saw little Jacky edging his way out of the window along the windowsill and frantically called for someone to get a ladder.

“There will not be time!” another man yelled. Then a tall, burly neighbor leaned against the side of the burning house, and other neighbors helped a lighter man climb onto his shoulders. As the heat from the fire behind Jacky grew intense, the top man managed to stand upright, stretch out his arms, and pluck the little boy from the windowsill. Just then the house’s roof caved in.

As the family was fleeing from the burning house, Mr. Wesley had realized that Jacky was missing, but when he tried to run back up the steps to get him, the stairs were on fire and wouldn’t support his weight. In agony he had quickly knelt in the hallway and committed Jacky to God before fleeing with the rest of his family. When the rescuers carried Jacky to the neighboring house where the family had taken refuge, his father cried out with joy, “Come, neighbors! Let us give thanks to God! He has given me all eight children. Let the house go. I am rich enough!”

This event left an indelible mark on John Wesley’s life. He took it as evidence that God had some particular purpose in sparing him. Later in his life as he led the Methodist revival in England, the incident became for him a picture of the world and his role in it. The burning house represented the perishing world. Each soul was symbolized by the perishing child who needed to be plucked from the fire.

On February 9, 1750, forty-one years after the fire, Wesley made this journal entry describing a Watch Night Service in London’s West Street Chapel: “About eleven o’clock it came into my mind that this was the very day and hour on which . . . I was taken out of the flames. I stopped and gave a short account of that wonderful providence. The voice of praise and thanksgiving went upon high, and great was our rejoicing before the Lord.”

Before he died, he wrote his own epitaph, which begins, “Here lieth the body of John Wesley, a brand plucked out of the burning.”

Reflection

Can you relate to Wesley’s analogy of a brand plucked out of the burning, representing souls being rescued out of a perishing world? How does your understanding of the world compare with Wesley’s?

Rescue others by snatching them from the flames of judgment.

Jude 1:23