John Wesley's Twenty-Eight Pounds

In 1731, a young Oxford fellow named John Wesley began keeping careful accounts of his finances. That year he earned thirty pounds and found he could live on twenty-eight, so he gave two pounds away. The following year his income doubled to sixty pounds. Wesley did not move to better lodgings or buy finer clothes. He kept his expenses at twenty-eight pounds and gave away thirty-two.

Year after year, the pattern held. When his income rose to ninety pounds, he gave away sixty-two. When it climbed to one hundred twenty, he gave away ninety-two. By the height of his ministry, Wesley was earning well over fourteen hundred pounds annually — a staggering sum in Georgian England — yet he still lived simply and poured nearly everything back out. Over his lifetime, he gave away more than thirty thousand pounds, funding schools, orphanages, and relief for the poor across Britain.

Wesley once wrote, "I do not lay up treasures on earth. I give all I can." When he died in 1791, the inventory of his personal estate amounted to a few coins, a worn coat, and a well-used Bible.

Luke 6:38 promises that when we give with open hands, the return comes "pressed down, shaken together and running over." Wesley discovered that the measure he used to give became the measure by which God filled his life — not with silver, but with purpose, joy, and a legacy that Christ is still multiplying nearly three centuries later.