Either way, the man was no machine. He didn’t preach the life of holiness and sanctification because it came easy. But he never stopped preaching—that sense of prophetic compulsion drove him to continue to seek and to teach the life “made perfect in love.”

When I first started reading any actual Wesley for myself, I had no taste for him. He seemed austere and humorless to me, even severe (and even now, I have never heard anybody accuse of him of being a funny guy)...