Thirdly: by attending upon all the ordinances of God

The Text

The third rule is one clause long and it is the load-bearing wall of the entire document. The first two rules told the member what to stop and what to do; without the third they would be a code of ethics, and the General Rules would be moralism with a conversion story attached. The third rule names where the power to keep the first two comes from: “by attending upon all the ordinances of God.” In Wesley’s theology the three rules are not three good ideas; they are his complete doctrine of the means of grace — do no harm and do good are the works of mercy, attend upon the ordinances is the works of piety, and grace flows through both. Everything contested in Wesley’s spirituality — the stillness controversy, sacramental realism, the danger of formalism, the relation of grace and discipline — is compressed into this sentence, which is why it is rated, with the one condition and the closing discipline, among the document’s high-contested clauses.

Translation Notes

“the ordinances of God.” Ordinances — ordained means, things God has appointed. The word is precise and polemical. It is not “spiritual practices” (which we choose) or “disciplines” (which we perform) but ordinances (which God instituted and we receive). The text behind the third rule is Malachi 3:7, which is also the text of Wesley’s Sermon 16: “Ye are gone away from mine ordinances, and have not kept them.” To neglect the ordinances is, in the rule’s own biblical frame, apostasy in slow motion.

“attending upon.” Not performing, not waiting for. The verb is deliberately between the two errors the next section maps. To perform an ordinance is the formalist’s word — as if the act itself delivered grace. To wait for grace apart from the ordinances is the quietist’s word — the Moravian “be still.” Wesley chooses attend upon: present, expectant, active, but receiving, not producing. The whole theology of the means is in the choice of that verb.

“all the ordinances.” The selectivity the word all forbids is the besetting sin of every tradition: keep the ordinances you find congenial (the warm worship, the easy reading) and quietly drop the costly ones (constant communion, fasting). Wesley’s “all” is the same total scope as the first rule’s “evil of every kind” and the second’s “good of every possible sort” — the document’s recurring refusal of the convenient subset.

“‘Stay in love with God.’” Rueben Job’s widely circulated modern paraphrase. It is pastorally generous and not false to Wesley’s end. But it relocates the rule from God’s appointed channels to the believer’s affective condition, and that is precisely the move Wesley’s sermon on the means exists to block: the point of the ordinances is that grace comes through them whether or not one presently feels in love with God — indeed they are how the love is restored when it has cooled. The paraphrase keeps the warmth and loses the means.

Historical Context

The third rule is a scar from the most important controversy of early Methodism: the stillness dispute. After Aldersgate, Moravian quietists at the Fetter Lane Society — following Philipp Molther — taught that one without full assurance should “be still”: abstain from the Lord’s Supper, from public prayer, from searching the Scriptures, since to use the means without faith was mere fleshly work, and grace would come directly to the passive soul. Wesley’s mother Susanna was unsettled by it; the London society was split by it; Wesley broke with Fetter Lane over it in 1740 and wrote Sermon 16, The Means of Grace, against it. The third rule is that break made permanent and binding. To put “attend upon all the ordinances of God” into the constitution of the societies is to legislate the defeat of stillness: in a Methodist society you do not wait, formless, for grace; you go to where God has promised to give it.

But Sermon 16 fights on two fronts, and so does the third rule. Wesley was equally clear that “large numbers called Christians abuse means of grace to their souls’ destruction… resting content in godliness’s form without its power… idly dreaming either that inherent power will eventually make them holy, or that merit in using them will move God.” The third rule was written in a Church of England full of exactly that formalism. So the clause is doubly edged from birth: against the enthusiast who despises the means and against the formalist who rests in them.

Lines of Interpretation

The disputed question is the sharpest in Wesleyan spirituality: how do ordained means convey grace without either becoming magic or becoming optional?

Roman Catholic

Tradition: the sacraments; ex opere operato

The Catholic tradition gives the strongest account of means really conveying grace — the sacraments effect what they signify, by the work worked, not the worthiness of minister or recipient. The third rule’s realism about the ordinances is, on this reading, latent sacramental theology.

Strengths

• Takes the means with full ontological seriousness — grace truly given, not merely occasioned
• Coheres with Wesley’s own high sacramentalism (constant communion)

Weaknesses

• Ex opere operato, loosely held, is exactly the “merit in using them” Wesley names as soul-destroying formalism
• Wesley insists “there is no power in this” — the means are channels, not causes; the Catholic frame must be qualified to fit him

Reformed

Tradition: the “outward and ordinary means”; Word and sacrament with the Spirit

The Westminster tradition’s formula — the outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicates the benefits of redemption — is almost exactly Wesley’s, and the Reformed safeguard (the means are effectual only by the Spirit’s working, not in themselves) is precisely his “no power in this.”

Strengths

• Supplies the exact theological balance the third rule assumes: real means, effectual only by the Spirit
• Guards against both magic and quietism, as the rule does

Weaknesses

• Reformed reticence about the frequency and necessity of the Supper is weaker than Wesley’s “constant communion”
• The decretal frame can make “attend upon” sound less urgently commanded than Wesley made it

Anglican

Tradition: the Prayer Book ordinances; Wesley the high churchman

Wesley never stopped being a Church of England priest, and the “ordinances” are first of all the Prayer Book’s: daily offices, Scripture, the Holy Communion. The third rule, on this reading, is Wesley binding his societies back into the church’s appointed worship, not away from it.

Strengths

• Historically exact: the ordinances are the established church’s own, and the rule is anti-separatist
• Explains the rule’s churchly realism — these are received, not invented

Weaknesses

• The actual Methodist movement’s drift toward independent worship strained this even in Wesley’s lifetime
• Can domesticate the rule into mere churchgoing, losing its expectant, grace-seeking edge

Modern / Ecumenical

Tradition: spiritual practices; the “stay in love with God” reception

The modern reading translates “ordinances” into “spiritual practices” or, in the most popular form, an affective state (“stay in love with God”). It is pastorally accessible and ecumenically broad.

Strengths

• Makes the rule usable for those alienated by the word “ordinance”
• Rightly insists the means serve the end — love of God — not themselves

Weaknesses

• “Practices” we adopt is not “ordinances” God appointed; the shift quietly returns the initiative to the self
• The affective paraphrase loses exactly what the means are for — grace when the feeling is gone — which is most of the Christian life

Wesleyan Voice

Sermon 16, The Means of Grace, is the authoritative commentary, and it is built as the third rule’s own defense on two fronts. Wesley’s definition is precise: the means of grace are “outward signs, words, or actions, ordained of God, and appointed for this end — to be the ordinary channels whereby he might convey to men preventing, justifying, or sanctifying grace.” Ordinary channels: not the only ways God can act, but the ways he has promised to act, and therefore the ways we are commanded to seek him. Against the stillness teaching, Wesley turns Christ’s own words: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened” — these are directions to the seeker, not only the believer; the unassured are to use the means to find, not abstain from them until found. The third rule is that argument in the imperative mood.

But the same sermon nails the opposite door shut, and this is the half the third rule’s admirers most often forget. Wesley insists: “before you use any means, let it be deeply impressed on your soul — there is no power in this… in itself it is a poor, dead, empty thing: separate from God, it is a dry leaf, a shadow.” The ordinances do not contain grace the way a cup contains water; God conveys grace through them and is never bound by them. To rest in the performed rite — “I have communicated, I have read, I have prayed, therefore” — is the formalism Wesley calls “soul-destroying.” So the Wesleyan use of the means runs on a knife: use them diligently, expectantly, all of them, as commanded — and look entirely through them to God, expecting nothing from the act and everything from him. Lose the first balance and you are a Moravian quietist; lose the second and you are a formal Christian with a dead religion. The third rule was written to keep a whole movement on that edge.

The structural Wesleyan point is the one recent scholarship has recovered and it is the reason this clause is the keystone: the entire General Rules are a practical theology of the means of grace. Wesley’s mature scheme divides the means into works of piety (prayer, Scripture, the Supper, fasting, Christian conference — this third rule) and works of mercy (doing good to bodies and souls — the second rule, with the first as its negative precondition). In On Visiting the Sick he says it outright: it is a mistake to think “the means of grace and the ordinances of God are equivalent terms,” as if only the works of piety conveyed grace; mercy is a means too. So the three rules are not ethics-ethics-then- piety. They are one integrated doctrine: the desire of salvation is brought to its fruit through the appointed channels, of which mercy and piety are the two halves. Remove the third rule and the first two become unpowered moralism; remove the first two and the third becomes the formalism Wesley loathed. The genius of the document is that it refuses to let anyone keep only the half they like — which is exactly what “all the ordinances” says.

Hymnody

The means of grace are the one part of the rule the Wesleys set to music as such. Charles Wesley’s hymn “The Means of Grace” (1740) was written into the stillness controversy itself — its argument is the third rule versified: “the prayer, the fast, the word conveys, when mixed with faith, thy life to me; in all the channels of thy grace I still have fellowship with thee.” Note the exact Wesleyan balance in one line: the channels convey — they are real — but “when mixed with faith” and “thy life,” not their own. The hymn even stages the quietist: “Catholic love alone can tell…” — and refuses the stillness that would have the soul wait empty. “O Thou who camest from above the pure celestial fire to impart” makes the using of the means the very altar on which the fire is kept — “ready for all thy perfect will, my acts of faith and love repeat.” And every communion hymn in the Wesleyan corpus — “Author of life divine, who hast a table spread,” “Victim divine, thy grace we claim” — is the third rule’s sacramental realism sung: real grace, through the appointed sign, looked through to the living Christ. The hymnody is the proof that for the Wesleys the means were not duty but the place of meeting.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

The first pastoral use is to restore the third rule as the power supply of the other two, because its loss is why so much Wesleyan Christianity has become exhausted ethics. Congregations are tirelessly urged to do no harm and do good and are quietly starving because no one has told them, in Wesley’s plain terms, that the strength to keep the first two rules is conveyed through the third. Preach the rules in their order and their logic: you cannot live the mercy without the means; the activist who has dropped the ordinances is running on a battery no one is charging. This is not piety added to ethics; it is the engine the ethics were always meant to run on.

The second use is the double guard, and the pastor must know which edge a given soul is on. To the seeker or the discouraged who has withdrawn from worship and the table to wait until they “feel ready” — the modern stillness — the third rule says: the means are for the unready; go, ask, seek, knock; that is how it is found, not after. To the long-faithful churchgoer whose religion has become the performance of ordinances with the power gone — the formalist — the same rule, through Wesley’s Sermon 16, says: there is no power in this; you have been resting in the dry leaf; look through it or it will damn you with a clear conscience. The third rule is the rare text that diagnoses opposite diseases with one sentence; the pastoral skill is to administer the right half.

The third use is the discipline of all. Every congregation curates the ordinances: keeps the music it likes, the preaching it prefers, communion at a comfortable interval, and treats fasting and constant communion as optional extras. The third rule’s “all” is a standing rebuke of the curated subset. The pastoral application is not legalism but recovery: name the dropped ordinances honestly — for most Methodist congregations, frequent communion and any fasting at all — and treat their absence not as preference but as the document treats it, a failure to attend upon all the ordinances of God, and therefore a failure at exactly the point where the strength for the whole Christian life is given.

Further Reading

• Malachi 3:7 — “ye are gone away from mine ordinances”; the third rule’s and Sermon 16’s text
• Acts 2:42 — the apostolic pattern: teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread, prayers
• Matthew 7:7–8 — “ask… seek… knock”; Wesley’s anti-stillness proof
• John Wesley, The Means of Grace (Sermon 16, 1746) — the decisive treatment; both edges
• John Wesley, On Visiting the Sick — works of mercy are means of grace (the integration of the three rules)
• Charles Wesley, “The Means of Grace” (1740) and the Hymns on the Lord’s Supper — the doctrine sung
• The Westminster Larger Catechism on “the outward and ordinary means” — the close Reformed parallel
• Henry H. Knight III, The Presence of God in the Christian Life: John Wesley and the Means of Grace
• Andrew C. Thompson, The Practical Theology of the General Rules — the whole document as a practical theology of the means
• The particular ordinances this rule requires: [[general-rules/the-ordinances-enumerated]]
• The works of mercy that are the means’ other half: [[general-rules/second-rule-do-good]]