They Knew Their God Volume 3: The Prophet of the Long Road

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“Someone has said that Methodism really had its birth in Susannah Wesley, the mother of John and Charles. And it might also be said that Elizabeth Asbury, in giving her only son to the ministry, was the mother of American Methodism.” So wrote Edwin and Lillian Harvey in their sketch of Francis Asbury in Volume Three of the series They Knew Their God.
“I well remember my mother strongly urged my father to family reading,” Asbury tells us, “and prayer; the singing of Psalms was much practiced by them both. . . . As a mother above all the women in the world would I claim her for my own, ardently affectionate; as a “mother in Israel” few of her sex have done more by a holy walk to live and by personal labor to support the Gospel, and to wash the saints’ feet. As a friend, she was generous, true, and constant.”


The sketch of Bishop Asbury in They Knew Their God Volume 3 is fairly short but concise. Like the other saints mentioned in this book, Asbury cultivated a close relationship with the Lord. The road was often long and hard both metaphorically and literally but he was faithful, and American Methodism owes much to this “prophet of the long road.”
Edwin and Lillian close their chapter on Asbury with the following paragraph:
“Much more could be said about such an extraordinary servant of the Lord but we close with the words of Henry Boehm, who knew him intimately, having traveled more than forty thousand miles with him: ‘Bishop Asbury possessed more deadness to the world, more of a self-sacrificing spirit, more of the spirit of prayer, of Christian enterprise, of labor, and of benevolence, than any other man I ever knew; he was the most unselfish being I was every acquainted with. Beyond any other person he embodied the genius and spirit of early Methodism.’”
The entire six-volume series of They Knew Their God is published by Harvey Christian Publishers and is available on their Online Christian Bookstore.

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