Turning the World Upside Down
Series: Defying Limits
Scripture: Acts 17:1–9 (Common English Bible)

In Acts 17, Paul and Silas are accused of “turning the world upside down.” It was not meant as praise. It was a warning—a charge leveled against people whose faith was disrupting the assumptions, systems, and power structures of the world around them.

This sermon explores how that same accusation became part of the Methodist story.

Drawing on the witness of the early Methodist movement, we remember a people who were mocked, threatened, and attacked because they refused to accept a world shaped by exclusion, inequality, and indifference. From the riots in eighteenth-century Wednesbury to the courage of unnamed Methodists who stood between violence and the vulnerable, these stories reveal a faith rooted not in respectability, but in transformative love.

At the center of this message is John Wesley’s definition of a Methodist: someone pursuing “universal love filling the heart and governing the life.” Not love as sentimentality or private feeling, but love as a governing principle that shapes every decision, every system, and every relationship.

This sermon challenges us to ask what it would mean to embody that kind of love today. A love that confronts injustice. A love that refuses to leave people behind. A love willing to disturb the peace when peace is built on harm.

The Ascension was not the end of Christ’s mission, but the moment that mission was handed to the church.

And the work of turning the world upside down continues now.

Reflection Questions:

1.  Wesley defined a Methodist as someone pursuing “universal love filling the heart, and governing the life.” Where does that definition challenge you most personally? 
2.  Jesus left the mission to us at the Ascension. What is one specific place where you feel called to turn the world upside down with God’s help? 

The gospel has never been about preserving the world as it is—but participating in God’s work of transforming it.

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