This Bible looks like it has been through a fire. It probably has. Its leather cover is cracked and deteriorated. The edges are badly damaged. Parts of it are visibly singed. Yet more than three centuries after it was printed, the Bible still survives.

Known today as the Epworth Bible, it dates to the seventeenth century and is now preserved at the Museum of Methodism in London. It was discovered among rubble beneath outside stairs at the Epworth Rectory in the mid-1800s. According to the museum, it is likely that the Bible survived the famous 1709 fire that destroyed the Wesley family home. And that connects this battered Bible to one of the defining stories of John Wesley’s life.

On the night of February 9, 1709, the Epworth Rectory caught fire. The Wesley family escaped, but five-year-old John was trapped upstairs. His father, Samuel, tried unsuccessfully to reach him through the flames. With no time to find a ladder, one man stood on another man’s shoulders and pulled John through an upstairs window. Shortly afterward, the roof collapsed.

The Wesley family never forgot what had happened that night. Susanna Wesley came to believe that God had preserved her son for a special purpose. John himself later adopted the biblical imagery of “a brand plucked out of the burning,” from Zechariah 3:2. Years later, when Wesley became seriously ill and thought he might die, he even began an epitaph for himself with the words, “John Wesley, a brand plucked out of the burning.”

That history makes this Bible especially fascinating to me. We cannot know with certainty exactly where it was when the rectory burned or who had used it. The museum appropriately says it was likely a survivor of the fire. But here is a Bible recovered from the Epworth Rectory, bearing what appear to be the scars of the same fire from which young John Wesley was rescued.

When I saw it in London, my mind went immediately to what happened after that night. The five-year-old pulled from the window would spend decades preaching the gospel across Britain, organizing Methodist societies, training and sending preachers, publishing Christian literature, and proclaiming the transforming grace of God. There is something striking about the fact that both the Bible and the boy survived.

Looking at this old Bible challenged me to think about God’s providence in my own life. We usually cannot see the significance of a moment while we are living through it. We do not know what God intends to do with the years, opportunities, difficulties, or second chances He gives us. John Wesley certainly could not have understood at five years old what his rescued life would eventually mean.

More than three centuries later, the fire-scarred Bible still remains, and so does the influence of the little boy who escaped those flames. It reminds me that the life God gives me is not simply mine to possess. It is mine to steward faithfully.

“Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?” Zechariah 3:2.

That is Wesleyan theology in practice: grace that preserves, grace that transforms, and a life given back to the God who gave it.