Let Us Plead for Faith Alone: Meaning, History, and Theology
"Let us plead for faith alone"
- Written
- 1740
- Category
- Hymn
- Tune
- Standard Tune
- Status
- Verified
- Rights
- Public domain
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Story
Let Us Plead for Faith Alone is an excerpt from Charles Wesley’s 1740 “Love-Feast” hymn sequence, later shaped into a four-stanza congregational hymn. Commonly sung to the Moravian tune SAVANNAH, it joins justification by faith with sanctification, perseverance, and faith working through love.
Overview
Let Us Plead for Faith Alone is a compact Charles Wesley hymn about justifying faith that refuses to separate trust in Christ from the transformed life that genuine faith produces. Its first stanza declares that God is the one who justifies and that faith receives grace; immediately, however, Wesley describes that faith as something “shown” by works. The hymn therefore does not commend passive belief or human merit. It presents salvation as God’s gracious act received by faith, with obedient love as the evidence and fruit of living faith.
The middle movement develops Wesley’s characteristically dynamic understanding of salvation. Faith is “active,” conquering sin and forming the Savior in the soul. Justification and sanctification are closely related without being confused: God justifies, while the faith that receives grace also opens into holiness and a life shaped by Christ.
The final stanzas add perseverance and assurance. Salvation is described as already begun, yet believers are called to continue until the Lord appears. The closing phrase, “faith which works by love,” echoes Galatians 5:6 and summarizes the hymn’s balance: saving faith rests on grace and becomes visible in love. For worship and teaching, the hymn is especially useful when discussing justification, sanctification, the relation of faith and works, and Wesleyan understandings of grace.
Historical Background
The text belongs to the early Methodist revival and first appeared in Hymns and Sacred Poems, published by John and Charles Wesley in London in 1740. Duke Divinity School’s Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition dates publication of that volume to July 14, 1740. The hymn was not originally printed as an independent four-stanza piece under the title “Let Us Plead for Faith Alone.” It formed the concluding portion of Part III of a much longer sequence headed “The Love-Feast,” a set of hymns for Methodist fellowship and communal devotion.
In the 1740 text, the relevant section begins with “Plead we thus for faith alone,” not the later “Let us plead for faith alone.” The material that modern hymnals print as four stanzas originally occupied stanzas 3 and 4 of Part III, each eight lines long. Modern editors divided those two long stanzas into four four-line stanzas, regularized spelling such as “Saviour” and “Sav’d,” and changed the opening wording. The resulting form preserves Wesley’s argument while making the excerpt function as an independent congregational hymn.
The setting is doctrinally significant. “The Love-Feast” sequence moves through Christian fellowship, holiness, faith, perseverance, and love. The lines now extracted as “Let Us Plead for Faith Alone” therefore originally belonged to a communal hymn rather than an abstract doctrinal essay. The claim of justification by faith is immediately connected with works that demonstrate faith, holiness formed within the believer, perseverance, and love.
The modern hymnal form is documented in The United Methodist Hymnal (1989), where it appears as number 385 with the tune SAVANNAH and a 7.7.7.7 meter. Hymnary identifies the text as public domain and dates the Wesley text to 1740. Its relatively small number of indexed hymnal appearances—Hymnary currently lists only a handful—shows that it is less widely circulated than Wesley standards such as “Love Divine” or “O for a Thousand Tongues,” but it retains a distinct place in Methodist worship because of its unusually concentrated statement about justifying and sanctifying grace.
SAVANNAH comes from a different historical stream. Hymnary attributes the melody to Tobias Friedrich of the early Moravian community at Herrnhut, about 1735. John Wesley included the tune in A Collection of Tunes, Set to Music, As They Are Commonly Sung at the Foundery in 1742, helping carry Moravian musical material into early Methodism. The present pairing should therefore be understood as a later and now established hymnal pairing; available evidence does not establish that Wesley’s 1740 “Love-Feast” text was originally sung to SAVANNAH.
Biblical Foundations
Romans 3:28 provides the clearest biblical parallel to the opening claim: justification is by faith apart from works of the law. Ephesians 2:8–10 gives the complementary pattern that the hymn itself follows—salvation is God’s gift by grace through faith, yet those who are saved are created in Christ for good works. That distinction is important for reading Wesley accurately: works do not purchase justification, but living faith does not remain fruitless.
The phrase “faith which by our works is shown” strongly recalls James 2:17–18, where faith without works is dead and faith is demonstrated by works. Wesley is thus holding Pauline language about justification together with James’s insistence that genuine faith becomes visible in action.
The hymn’s final line is an especially clear allusion to Galatians 5:6: “faith working through love.” This text helps explain why the hymn moves from justification into sanctification rather than treating “faith alone” as bare intellectual assent. Romans 5:1–2 adds the assurance dimension: those justified by faith have peace with God and stand in grace while rejoicing in hope.
Verse Explanation
The first stanza states the central claim: God justifies, faith receives grace, and genuine faith can be recognized by the works that flow from it. Its language deliberately places justification by faith beside visible obedience.
The second stanza describes what living faith does within the believer. It opposes sin and death, brings holiness, and forms the character of Christ in the soul. The focus therefore shifts from justification to sanctification without treating them as competing doctrines.
The third stanza calls Christians to contend for this faith and speaks of salvation as already begun. Wesley presents eternal life as both a present gift of grace and a future hope.
The final stanza emphasizes perseverance until Christ appears. Its closing phrase, “faith which works by love,” gathers the whole hymn into the language of Galatians 5:6: the faith that saves is a living faith expressed through love.
Theological Reflection
The hymn’s central doctrine is justification by faith, but Wesley states it in a deliberately relational way. God is the one who justifies; faith is not a meritorious work but the means by which grace is received. The believer’s confidence therefore rests in God’s action rather than moral achievement.
At the same time, the hymn guards against reducing faith to assent. “Active faith” conquers sin, hallows the believer, and forms Christ within the soul. This is Wesleyan soteriology in miniature: justifying grace reconciles the sinner to God, while sanctifying grace renews the person in holiness and love. The good works mentioned in the hymn are evidence and fruit of grace, not an alternative ground of salvation.
The text also speaks of assurance and inaugurated salvation. “Heaven already is begun” presents eternal life as a reality already tasted in communion with God, while the call to persevere recognizes that Christian discipleship continues toward the appearing of Christ. The final emphasis on faith working through love keeps assurance from becoming complacency. Faith is steadfast trust that expresses itself in holy love.
Because the hymn places justification, sanctification, perseverance, and love in one short sequence, it is particularly useful for correcting false oppositions. Wesley does not choose between grace and obedience, or between faith and love. He orders them: God gives grace, faith receives it, grace makes whole, and living faith bears the fruit of love.
Church Impact
Let Us Plead for Faith Alone has a narrower printed circulation than many of Charles Wesley’s best-known hymns. Hymnary currently indexes the text in only a small number of hymnals, among them The United Methodist Hymnal (1989), the later United Methodist music supplement, and Our Great Redeemer’s Praise (2022). Those appearances document continued Methodist editorial use, not universal or frequent congregational singing.
Its particular value lies in teaching. The hymn gives congregations a concise way to sing about justification by faith while refusing to separate saving faith from holiness and love. That makes it especially suited to services or classes dealing with grace, conversion, assurance, sanctification, and the relationship between faith and works.
The tune SAVANNAH also connects the hymn to the musical exchange between early Moravian and Methodist communities. Although the tune’s history is broader than this text, its use in modern Methodist hymnals places Wesley’s doctrinal poetry within a melody that entered English Methodist practice through John Wesley’s 1742 Foundery tune collection.
Musical Notes
The represented modern hymnal setting uses SAVANNAH, a 7.7.7.7 tune attributed by Hymnary to Tobias Friedrich of Herrnhut, about 1735. The melody is also known under names including HERRNHUT and HÖCHSTER PRIESTER. Hymnary traces it through a Herrnhut source and John Wesley’s Foundery Collection of 1742, and gives D major as the key of the United Methodist Hymnal setting. The tune is public domain, but the copyright status of any later arrangement or engraving must be considered separately.
SAVANNAH was not composed for this Wesley text. The words first appeared in 1740 as part of “The Love-Feast,” while the tune entered Wesley’s English tune collection in 1742. The pairing is established in modern Methodist hymnody, including The United Methodist Hymnal #385, but available evidence does not demonstrate an original 1740 text-and-tune pairing.
Chord research outcome: not_found. Deliberate searches were made for the exact title, first line, SAVANNAH, chord charts, and guitar or lead-sheet versions. A modern commercial arrangement with printed chord symbols was located, but it uses music attributed to Carl M. von Weber rather than the represented SAVANNAH tune and therefore was rejected as a mismatched arrangement. The inspected SAVANNAH resources provide notation, MIDI, or tune information rather than an eligible explicit word-aligned chord source with a clear republication basis. No new ChordPro chords were inserted, and no harmony was inferred from notation or audio.
Application
- Ground assurance in God’s justifying grace rather than in personal achievement.
- Examine whether professed faith is becoming visible in concrete works of love, mercy, and obedience.
- Use the hymn to distinguish good works as the fruit of salvation from works treated as the basis of justification.
- Pray for the active faith Wesley describes—a faith that resists sin and grows in holiness through grace.
- Treat perseverance as part of discipleship: continue in faith and love while looking toward the appearing of Christ.
Discussion Questions
- How does the hymn distinguish the ground of justification from the works that show living faith?
- Why does Wesley move so quickly from justification to holiness and the formation of Christ in the soul?
- How do Romans 3, James 2, and Galatians 5 help explain the hymn’s meaning of “faith alone”?
- What does Wesley mean by saying that “heaven already is begun”?
- How does the final phrase “faith which works by love” shape Christian assurance and perseverance?
Teaching Tips
- Read Romans 3:28 and Ephesians 2:8–10 together before singing, distinguishing salvation by grace from the good works that follow it.
- Pair the first stanza with James 2:17–18 so learners can see why Wesley describes faith as something shown by works.
- Use Galatians 5:6 to explain the hymn’s closing phrase and Wesley’s conviction that living faith expresses itself through love.
- Show that the modern four-stanza hymn is an excerpt from Part III of Wesley’s longer 1740 “Love-Feast” sequence; this historical context helps explain its communal emphasis.
- When discussing the tune, distinguish Tobias Friedrich’s SAVANNAH melody from later arrangements and from unrelated modern chorded settings.
Sources
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Duke Divinity School, Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition — Hymns and Sacred Poems (1740), including The Love-Feast Part III and the original text
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Duke Divinity School — Charles Wesley's Published Verse and 1740 collection chronology
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Hymnary.org — Let us plead for faith alone text authority, public-domain status, date, meter, and hymnal instances
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Hymnary.org — The United Methodist Hymnal 385, modern four-stanza text and SAVANNAH pairing
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Hymnary.org — SAVANNAH tune authority, Tobias Friedrich attribution, sources, meter, and public-domain status
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Moravian Archives, Bethlehem — Tobias Friedrich, First Musician of the renewed Moravian Church
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United Methodist General Commission on Archives and History — Charles Wesley biography
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Sheet Music Plus — Modern chorded arrangement using a Carl M. von Weber tune, rejected as a mismatch with SAVANNAH
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Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines — Copyright terms of protection
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U.S. Copyright Office — What is Copyright and public-domain guidance
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World English Bible Classic — Romans 3
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World English Bible Classic — Ephesians 2
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World English Bible Classic — James 2
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World English Bible Classic — Galatians 5
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World English Bible Classic — Romans 5
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