Wesley's heart strangely warmed
Aldersgate and the evangelical conversion
John Wesley has been a clergyman for over a decade and a missionary to America, and he is, by his own testimony, not yet a Christian in the sense that matters.
He has the form. He has the practice. He has the discipline and the learning and the ordination. He does not have the thing itself — the direct, personal assurance of God's grace toward him specifically. He knows the doctrine. He does not know the peace.
On the evening of May 24, 1738, he goes — unwillingly, he says — to a meeting in Aldersgate Street in London where someone is reading Luther's preface to the letter to the Romans. Luther is describing what happens when genuine faith receives the doctrine of justification — when it moves from intellectual assent to personal trust.
At about a quarter before nine, Wesley writes, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation: and an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.
The warmth. The personal mine. The assurance that is different from the argument.
Wesley has known the doctrine for years. Now he knows the one the doctrine describes.
Everything that follows — the forty thousand sermons, the quarter million miles, the Methodist movement — flows from one word in Aldersgate Street: mine.
“I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation.”
— John Wesley, Journal, May 24, 1738 AD
“I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I that live, but Christ living in me. That life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me.”
Wesley knew the doctrine before Aldersgate. He preached it, argued it, defended it. What he did not have was the mine — the personal assurance that the grace he proclaimed was for him specifically.
The movement from doctrine to assurance is not automatic. Many people know the theology of grace without having received it as personal. The head can know what the heart has not yet trusted.
Aldersgate is not the only form this takes. For some it comes gradually. For some in crisis. For some in ordinary moments of prayer. But the movement — from knowing about to knowing — is the one that changes everything.
Do you know the doctrine? And do you know the mine?