Jitterbugging for Jesus

It is not something at a distance: it is a present thing; a blessing which, through the free mercy of God, ye are now in possession of.

— From John Wesley’s sermon “The Scripture Way of Salvation”

John Wesley: A larger than life religious leader who stood about 5 feet tall.

He had been ordained as a Church of England priest more than 10 years when, suddenly, he melted into a state of quietly exciting perfection.

Sitting in a Sunday evening service in England, after a depressingly disastrous mission across the Atlantic in Georgia, John Wesley listened intently to a preacher reading from the preface to Luther’s Commentary on Romans.

Ever been seated on a plane next to a moralist Christian who insists on “saving” you hellfire or babbles ad nauseam about how God came into his life and saved him and you feel like jumping out of the jet? Before Aldersgate, Wesley was that kind of moralistic priest.

The lifelong, zealous Christian Wesley famously wrote in his journal about his life-changing conversion on May 24, 1738 as follows:

“About a quarter before nine, while [a Moravian preacher] 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.”

UP TO THAT POINT in his life, Wesley was the kind of obnoxious, moralistic Christian who makes you want to jump out of the jet if you’re stuck next to him on a long flight.

After that night at Aldersgate, the 35-year-old priest dropped his moralistic belief that we can get right with God through moral achievement. He dropped his inclination to blow people down with his zealous proselytizing.

The re-born Wesley was all in with the merciful, invitational God of unmerited grace, not the God of rigid, biblical law.

Certainly, Wesley was still was burning with holy zeal. But it was zeal no longer tainted by a moral superiority complex. It was about gratitude for mercy — and a certain kind of Holiness he defined for the ages.

FROM THE MOMENT we come kicking and screaming into the world until the time we surrender to “new life” in Christ in conversion, God’s grace is present in our life. So said Wesley in his elaborate take on grace and salvation by faith and Holiness, which he detailed in his great sermon “The Scripture Way of Salvation.”

The following outline is adapted from that sermon.

1. Prevenient (preceding) grace
This grace, Wesley taught, enables us to know the difference in good and evil and choose the good. Her preferred “prevenient grace” over the common “natural conscience” description.

Until we convert and surrender all, God is always wooing us, always actively seeking us, wanting us to know His/Her love to the fullest.

It’s the offer of God’s free gift of extravagant grace; it’s in no way based on our merit, for not one of us deserves God’s gracious forgiveness.

But it’s a gift we can take or reject; it’s our decision to make in our free will.

“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God —- not the result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).

2. Justifying grace
Justification is simply a pardon of our sins, like a judge’s pardon of our crimes. Justifying grace aligns us to righteousness.

Through justification, the image of God in which we were created is — which has been distorted by sin — is renewed within us.

3. Conversion.
Conversion is doing a 180, turning one’s life around, reorienting, as Wesley did when he heard the words of Luther and actively listened to those stirring words about the Epistle to the Romans.

Conversion is commonly known as being born again, of making an entirely new beginning, receiving new life in Christ.

It may be sudden and dramatic as it was for Paul at Damascus or Wesley that night, or it might be, as it certainly was for me over a period of a few years, a gradual process.

4. Sanctifying Grace (Holiness)
Despite his dramatic turn at Aldersgate, Wesley didn’t believe for a minute that salvation is a static, one-time event. Wesley said pointedly in “The Scripture Way of Salvation” that soon after we are justified and born again, “temptations return, and sin revives, showing it was but stunned, not dead.”

Some Christians rationalize their adulterous affairs or stealing or cheating in business by believing God forgives those sins because they were “saved” when they received Christ into their hearts in an altar call or in baptism.

I’ve known many of those Christians. They ascent to the old bumper-sticker theology:

I’M NOT PERFECT, JUST FORGIVEN

Wesley believed salvation can be sinned away in a heartbeat because of those temptations enticing us at every turn.

This is where God’s grace as sanctification, or Holiness comes into play.

Sanctification is the ongoing experience of God’s gracious presence transforming us into whom God intends us to be.

As I’ve noted many times, salvation is about transformation — and transformation requires spiritual practices and disciplines that lead to growth and maturity in Christ. Otherwise, it amounts to so much of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer articulated as “cheap grace:

“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession . . .

“Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

Wesley believed that through God’s sanctifying grace — coupled with our discipleship and spiritual discipline — we grow and mature in our ability to live as Jesus lived.

As we pray, study the Scriptures, fast, worship, and share in fellowship with other Christians, we deepen our knowledge of and love for God.

We do all the good for God and for others that we can do — and NOT because good deeds save us. Only faith can save us.

Once we’ve been saved, we naturally, very much desire to respond to God’s grace by doing all the good deeds we can do. And anyway, as James famously said in his epistle, “faith without works is dead.”

(Luther, who in spite of his greatness had some whacko notions he never let go of, was so obsessed with salvation by faith alone that he wanted to remove the epistle of James from the Bible entirely!)

WESLEY BELIEVED WE’RE IN OUR DISCIPLESHIP, with God’s help, in the path of sanctification toward perfection, which he simply defined at one point as spiritual maturity. Perfection is a matter of being in a continual process of being made perfect in our love of God and each other.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern that is the will of God — what is good and acceptable and perfect.

— Romans 12:1-2

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*If you want to read “The Scripture Way of Salvation” — one of Wesley’s most significant sermons — for yourself, go here.