Heart Strangely Warmed

Heart Strangely Warmed

Romans 6:1-7

May 24, 2020 • Mount Pleasant UMC

It was many years ago, after I had given a message when someone came up to me and said, “Can you talk?” Pastors love that question. It just naturally has a sense of foreboding around it. As the conversation began, this person began to tell me some struggles in their life, and then chose to tell me, very specifically, the plans for that next weekend. “Is that a sin?” I was asked. I think my conversation partner already knew the answer, but I had to answer honestly; I said yes, I believed it was. “Well,” came the response, “doesn’t God have to forgive me? I mean, that’s what he does, right?” In that statement, I heard echoes of the famous last words of a German poet, Heinrich Heine, who on his deathbed said, “Of course God will forgive me; that’s His job.” But, poetic or not, it was a big question for a young pastor! And I don’t remember what I said that evening, but I’ve thought a lot about that question over the last many years. Forgiveness is God’s job—right? So no matter what I do, no matter what choice I make, no matter how I live my life, God has to forgive me, because that’s his job—right? Or is it?

Today is Aldersgate Day, and I recognize that many of you have no idea what I’m talking about when I say that. Nor do you realize that, 282 years ago today, on a Saturday, a major event took place that, whether you know it or not, continues to shape you and me and all of us in the Methodist tradition. This is the day when the founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley, found his heart “strangely warmed,” found his life forever changed. So this morning, I want to do three things. I want to tell you the story of John Wesley and Aldersgate, I want to tie it into what Paul says in the passage Conner read for us in Romans, and then I want to come back to the question my friend asked me. Trust me, all three of these things tie together on this day when we remember Aldersgate.

So, a little bit of history, about a British preacher’s kid born in 1703—June 28, to be exact. I like to think that all good preachers were born in June, but Pastor Rick might disagree with that! Anyway, that preacher’s kid was John Wesley, one of nineteen children who were born to Susanna and the Reverend Samuel Wesley. Ten of those children survived, though John nearly did not. One night when John was five years old, the parsonage caught on fire—some say it was set on fire because some people did not like what Samuel, John’s father, was preaching. (This is why I don’t advertise where I live!) John was caught in a room upstairs, and rescued at nearly the last minute by neighbors who, reportedly, stood on each other’s shoulders to reach him. He nearly died that night as a child, and so throughout his life, he referred to himself as a “brand plucked from the burning” (cf. Zechariah 3:2) because his mother had told him she believed God saved him for a reason. He grew up hearing that over and over again.

John Wesley was not a large man in physical stature; when they put up a life-size statue of him at Asbury Seminary, the comment I heard most often was, “I pictured him bigger!” Of course, then I found out he’s only an inch shorter than I am, so I think he’s just the right size. Anyway, Wesley became a preacher but never really had an intention to serve the local church—probably because of the way his father had been treated. He also was more comfortable in academic settings, though eventually he took a charge, along with his brother Charles, to go to America and convert the natives. During the voyage to the New World, a ferocious storm attacked the ship and Wesley was among those who feared for their lives. But he also noticed, in the midst of that storm, a German group called the Moravians who sang while the English screamed (that’s how he described it). He was amazed at the peace they seemed to have while his soul was in turmoil. It made a deep impression on him.

During his two years in America, Wesley made a lot of mistakes. His rigid approach to religion did not tend to sit well with the American colonists in Georgia, and then he fell in love with a woman. Sophie Hopkey. Sophie, however, did not return John’s affections. Still, Wesley was convinced they would be married—until she showed up at church with her new husband. Yes, courtship, dating and marriage was a lot different then than it is now! Well, John Wesley responded by refusing to serve Sophie and her husband communion that morning, and you can imagine how well that went over with Sophie and her parents and the whole church! It wasn’t long before life became so uncomfortable for John Wesley that he had to get out of town. He left in the middle of the night and took a ship back to England.

Once back in England, Wesley remembered those Moravians he had encountered on the ship. And that led him to that fateful Saturday night, when he was invited to go to a prayer meeting on Aldersgate Street. He went, he wrote, “very unwillingly,” and once there he found someone reading Martin Luther’s introduction to the Romans. I have a copy of that if you’d like to read it sometime. It’s not exactly riveting, and not what I would choose to occupy my time on a Saturday night, yet God’s Spirit can use most anything, even a German commentary on Scripture, to reach people. I do want you to hear Wesley’s own words about what happened to him that night on Aldersgate Street. You may have heard it before because these may very well be the most well-known words John Wesley every wrote:

About a quarter before nine, 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 (John Wesley and the Letter to the Romans, pgs. 3-4).

There are two questions I have about this experience, neither of which can be definitively answered. The first thing I want to know is where in Luther’s introduction the reader was reading. That’s the historian in me; it doesn’t really matter, but I’d like to know. The more important question is this: what really happened to Wesley in that moment?

People debate whether this was Wesley’s true conversion moment or if this was some other work God was doing in him. And I suppose, ultimately, the answer to this question doesn’t matter, at least as far as being able to label it. What does matter is that, from this moment on, Wesley’s life was different. He was changed. That “heart strangely warmed” made all the difference and he now had a newfound passion and energy for preaching the Gospel and seeing people come to know Jesus. What he experienced that night at Aldersgate is what Paul had described centuries before in that letter Luther was commenting on: the letter to the Romans.

A lot of people consider the letter to the Romans Paul’s magnum opus. It’s his clearest expression of what he believed and what he taught, and it was probably written as a way to introduce himself to the church at Rome. Unlike most of his letters, Romans is not written to a church he began; they did not know Paul personally before this, and so, it seems, he wrote this letter as a way to explain his theology before he arrived there. Sort of like how pastors today send out a letter ahead of their arrival so you at least have some idea of what you’re getting yourself into. The early part of the letter is a discussion of the way sin and the law interact with each other. By “law,” Paul doesn’t mean the legal code of the Romans; he means the Old Testament law, which we tend to not think a whole lot about. We tend to ignore most of it unless it suits our purposes, and we forget that Jesus said, “I have not come to abolish [the Law and the Prophets], but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17). But that’s a bigger discussion for another time. In the passage we read this morning, which is a small piece of a larger argument Paul is making, he is addressing the relationship between God’s grace and sin. The question he really wants to get at is this: if some of God’s grace is good, wouldn’t more grace be better? And if because of our sin, we receive grace, then shouldn’t we sin more so we can get more grace? It may sound a little ridiculous but there have been people through the centuries who have preached exactly that. One of the most famous was a Russian monk named Rasputin, who taught that since those who sin with abandon require more forgiveness, we should continue to sin so that we can enjoy more of God’s forgiving grace than “ordinary sinners” (cf. Mohrlang, “Romans,” Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Vol. 14, pg. 101). Now wouldn’t we all like that to be true? Do whatever you want so you can get more grace? But apparently Rasputin and his like failed to read Romans 6, because Paul says directly that such an attitude is from the devil.

“Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?” Paul asks, and then he answers his own question: “By no means!” That could also be translated, “Perish the thought!” or “Away with that idea!” (cf. Harrison, “Romans,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 10, pg. 68). I sort of hear it like that annoying Discover Card commercial that’s running all the time right now: “No, No, No, Uh huh, no way!” But why not? Because sin belongs to the old nature, the old person, and Paul says, that person died when we came to Christ. Paul says when you became a follower of Jesus, when you took on the name “Christian,” you died. The old person you once were no longer exists—but your conversion is not the end of the story. That dead person was given a new life, a different life. On the outside, you may look like the same person, but the essential you, the you that is inside, the you that you know—that person is not the same. If we are the same after we trust in Christ and repent of our sins, Paul would doubt if we really did come to know Jesus because in Jesus, everything changes. Tom Wright says we pass from one type of humanity to another, and we should never be the same (cf. Wright, Paul for Everyone—Part One, pg. 101). To go on sinning is logically impossible for a person who has died to sin (cf. Harrison 68). And this is where Paul’s writing ties back into my friend’s question. To my friend, Paul would say, “If you’ve decided to do what you know is sin, you’re not really determined to follow Jesus. To follow Jesus, you have to die to sin. You can’t have it both ways.”

That was Wesley’s struggle. In fact, after that horrendous storm on the ship, Wesley approached the Moravian Bishop and asked him why they weren’t afraid to die in the storm. The Bishop could sense Wesley’s fear and asked him, “Mr. Wesley, do you know Christ as your Savior?” John Wesley replied, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world!” But the Bishop pressed further, “But, Mr. Wesley, do you know that He has saved you?” “I trust that I do!” Wesley said and and got away as quick as he could. He wrote in his diary how frightened he was to have been asked such an intimate personal question about the state of his soul. Wesley knew a lot about Jesus, but he had no assurance that he had passed from death to life. In fact, most scholars believe that, above everything else, this is what happened at Aldersgate: John Wesley found the the assurance of his salvation that he had been looking for. He found the presence of the Holy Spirit living within and he was never the same. When you know that you know Jesus, when you have the Spirit living within you reminding you that you are united with Christ, it’s not that you can’t sin. You certainly can; as I say often, “Methodists don’t just believe in backsliding—we practice it!” Temptation is always there and we can choose to give into it. If our hearts are strangely warmed, it’s not that we can’t sin. It’s that we don’t want to because we want to please Christ more (cf. John Wesley x).

A change of status requires that you take steps to bring your actual life in line with the person you have become. There have been many times in my life where a change of “status” meant a change in life. One happened on May 20, 1989, thirty-one years ago this past week, when I went from being single to being a married man. In those moments, nothing changed externally. I still looked the same, and in many ways, I still felt the same. But in reality everything had changed because I was no longer just living for myself. There was someone else who was depending on me, and eventually two more someone elses who came along as a result of that marriage who also depended on me. I could no longer just make decisions for me or live my life for myself; “me” had become a “we.” Promises had been made, and as Tom Wright says, “those promises can be broken, but they can’t be unmade” (102). Outwardly nothing looked the same; inwardly everything had changed. In a similar way, my ordination was a time of huge change. The person who walked onto that stage at Elliot Hall of Music on the campus of Purdue University  in May 1995 was not the same person who rose from the kneeler after Bishop White put his hands on my head. Now, there were no angels singing, no bright light from heaven and no warm fuzzy feelings when that happened. And, on paper, all I got to do was now add the letters “Rev.” in front of my name. But as Bishop White reminded us, you can never be unordained. Something changed in that moment as God through the church set me and others apart for particular ministry. Yet, it was up to me to live into it, and I’m still trying to do that. Twenty-five years later and I’m still seeking to become all that God wants to me be, but I keep moving forward because I know there is no way back. The old Dennis is gone. It’s the same thing but even more dramatic when you’re talking about repentance and salvation. The old man, the old woman has died and the new has come.

The phrase Paul uses here is that we are “united with” Jesus when we come to him (6:5). The original words also mean “grown together” or “fused into one” (Harrison 70). It’s the image of two things being, maybe, melted together and becoming impossible to separate. Or, if you do pull them apart, you do irreparable damage to both. There’s a practice in horticulture called “grafting,” where maybe a branch that wasn’t originally a part of a tree is inserted onto the plant. It requires a lot of work, matching tissue and giving attention to the way the new branch is connected, but the goal is that the two would grow together for the future, become one plant. To take the new branch off after they have been fused together will do damage to both. That same image is used in Scripture to describe how we are connected to Christ; we’re grafted in, we’re fused together, we’re united with him, the intent being that such union will last forever. We become more and more like him, closer and closer to him. We gain strength from him to overcome sin and temptation. The old “me” is gone; the new “me” has come and the new “me” is united with Christ (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:17).

That night at Aldersgate, as the prayer meeting went on, Wesley found his heart turning to prayer, mainly praying to forgive those who had hurt him in the past. When he began to give testimony to what God had done in his heart, he says the enemy whispered to him, “This cannot be faith; for where is your joy?” Just because he encountered Jesus in that room did not mean the doubts had gone away, but he writes that he had to learn to hold onto Jesus all the more. I love what he wrote when he got home. Let me share with you another excerpt from his journal:

After my return home, I was much buffeted with temptations, but I cried out, and they fled away. They returned again and again. I as often lifted up my eyes, and he “sent me help from his holy place.” And herein I found the difference between this and my former state chiefly consisted. I was striving, yes, fighting with all my might under the law, as well as under grace. But then I was sometimes, if not often, conquered; now, I was always conqueror.

The next morning, the tempter continued to question him. “If you do believe, why is there not a more sensible change?” But Wesley writes that he knew an overwhelming peace with God that allowed him to move forward. And his continued cooperation with Jesus in resisting sin and calling others to do the same changed England and his witness continues to change the world. It’s amazing what God can do with a person who knows that they know the savior of the world.

So I want to ask you this morning: have you had an Aldersgate experience? Have you had a moment when you knew you trusted Christ, Christ alone for salvation? For a lot of us, especially if you’ve grown up in church, it’s so easy to know a lot about Jesus without knowing Jesus. I’ve shared before that I grew up in the church, but I gave my life to Jesus in a Bible School classroom in the basement of the Church of the Brethren in the summer after my fifth grade year. At that moment, I knew I needed a personal faith; I couldn’t rely on my parents’ faith or even my church upbringing. I wanted to know Jesus for myself. And everything changed in that moment, in that basement classroom. I was saved, but I continued to hear the whispers of the enemy, just as Wesley described. I didn’t hear an audible voice; Satan got at me through the vehicle of fear. Fear of not being good enough. Fear of not being accepted. Fear that God loved everyone else but not me. That went on for a number of years, but I remember very clearly a day when I was home alone, and the fear voice was working overtime. For some reason I wandered over to look at the bookshelf in our family room and the book Peace With God by Billy Graham nearly jumped off the bookshelf at me, or so it seemed. I don’t ever remember seeing it there before, but the title alone was what I needed, so I grabbed it, and did the thing where you flip it open to a random place and start reading. Like with Wesley’s experience, I wish I had taken better care to remember exactly where I turned and what I read, but all I know is that God used Billy Graham’s words, written many years before, to speak peace to my soul that day. It was as if Jesus spoke through the printed page just like he spoke to the storm long ago: “Peace, be still.” It was my Aldersgate moment, where I knew that I knew, where I found the peace I had longed for for so long. There are still times I find fear pursuing me; this pandemic has been one of those times, not constantly, but there have been moments, my family will tell you, where the voice of the enemy seemed so loud and I gave into fear. But that voice is not what is loudest in my life most of the time since that Aldersgate moment. I know that I know that Jesus is in control and he will bring me safely home.

So, let me ask again: have you had an Aldersgate moment? Have you been able to come to that moment when you turned your back on sin and embraced God’s forgiving and loving grace? Have you had that moment when you know that you know that you are united with Christ forever? Do you know that you have died and been made alive again? Have you had an Aldersgate moment? As I’ve said, one defining characteristic of such a moment is that determination not to give into sin from that moment on, and reliance upon the strength of Christ to live that commitment out. As one author puts it, “The true children of God show the authenticity of their faith by their abstention from sin…if we know the true meaning of grace, we will never presume upon it” (Mohrlang 102). But we can’t do that alone. That truth was the secret of the Wesleyan revival and the early Methodist movement. Everywhere Wesley went to preach, he organized those who chose to follow Jesus, those who experienced their own Aldersgate moment, into small groups. He called them classes and bands and societies, but they were what we call small groups. He did that because he knew that we cannot and are not meant to walk this path of faith alone. Jesus did it before Wesley; he established a small group of disciples because he knew they needed each other. It’s no different in 2020. If we’ve proven anything in the midst of this pandemic, it’s that we need each other. I know we’re cautious, but we’re also eager to see friends, to be back together. We were made for community; this life of faith is too hard to go it alone. Our LifeGroup has been meeting weekly on Zoom during this time, and we’ve done very little Bible Study. We’ve done some praying, but mostly we’ve talked—about life, about the pandemic, about getting through all of this with our faith and sanity intact. We need each other, and so let me encourage you, when we get out of this and start returning to something resembling normal, make sure you have some folks who will love you, who will be Jesus to you, who will walk with you through whatever comes and help you ignore the voices of the enemy. If Aldergate Days are going to last in our lives, we’re going to need each other.

So, I’m going to pray for all of us. First, that we will experience our own Aldersgate, a filling by the Holy Spirit and an assurance of Jesus’ presence. If you’ve already experienced Aldersgate, then pray for people you know who are living in fear in these days. And then second, I’m going to pray that we will all be surrounded by people whose hearts are also strangely warmed and who will walk with us on the way, that we won’t try to go it alone. Let’s pray, shall we?