January 4, 2009
Seeing in the New Year, John Wesley Style: Step 3, Receive Christ as your only Saviour
(This post continues a series on John Wesley’s Directions for Renewing our Covenant with God)
So, here it is, receive Christ as your only saviour. Surely any evangelical has heard all this before, right?
Well, in a sense, yes, probably. I didn’t find anything particularly surprising in what Wesley put here. But really, that’s a bit of a comfort – if we’d got this part wrong, it wouldn’t matter very much which parts we had got right. Still, it’s good to go over the basics from time to time.
The thing Wesley is keen to underline here is that we must have Christ, and Christ alone to be our Saviour. “This is your closing with Christ as your Priest. And in this is included your renouncing your own righteousness; you can never, you will never cast yourselves on him alone, ’til all your hopes in yourselves have given up the ghost… let not only your sins go, but let your righteousness go, all the refuge of lies in which you have trusted.”
I don’t know about you, but much though renouncing my own righteousness is more appealing than renouncing the world and worldly happiness, I don’t find it easy. Wesley says it all flows from two necessary things, a knowledge of your own sin, and a knowledge of your total inability to reform yourself. Once again though, Wesley seems to view this as a process which lasts ages – this time it sounds like he’s thinking in terms of weeks:
“Nothing will bring a sinner to Christ, but absolute necessity: he will try to forsake his sins, he will think of leaving his drunkeness and becoming sober; of leaving his adulteries and becomign chaste, and so see if by any means he may not escape. He will go to prayers and sermons and sacraments and search out if there is any salvation in them; but all these, though they be useful in their places, yet looking no further, the sinner sees there is no hope in them…”
All this to say that, while I’m sure he wouldn’t say it’s impossibe, Wesley doesn’t seem to have high hopes for people just becoming Christians on the street during first contact. It reminds me of the importance of offering good follow up, and the usefulness of courses like Christianity Explored to give seekers time to take in what’s going on.
Having basically said that we should allow the Law to grind us more or less into the dust, Wesley offers three reasons why we should be confident in trusting Christ to cover all our sins, to paraphrase: That is what he was made Christ (the annointed one) for, God commands that we do, and he promises that Jesus will provide a safe refuge.
