Friends
On the night of May 24th, 1738, John Wesley accepted an invitation to a religious meeting at Aldersgate Street in London where the key event was to be the reading of Martin Luther’s preface to the Romans. He was feeling tired and mentally low and writes in his journal that he went “very unwillingly” and yet something happened. At about 8:45pm, whilst listening to the reading, he went from a theoretical understanding of theology, to a personal experience of the living God and describes it as feeling his heart “strangely warmed.”
He wrote: “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.”
He wasn’t the first Wesley to feel this heart-warming experience: three days earlier on the 21st of May, Charles had also experienced a unique and extraordinary sense of the presence of God.
Methodism didn’t catch fire and burn in 18th century Britain because Charles wrote good hymns or because John was an organiser par excellence (although both are true) but because of their personal, lived experiences of the living God, an experience that they found hard to articulate but which was best expressed by John’s “heart strangely warmed.”
We need our hearts to be strangely warmed today. If we are to grow as disciples and as churches and come to know God afresh, then the sharing of these moments and the seeking to encounter God are the only way that we can hope to do so. It is not enough to think that the idea is rather lovely, or even that it helps us make sense of the world. Like John and Charles, we need to feel it, to experience it for ourselves. For Charles it was this: “That I, a child of wrath and hell, I should be called a child of God, should know, should feel my sins forgiven, blest with this antepast of heaven.”
“Antepast” is a strange word to us today, but it means a foretaste, specifically a first course to whet the appetite. In Church terms, “a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.” As we reflect on Aldersgate Sunday today, it is perhaps a day to recall our own conversion, and to pray that we too should continue to feel our hearts strangely warmed, or if they have yet to warm at all, should come to know fully the God we profess, Sunday by Sunday.
God bless, Vicci