Receiving faith and receiving Christ

In our series on John Wesley’s sermon “The Scripture Way of Salvation,” we have been reading about the meaning of salvation and we have begun to consider the meaning of the word “faith.” Here, we continue to delve deeper into the meaning of that widely used but frequently undiscussed word.

2. Taking the word in a more particular sense, faith is a divine evidence and conviction not only that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself,” but also that Christ loved me, and gave Himself for me. Faith is not merely belief about Jesus — although it is surely that. It is belief about my relationship with Jesus. It is not faith to merely believe that Jesus Christ reconciled the world to God. We have not arrived at faith until we have come to know that this general reconciliation of the wider world to God includes me. Jesus loved me. He gave his life for me. To stop short of this is to stop short of saving faith.

It is perhaps worth noting that in his journal after that night on Aldersgate Street, it is the second piece of faith that Wesley reported receiving. Christ love him, even him, and had given himself for John Wesley.

It is by this faith (whether we term it the essence, or rather a property thereof) that we receive Christ; I want to be careful here. I am worried that there may be some things going on in this passage that refer to debates that I am ignorant about. I am not sure what the debate about essence or property is all about. I’ll run into a similar issues in the next section. But, it is interesting to me how Wesley speaks of receiving Christ here. In many parts of the evangelical world, we speak of receiving Christ as a kind of verbal enactment on our behalf. I kneel. I pray. I tell Jesus that I receive him as my Lord and Savior, and having done so, we say I have received Christ.

This does not appear to be what Wesley has in mind. It appears to me that receiving Christ is less about us letting Jesus in and more about us coming to that double-sided faith that Wesley wrote of above. When we come to faith that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself and that Christ loved me and died for me, we receive Christ along with that faith. To have that faith is to receive Christ. We may proclaim that in some way at some point, but whether we inform Jesus that we receive him or not, when we have faith, we have Jesus.

that we receive Him in all His offices, as our Prophet, Priest, and King. I don’t think this is a common expression in contemporary Christianity, but Wesley used it a lot. In Israel, there were three anointed offices of leadership. When God called a person to the role of prophet, priest, or king, that person would be anointed with oil as a sign of God’s blessing and commission to the office. As many of you know, the word “messiah” means anointed and the word “Christ” means messiah. What we are saying when we say Christ is that Jesus has assumed place of the prophets — those who speak God’s word to us — the priests — those who make sacrifice and intercession for us — and the kings — those who govern and secure the peace on earth and in this particular case rule our heart and lives. To receive Christ is to receive him in all these offices.

It is by this that He is “made of God unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.” When we receive Christ, we no longer sing “I did it my way.” To receive Christ is to take the most radical step outside the taken-for-granted basic ideas of our American culture that one can take. When we receive Christ, he becomes for us our entire claim to any righteousness we have before God. He becomes the source of all the wisdom we claim to possess. He becomes the sole key to the chains that bind us fast in slavery to sin and death. He becomes the sole beacon, model, and source of the grace that turns grubby sinners into saints of light. To live in Christ is to live entirely for and by Christ. We have no more claim to set our own course or demand our own way. There is only one way. It is his, and we tread gratefully, joyfully upon it, and it alone.

Christians during most of my life have made arguments from the political right and political left about how Jesus can and should shape the culture around us. It always seems to involve some form of bending the levers of power or the engines of influence in a Jesus-centric direction. I may be wrong in this thought, but I think that is always a mistake. I think it is the temptation of the ring of power. I think the way Jesus changes the world is by changing us, one at a time, and building his church one stone at a time. When Jesus becomes our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption — our all in all — then the chaos of the world discovers one more place it cannot rule, and so the world becomes just a tiny bit more like heaven.