Show me the nail marks

In our journey into the depths of John Wesley’s sermon “The Scripture Way of Salvation” we are now entering a long section in which he answers questions and objections to what he has laid out thus far. The length of what is left in this sermon demonstrates that Wesley’s understanding of salvation was no less contested in his day than it is in ours. The only difference, perhaps, was that in his day there was a convinced, stubborn, and energetic advocate for Wesleyan theology who would not let detractors and questioners silence his voice or still his feet.

Let us turn to the crowd now and field some questions for the Rev. Wesley.

2. “But does not God command us to repent also? Yea, and to ‘bring forth fruits meet for repentance’–to cease, for instance, from doing evil, and learn to do well? And is not both the one and the other of the utmost necessity, insomuch that if we willingly neglect either, we cannot reasonably expect to be justified at all? But if this be so, how can it be said that faith is the only condition of justification?” This question, I believe speaks exactly of the confusion by some Christians I raised in my last post. In both the Bible and the preaching of the church, we hear a great deal about the good works God calls us to. And it does very much seem that if we refuse or neglect these, that we cannot expect pardon. If that is so, how is it that we can so strongly say that there is only one condition for our justification?

God does undoubtedly command us both to repent, and to bring forth fruits meet for repentance; which if we willingly neglect, we cannot reasonably expect to be justified at all: therefore both repentance, and fruits meet for repentance, are, in some sense, necessary to justification. It would seem Wesley has just given up the entire argument, but let us read on to see if there is more here.

But they are not necessary in the same sense with faith, nor in the same degree. So here comes a distinction. Let us see if this is a distinction that actually makes a difference or whether it is merely a clever use of words.

Not in the same degree; for those fruits are only necessary conditionally; if there be time and opportunity for them. Otherwise a man may be justified without them, as was the thief upon the cross (if we may call him so; for a late writer has discovered that he was no thief, but a very honest and respectable person!) but he cannot be justified without faith; this is impossible. Let us ignore the parenthetical aside. I assume this is a jab at someone known to Wesley and his audience, but I have not the depth of knowledge to even guess his target here. Wesley scholars, perhaps, can tell us, but I cannot.

The meat of Wesley’s point brings us to the Gospel of Luke, and one of the most famous anonymous men in the history of Christendom. This thief on the cross is the exception who proves the rule. Yes, God calls you to engage in the kinds of work that demonstrate your repentance and your serious desire for faith. He calls you to produce the works and fruits that true faith would produce in your life, until that time that you receive that gift. In one contemporary way of putting it, perhaps a bit scandalously, fake it until you make it.

If we have time and ability to do such works and refuse to do so, we should not expect the gift of faith or the pardon and justification which such faith secures. The refusal itself is a contradiction of the claim that we truly are seeking and desiring the faith necessary to our salvation. We cannot claim to want Jesus and also refuse to obey his commands.

But, of course, many of us do. Indeed, as a pastor I’ve encountered more people who draw the wrong lesson of the thief on the cross than I could count. I’ve met a great many men and women who say they believe in Jesus and yet appear to follow few if any of his commands.

Not all of them, but some of them, point to the thief on the cross as their champion. That man belonged to no church. He had no means of baptism. He had no time to study the Bible or attend a prayer group. He had no time or money to give to the work of the church or the relief of the poor. He had not time to take a moral stand that would put him at odds with popular opinion. All he had to do was express belief in the Lordship of Christ, and he was welcomed in paradise.

If the thief on the cross did not have to do any of those things to be welcomed into paradise, they say, then neither do I.

And here, when talking with such individuals, I’ve been prompted, but too timid, to ask whether they can show me the marks of the nails in their hands and feet that prevent them, like the thief, from acting on the commands of Christ. Show me these, and I will concede your point. Show them not, and I will urge you to consider whether your argument is one you stake paradise on in the face of the One who granted grace to your champion on that cross.

Yes, there are cases in which we can see that faith is the only unconditional condition for justification, but most of us are not so constrained as that poor sinner on the cross. As we have ability, we are called to various works as signs and expressions of our repentance, but there are circumstances — very few — where such actions are impossible and therefore not necessary. But those very rare cases demonstrate the distinction between the conditional works and unconditional faith that we require.

Likewise, let a man have ever so much repentance, or ever so many of the fruits meet for repentance, yet all this does not at all avail; he is not justified till he believes. But the moment he believes, with or without those fruits, yea, with more or less repentance, he is justified. Perhaps all that Wesley has written here can be summed up best by the Apostle Paul, “For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.”

–Not in the same sense; for repentance and its fruits are only remotely necessary; necessary in order to faith; whereas faith is immediately necessary to justification. It remains, that faith is the only condition, which is immediately and proximately necessary to justification. I will confess, again, my own lack of expertise to pry apart the full meaning here. There is a a great deal of philosophy and theology dealing with the necessity of causes and those which are near and those which are more distant from the thing caused, forming a great metaphysical chain.

Being ill equipped to illuminate Wesley’s precise meaning here, I would suggest, however, that it is, for those of us who follow in the tradition staked out by Wesley’s ministry, clear that his central point is repeated here: repentance and works are necessary for salvation but not in the same way that faith is. Repentance can bring us to a place of faith, but only faith can bring us to a place of salvation.

One and only condition

As we press onward into John Wesley’s sermon “The Scripture Way of Salvation” it will help you to recall how he described faith in a previous section of the sermon. Faith is the conviction that God was in Christ reconciling that world to Himself and that Christ loved me and gave Himself up for me. With that in mind, we read on.

1. And, first, how are we justified by faith? In what sense is this to be understood? I answer, Faith is the condition, and the only condition, of justification. Wesley is going to expand on some of these terms in a moment, but as we read him in 2023, it is important to note that one thing was not deemed even necessary to explain, and that is that there are conditions that must be met for us to be put into right relationship with God.

In our day, more than a few Christian voices would resist the idea that there are any conditions on our salvation. Some do not say it explicitly that way, but you do not have to be in ministry very long before you meet Christians who have clearly understood that they have been told that God would never place any condition or expectation on them. Obviously, such doctrines are contrary to any Wesleyan theology.

It is the condition: none is justified but he that believes: without faith no man is justified. To demonstrate my point, here Wesley is plain as day. No one is justified unless they believe. No one. And if person does not have faith (see above), he or she is not and will not be pardoned for their sin or put into right relationship with God.

A retired pastor in my conference recently posted a message on social media inspired by, he said, a thousand funeral services. He wrote that the fact that someone loved us or the fact that we loved a person does not get them into heaven.

His post was met with some push back and some questions. At least one comment suggested that it was not a kind thing to post in public. Of course, if faith is the condition of our salvation, then the unkindness would be to conceal that fact. I suspect many who were uncomfortable at my colleague’s post would not agree with Wesley that faith is the condition for our justification before God.

And it is the only condition: this alone is sufficient for justification. Every one that believes is justified, whatever else he has or has not. In other words: no man is justified till he believes; every man when he believes is justified. And here is the good news. Faith is all you need. You do not need to be educated or rich or young or old or respected or anything else. Your life can be a mess. You can be a mess. None of that matters at all, so long as you meet the only condition – faith.

Of course, this news is not good news to everyone. If you are sitting in church on Sunday morning, taking great pride in your success at business or your position of authority, if you believe you are at peace with God because you put cash in the offering plate and are considered respectable in every way, then a young John Wesley showing up to preach that none of that matters one bit is not going to be met with an “amen.”

Just that kind of preaching got Wesley disinvited from many pulpits, and just that word is still upsetting today.

I remember when I first encountered this in my ministry. It was my first part-time appointment. I was teaching a class on Methodism and we used some of Wesley’s sermons. I was teaching on this very point: specifically that attending church every week is not going to get you into heaven, but only faith will do that. An older member of the class looked up with shock and indignation as asked why he’d been bothering attending church for 50 years if it was not going to get him into heaven.

He is the only Christian I ever heard ask that question out loud, but I assure you that he is far from alone in our pews. This most basic truth escapes so many. There are untold numbers who turn their back on church because they believe that there is a long list of things that must do or be or change before they can be saved, and there are untold numbers of people sitting in pews who believe that the things they have done or the station of life they have achieved or the checks they have written will get them into heaven.

Both groups are wrong.

Lord, help us to see that there is only one condition for our justification, faith in Jesus Christ.

Being blessed by assurance

Our journey into John Wesley’s sermon “The Scripture Way of Salvation” gets a little bit into the weeds with this entry, but we will find in those weeds some crucial ideas for those of us who claim to be a part of the Wesleyan theological tradition. Please join me as we trek ever onward.

3. “But is this the faith of assurance, or faith of adherence?” This is obviously an important debate for Wesley and his day. I am certain I do not grasp all the nuance of the question Wesley sets out to answer, but the answer is valuable, nonetheless.

The Scripture mentions no such distinction. Please bear with this observation once again. I feel it is worth stopping and noticing how often Wesley turns to the Bible when he’s wrestling with a question. For Wesley, the first answer to any theological or practical question was to turn to Scripture. He is like the older lady who stood up at my annual conference one year during a heated debate and asked the bishop and the body the simple question, “What does the Bible say?” Like many at the meeting, lots of my fellow Christians are quick to quibble with the presumption that asking that question resolves the difficulty, but I think Wesley’s statement is significant. The Bible is not just one resource among many as we seek better understanding. It is the first and primary source of all we need to know about our faith and our practice.

The Apostle says, “There is one faith, and one hope of our calling”; one Christian, saving faith; “as there is one Lord,” in whom we believe, and “one God and Father of us all.” Wesley is clearly trying to resolve the question about different kinds of faith by saying there is, in fact, only one faith. As we will see below, he makes room to say there are different branches or acts of faith. He does not ignore the complexity of actual lived experience, but he is holding together what some others seek to divide.

And it is certain, this faith necessarily implies an assurance (which is here only another word for evidence, it being hard to tell the difference between them) that Christ loved me, and gave Himself for me. When I first read this sermon, remember this being the first time I saw clearly that Wesley linked the definition of faith in Hebrews 11 with the idea of assurance. And here I think I begin to get some clarity on the debate at hand.

There are even today in some branches of Christianity those who argue that when we have made the verbal action of “receiving Christ” or “inviting Christ” into our hearts, even if we have no internal sense of God’s love, that we should stand on the promise of Scripture. Have confidence that you are saved, some say, even if nothing in you tells you this is so. Have confidence that Christ loves you and died for you, even if nothing in your being gives you any evidence that is true.

I’ve heard of pastors citing Romans 10:9-10 to say that if someone kneels and recites the sinner’s prayer and affirms that they believe in the fact of the resurrection that they are saved. They counsel those who question their salvation to not trust the evidence of their own spirit, but instead to grasp tightly to the words of Paul. If it is some version of this practice and theology that Wesley is grappling with here, then I think that Wesley’s response would be that such arguments skip over what Paul means when he says “believe in your heart.”

For many people, the faith of a Christian is understood as an act of will. We will ourselves to believe. We have faith because we have taken a leap beyond the rational and press on into the darkness with our heads down in spite of the evidence before us.

For a Wesleyan, this gets faith backwards. Faith is not an act of personal willpower that we cling to tightly even though we cannot see a reason to do do so. Faith is a gift that we are given, that we accept, and that fills us with the confidence (see a bit more on this shortly) that we are not, in fact, pressing into the darkness but pressing on toward the light that we see by faith even if we cannot now see it by sight.

To “believe in your heart” is not to set your resolve to affirm a thing without any evidence it is true. It is, rather, to discover in your deepest being that the Spirit has revealed to you the love of Jesus Christ. Belief is a blessing that God gives us. It is something that finds us. It is something we are given, by grace, even though we do not deserve it.

Wesley is saying — no doubt based on his own experience of long years of struggle — that assurance (evidence) of faith cannot be separated from the possession of faith. You cannot possess something you have no evidence that you have. Contrary to a lot of the ways we talk about faith these days, your faith is not something that you do. It is something that your receive, and when you receive it, you will know it. In one formulation of Wesleyan theology: All can be saved, and all can know they are saved.

So, to be direct about it, if a person has prayed to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord, the question of whether they are saved is not whether they said the words but whether they have any assurance that they are saved. Salvation is not an incantation or a magic spell. It is an act of a gracious and sovereign God.

For “he that believeth” with the true living faith “hath the witness in himself”: “the Spirit witnesseth with his spirit that he is a child of God.” “Because he is a son, God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into his heart, crying, Abba, Father”; giving him an assurance that he is so, and a childlike confidence in Him. Here we see Wesley linking the idea of assurance with the confidence or adherence that we discussed above. The childlike confidence that we are, indeed, children of God is something grows out of the Spirit speaking to our spirit.

But let it be observed, that, in the very nature of the thing, the assurance goes before the confidence. For a man cannot have a childlike confidence in God till he knows he is a child of God. Therefore, confidence, trust, reliance, adherence, or whatever else it be called, is not the first, as some have supposed, but the second, branch or act of faith. The next time you sing “Blessed Assurance,” perhaps you will sing with more gusto this deeply Wesleyan hymn. The words “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine” are words of joy. They are words of a longing fulfilled. Let us not sing it through gritted teeth but with smiles we cannot contain.

4. It is by this faith we are saved, justified, and sanctified; taking that word in its highest sense. But how are we justified and sanctified by faith? This is our third head of inquiry. And this being the main point in question, and a point of no ordinary importance, it will not be improper to give it a more distinct and particular consideration. We have come far with Wesley in this sermon, but all so far has been preparing us for the main topic. Please join me soon as we continue reading with Wesley.