A Quarter Before Nine

We have his own account, in his own journal, with the time in it.

On 24 May 1738, John Wesley was thirty four years old. He was an ordained clergyman of the Church of England. He was a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. He had led a disciplined religious society at Oxford that other students had mocked as Methodists. He had sailed to Georgia as a missionary and come home considering the trip a failure.

He had believed all the right things, in the right order, for his entire adult life. He had also, by his own written account, been badly shaken on the voyage home from Georgia by a group of Moravian passengers who were not afraid during a storm when he was, which is a humiliation he wrote down himself rather than leaving out.

Here is what he wrote about that evening.

In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate-street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. 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.

The three words people skip are at the front.

Very unwillingly.

He did not want to go

I want to spend our time on those three words, because everything about how this gets retold tends to remove them.

He went. He did not want to. He wrote both facts down himself, in that order, and he kept the second one in when he published.

That is a man dragging himself to a meeting on a Wednesday evening because it was the thing he did, with nothing in him that expected anything, and it is the only reason he was in the room.

And notice what he does not do. He does not manufacture an appetite first. There is no line in the journal where he works himself up, prays about his reluctance, or decides to go with a better attitude. He records the reluctance and then records the address.

You are not disqualified by going unwillingly. Romans 1:17 was the passage being read that night, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps Wesley's own three words in the account rather than letting them be edited out of the story.

And the passage matters, because it is named in the journal. Somebody was reading Luther's preface to Romans, and the verse at the heart of that preface is this one.

For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.Romans 1:17, King James Version

The just shall live by faith. That is what was being read aloud in an ordinary room when it happened.

You are sitting under words that have been read out for centuries and are not finished with anybody yet. Romans 1:17 was already old and already familiar in that room, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the reason familiar words are not spent ones.

Now, I want to be careful and honest about two things, because this category is held to that.

First: we do not know exactly where on Aldersgate Street the meeting was. The site has never been established with certainty, and the memorial there marks the street rather than the house.

Second, and more importantly: historians disagree about how decisive that evening was in Wesley's life. Some read it as the hinge of everything. Others point out that he was preaching and organizing before it, that he had periods of real doubt after it, and that in later editions of his journal he added notes qualifying some of what he had written. The record is genuinely contested, and I am not going to settle it here.

You have been handed an account with the doubt still in it, and the man who wrote it did not clean up his own record. Wesley's written journal keeps the unwillingness and the later qualifications together, and the same Spirit who preserved that honesty is the reason nobody has to have a tidy story.

But here is the thing that is not contested, and it is the thing you need.

He had been a clergyman, a missionary, a scholar and the leader of a society of devout men, and he wrote that on that evening something arrived that he had not had before, and that he could only describe with the word warmed.

The belief had been there for years. The warmth was new.

You have had the belief for years without the warmth, and the most organized religious man of his generation wrote the same thing about himself. Romans 1:17 says from faith to faith, which is a phrase about movement rather than arrival, and it is His Spirit who is the reason that reaches somebody sitting in a circle of chairs on a Wednesday.