Strangely Warmed Hearts

When John Wesley went to that Moravian meeting on Aldersgate Street, it was like Moses going to the burning bush, it was like the Samaritan woman going to Jacob's Well, it was like Saul of Tarsus going to Damascus.  When Wesley left that meeting, his life was never the same.  He wrote in his journal, "I felt my heart strangely warmed.  I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for my 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."    

The language Wesley used was not the language of the head, but the language of the heart.  What he had been trained to understand in his head became personal experience.   Methodism has ever since that day embraced the experience of the heart strangely warmed.  It is the experience of the new birth.  It a word which speaks of conversion.  It is a word about the inner change worked by grace as we repent and turn away from our sin toward the Savior on the cross.  

When I was growing up in the Methodist Church it was a common thing to hear preachers preach invitational sermons calling those who were listening to open their hearts to the experience of the new birth.  It seemed back then that preachers assumed that there was someone within the sound of the Word being proclaimed who needed to be born again.  Over the years it has seemed that preachers have come to the place of assuming that everyone within the sound of the sermon being preached has had that born again experience so there is no need to preach that message.  As a result the altar started needing dusting and the baptismal font stood empty of water.  And the church started losing its spiritual power.