You have made us a reproach to our neighbours Psalm 44:13

• DAY 9 MORNING PSALM 44-46

• DAY 9 EVENING PSALM 47-49

On the Sunday following Aldersgate, John Wesley was 'roughly attacked in a large company as an enthusiast, a seducer and a setter-forth of new doctrines.' Mrs Hutton was as much offended as the rest, and she said , 'if you were not a Christian ever since I knew you, you were a great hypocrite for you made us all believe you were one.' Skevington-Wood says that Wesley’s ministry had been impeccably sane but lamentably ineffectual prior to his embracing this doctrine of salvation. Wesley was certainly not deterred by the attitude of his friends. Dr Plumb says that Wesley’s conversion was 'followed ….by a burning determination to bring to others what he himself had felt.' It was the warmed heart that made Wesley an evangelist. The fire could only spread as first of all it was kindled. The flame was lit in Aldersgate Street. Then Dr Bett said ‘There came to him “a spiritual energy, an evangelical zeal, an unction of the holy one that he had never before possessed.'

In all his earlier disciplined life of holiness and the good works to which he set his hand writes Edwards, ‘his primary concern was on what he could do for God. But after that Aldersgate Street heartwarming he asked only what God could do for him and through him. Thus at a stroke the old sense of strain and effort had gone. There was no longer the anxious probing of heart and conscience begetting ‘the spirit of heaviness.’ All was of grace through faith, and now he found he was always a conqueror.’ it was out of this experience that the ecclesiastical of Georgia could later become the evangelist of the open road.’

Increasingly Wesley was excluded from church after church because he preached evangelical doctrines. Wesley had already experienced this exclusion even before Aldersgate. He had begun to preach justification earlier in the year. Justification by faith was the doctrine that caused such offence. On the fifth of February 1738, at St John the Evangelist, Westminster, he preached on those strong words ‘If any man be in Christ he is a new creature.’ ‘I was afterwards informed, many of the best in the parish were so offended that I was not to preach there any more.’ Nor did he. On 26th February he preached three times at St Lawrence Jewry , St Catherine Cree, St John Wapping. ‘I believe it pleased God to bless the first sermon most he wrote ‘because it gave most offence.’ Then after Aldersgate yet more churches refused Wesley to preach in their pulpits. Again and again he was excluded.

• Lord, we pray for the raising up of another wave of evangelists with the spiritual energy and the evangelical zeal and the unction of the Holy Spirit, that was on John Wesley. Although the preaching of the Gospel be a ‘sign spoken against’ and ‘a reproach to our neighbours’ give us the courage and fiery determination to keep going. Set a fire deep down in our soul. We want more of you Lord, more passion to preach the Good News of grace to a lost and dying world.

REFERENCES

Skevington-Wood, A. The burning heart John Wesley: Evangelist,Cliff College Publishing, 73 -74

Benham, D. Memoirs of James Hutton, 34

Edwards, M. A history of the Methodist church in Great Britain, Vol1, 51

Wesley, J. Vol 1, 440