Wesley Corpus

“ Observing this terrible abuse of preaching Christ given for us, we began to insist more than ever on Christ wing in us. All our exhortations and preaching turned on this: we spoke, we writ, of nothing else. Our constant inquiries were,--‘ Is Christ formed im you? Have you a new heart? Is your soul renewed in the image of God? Is the whole body of sin destroyed in you? Are you fully assured, beyond all doubt or fear, that you are a child of God? In what manner, and at what moment did you receive that full assurance?’ Ifa man could not answer all these questions, we judged he had no true faith. Nor would we permit any to receive the Lord’s Supper among us till he could. “Tn this persuasion we were, when I went to Greenland, five years ago. There I had a correspondence by letter with a Danish minister on the head of justification. And it pleased God to show me by him, (though he was by no means a holy man, but openly guilty of gross sins,) that we had now leaned too much to this hand, and were run into another extreme: that Christ im us and Christ for us, ought, indeed, to be both insisted on; but first and principally Christ for us, as being the ground ot all. I now clearly saw, we ought not to insist on any thing we feel any more than any thing we do, as if it were necessary previous to justification, or the remission of sins. I saw that least of all ought we so to insist on the full assurance of faith, or the destruction of the body of sin, and the extinction of all its motions, as to exclude those who had not attained this from the Lord’s table, or to deny that they had any faith at all. I plainly perceived, this full assurance was a distinct gift from justifying faith, and often not given till long after it; and that justification does not imply that sin should not sé in us, but only that it should not conquer.