Presence

For much of his early life, John Wesley longed for a real experience of Jesus Christ. He grew up in a parsonage, the child of a preacher, and that's a dangerous place to grow up. In a pastor's family, you speak about Jesus and read about Jesus and are surrounded by the things of Jesus and the church so much that it's easy for Jesus to become just a job or just some historical curiosity or even just a story. When I was in seminary, Professor Boyd told us that becoming a pastor would cut our chances of going to heaven in half. I know now what he means. Being in a pastor's home or being a pastor means you deal with holy things so often they can easily become familiar and any sense of Jesus' presence is easy to miss. Wesley grew up in such a home, and while I don't think he ever doubted the truth of Jesus, what he often lacked was a sense of the presence of Jesus.

Perhaps that's why, then, his final question to those early Methodists is this one: Is Christ real to me?

After everything else, do I have a sense that Jesus is here with me, just like he said he would be? After all, his name is Emmanuel, "God with us."

Getting to that question took Wesley through a long series of doubts, on a journey to America to convert the natives, through a personal trial while in Georgia, on a long ship ride home, through storms both metaphorical and real, and finally to a place on Aldersgate Street where he went "quite unwillingly" for a Bible study one evening. And there, while someone was reading from Luther's commentary on the book of Romans, Wesley, for perhaps the very first time in his life, experienced a sense of Jesus' presence. "I felt my heart strangely warmed," he wrote later. And he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Jesus loved him. (If you've ever read a commentary, you know this was a work of God...because those are not the most exciting books to read!)

Not that the moment at Aldersgate changed everything forever. He went on to sometimes have doubts and fears. But Wesley was a changed man and faced such things differently because Christ was real to him. He knew that he knew that he knew. Just a day or so before, his brother Charles had experienced a very similar thing, and when John's heart was warmed, they together sang the hymn Charles wrote out of his own experience:

Where shall my wondering soul begin?

How shall I all to heaven aspire?

A slave redeemed from death and sin,

A brand plucked from eternal fire,

How shall I equal triumphs raise,

Or sing my great Deliverer’s praise?

This is the point to which all of Wesley's questions have driven us: is Christ real to me? Do I have a sense of his presence every day, in every moment of every day? What that looks like is often different because God, just as he did in the Scriptures, reveals himself in different ways to different people. To Mary, God sent an angel by the well. To Joseph, he spoke through a dream. To Moses, he was a burning bush. And to Ezekiel, he was a wheel within a wheel. To me, God often reminds me of his presence in the beauty of nature, or in a kind word that comes at just the right time. God shows up through a song that I've heard a hundred times before but had never allowed to get into my soul. Jesus becomes real as I serve the downtrodden and the poor. Jesus becomes real through the love of my family. My longing is that I would sense his presence in every moment, but I'm not there yet. There's still too much of "me" left, but I'm working on it. And, by God's grace, Jesus is more real to me today than he was a year ago.

So...what about you? After all these introspective questions, where do you experience the presence of Jesus? Where will you sense or see him today? Is Christ real to you?