In my last article, the first in this series, I stated my aims in these reflections. I am hardly the first person to lay out the Wesleyan understanding of salvation and so I am not going to try to cover everything that can be said. My goal is “to put the most important issues right up front and then spend a bit of time highlighting implications that don’t always get raised for those who want to go just a bit deeper.”
This month, we are looking at “convicting grace.” This is an aspect of the Wesleyan understanding of salvation that sometimes doesn’t get talked about. Part of the reason for that is because it is not a major theme in Wesley’s writings, certainly there is nowhere near the level of discussion that we get on justification and sanctification. It could be argued that convicting grace really isn’t its own “kind” of grace because could be seen as part of prevenient grace. That may be so, but then we might say that there aren’t really any different “kinds” of grace to start with; there is just the one grace of God and we experience it differently depending on where we are in the process.
The idea of “convicting grace,” is that someone does not, in general, go from being the lord of their own life to surrendering their whole life to the lordship of Christ without some resistance. Wesley’s presentation about how we move through the process of salvation was always aimed at the general experience, the way many people do, in fact, experience the grace of God. It is descriptive, not prescriptive. That is to say, it helps us to recognize landmarks on our way, not tell us what must happen. Most people experience conviction at some point during their coming to saving faith.
What is most important, theologically, to emphasize, is that Wesley understood convicting grace and conviction as being part of the process of salvation. Conviction is not primarily to be interpreted as a sign of the wrath and anger of God, seeking and even glorying in our destruction. It should be interpreted as part of God’s aim of salvation for our lives. The growing awareness that the sin in our lives is fundamentally incompatible with the life of holiness and discipleship that the Gospel calls us to is not a sign that we are moving away from saving faith, but toward it.
To be clear, to be “moving toward” saving faith is not the same thing as to “have saving faith.” A person yearning to be saved must not stop while under conviction any more than they should at prevenient grace. However, it is a phase most people go through and we must always remember it is part of the salvation process, a sign that a person is, by grace, drawing closer to God.
This is crucially important. We can sometimes becomes fixated on the love of God, and the fact that God calls us exactly as we are, and we are loved even in the midst of our sin and brokenness. If we aren’t careful, we can lose sight of the fact that following Christ necessarily means denying ourselves. As Jesus says, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).
One of the things that the early Methodists assumed was that people who were new in their midst had not yet been justified, did not yet have saving faith. Because of that, the first and only question that needed to be answered to join was “Do you desire to flee from the wrath to come?” The strong heritage of Christianity in America can sometimes work against us. If your whole community thinks of Christian faith as the only real option, whether they live it out or not, it can be hard to explain why being a disciple of Christ is different than simply “believing in God.”
You might live in a community where everyone already more or less thinks of themselves as being a Christian, whether their lives are shaped by Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit or not. In situations like that, people sometimes don’t think that there is much of a difference between “being a Christian,” and “just being a person.” When that is the basic assumption shared by most people, it can be hard to explain the kind of transformation that is supposed to take place by grace and through faith.
This is not only a theological problem, it is a practical problem. If we lose the importance of convicting grace as part of our understanding of salvation, it will impact our witness. A church that has forgotten that conviction is part of the process of salvation might say to their community, essentially, “Come and join with us. It is easy. We really aren’t all that different from non-Christians. We live basically the same way and we think basically the same way. You can join with us, add Sunday worship to your schedule, and nothing else really needs to change. Just please join with us.” A church with that kind of message may have a hard time reaching people. After all, why would anyone join a group that doesn’t make a difference in their lives?
As a general rule, people do not slide directly from prevenient grace to justification without conviction for their sins. Because of that, we can get a sense of how ministry is going. Do people in your church or community experience conviction for their sins? If not, it might be worth raising the question as to whether people are really encountering God and experiencing justification.
Make no mistake, the presence of God in people’s lives will highlight sin and bring conviction. In most cases, we don’t even need to especially go to war with the specific sins of the people to get them to experience conviction. If people are seeking God and attempting to follow Christ, the Holy Spirit will bring conviction. In fact, the only real conviction that makes real change is the conviction of the Holy Spirit. That, of course, does not get us off the hook of real work. We do need to proclaim, in word and especially in deed, the fullness of the gospel and the radical transformation it involves. If we are really doing what we say we do in the Global Methodist Church; if we are really making disciples and spreading scriptural holiness across the globe, we shouldn’t be a bit surprised if people experience conviction. We should be more surprised if people don’t. Maybe not everyone will feel conviction, and it will probably impact different people at different times and in different ways, but we should not try to avoid it, because the only way to avoid conviction is to avoid the gospel altogether.
