The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 257

wholly to “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”
At a meeting of the Moravian society in London a statement was read
from Luther, describing the change which the Spirit of God works in the
heart of the believer. As Wesley listened, faith was kindled in his soul.
“I felt my heart strangely warmed,” he says. “I felt I did trust in Christ,
Christ alone, for 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.”—Ibid., page 52.
Through long years of wearisome and comfortless striving—years
of rigorous self-denial, of reproach and humiliation—Wesley had
steadfastly adhered to his one purpose of seeking God. Now he had
found Him; and he found that the grace which he had toiled to win by
prayers and fasts, by almsdeeds and self-abnegation, was a gift, “without
money and without price.”
Once established in the faith of Christ, his whole soul burned with the
desire to spread everywhere a knowledge of the glorious gospel of God’s
free grace. “I look upon all the world as my parish,” he said; “in whatever
part of it I am, I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty, to declare
unto all that are willing to hear, the glad tidings of salvation.”—Ibid.,
page 74.
He continued his strict and self-denying life, not now as the ground,
but the result of faith; not the root, but the fruit of holiness. The grace
of God in Christ is the foundation of the Christian’s hope, and that
grace will be manifested in obedience. Wesley’s life was devoted to
the preaching of the great truths which he had received—justification
through faith in the atoning blood of Christ, and the renewing power of
the Holy Spirit upon the heart, bringing forth fruit in a life conformed to
the example of Christ.
Whitefield and the Wesleys had been prepared for their work by long
and sharp personal convictions of their own lost condition; and that they
might be able to endure hardness

256