The Heart Strangely Warmed on Aldersgate Street

On May 24, 1738, John Wesley walked through the streets of London as a defeated man. He had crossed the Atlantic to convert Native Americans in Georgia — and failed. He had studied scripture at Oxford for years, led a disciplined "Holy Club," and could parse Greek verbs with surgical precision. Yet for all his knowledge, the living Christ remained a stranger to him.

That evening, Wesley reluctantly attended a Moravian meeting on Aldersgate Street. Someone read aloud from Martin Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. As the words unfolded — not new words, but ancient ones he had read a hundred times — something shifted. "I felt my heart strangely warmed," Wesley later wrote. "I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation."

Like the two disciples trudging toward Emmaus, Wesley had walked for years alongside the very scriptures that testified of Christ without truly seeing Him. He knew the text but had not yet met the Person within it. And like those disciples whose eyes were opened in the breaking of bread, Wesley's recognition came not through more study or harder striving, but through a moment of quiet surrender — a heart finally opened to what had been there all along.

The Risen Lord often walks closest in the very seasons we are most convinced He is absent.