The Personal Experience by William Ambrose Spicer

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 16, 1908

The Personal Experience

By William Ambrose Spicer

While John Wesley and his associates in Oxford had won the name of Methodists by their piety and devotion, it was Spangenburg, the Moravian associate of Zinzendorf, who turned Wesley’s thoughts into the channel that led directly to the great revival of personal religion that characterized the early years of Methodism.

Wesley had come to America, under a Church of England society, to labor for Europeans and Indians in the Georgia Colony. There Spangenburg met him.

“Do you know Jesus Christ?” asked Spangenburg. “I know he is the Saviour of the world,” replied Wesley. “True; but do you know he has saved you?” “I hope he has died to save me.” “Do you know yourself?” “I do.”

With this Spangenburg left him. Wesley felt that by such direct and personal and abrupt questions Spangenburg was rather unfair. But as he thought the matter over, the idea of personal experience in the forgiveness of sin and the assurance of it began to work. Wesley found the Saviour—his Saviour, and the Great Revival was born in his soul.

Luther was prepared for the work of the Reformation, not merely by study of the doctrinal side of justification by faith, but, above all, by the personal experience in the doctrine. He had struggled under the burden of his own guilt, wrestling in agony over his sins. When that text, “The just shall live by faith,” came to him as a living word it wrought reformation in his own heart, and he was prepared to preach reformation truth to others.

We are never to allow gospel truth to become a mere theory. It is a personal experience in those that believe—something that we can submit our lives to anew every day. Every day those who may have been long in the way are to talk with the Lord and pledge the heart’s service to him in personal and actual fellowship with a personal Saviour whose sustaining grace and assurance of acceptance we need to-day just as much as the first day we found him.

Paul never outgrew the simplicity of personal experience, and hence never became a backslidden formalist. “Who loved me, and gave himself for me,” was the key-note of his message of a personal Saviour.

“Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord his God.” Ps. 146:5. It is not enough that he is the “God of Jacob;” he must be to the believer “his God,” as well.

W. A. S.