Free and Full Pardon Proclaimed to the Guilty: A Comparative Study of the Evangelical Preachers of Grace from Luther to Spurgeon
This report examines a distinct and unusually consoling stream within the Christian tradition: the great preachers of free grace, those pulpit theologians and hymn writers who made it the labor of their lives to proclaim full, free, and immediate pardon to the guilty conscience. The figures gathered here, Martin Luther, John Bunyan, John Newton, the Wesley brothers, Robert Murray M'Cheyne, and Charles Haddon Spurgeon, differ in century, nation, temperament, and churchmanship, yet they converge upon a single evangelical conviction that they believed to be the very heart of the gospel: that the good news of Jesus Christ is good news precisely and especially to the guilty. Where guilt tells the burdened soul that God's welcome must be earned, deserved, or delayed until sufficient sorrow and reformation have accumulated, these preachers insisted with one voice that no sin is too great for the blood of Christ, that the vilest offender is welcomed the moment he comes, that assurance rests upon Christ's finished work and not upon the sinner's fluctuating feelings, and that the crushed conscience finds its rest not by looking inward at itself but by looking outward and upward to the cross. This study traces the shape of that proclamation in each figure through their real sermons, treatises, letters, and hymns, and then synthesizes what they teach together about the anatomy of a settled conscience. Throughout, the aim is not antiquarian but pastoral, for guilt that will not lift is among the heaviest burdens a human heart can carry, and the message these preachers spent their lives declaring is that such a burden was never meant to be carried alone, and in Christ need not be carried at all.
The Guilty Conscience and the Good News Addressed to It
Before considering the preachers themselves, it is worth pausing over the condition their preaching addressed, for the experience of guilt is universal enough to be almost invisible and heavy enough to be almost unbearable. Guilt in its healthy form is a moral faculty, the conscience registering a real breach between what we have done and what we ought to have done, and the whole biblical witness treats this capacity as a gift rather than a malfunction. The Psalmist who cries, "For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me" (Psalm 51:3), is not diseased but awake. Yet guilt has a way of overreaching its proper office. What begins as an honest verdict on a particular act can metastasize into a settled sentence upon the whole self, so that the sufferer no longer says, "I did a wrong thing," but rather, "I am a wrong thing, and beyond the reach of mercy." This is the terrain the preachers of grace understood with pastoral precision, because most of them had traversed it themselves. They knew the difference between the conviction that drives a soul toward God and the accusation that drives it to despair, and they labored to keep their hearers from mistaking the second for the first.
The Scriptures the evangelical tradition returned to again and again are worth setting out at the beginning, because they form the backbone of everything the preachers said. The first is the tender invitation of Isaiah, in which the Lord does not minimize the offense but rather names it at its darkest and then pledges pardon anyway: "Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool" (Isaiah 1:18). The realism of that verse is its comfort. It does not say the sins are trivial; it says they are scarlet, and it promises that scarlet shall become snow. The second is the plainest promise of pardon in the New Testament, the assurance that confession meets not reluctance but faithfulness: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9). The apostle grounds forgiveness not merely in God's kindness but in his justice, because the debt has been paid, and it would be unjust of God to demand payment twice of a debt already settled at Calvary. The third is the great acquittal of Romans, the verdict that stands over every believer regardless of how the day has felt: "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:1). To these the tradition added the images of distance and depth that picture the completeness of God's removal of sin: "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us" (Psalm 103:12), and the promise of Micah that God will "subdue our iniquities" and "cast all their sins into the depths of the sea" (Micah 7:19). Finally there is the sustained argument of Hebrews 10, which contrasts the endless repetition of the old sacrifices, which "can never take away sins" (Hebrews 10:11), with the single sufficient offering of Christ, "for by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified" (Hebrews 10:14), and which draws from that finished work the striking conclusion that the conscience may now draw near without fear: "Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus... let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience" (Hebrews 10:19-22).[1]
What unites these texts, and what the preachers of grace saw so clearly, is that the direction of gospel comfort runs against the instinct of guilt. Guilt turns the eye inward and downward, endlessly auditing the self, weighing the sincerity of its own repentance, measuring the depth of its own contrition, and always finding the account short. The gospel turns the eye outward and upward, away from the ledger of the self and toward the accomplished work of another. This reorientation is not a denial of guilt but its true resolution, for it does not tell the guilty they are innocent, which would be a lie the conscience could never accept, but tells them that their real guilt has been really borne by a real substitute, which is the only thing that can actually quiet an honest conscience. It is precisely because these preachers refused to trivialize sin that their message of pardon carried such weight. They preached to people who knew themselves to be genuinely guilty, and they told them of a genuine forgiveness, purchased at genuine cost, offered without price. The remainder of this study follows how six figures, each in his own voice and out of his own struggle, carried that single message to the burdened.
John Bunyan and the Burden That Fell at the Cross
No writer in the English language has portrayed the weight of guilt and its sudden release more memorably than John Bunyan, the Bedford tinker whose The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) became, after the Bible, the most widely read book in the Protestant world.[2] The reason Bunyan could describe the burden so vividly is that he had felt it so crushingly, and his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), remains one of the most searching records ever written of a conscience under conviction.[3] For years, by his own account, Bunyan was tormented by the sense of his own sinfulness, haunted by particular Scriptures that seemed to shut him out, convinced at times that he had committed the unpardonable sin, and driven nearly to despair by a fear that Christ had left him behind. The very title he gave to that book, borrowing Paul's self-description as the chief of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15), tells us how he understood his own case. He did not write as a serene saint recollecting mild disquiet; he wrote as a man who had been to the edge of the pit and had been drawn back only by grace, and it is out of that experience that the great allegory was born.
The most famous scene in The Pilgrim's Progress, and arguably the emotional center of the whole book, is the moment when Christian, who has toiled from the City of Destruction with a great burden bound upon his back, comes at last to the place of deliverance. Bunyan's description is deliberately understated, which only heightens its power: "He ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending; and upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a Sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the Sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more."[2] Everything in Bunyan's theology is compressed into that image. The burden is not argued off, not gradually lightened by degrees of moral improvement, not lifted by the pilgrim's own effort of will. It simply falls, and it falls at the sight of the cross, and it rolls into the empty tomb and is gone. Christian did not remove it; he could not. He had tried, in earlier scenes, to be rid of it by other means, and had only sunk deeper into the Slough of Despond. Deliverance came at the one place where a substitute had borne what the pilgrim could never bear.
Bunyan is careful to record what Christian does next, for it is the natural response of a pardoned conscience. "Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death."[2] Bunyan writes that Christian stood still a while to look and wonder, that the tears came to his eyes, and that he then gave three leaps for joy and went on his way singing. This is the affective signature of free grace throughout the tradition: astonishment, relief, tears, and song. The pilgrim is not merely relieved of a penalty; he is undone by a kindness he never earned and could never repay. And Bunyan is theologically exact about the mechanism, placing on the lips of the Shining Ones who meet Christian the assurance that his rags are exchanged for a change of raiment, that his forehead is marked, and that his burden is fallen for good. The guilt does not return in Bunyan's telling because it was not merely suppressed but transferred, borne away by the crucified and risen Lord into the grave that could not hold him.
If The Pilgrim's Progress dramatizes the fall of the burden, two of Bunyan's lesser known but pastorally richer works press the question that the guilty conscience always asks: but will he receive one such as me? The first is Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ (1678), an extended and tender exposition of a single verse, the word of Jesus in John 6:37, "All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out."[4] Bunyan seizes upon the doubled negative of that promise, the "in no wise cast out," and turns it over and over, showing that Christ has bound himself by his own word to refuse no one who comes. The coming sinner, Bunyan argues, may bring nothing but his sin and his need, may come trembling and doubting and half persuaded that he will be turned away, and still the promise holds, for the ground of acceptance is not the quality of the coming but the faithfulness of the One who receives. Bunyan anticipates every objection the burdened soul can raise, the greatness of the sin, the lateness of the hour, the coldness of the heart, the fear that one is not of the elect, and to each he returns the same answer: the text says "him that cometh," and it makes no exceptions, and Christ will not begin making exceptions now.
The second and most daring of these works is The Jerusalem Sinner Saved, published in 1688 and sometimes titled Good News for the Vilest of Men.[5] Bunyan takes as his text the risen Lord's commission that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, "beginning at Jerusalem" (Luke 24:47), and he presses a startling point. Why Jerusalem first? Because Jerusalem was the city that had murdered the Lord of glory, the very place where the greatest sinners in human history had gathered, and yet it was there, among the worst, that the gospel was to be preached first. Bunyan reasons from this that Christ delights to save the vilest, that the greatness of a sinner is no bar to mercy but rather an occasion for the greater display of grace, and that the man who thinks himself too far gone is precisely the man the gospel was designed to reach. "The bigger the sinner, the more room in Christ for such a one," runs the substance of Bunyan's argument, and he presses it against the despairing conscience with relentless tenderness. He knew that the deepest temptation of the guilty is not to doubt God's power to save but to doubt God's willingness to save someone like them, and his whole aim in The Jerusalem Sinner Saved is to demolish that doubt by pointing to a Savior who began at Jerusalem. For Bunyan, then, the good news is not a general amnesty offered to the moderately flawed but a specific and passionate welcome extended to the chief of sinners, of whom he counted himself the first.
Charles Spurgeon and Free Grace for the Chief of Sinners
Two centuries after Bunyan, Charles Haddon Spurgeon stood in the pulpit of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London and preached the same free grace to congregations of five and six thousand, and to a reading public that numbered in the millions through his printed sermons.[6] Spurgeon revered Bunyan above almost every other author and was fond of saying that if you pricked Bunyan anywhere his blood would run bibline, so saturated was he in Scripture, and the same could be said of Spurgeon himself on the doctrine of grace. But Spurgeon also carried in his own memory a conversion so vivid that it shaped everything he later preached about how the guilty come to peace. As a boy of fifteen, driven by a conviction of sin that he described as years of misery under a burdened conscience, he was caught in a snowstorm one Sunday morning and turned into a small Primitive Methodist chapel in Colchester. The regular minister did not appear, and an unlettered layman took the text from Isaiah, "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth" (Isaiah 45:22). The man had little to say and said it plainly, urging his hearers simply to look to Christ, and then, spotting the miserable boy under the gallery, he fixed on him directly and cried, in substance, "Young man, you look very miserable. Look to Jesus Christ. Look! Look! Look! You have nothing to do but to look and live."[7] Spurgeon looked, and by his own testimony the cloud lifted in that instant. He had been trying for years to feel his way to peace, and he found it the moment he stopped looking at himself and looked away to Christ.
That memory became the theological engine of Spurgeon's evangelistic preaching and of his most enduring book on the subject, All of Grace (1886), written expressly for the anxious and the guilty and given away by the tens of thousands.[8] The whole design of All of Grace is to take the burden off the sinner's own performance and place it wholly upon Christ. Spurgeon opens by insisting that salvation is a matter of grace from first to last, that "the LORD is not looking for that in you which is not there, but He is willing to give you that which you have not got," and that the sinner is to bring nothing to Christ but his sin and his need.[8] He is at pains to correct the most common error of the guilty conscience, which is to suppose that one must first improve oneself, feel a sufficient sorrow, or attain a certain standard before daring to approach. Against this Spurgeon urges the sinner to come at once, as he is, without preparation, precisely because there is no preparation that could ever qualify him and none is required. "If you wait till you are better," he warns in effect, "you will wait until you are worse," and the only fitness Christ requires is that a soul should feel its need of him.
Spurgeon's favorite illustration of saving faith was the very word that had converted him, the act of looking. In All of Grace he explains that faith is not a great work the sinner performs but a simple looking away from oneself to Christ, as the bitten Israelites in the wilderness were healed not by treating their own wounds but by looking to the bronze serpent lifted up (Numbers 21, John 3:14).[8] "There is life in a look at the Crucified One," runs the hymn Spurgeon loved, and the whole burden of his counsel to the guilty was to get them to stop staring at their own hearts and to look outside themselves to the wounds of Jesus. This was not a denial of the reality of sin. Few preachers have exposed the depth and desperation of human guilt more searchingly than Spurgeon. But he was persuaded that the guilty conscience could never be cured by more introspection, only by a transfer of gaze, and so he preached the look until it became the signature of his ministry.
At the heart of Spurgeon's proclamation stood the blood of Christ, and few of his sermons press the sufficiency of that blood more powerfully than "The Blood of Sprinkling," preached in 1888 on the text of Hebrews 12:24, which speaks of "the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel."[9] Spurgeon's point in that sermon is that the blood of Christ has a voice, and that its voice is louder and better than the voice of guilt. The blood of Abel cried from the ground for vengeance; the blood of Christ cries from heaven for pardon, and it speaks a better word, a word of mercy, reconciliation, and peace. To the conscience that will not be quiet, that goes on accusing long after confession has been made, Spurgeon answers that there is a voice that pleads more loudly still, and that the plea of the blood outweighs the plea of the sin. He was fond of declaring, on the authority of 1 John 1:7, that "the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin," and he laid particular weight on that little word "all." No sin is exempted from its cleansing power; no offense is placed beyond its reach; the chief of sinners is not too great a case for a Savior whose blood cleanses from all sin. This is why Spurgeon could preach with such freedom to the worst of men, for he genuinely believed that the atonement was sufficient for any sinner who would come.
Spurgeon addressed himself with special tenderness to those crushed under a sense of having sinned too greatly to be received. He knew, as every faithful pastor knows, that this is the last citadel of despair, the conviction not that God cannot forgive but that God will not forgive someone like me. To such he preached the chief of sinners text with evident relish, reminding his hearers that Paul, who called himself the foremost of sinners, was saved as a pattern, "that in me first Jesus Christ might shew forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him to life everlasting" (1 Timothy 1:16). If the persecutor of the church could be pardoned and made the chief apostle, then no case that came to Spurgeon's pulpit was hopeless. He would tell the despairing that their very sense of unworthiness was no disqualification but rather the appointed door through which grace enters, for Christ came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. In all of this Spurgeon was doing nothing more than translating into Victorian English the ancient evangelical conviction that the gospel is good news to the guilty, and he did it with a warmth, a directness, and a homely tenderness that drew the burdened to Christ in numbers few preachers have equaled.
John Newton and the Astonishment of Amazing Grace
If Bunyan and Spurgeon proclaimed free grace from the pulpit, John Newton embodied it in his own biography with a vividness that has made his testimony one of the most beloved in the Christian world. Newton's life is the reason that the word "amazing" attaches so naturally to grace in the evangelical vocabulary, for he had more reason than most to be amazed. Born in 1725, orphaned of a devout mother at the age of six, pressed into the Royal Navy, flogged for desertion, and eventually sunk to the lowest depths of the eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade, Newton became a captain of slave ships and, by his own later horror, a willing agent of one of history's greatest crimes.[10] He was, in his own estimate, a blasphemer and an infidel, a man who mocked religion and corrupted others, and who at one point in West Africa was himself enslaved and brought so low that he ate the discarded food of others to survive. His conversion did not come all at once, but its turning point was a violent storm off the coast of Ireland in March of 1748, when his ship the Greyhound seemed certain to founder and Newton, standing at the pumps through the long night, cried out almost involuntarily for the Lord's mercy and afterward could not shake the sense that a hand had been laid upon him.[10] He marked that day for the rest of his life, and each year kept the anniversary as a solemn remembrance of the mercy that had reached him at the bottom.
Out of this history came the hymn that has carried the doctrine of free grace to more hearts than perhaps any sermon ever preached. "Amazing Grace" first appeared in the Olney Hymns of 1779, written by Newton for his rural parish, and its opening stanza is straightforwardly autobiographical: "Amazing grace! how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see."[11] The force of the hymn lies in the word "wretch," which Newton did not use as a poetic flourish but as a literal confession. He knew what he had been, and he refused to soften it, precisely because the wretchedness of the sinner is the measure of the amazement of the grace. The hymn goes on to trace the whole arc of the Christian life under grace, the conviction that first taught the heart to fear and then relieved those fears, the many dangers, toils, and snares through which grace has already led, and the confidence that "grace will lead me home." It is a theology of pardon set to a tune that ordinary people could sing, and it has done more to lodge the doctrine of free forgiveness in the popular imagination than volumes of divinity.
Newton wrote his own epitaph, and it deserves to stand as one of the great statements of the tradition, because it holds together the horror of the sin and the wonder of the pardon without flinching from either. It reads: "John Newton, Clerk, once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was, by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long laboured to destroy."[12] Every word is weighed. He does not hide behind euphemism; he names himself an infidel and a servant of slaves. And then, against that black background, he sets the four great verbs of grace: preserved, restored, pardoned, appointed. This is the logic of amazing grace, that the pardon is proportioned not to the smallness of the sin but to the richness of the mercy, and that the chief of sinners becomes, by that very mercy, a preacher of the faith he once labored to destroy. Newton never got over it, and he did not want to, for he believed that the health of the Christian life depends on never losing the astonishment of being forgiven.
Newton's letters, gathered in the collection he titled Cardiphonia, or "the utterance of the heart" (1781), are among the tenderest pastoral writings in the English tradition, and they are full of counsel to the guilty and the doubting.[13] Newton had a rare gift for meeting the burdened where they were, without either indulging their despair or dismissing it, and his letters return again and again to the sufficiency of Christ over against the sinner's sense of unworthiness. One saying attributed to him captures the settled realism of a conscience that has learned to rest in grace: "I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I wish to be, I am not what I hope to be in another world; but still I am not what I once used to be, and by the grace of God I am what I am."[14] The honesty of that confession is its comfort. Newton does not pretend to have arrived; he freely admits how far short he falls of what he ought to be. But he anchors his identity not in his progress but in grace, and he ends where Paul ended, "by the grace of God I am what I am" (1 Corinthians 15:10). For the guilty soul tempted to measure its standing by its performance, Newton's letters are a long and gentle argument that our standing was never grounded there in the first place, and that the same grace which saved a wretch at the bottom of the sea is more than enough to keep him to the end.
Martin Luther and the Conscience Set Free by Justification
The evangelical proclamation of free pardon did not begin with Bunyan or Newton; it was recovered, with world-altering force, in the conscience of a single German monk two centuries earlier. Martin Luther is remembered chiefly as a reformer of the church, but the reformation began as the deliverance of a terrified conscience, and it is at that level, as a preacher of grace to the guilty, that he belongs in this study.[15] Luther entered the monastery to save his soul and found there not peace but torment. He was a scrupulous and honest man, and the more earnestly he pursued the medieval program of confession, penance, and merit, the more clearly he saw that he could never do enough to satisfy a holy God. He confessed his sins for hours until his exhausted confessor grew impatient; he punished his body; he strove after a righteousness he could not attain; and all the while the phrase "the righteousness of God" (iustitia Dei) in Romans 1:17 struck him as a threat rather than a promise, for he understood it as the righteousness by which God judges and condemns sinners, and he knew himself to be condemned. He later confessed that he did not love that righteous God, but hated him, and murmured against him, so crushed was his conscience under the demand of a perfection he could not produce.[16]
The turning point, which Luther described near the end of his life in the preface to the 1545 edition of his Latin works, came as he meditated day and night on the connection in that verse between the righteousness of God and the words that follow, "the just shall live by faith."[16] Suddenly he grasped that the righteousness of God spoken of in the gospel is not the active righteousness by which God punishes the sinner but the passive righteousness by which God, out of sheer mercy, credits righteousness to the sinner through faith in Christ. The righteousness required was the righteousness given. Luther describes the moment in unforgettable terms: "Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me."[16] The phrase that had terrified him now became the sweetest phrase in Scripture, because it announced not a demand but a gift. This is the discovery that lies at the heart of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and its significance for the guilty conscience can hardly be overstated. It meant that a sinner is accounted righteous before God not on the basis of anything he has done, is doing, or will do, but wholly on the basis of what Christ has done, received by faith as a free gift.
From this recovery Luther drew a doctrine of Christian freedom that speaks directly to the burdened. In his treatise The Freedom of a Christian (1520) he expounded what he called a joyful exchange, in which Christ takes the sinner's sin, guilt, and death upon himself, and gives the sinner in return his own righteousness, life, and blessedness.[17] The believer, united to Christ by faith, may therefore say that Christ's righteousness is now his, and that his sin is now Christ's, borne away and abolished at the cross. Luther also coined the famous formula that the Christian is simul justus et peccator, at once righteous and a sinner, righteous in Christ and by faith while still a sinner in himself and in experience.[15] This formula is a lifeline to the guilty, for it explains how a person can be genuinely and completely forgiven while still feeling the weight of remaining sin. The forgiveness does not wait upon the disappearance of the sin; it rests upon the finished work of Christ, and it stands complete even while the struggle continues. Luther thus severed the link, which guilt is forever trying to forge, between the believer's acceptance before God and the believer's own performance.
Luther was also, perhaps because of his own long agony, one of the wisest pastors of the accused conscience in the history of the church, and he understood the accusations of guilt as a spiritual assault to be answered with the gospel rather than with more effort. In a letter of consolation written in 1530 to his young colleague Jerome Weller, who suffered from crushing bouts of depression and self-accusation, Luther gave counsel that has comforted the guilty for centuries.[18] When the devil accuses you of your sins and declares you worthy of death and hell, Luther advised, do not try to answer him by pleading your own goodness, for on that ground you will always lose. Instead, turn the accusation into an occasion to preach the gospel to yourself and to the accuser. Admit the sin freely, Luther said in substance, and then say: yes, I am a sinner, and I deserve death and hell, but I know One who took my sin and made satisfaction for it, whose name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and where he is, there I shall be also.[18] The whole strategy is to refuse the contest on the ground of one's own merit and to shift it entirely onto the ground of Christ's. Luther knew that the guilty conscience can never win an argument about its own worthiness, because on that field the accusation is true, and so he taught the burdened to abandon that field altogether and to take refuge behind the finished work of Christ, where the accusation, however true, can no longer condemn.
Luther's mature counsel, worked out through years of preaching and pastoral care, was that the whole art of the Christian life lies in learning to distinguish law from gospel, that is, to hear the accusing word of God's holy demand without confusing it with the pardoning word of God's grace in Christ.[15] The law is good and necessary, for it exposes sin and drives the sinner to Christ, but the law was never meant to give peace, and the soul that seeks its comfort in its own law-keeping will find only despair. The gospel, by contrast, speaks no demand at all but only gift, announcing that the debt is paid and the sinner accepted. Luther taught that in the hour of temptation and terror the believer must learn to silence the accusing voice of the law with the consoling voice of the gospel, saying to the law, in effect, that it has already been satisfied in Christ and has no further claim. For the person crushed by guilt, this distinction is not academic. It is the difference between a conscience forever chained to its own inadequacy and a conscience set free by the announcement that Another has done what we could never do. That freedom, purchased by Christ and received by faith, is Luther's great gift to every burdened soul who has ever wondered whether God's forgiveness must be earned.
The Wesleys and Robert Murray M'Cheyne: Assurance and the Look to Christ, Not Self
If Luther recovered justification and Bunyan and Spurgeon proclaimed free pardon, it fell to others in the tradition to press with particular care the question of assurance, the experiential certainty that this pardon belongs to me. Among the most influential were the brothers John and Charles Wesley, whose ministry in the eighteenth century made the assurance of pardon a central theme of the evangelical revival. John Wesley had labored for years as an earnest and even fanatically disciplined clergyman without ever knowing peace, crossing the Atlantic as a missionary and returning defeated, writing in his journal that he had gone to America to convert the Indians but that no one had converted him.[19] His deliverance came on the evening of May 24, 1738, at a small religious meeting in Aldersgate Street in London, where someone was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. Wesley recorded the moment in words that have become famous: "About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. 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."[19] The three words "even mine" are the crux. Wesley had long believed, in a general way, that Christ died for sinners; what he received at Aldersgate was the personal assurance that Christ had taken away his sins, and that assurance transformed his ministry.
The doctrine John Wesley built upon that experience was the witness of the Spirit, drawn from Paul's words that "the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God" (Romans 8:16).[20] Wesley taught that God does not intend his children to live in perpetual uncertainty about their acceptance, but rather grants, through the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit, a settled confidence that one's sins are forgiven and that one is reconciled to God. He was careful to guard this doctrine against presumption and self-deception, insisting that the Spirit's inward witness is confirmed by the outward fruit of a changed life, so that assurance is never a license for sin. But against the grinding anxiety of the scrupulous conscience, forever wondering whether it has done enough, Wesley proclaimed that assurance is the ordinary privilege of the believer, grounded not in the strength of one's own feelings but in the finished work of Christ applied to the heart by the Spirit. This was pastoral good news of the first order, for it lifted from the shoulders of ordinary Christians the impossible burden of establishing their own standing before God and rested that standing where it belonged, on Christ received by faith.
Charles Wesley, the poet of the revival, turned this experience of pardon into hymns that the whole English-speaking church still sings, and no hymn expresses the release of the guilty conscience more vividly than "And Can It Be" (1738), written in the flush of his own conversion. Its fourth stanza describes the soul's emergence from the prison of guilt with an image that has become proverbial: "Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature's night; thine eye diffused a quickening ray, I woke, the dungeon flamed with light; my chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed thee."[21] The falling chains are Charles Wesley's counterpart to Bunyan's falling burden, the same reality rendered in a different image: the guilty soul, bound and imprisoned, is set at liberty not by its own struggling but by a light that breaks into the dungeon from outside. The hymn's opening question, "And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Saviour's blood?", captures exactly the astonishment of the pardoned, the wonder that grace should reach so far and stoop so low. And its final stanza gathers the whole doctrine of assurance into a single triumphant line, "No condemnation now I dread," echoing Romans 8:1, and grounds that fearlessness not in the singer's worthiness but in being "clothed in righteousness divine," the imputed righteousness of Christ that Luther had rediscovered two centuries before. Charles Wesley's other great hymn of the same period, "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing," presses the same note, celebrating a Savior whose blood "can make the foulest clean" and whose "blood availed for me."[22]
The Scottish minister Robert Murray M'Cheyne, who died in 1843 at the age of only twenty-nine after a brief but extraordinarily fruitful ministry in Dundee, gave the tradition one of its most quoted pieces of counsel on the crucial matter of where the anxious soul should look for peace.[23] M'Cheyne was himself a man of tender conscience and deep devotion, and he understood how easily the earnest believer becomes trapped in a ruinous introspection, forever examining the state of his own heart for evidence of grace and forever finding the evidence ambiguous. The counsel most closely associated with his name, recorded in the tradition that grew up around him through Andrew Bonar's Memoir and Remains of the Rev. Robert Murray M'Cheyne (1844), urges the soul to redirect its gaze away from itself and toward Christ: "For every look at self, take ten looks at Christ."[24] The attribution should be made with care, for the saying comes to us through the memory of his friends rather than from his own printed pen, but it distills exactly the pastoral wisdom his life and ministry embodied. The point is not that self-examination is worthless, for the New Testament does counsel it, but that self-examination can never itself give peace, because the self is precisely the thing that keeps failing the examination. Peace comes only from looking to Christ, and so the proportion matters: for every anxious glance at one's own inadequate heart, ten steady, deliberate looks at the sufficient Savior.
M'Cheyne's own understanding of pardon is captured most beautifully in his hymn "Jehovah Tsidkenu," which takes its title from the Hebrew phrase meaning "The LORD Our Righteousness" (Jeremiah 23:6).[25] The hymn traces his own journey from spiritual deadness to peace, and it locates that peace precisely in the imputed righteousness of Christ rather than in any righteousness of his own. Its opening lines describe the condition of the unawakened conscience: "I once was a stranger to grace and to God, I knew not my danger, and felt not my load." It goes on to describe the awakening, the conviction of sin, and then the discovery of the one truth that gives rest, that the name of Christ, the LORD Our Righteousness, is the only ground on which a guilty sinner can stand before a holy God. M'Cheyne understood, as all the preachers of grace understood, that the burdened conscience cannot manufacture its own righteousness and must instead receive the righteousness of Another. His counsel to look away from self to Christ is not a psychological technique but the practical consequence of the doctrine of justification: if my acceptance rests on Christ's finished work and not on the state of my own heart, then the logical and healing thing to do is to look steadily at Christ and only glancingly at myself. In this M'Cheyne stands with Luther, with the Wesleys, and with the whole tradition, teaching the guilty that their peace was never meant to be found by looking inward, and can only be found by looking to the cross.
The Anatomy of Assurance: Resting on Christ's Finished Work, Not on Feeling
Having traced the proclamation of free grace through six figures, we are now in a position to gather up what they teach in common about the anatomy of a settled conscience, for their agreement on this point is remarkable and their counsel is of the greatest practical value to anyone burdened by guilt. The first and most fundamental principle they hold in common is that assurance rests upon the object of faith rather than upon the act or the feeling of faith. This distinction, though it sounds technical, is the hinge on which the whole matter turns. The anxious soul instinctively grounds its confidence in the quality of its own believing, asking whether its faith is strong enough, sincere enough, warm enough, and by that measure it is forever uncertain, because human faith is always mixed with doubt and human feeling is always in flux. The preachers of grace redirect the question entirely. The ground of assurance, they insist, is not how well I am believing but Whom I am believing, not the firmness of my grip on Christ but the firmness of Christ's grip on me, not the strength of my faith but the strength of its object. Spurgeon captured this when he observed that a trembling hand may receive a golden gift, and that the value lies in the gift and not in the trembling. A weak faith laid hold of a strong Savior is saved, not because the faith is strong, but because the Savior is.
The second principle, which follows directly from the first, is that the finished work of Christ is the immovable foundation on which the conscience rests, and that this work is genuinely finished. Here the tradition leans with all its weight on Hebrews 10 and on the great cry of the crucified Lord, "It is finished" (John 19:30). The argument of Hebrews is that the old sacrifices had to be repeated endlessly precisely because they could never actually take away sin, so that the worshipper was left with a perpetually accusing conscience, but that the single sacrifice of Christ has done what all the others could not, perfecting forever those who are sanctified (Hebrews 10:14).[1] The word "finished" is decisive for the guilty conscience, because guilt is always trying to reopen the account, to suggest that something remains to be paid, that the atonement was somehow insufficient for this particular sin or this particular sinner. Against every such suggestion the preachers of grace hold up the completed work of the cross. There is nothing left to add, nothing left to pay, no supplement the sinner must contribute. Luther's joyful exchange, Bunyan's burden rolling into the empty tomb, Spurgeon's blood that cleanses from all sin, Newton's fourfold verbs of mercy, all are ways of saying the same thing: the work is done, and the conscience may rest on it because God himself rests satisfied with it.
The third principle is that feelings, while real and not to be despised, are an unreliable foundation for assurance and must be subordinated to the objective promises of God. Every figure in this study knew the treachery of feelings, and several of them, Bunyan and Luther most of all, endured long seasons in which their feelings testified against them, insisting that they were cast off and beyond mercy even after they had come to Christ. What delivered them was not a change in their feelings but a return to the promise of God over against their feelings. Luther learned to answer the accusing feelings not by trying to feel differently but by preaching the gospel to himself, pointing away from his own condition to the finished work of Christ. Newton, in his letters, gently but firmly taught the doubting that the ground of their acceptance had never been their frames and feelings, which rise and fall like the weather, but the unchanging word of a faithful God. This does not mean that feelings are irrelevant to the Christian life, for the joy of the pardoned is one of the great themes of the tradition, from Christian's three leaps to Wesley's warmed heart. But the order matters absolutely. Feeling is the fruit of assurance, not its root; it follows faith in the promise and must never be made the condition of it. The soul that waits to feel forgiven before it will believe itself forgiven has reversed the divine order and will wait forever, whereas the soul that believes the promise on the strength of God's word will often find, as Bunyan and Wesley found, that the feeling follows in due time.
The fourth principle is that the direction of the healed gaze is outward and upward rather than inward and downward, which is precisely the M'Cheyne counsel of ten looks at Christ for every look at self. The reason this matters so much is that guilt is essentially a mode of self-attention, a relentless auditing of the self, and it cannot be cured by more of the same. One cannot introspect one's way to peace, because the self under examination is guilty, and honest examination will always confirm the verdict. The only cure is to change the object of attention, to look away from the accusing self to the interceding Savior. This is why Spurgeon preached the look, why Luther preached the distinction of law and gospel, why the whole tradition is oriented away from self-scrutiny and toward the cross. It is worth emphasizing that this outward look is not a denial of sin or a suppression of conscience. The preachers of grace were, if anything, more honest about sin than their contemporaries, refusing every euphemism and naming the offense at its worst. What they refused was the conclusion that guilt draws, that such a sinner must be excluded. The outward look holds together an unflinching honesty about sin with an unshakable confidence in the sufficiency of Christ, and it is in that combination that the conscience finds rest.
The fifth principle, often overlooked, is that assurance grows and is nourished through the ordinary means of grace rather than seized in a single decisive experience and then possessed independently. While several figures in this study, Wesley at Aldersgate and Spurgeon in the Colchester chapel, could point to a datable hour of deliverance, none of them treated assurance as a static possession requiring no maintenance. Newton kept the anniversary of his deliverance every year, returning deliberately to the memory of grace lest he grow cold. M'Cheyne counseled daily looks at Christ, an ongoing discipline rather than a single act. The Wesleys wrote hymns precisely so that the truth of pardon might be sung into the heart again and again, week by week. The tradition understood that the guilty conscience is not permanently silenced by one encounter but must be answered afresh, and that the appointed places to hear the answer are the reading and preaching of the Word, the sacraments, prayer, and the fellowship of other believers. This is a matter of real pastoral importance, for the soul that expects a single experience to settle the question forever is often thrown into fresh confusion when the old accusations return, whereas the soul that has learned to bring its guilt again and again to the same finished work of Christ finds that the assurance deepens over a lifetime. Assurance, in the mature understanding of these preachers, is less a possession to be guarded than a fountain to be returned to, and the returning is itself part of the Christian life.
When Guilt Will Not Lift: The Wisdom of Seeking Help
For all the clarity and comfort of the gospel of free grace, honesty and compassion require us to acknowledge that there are seasons in which guilt does not lift, in which the burden seems to cling despite every look at Christ, and in which the soul cannot feel the pardon it may intellectually believe. The preachers of grace knew these seasons well, and it is a mark of their trustworthiness that they did not pretend otherwise. Bunyan's Grace Abounding records months and years in which the promises seemed sealed against him, in which one Scripture would lift him only for another to cast him down, and in which he could find no settled peace no matter how he strove. Luther endured what he called his Anfechtungen, seasons of spiritual assault and terror so severe that he sometimes despaired of life itself. William Cowper, the poet who collaborated with Newton on the Olney Hymns and wrote "God Moves in a Mysterious Way," suffered from a lifelong melancholy so deep that at times he could not believe himself forgiven at all, and Newton walked beside him through those darknesses with extraordinary patience, never scolding him for his inability to feel the grace that Newton was sure surrounded him.[26] The tradition, in other words, is not naive about the persistence of guilt, and it does not add to the burdened soul's distress by implying that a true believer would simply feel better if he tried harder or believed more.
Several things need to be said gently to the soul in such a season. The first is that the persistence of a feeling of guilt does not overturn the fact of pardon, any more than a cloud overturns the sun. The preachers of grace consistently taught that the believer's acceptance rests on the finished work of Christ and not on the believer's ability to feel it, and this means that a pardoned soul may pass through long stretches of darkness in which the pardon is invisible to it and yet remains entirely real. The word of God stands over the feeling, not the feeling over the word. Newton's counsel to Cowper, in substance, was that the grace of God did not depend on Cowper's capacity to perceive it, and that the Savior held him fast even when he could not feel the grip. This is a truth to be held onto with both hands in the dark: the reality of forgiveness is not measured by the temperature of the conscience.
The second thing to be said is that the failure of guilt to lift is not always a purely spiritual matter, and that the burdened soul is under no obligation to treat it as though it were. The old writers spoke of melancholy, and they understood, in their own idiom, that the body and the mind bear upon the spirit, that a conscience may be oppressed by causes that are not simply matters of unbelief or unconfessed sin, and that such oppression calls for care and not merely for exhortation. Luther, with characteristic bluntness, would sometimes tell a melancholy friend that his trouble was not only the devil but also his overtaxed body and mind, and would prescribe company, music, rest, and ordinary human kindness alongside the gospel. This older pastoral instinct points toward a truth that deserves to be stated plainly and without any hint of shame: when guilt becomes crushing, when it will not lift, when it robs a person of sleep and rest and the capacity to receive comfort, then seeking the help of other people is a wise and faithful part of God's provision, not a failure of faith. To open one's burden to a trusted pastor, to a wise and mature friend, to a Christian confessor or counselor, or to a doctor when the weight bears down upon body and mind, is fully compatible with trusting in Christ, and is indeed one of the ordinary ways in which God carries his children through the valley. This report offers no medical or diagnostic guidance and names no conditions; that is not its place. But it affirms without reservation that reaching for human help is neither weakness nor unbelief. The whole tradition of grace bears witness that God usually carries the crushed not by a lightning bolt of feeling but through the patient companionship of others, a Newton walking beside a Cowper, a Luther writing to a Weller, a friend who will sit with the burdened and remind them of the promise when they cannot remember it themselves.
The third thing to be said is that even in the season when guilt will not lift, the sufferer is not abandoned, and the darkness is not the last word. The very desire to be free of guilt, the very grief over sin, the very longing to feel the pardon one cannot yet feel, is itself a work of grace and a sign that the Spirit has not departed. The soul that has ceased to care about its sin does not lie awake grieving over it; the grief is evidence of life. The preachers of grace would say to the one in the long dark that the Savior who bore the sin is nearer than the feeling suggests, that he is well acquainted with grief, and that he does not despise the bruised reed or quench the smoking flax (Isaiah 42:3, Matthew 12:20). They would counsel patience, the keeping of the ordinary means of grace even when they seem to yield nothing, the company of God's people, and above all the refusal to let the feeling of condemnation have the final say over the promise of God. And they would remind the sufferer, as Bunyan reminded himself in his darkest hours, that many have gone through this valley before and have come out into a large place, and that the God who brought them through is the same God who is present now. The persistence of guilt is a heavy trial, but it is a trial through which Christ leads, and it is not a sign that grace has failed. It is often, in the mysterious economy of God, the very furnace in which a deeper and more unshakable assurance is finally forged, an assurance no longer dependent on good feelings because it has learned to rest in the dark on the naked promise of a faithful God.
Conclusion: The Full and Free Pardon of Christ
We have followed the proclamation of free grace through six of its greatest heralds, from Luther's terrified conscience finding paradise through the open gate of justification, through Bunyan's pilgrim watching his burden roll into the empty tomb, through Newton's astonishment that grace should save a wretch like him, through the Wesleys' warmed hearts and falling chains, through M'Cheyne's counsel to take ten looks at Christ for every look at self, to Spurgeon's tireless offer of a blood that cleanses from all sin. Across three centuries and several nations these men differed in a hundred ways, but on one thing they were of one mind, and it is the thing most worth carrying away: that the gospel of Jesus Christ is good news, and that it is good news precisely to the guilty. This is not a marginal or sentimental claim. It is the center of the Christian message, that God, in Christ, has done for sinners what sinners could never do for themselves, has borne in his own body the sin and guilt of all who come to him, and now offers to the burdened a pardon that is full, that is free, and that is immediate, requiring no prior improvement and no accumulated worthiness, but only the empty hands of a soul that comes as it is.
To the reader who carries a guilt that will not lift, who has perhaps read this far because the accusations of conscience have grown too heavy to bear alone, the whole tradition gathered here speaks with one voice and speaks tenderly. It says, first, that your sense of your own unworthiness, however true, is not a disqualification but the very door through which grace enters, for Christ came not to call the righteous but sinners, and it was to the chief of sinners that Paul confessed he belonged, and Bunyan after him, and Newton after him, and they were not turned away. It says, second, that no sin is too great for the blood of Christ, that the word "all" in the promise that his blood cleanses from all sin admits of no exceptions, and that the offense you are most afraid to name is not beyond its reach. It says, third, that your peace was never meant to rest on the state of your own heart, which will always fail the examination, but on the finished work of Christ, which cannot fail, so that the healing thing to do with your guilt is not to bury yourself deeper in it but to look away from it to the cross where it was borne. And it says, finally, that if the burden still clings, if you cannot yet feel the pardon you long for, you are not abandoned and you are not beyond help, and it is a wise and faithful thing to let others help you carry it, a pastor, a friend, a counselor, a doctor, for God delights to carry his children through the dark by the hands of one another.
The Scriptures the preachers loved remain the surest words of all, and they are given not as demands but as promises to be leaned upon. "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow" (Isaiah 1:18). "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9). "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us" (Psalm 103:12). He will "cast all their sins into the depths of the sea" (Micah 7:19). "By one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified" (Hebrews 10:14). "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:1). These are not the words of a reluctant God who must be persuaded to forgive, but of a Father who ran to meet the returning prodigal while he was yet a great way off, and fell on his neck, and kissed him, and called for the best robe, before the son had finished his rehearsed confession. That is the God the preachers of grace proclaimed, and that is the pardon they staked their lives upon: full, because it leaves nothing unforgiven; free, because it costs the sinner nothing and cost the Savior everything; and finished, because on the cross the Lord of glory cried, "It is finished," and rose again to prove it so. The burden may fall, dear reader. It fell for Christian at the cross, and the tomb into which it rolled is empty still. There is rest for the guilty in the wounds of Jesus, and the invitation to come and find it stands open, without condition and without price, to you.
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References
[1] The Holy Bible, King James Version. Passages cited throughout include Isaiah 1:18; Isaiah 42:3; Psalm 51:3; Psalm 103:12; Micah 7:19; Jeremiah 23:6; Matthew 12:20; Luke 24:47; John 6:37; John 3:14; John 19:30; Romans 1:17; Romans 8:1; Romans 8:16; 1 Corinthians 15:10; 1 Timothy 1:15-16; Hebrews 10:11, 10:14, 10:19-22; Hebrews 12:24; 1 John 1:7, 1:9.
[2] John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come (London, 1678). The scene of the burden loosing at the Cross and the Sepulchre.
[3] John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (London, 1666), Bunyan's spiritual autobiography recording his prolonged conviction of sin and his coming to peace.
[4] John Bunyan, Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ (London, 1678), an exposition of John 6:37.
[5] John Bunyan, The Jerusalem Sinner Saved; or, Good News for the Vilest of Men (London, 1688), an exposition of Luke 24:47.
[6] Iain H. Murray, The Forgotten Spurgeon (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1966); and Arnold Dallimore, Spurgeon: A New Biography (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1985).
[7] Charles H. Spurgeon, C. H. Spurgeon's Autobiography, compiled by Susannah Spurgeon and Joseph Harrald (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1897-1900), vol. 1, recounting his conversion under the preaching on Isaiah 45:22 in the Primitive Methodist chapel at Colchester.
[8] Charles H. Spurgeon, All of Grace: An Earnest Word with Those Who Are Seeking Salvation by the Lord Jesus Christ (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1886).
[9] Charles H. Spurgeon, "The Blood of Sprinkling," sermon on Hebrews 12:24, in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, vol. 34 (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1888).
[10] Jonathan Aitken, John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace (Wheaton: Crossway, 2007); and John Newton, An Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting Particulars in the Life of John Newton (London, 1764).
[11] John Newton, "Amazing Grace," in Olney Hymns, in Three Books, by John Newton and William Cowper (London, 1779).
[12] The self-composed epitaph of John Newton, inscribed at the church of St Mary Woolnoth, London, and at Olney; text preserved in Newton's papers and standard biographies.
[13] John Newton, Cardiphonia: or, The Utterance of the Heart; in the Course of a Real Correspondence (London, 1781).
[14] Saying widely attributed to John Newton and preserved in the collections of his sayings and letters; cited in numerous biographies including Aitken, John Newton.
[15] Martin Luther; see the treatments in Roland Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1950); and Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
[16] Martin Luther, Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther's Latin Writings (1545), in Luther's Works, American Edition, vol. 34, ed. Lewis W. Spitz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1960), recording his discovery of the passive righteousness of God in Romans 1:17.
[17] Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian (1520), in Luther's Works, American Edition, vol. 31, ed. Harold J. Grimm (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1957).
[18] Martin Luther, Letter of Consolation to Jerome Weller (1530), in Luther: Letters of Spiritual Counsel, ed. and trans. Theodore G. Tappert, Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955).
[19] John Wesley, The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., entry for May 24, 1738, describing the Aldersgate experience; standard edition ed. Nehemiah Curnock (London: Epworth Press, 1909-1916).
[20] John Wesley, "The Witness of the Spirit," Sermons I and II, on Romans 8:16, in The Works of John Wesley, Bicentennial Edition, vol. 1, ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984).
[21] Charles Wesley, "And Can It Be That I Should Gain," in Hymns and Sacred Poems (London, 1739).
[22] Charles Wesley, "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing," in Hymns and Sacred Poems (London, 1740).
[23] Andrew A. Bonar, Memoir and Remains of the Rev. Robert Murray M'Cheyne (Dundee, 1844).
[24] Counsel popularly associated with Robert Murray M'Cheyne and preserved within the tradition surrounding Bonar's Memoir and Remains; the exact wording is transmitted through the recollection of his friends rather than his own printed works, and is here attributed with that caution.
[25] Robert Murray M'Cheyne, "Jehovah Tsidkenu: The Watchword of the Reformers" (1834), hymn included in Bonar, Memoir and Remains of the Rev. Robert Murray M'Cheyne.
[26] On William Cowper's melancholy and Newton's pastoral care of him, see Aitken, John Newton; and William Cowper, "Light Shining out of Darkness" ("God Moves in a Mysterious Way"), in Olney Hymns (London, 1779).