<p>Many people have done everything right in religion, gone to church, followed the rules, and still felt an empty heart, without the certainty that God truly accepted them. John Wesley lived that same restlessness for years as a clergyman, before finding the answer he was searching for.</p>
<p>Born on June 28, 1703, in Epworth, England, he was one of nineteen children of the Anglican pastor Samuel Wesley and Susanna Wesley. At age five, he escaped a fire in the family home, and his mother began calling him “a brand plucked from the fire,” certain that God had spared him for a greater purpose.</p>
<p>At Oxford, he and his brother Charles formed a group for study and spiritual discipline that was nicknamed, with irony, “Methodists.” Ordained a priest of the Church of England in 1728, he lived out religious practices with rigor, but admitted he lacked the inner peace of salvation that he preached to others.</p>
<p>In 1735, he set out as a missionary to the English colony of Georgia, in America. The mission ended in failure: a broken engagement and a poorly handled pastoral conflict forced him to leave the colony under suspicion, in 1737, still without the spiritual certainty he sought.</p>
<p>Back in London, he heard a reading of Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans at a meeting on Aldersgate Street, on May 24, 1738. There, he later wrote in his journal, “I felt my heart strangely warmed,” and received the assurance that Christ had taken away his sins.</p>
<p>From 1739 onward, he preached in the open air to miners and laborers whom the churches usually ignored, a practice seen as scandalous for a clergyman. He organized converts into societies with small groups of mutual support, and his friendship with George Whitefield broke down over disagreements on grace and predestination.</p>
<p>He traveled about 400,000 kilometers on horseback and preached more than forty thousand sermons over fifty years of itinerant ministry. His marriage to Mary Vazeille, in 1751, was marked by jealousy and constant conflict over his travels, ending in permanent separation.</p>
<p>Wesley died in London on March 2, 1791, repeating: “best of all, God is with us.” His life shows that the certainty of faith is not born of religious effort, but of grace received, grace that is not content within walls: it must go where people are.</p>
