The Ground, Nature, and Meaning of God’s Pardoning Act
The Fallen Condition That Makes Justification Necessary
The sermon opens not with the doctrine itself but with the condition that makes the doctrine necessary, and Wesley grounds his whole argument in the account of the Fall in Genesis and its consequences as read through Paul’s letter to the Romans. He insists that before any person can rightly understand what it means to be justified, that person must first understand what it means to be, by nature, utterly without righteousness. Adam, created in the image of God and set in a state of perfect holiness and happiness, forfeited that state by disobedience, and in him, Wesley argues, all his posterity fell as well — not merely into a weakened or diminished condition but into total spiritual ruin. He describes the natural state of every human being since the Fall as one void of true righteousness and holiness, void of the knowledge and love of God, and consequently dead in trespasses and sins, subject to the wrath and curse of God, and given up to a reprobate mind, to vile affections, and to numberless follies and vices.
Wesley is careful to insist that this is not a poetic exaggeration but the literal and universal condition of humanity, Jew and Gentile alike, prior to any work of grace. He walks through the biblical description of this state — man’s understanding darkened, his will perverse and disordered, his affections alienated from God and turned toward the creature, his whole soul in a settled aversion from all that is truly good. This condition, he says, is the reason the whole world stands guilty before God and why the language of Scripture is not that some men occasionally sin but that all have sinned and are, in the phrase he draws directly from his text in Romans, “ungodly.” It is only against the backdrop of this total ruin that the meaning of justification can be rightly seen, because justification is God’s answer to exactly this condition — not to a partial fault needing correction but to an entire deadness needing rescue.
This opening move matters within the sermon’s own logic because it forecloses, from the very first page, any account of justification that supposes God finds in the sinner some seed of merit to reward. If the condition described is what Wesley says it is — utter destitution of righteousness — then whatever God does in justifying such a person cannot be a recognition of anything praiseworthy already present. The doctrine that follows is thus built, deliberately, on the ruins of human merit.
What Justification Is Not
Having established the condition of the sinner, Wesley turns to define his key term with great precision, and he chooses to do this first by clearing away several false or misleading notions of what justification might mean before stating positively what it does mean. He insists that justification is not the same thing as being made actually and inherently righteous — that is, it is not the same as sanctification. To be justified, in Wesley’s careful use of the word, is not to be made holy in one’s inward nature or outward life; that renewal is a distinct work of God, following upon justification but not identical with it. He is emphatic that confusing these two — supposing that to be justified means to have already become righteous in oneself — corrupts the entire doctrine and drives people either to despair, because they cannot find in themselves the holiness they suppose is required, or to false security, because they mistake some partial change in themselves for the pardon that only God can grant.
He further rules out several other possible senses of the term. Justification, he says, does not mean that God is deceived concerning those whom he justifies, as though God accounted them righteous by mistakenly overlooking their true condition. Nor does it mean that God judges concerning us contrary to the real nature of things, as if he supposed that we had never sinned when in fact we had. Wesley is anxious to protect the honor and truthfulness of God in this doctrine: whatever justification is, it cannot involve God calling white what is black or pronouncing clean what remains, in itself, unclean. Justification likewise is not to be confused with a mere clearing of the sinner from the accusations of Satan, nor is it simply the quieting of the sinner’s own conscience — a person’s inward sense of peace, Wesley notes, can be mistaken or presumed, and the reality of justification does not rest upon whether the sinner feels forgiven but upon what God has actually done.
By this process of elimination Wesley narrows the field considerably, and the effect within the sermon is to strip away, one by one, every account of justification that would locate its ground either in a change wrought within the sinner or in the sinner’s own perception of things. The doctrine, as he is building it, must be sought entirely in what happens between God and the sinner, not in what happens within the sinner.
What Justification Is
Having cleared this ground, Wesley now states his positive definition directly: to justify, in the proper and scriptural sense that concerns his text, is to pardon, to forgive. He is explicit that justification is the great work which God does for us, in contradistinction to sanctification, which is the work he does in us; the one restores us to the favor of God, the other renews us in the image of God. Justification, therefore, is that act of God’s free grace in which he forgives all the sins of the one who believes, and accounts or accepts that person as righteous — not because that person is, in themselves, righteous, but because of what Christ has done and suffered on their behalf. Wesley describes this pardon as being granted on account of the satisfaction made by Christ, so that God, whose justice had required a reckoning for sin, is now able to receive the sinner into favor without any diminishing of his own justice or truth, the whole ground of acceptance resting not on anything found in the sinner but on the merit and atonement of Christ.
He is careful to state this as a relative change, not a real one — meaning a change in the sinner’s relationship and standing before God, not yet a change in the sinner’s inward moral nature. The guilt is removed, the sentence of condemnation is lifted, the person passes from a state of wrath into a state of favor and acceptance, and yet, at the very moment this takes place, no alteration has necessarily occurred in the substance of that person’s character; that renewal belongs to the distinct and following work of sanctification, which Wesley has already excluded from the definition of justification itself. What God does in justifying, then, is to reckon or impute righteousness to the believer for Christ’s sake, so that the believer stands before God as though clothed in a righteousness not their own — Christ’s righteousness accepted in the place of the sinner’s want of righteousness.
This positive definition carries forward everything Wesley established negatively: because the sinner was shown to possess no righteousness of their own whatsoever, and because justification has now been shown to consist in pardon granted on the ground of Christ’s satisfaction alone, the entire structure of the doctrine points toward a single conclusion still to be drawn out — that if pardon rests wholly on Christ’s merit and not on anything found in the sinner, then the terms on which this pardon is received must likewise exclude every human work or qualification, a matter Wesley takes up directly in the sections that follow.
The Terms on Which Justification Is Received
Having shown that pardon rests entirely on the satisfaction made by Christ and not upon anything found in the sinner, the work now turns to the question of the instrument by which this pardon is laid hold of — on what terms, precisely, a guilty person comes to receive what Christ has purchased. Wesley states the matter plainly: the one and only condition required is faith, and faith alone. Not faith added to some measure of works, not faith as the beginning of a process that must be completed by obedience, but faith as the sole channel through which the already-accomplished merit of Christ is received by the sinner. Every other supposed condition — repentance, sincere endeavor, partial obedience, works of mercy — however proper and even necessary in their own place, is excluded from any share in the actual ground or instrument of justification itself. Wesley presses this exclusion in both directions: works done before faith cannot merit justification, since the person is still unregenerate and estranged from God; and works done after faith cannot be added as a further condition, since to do so would be to make Christ’s satisfaction insufficient by itself and to return the sinner, in some degree, to a reliance on personal righteousness.
This is why Wesley repeatedly identifies the persons who are justified not as the relatively decent or the partially reformed but as the ungodly — those who, at the moment they are justified, have nothing of their own to plead. He draws directly on the language of Scripture concerning the one who “worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly,” insisting that this description is not a paradox to be softened but the very heart of the doctrine: God’s justifying act meets the sinner precisely as sinner, stripped of every plea except unworthiness, and it is faith — not merit accumulated up to that point — that is reckoned for righteousness. Wesley is careful to note that this does not mean the person justified remains without any change; it means only that the change is not the ground of the verdict. The verdict precedes and produces the change in life, rather than resulting from it.
Within the work this settles the logical order that has been building since the discussion of the fallen condition: because the sinner brings nothing, the terms of reception can only be an empty hand held out to receive a gift, not a hand offering something in exchange. Faith, in Wesley’s presentation, is precisely this empty-handed reception — it contributes nothing of merit to the transaction but simply lays hold of what Christ has already accomplished.
Excluding Works of Every Kind
Wesley anticipates that this exclusion of works will provoke immediate resistance, and he addresses it directly rather than leaving it as an implication. He takes up the objection that surely some works — if not the whole law, at least the moral law, at least love, at least sincere obedience — must contribute something toward acceptance with God. Against this he argues that if any work whatsoever, however small, were admitted as a partial ground of justification, the entire doctrine of grace would collapse into a doctrine of merit, since grace and merit cannot be mixed without grace ceasing to be grace. If justification is by grace at all, he insists, then it is by grace alone; the moment human contribution is introduced as a co-ground, the transaction is no longer one of free gift but of wages owed, however small the wage.
He distinguishes carefully between the fruits of justification and its ground. Good works, holiness, and obedience are not denied a place in the Christian life — Wesley is emphatic elsewhere in his preaching that true faith cannot exist without them — but their place is downstream of justification, not upstream of it. They are the necessary evidence and consequence of a faith that has already justified, not the price paid to secure justification in the first place. This ordering is crucial to the whole argument: reverse it, and the sinner is thrown back upon exactly the self-derived righteousness that the earlier sections showed to be nonexistent and insufficient.
The upshot is that the exclusion of works is not a minimizing of holiness but a protection of grace. By insisting that nothing but faith is the condition of justification, Wesley secures the point that the pardoned sinner owes the whole of their acceptance to Christ, leaving no room for boasting and no room for despair, since the ground of confidence lies wholly outside the fluctuating state of the believer’s own performance.
The Nature and Object of Justifying Faith
Having excluded works as any part of the ground, Wesley turns to define faith itself, since not every kind of belief qualifies as the faith that justifies. He rules out, first, mere intellectual assent — the kind of faith by which even devils are said to believe and tremble, acknowledging the truth of God’s existence and power without any trust or surrender of the heart. He rules out, second, the faith of a heathen who may believe in a providence or a future judgment without any knowledge of Christ. He rules out, further, even the faith possessed by the disciples during Christ’s earthly ministry before the full revelation accomplished in his death and resurrection, since that faith, however sincere, lacked the object that specifically constitutes Christian faith.
Justifying faith, as Wesley defines it, is a sure trust and confidence which a person places in Christ, that through his merits their sins are forgiven and they are reconciled to the favor of God. It is not bare notional agreement that Christ died for sinners in general, but a personal reliance upon Christ as having died for oneself — an appropriating trust rather than a detached historical acknowledgment. Its object is specifically the person and finished work of Christ: his life, death, and resurrection considered as the sole and sufficient satisfaction for sin. Faith, on this definition, is essentially relational and fiduciary rather than merely cognitive; it is the heart’s reliance upon a Person and his accomplished work, not simply the mind’s assent to a set of propositions about him.
This definition matters within the argument because it protects the doctrine from a serious misunderstanding: if faith itself becomes reduced to a work of the intellect that a person performs and thereby earns merit for performing, the entire structure built up against self-righteousness would be quietly reintroduced through the back door. By defining faith as trust rather than achievement, Wesley keeps the whole transaction one of reception rather than merit even at the point of faith’s own exercise.
Distinguishing True Faith from Its Counterfeits
Because so much rests on faith being rightly identified, Wesley devotes attention to distinguishing living faith from its various imitations, warning that many suppose themselves to have faith who possess only its shadow. A merely historical faith, which assents to the facts of the gospel narrative as one might assent to any other reported history, is shown to fall short, since such assent produces no change of heart and leaves the person exactly as it found them. A faith that consists only in freedom from doubt about doctrines, without any accompanying trust in Christ for one’s own salvation, is likewise shown to be insufficient.
True, justifying faith is marked, in Wesley’s account, by its inseparable connection to inward and outward fruit. Where this faith is present, it is followed by a sense of pardon, by peace with God, by love flowing back toward God and neighbor, and by a decisive turning from sin — not because these fruits are the ground of justification but because they are its immediate and necessary consequence. Faith of this kind cannot remain barren; where the fruits are entirely absent over time, Wesley suggests, this is evidence that the faith itself was never of the justifying kind to begin with, however confidently it may have been professed.
This distinction guards the doctrine on its other exposed flank. Having spent the bulk of the work excluding works from any share in justification’s ground, Wesley here forecloses the opposite error — that faith might be reduced to a merely verbal or notional profession detached from any real transformation. The faith that justifies is, in his presentation, always a living faith, and a living faith is always a working faith, even though it is not by that working that it justifies.
