Good works before salvation are not good

Wesley understood entire sanctification, or perfection in love, then, as a continuum of grace and response that leads persons from the guilt and despair of their sin to the knowledge of God and, by faith in His grace in Jesus Christ, to the crisis moment of the justification and the new birth.

The life of sanctification springs from the regenerated life created by the new birth and continues as the Holy Spirit through His gracious ministry calls them to moment-by-moment obedience to the will of God, which is the expression of His holiness and love. In this part of the Christian’s progress in obeying the will of God and conforming to the mind of Christ, the remains of the rebellion and fallenness create conflict and often depression. 

The nature is still corrupted by a systemic illness that makes a free and ready response to the love of God a source of contention in the inner volitional being. The volitional powers have to be cleansed from the effects of the Fall, which remain even after justification, before persons can be wholly free to enjoy and express the pure love of God in all their relationships. His emphasis upon the importance of what God does “in us” through Christ, as well as upon what God does “for us” through Christ, constitutes Wesley’s greatest contribution to the Christian church.

Wesley believed that the Bible clearly and persistently taught that God had wedded holy living and salvation by faith alone into one inseparable whole. “If we believe the Bible, Who can deny it? Who can doubt of it?” he asked. “It runs through the Bible from the beginning to the end in one connected chain.” The proclamation of God’s “great salvation,” he contended, had been part of the tradition and experience of the primitive church and had been experienced by earnest Christians in the subsequent history of the church whenever there was a genuine revival of biblical preaching and obedient discipleship. 

It had been largely neglected by the Protestant Reformers because of their abhorrence of the doctrines clustering around merit by works, which they saw as causing the failure of Evangelical doctrine in the medieval Catholic church. God had now entrusted to the Methodists the special responsibility to proclaim it again as the birthright of all Christians. In doing so they brought the Reformation principle of salvation by faith alone to its legitimate and logical conclusion.

Wesley became convinced, even before his contacts with the Moravians, that this relationship of living before God in the perfection of love was the supreme end of Christianity. Not unlike Luther, his first efforts to know the truth for himself ended in frustration and despair. The disciplines and works of charity of his “Holy Club” were not enough. 

Only after his own experience of personal faith in Christ, in what is now known as his “Aldersgate experience,” did he see that one’s relationship with God was established by the merit of Christ rather than the merit of personal good works. 

Out of this new understanding of faith and grace, he saw that a clear call for Christian perfection by faith was the logical consequence of the Reformer’s bold call for justification by faith. His formulation of sanctification as “faith working by love” began to define a concept of sanctification that Wesley felt was more biblical and closer to the tradition of the early Christian church than that which the Catholicism or Protestantism of his day were proclaiming. His view of faith as the means to love became his hermeneutic of grace and salvation; it places him, in the minds of some scholars, into the arena of Catholic devotion. But his refusal to forsake the Reformed principle of justification by faith, in the opinion of others, places him squarely in the camps of Calvin and Luther.34

For Wesley, God’s sovereign grace through saving faith becomes an active principle of holiness within the hearts of believing men and women. Out of his reflection of this mix of faith, life, reason, and the experience of the church, all judged and authenticated by the Word of God, Wesley’s understanding of sanctification was fleshed out and placed at the center of his theological system. Thereafter, he stood by his conviction on the doctrine, in spite of the resistance he encountered from the lackluster deism so prevalent in his own Church of England and the rampant antinomianism in many of the nonestablished country churches. He and his followers set before their hearers the promise of a heart perfected in love, a personal restoration to the moral image of God, and the responsibility and power to express that love in relationship with God and neighbor. Through Christ and the indwelling Holy Spirit, the “bent to sinning” could be cleansed from the repentant, believing heart, and a “bent to loving obedience” could become the mainspring of one’s life.


Dieter, M. F. (1987). The Wesleyan Perspective. In S. N. Gundry (Ed.), Five Views on Sanctification (pp. 19–21). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.