John Wesley and sanctification
Wesley declared that the supreme and overruling purpose of God’s plan of salvation is to renew men’s and women’s hearts in His own image. It is a teleological theme,14 for he believed that all the grand currents of biblical salvation history moved toward this one end and had, in a restricted but definite manner, a fulfillment and perfection in this life.
Wesley held that God had promised salvation from all willful sin, and he saw this promise in passages such as the following: Deuteronomy 30:6; Psalm 130:8; Ezekiel 36:25, 29; Matthew 5:48; 6:13; 22:37; John 3:8; 17:20–21, 23; Romans 8:3–4; 2 Corinthians 7:1; Ephesians 3:14–19; 5:25, 27; and 1 Thessalonians 5:23.
He believed that such passages as Luke 1:69–75, Titus 2:11–14, and 1 John 4:17 indicated that this sanctification took place before death. By grace, God would restore to us the holiness that had been lost in the Fall by our first parents.
The gracious element resides in God’s good will to all, in that He is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to a saving knowledge of Himself. Only the merits of Christ’s life and death bring us salvation, and His grace alone gives us the freedom to respond to His offer of forgiveness, cleansing, and a new relationship with Him in love.
The gracious element resides in God’s good will to all, in that He is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to a saving knowledge of Himself. Only the merits of Christ’s life and death bring us salvation, and His grace alone gives us the freedom to respond to His offer of forgiveness, cleansing, and a new relationship with Him in love.
The grace of response is available to all persons; whosoever will may, come. A subjective view of sanctification is firmly conjoined with the more prevalent objective view. Two apparently contradictory views come together; “freedom and dependence are joined.”
God first expressed this good will to humankind through His prevenient grace when He called Adam and Eve back to Himself after they had been corrupted in every part of their nature through their disobedience in Eden. And He has continued through all the ages since to call all their descendants—each one blighted by original sin and burdened by personal rebellion—back to Himself. His persistent purpose is to restore the divine moral image of love and purity of relationship with Him that had been lost because of their kinship with fallen Adam.
God first expressed this good will to humankind through His prevenient grace when He called Adam and Eve back to Himself after they had been corrupted in every part of their nature through their disobedience in Eden. And He has continued through all the ages since to call all their descendants—each one blighted by original sin and burdened by personal rebellion—back to Himself. His persistent purpose is to restore the divine moral image of love and purity of relationship with Him that had been lost because of their kinship with fallen Adam.
“Real religion,” he preached in 1758 from the text 1 John 3:8, is the restoration of human beings “by Him that bruises the serpent’s head” to “all that the old serpent” deprived them of—not only to the favor of God, but to “likeness to the image of God”; not simply deliverance from sin but being filled with all the “fulness of God.” Nothing short of this is true religion, he declared.
Dieter, M. F. (1987). The Wesleyan Perspective. In S. N. Gundry (Ed.), Five Views on Sanctification (p. 16). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
Dieter, M. F. (1987). The Wesleyan Perspective. In S. N. Gundry (Ed.), Five Views on Sanctification (p. 16). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
