John Wesley believed - experience confirms scripture doctrine

Wesley used his observations of contemporary experience and his reflections on the lives of past Christians to shape his understanding of God’s will, he nevertheless held God’s Word as ultimate and authoritative. He refused to consider seriously any teaching unless it could stand its ground under the pure light of revelation. No Christian leader has ever been more faithful in bringing all observation, experience, and rational conclusions to the Scriptures for final judgment. “If by catholic principles,” he said on one occasion, “you mean anything other than scriptural, they weigh nothing with me. I allow no other rule, whether of faith or practice than the Holy Scriptures.” At the same time, he insisted that God’s truth was given to us to be translated into life and could be if it were received and believed. 

Therefore, to understand salvation fully, one must take into account the knowledge of God given to those who were honestly seeking His will and experiencing His grace; any valid test of true Christianity had to consider this evidence. Experience, he believed, could confirm a doctrine of Scripture, but it could not establish a doctrine of Scripture. Only the Bible itself could do that.

Wesley’s lifelong passion for Christian holiness was fired by his conviction that the Word of God teaches, by precept and by promise, that Christians should not be “content with any religion which does not imply the destruction of all the works of the devil, that is of all sin.” He never allowed that entirely sanctified Christians could become sinless in the sense that they could not fall again into sin through disobedience. 

He did teach that so long as men and women were the creatures of free will, they were able to respond obediently or disobediently to the grace of God. They would never be free from the possibility of deliberate, willful sinning in this life. They could, however, be delivered from the necessity of voluntary transgressions by living in moment-by-moment obedience to God’s will. 

Whatever difficulty might arise in defining the theology, content, or means of attaining such a loving relationship with God, it could mean no less than freedom from the dominion of sin in this life. It did not, however, mean freedom from all the effects of sin in the deranged worldly order in which we experience even the most perfect of our present relationships under grace. Total freedom from the effects, as well as the presence of all sin, had to await the glory to come.

Wesley believed that the promised present victory over sin was possible only through the Christ life implanted in believers by the Holy Spirit. Even those who enjoyed the closest walk with God, however, still had many imperfections in them as part and parcel of the fallen created order and had to depend daily on the atoning merits of Christ’s blood and sincerely pray, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” “For,” he noted, “neither love nor ‘the unction of the Holy One’ makes us infallible: therefore … we cannot but mistake in many things.”

In his well-known tract on Christian perfection, he maintained that “there is no perfection of degrees, as it is termed; none which does not admit of a continual increase. So that how much soever any man has attained, or in how high a degree soever he is perfect, he hath still need to ‘grow in grace’, and daily advance in the knowledge and love of God his Saviour.”

In Wesleyan thought a person’s full commitment to the relationship with God and neighbor in love is not a fixed superior state; it is, rather, a new stage, a new arena of ethical response to the divine will already inherent in the regeneration of new birth in Christ.

Dieter, M. F. (1987). The Wesleyan Perspective. In S. N. Gundry (Ed.), Five Views on Sanctification (pp. 13–14). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.