Notes:
Sermon 43: The Scripture Way of Salvation
In 1750 Wesley had concluded the third volume of his Sermons on Several Occasions: In Three Volumes with the sermon on ‘Satan’s Devices’. Ten years later, he decided to publish yet another, fourth, volume and to open it with his sermon on Original Sin. During that decade, however, he had become embroiled in an unpleasant controversy with a Scottish dissenter, Robert Sandeman, and his disciples, on the relative merits of ‘a faith of adherence’ (Sandeman’s notion of faith as an act of will) and ‘a faith of assurance’ (Wesley’s ‘heart religion’). In 1757 Sandeman had expounded his views in two volumes, Letters on Theron and Aspasio, Addressed to the Author (James Hervey), under the pen name ‘Palaemon’. His advocacy of salvation by assent had seemed dangerous to Wesley; already it had encouraged Thomas Maxfield and George Bell in their rush into antinomianism. Wesley’s reaction was, therefore, as vehement as anything he ever published: A Sufficient Answer to the Letters to the Author of Theron and Aspasio (1757; reprinted in Works, 1773, Vol. XX). He followed this up in 1762 with three pamphlets in the same vein: Thoughts on the Imputed Righteousness of Christ; A Blow at the Root: or Christ Stabbed in the House of His Friends; and Cautions and Directions given to the Greatest Professors in the Methodist Societies. In 1763 he continued with Farther Thoughts Upon Christian Perfection.
The controversy, of course, had a history. Nathaniel Culverwell had explored it a century before in ‘The White Stone’, a chapter in A Discourse on the Light of Nature (1st edn., 1652; 3rd. edn., 1661):
“Assurance is the top and triumph of faith. Faith—that’s our victory ‘by which we overcome the world’. But assurance—that’s our triumph by which ‘we are more than conquerors’. ’Tis flos fidei, the very lustre and eminency of faith. Faith—that’s the root; assurance the top-branch, the flourishing of faith. Justifying faith—that does not only dwell in the understanding, in nudo assensus; but requires an act of the will, to which must embrace a promise. Indeed, it calls for an act resulting from the whole soul, which must receive Christ offered unto it. But now, assurance consists only in the mind, and so there you have the difference between the Faith of Adherence and the Faith of Assurance…. When I say that every believer may be assured of his salvation, I don’t 02:154say that every believer is assured of it…. A man may be a true child of God and certainly saved, though he have not assurance he may be in a safe though in a sad condition. ’Tis required to the bene esse, not to the esse of a believer (p. 103).”Wesley could never have agreed, after 1738, that assurance ‘consists only in the mind’; when he published his extract from Culverwell in the Christian Library (1752), Vol. XVII, he omitted the passage just quoted.
He would also have known of William Allen’s threefold distinction in The Glass of Justification (1658): ‘Faith, as it justifies, hath three acts: credence, adherence, confidence’ (p. 43); this is very close to his own idea. And he also knew the famous summary of the question in Arthur Bedford’s The Doctrine of Assurance (1738), Appendix, p. 36:
“To put this controversy into as clear a light as I can, I shall only add that there is a ‘faith of adherence’ and a ‘faith of assurance’. The ‘faith of adherence’ is a saving faith, wrought in the heart of a sinner by the Spirit and Word of God, whereby he is convinced of his sin and misery and of his disability in himself and all other creatures, to recover him out of his lost condition—[he] not only assenteth to the truth of the promise of the Gospel, but receives and rests on the death and righteousness of Christ Jesus, therein held for pardon of sin and for the accepting and accounting of his person as righteous in the sight of God. And thus he hopes, though he hath no certainty. The ‘faith of assurance’ is that whereby a man absolutely knows all this to be true in his own particular case. So that the faith of adherence is general but the faith of assurance is particular. Now this ‘faith of adherence’ alone is sufficient to bring a man to heaven, because the promises are given in general to every one who believes. And, therefore, to limit salvation to a particular degree of faith is to destroy all those promises on which thousands of Christians have hitherto depended for their eternal comfort. From which ‘uncharitableness, false doctrine and heresy, Good Lord, deliver us!’”Given, however, the still unsettled state of mind among the Methodists in 1765, Wesley decided to sum up the matter yet once more: to correlate the faith that saves with the faith that sanctifies. This was the task he set himself in The Scripture Way of Salvation. In it, he gathered up the best residues of earlier sermons—Salvation by Faith, ‘Justification by Faith’, and ‘The Circumcision of the Heart’. Here he could reemphasize the point that in the Christian life all is of grace—‘preventing’, ‘justifying’, ‘accompanying’, and ‘sanctifying’. He could have made Henry Smith’s point yet again, that ‘good works are the way to come to heaven, though they be not the cause why we shall come to heaven.’
See Sermons, ed. by Thomas Fuller (1675), p. 562.
When, therefore, he was reordering and republishing his Sermons 02:155in 1771, he could see the logic of adding The Scripture Way of Salvation to the sequence of Christian Perfection, Wandering Thoughts, and ‘Satan’s Devices’. Later, in 1787, he would revert to the order of 1760 and, in effect, discard The Scripture Way of Salvation. Clearly, whatever the gain here in terms of the legal function of SOSO, its effect was an obvious loss in terms of doctrinal substance.
Of all the written sermons, this one had the most extensive history of oral preaching behind it: forty instances of his using Eph. 2:8 before 1765, nine in 1738, including the first written sermon on it (No. 1, Salvation by Faith). The text continued to be a favourite: twenty recorded instances in the quarter century following 1765. The Scripture Way of Salvation went through five further editions in Wesley’s lifetime. For its publishing history and a list of variant readings, see Appendix, Vol. 4; see also Bibliog, No. 265.
The Scripture Way of SalvationEphesians 2:8
Ye are saved through faith.
11. Nothing can be more intricate, complex, and hard to be understood, than religion as it has been often described. And this is not only true concerning the religion of the heathens, even many of the wisest of them, but concerning the religion of those also who were in some sense Christians; yea, and men of great name in the Christian world, men ‘who seemed to be pillars’
Gal. 2:9, οἵ δοκοῦντες στύλοι εἶναι…. Later, in No. 82, ‘On Temptation’, §2, Wesley will argue for a different translation: ‘by a careful consideration of every text in the New Testament wherein this word [δόκειν] occurs, I am fully convinced that it nowhere lessens, but everywhere strengthens, the sense of the word to which it is annexed. Accordingly, ὁ δόκει ἔχειν does not mean “what he seems to have” but on the contrary, “who he assuredly hath”.’ Cf. his translation to this same effect in the Notes, and see also Nos. 85, ‘On Working Out Our Own Salvation’, IIΙ.7; 90, ‘An Israelite Indeed’, I.5; 128, ‘The Deceitfulness of the Human Heart’, III.3. He nowhere notices the irony of Paul’s use of δοκοῦντες in Gal. 2:9.
22. It is easily discerned that these two little words—I mean faith and salvation—include the substance of all the Bible, the marrow, as it were, of the whole Scripture. So much the more should we take all possible care to avoid all mistake concerning them, and to form a true and accurate judgment concerning both the one and the other.
Let us then seriously inquire,
I. What is salvation?
II. What is that faith whereby we are saved? And
ΙII. How we are saved by it.
11I. 1. And first let us inquire, What is salvation? The salvation which is here spoken of is not what is frequently understood by that word, the going to heaven, eternal happiness. It is not the soul’s going to paradise, termed by our Lord ‘Abraham’s bosom’.
Luke 16:22. Cf. the Talmudic tractate Kiddushin, 72b, and the comment of Kaufmann Kohler in The Jewish Encyclopedia, ‘Abraham’s Bosom’. Bengel, Gnomon, loc. cit., comments that ‘the Jews used to call the state of the righteous dead “the bosom of Abraham” and “the Garden of Eden”.’ See No. 115, ‘Dives and Lazarus’, I.3 and n.
22. If we take this in its utmost extent it will include all that is wrought in the soul by what is frequently termed ‘natural conscience’, but more properly, ‘preventing grace’;
A special gracious activity of the Holy Spirit in the heart and will, always in anticipation (praeveniens) of any human initiative or act of choice. ‘Pre-venting’ grace (distantly kin to what the Calvinists called ‘common grace’, save that it is uniquely the work of the Holy Spirit) ‘goes before’ conscious awareness of one’s condition, to ‘turn’, to ‘draw’, to stir up ‘the desires after God…all the convictions which the Holy Spirit…works in every child of man.’ Thus, it displaces ‘natural conscience’ (the notion of which presupposes human autonomy and free will); it signifies the divine initiative in all human ‘re-actions’ that aspire to faith. Thus, ‘preventing’ (prevenient) grace is the theological principle that assigns an absolute priority to the indwelling Spirit and yet allows for actual and valid human involvement, since the actions of the Holy Spirit are ‘resistible’, as the decrees of the Father are not (cf. the canons of the Second Council of Orange, A.D. 529).
Wesley’s teaching here reaches back to Jerome, at least (cf. Epistles, 31, 33, 34, 62), and thence through the Middle Ages to Martin Bucer, Johann Gropper, and The King’s Book (A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for Any Christian Man, ‘The Article of Free Will’) to Fénelon (Christian Counsel, ch. XXI). But it assumes an even more crucial role in Wesley’s thought, especially in his stress upon the Holy Spirit as its agent and on its transformation of ‘natural conscience’ (e.g., the analogue between its role in Wesley’s ethics to the role of ‘conscience’ in Joseph Butler’s Fifteen Sermons, II and III). It was in this sense that John Fletcher could rightly ‘deny that Mr. Wesley is an Arminian’, since ‘Arminius held that man hath a will to turn to God before grace prevents him’ (Works, 1825, I.229), whereas, for Wesley, it is the Spirit’s prevenient motion by which ‘we ever are moved and inspired to any good thing’. The early Wesley tended to ground ‘preventing grace’ in baptism; the mature Wesley linked it more closely to repentance; the late Wesley correlates it with the order of salvation as a whole; cf. No. 85, ‘On Working Out Our Own Salvation’, I.21 (‘God breathes into us every good desire, and brings every good desire to good effect’), and III.3-4, Wesley’s most compact and complete statement of the doctrine and its import. But see also Notes on Rom. 2:14, together with the comment in Predestination Calmly Considered (1752), §45; and yet another comment in Some Remarks on Mr. Hill’s Review (1712), 12:xvi. Cf. Charles Rogers’s Duke University dissertation, The Doctrine of Prevenient Grace in John Wesley. For other references to will and liberty, cf. No. 60, ‘The General Deliverance’, I.4 and n.
Cf. John 6:44; and below, No. 47, ‘Heaviness through Manifold Temptations’, IIΙ.9 and n.
Cf. John 1:9.
Cf. Mic. 6:8.
33. But we are at present concerned only with that salvation which the Apostle is directly speaking of. And this consists of two general parts, justification and sanctification.
Justification is another word for pardon.
See No. 5, ‘Justification by Faith’, II.5 and n.
An echo of the bitter controversy about the ‘causes’ of justification between the Roman Catholics, the Calvinists, and the Anglicans; cf. Nos. 5, ‘Justification by Faith’, II.5; and 20, The Lord Our Righteousness, intro.; see also C. F. Allison, The Rise of Moralism, ch. 1.
Session VI of Trent (ch. VII) had listed five distinguishable ‘causes’ of justification and had specified ‘“the meritorious cause” as the atoning Passion and death of Jesus Christ who “merited our justification…unto God the Father”’. The Calvinists had countered this by insisting on the atonement as the formal cause of the justification of the elect (as in Davenant, Downham, and others). This had focused the issue: the idea of ‘formal cause’ entailed a doctrine of predestination on the one hand and irresistible grace on the other; the notion of ‘meritorious cause’ did not. Wesley had tried to hold to the good intentions of both views but finally was forced to come down on the side of ‘meritorious cause’ (as in No. 20, The Lord Our Righteousness). No other single point (which embraces the correlative issue of ‘good works after faith’) so excited the Calvinist polemic against him from 1765, both until and after his death.
Cf. Isa. 53:12.
Cf. Phil. 4:7.
Cf. Rom. 5:2.
1 Pet. 1:8.
44. And at the same time that we are justified, yea, in that very moment, sanctification begins. In that instant we are ‘born again’, ‘born from above’,
John 3:3, 7. Cf. No. 3, ‘Awake, Thou That Sleepest’, I.2 and n.
John 3:6, 8.
Cf. No. 19, ‘The Great Privilege of those that are Born of God’, I.1 and n. The ‘relative change’ denotes the new relationship between God and his pardoned child; the ‘real change’ is in the actual heart and will of the justified one, which is the equivalent of regeneration, ‘the new birth’—which in turn is the beginning of a new lifelong process of sanctification or holy living; cf. Nos. 18, ‘The Marks of the New Birth’; and 45, ‘The New Birth’.
Cf. Rom. 5:5. Cf. No. 3, ‘Awake, Thou That Sleepest’, II.10 and n.
Jas. 3:15.
Cf. Phil. 2:5.
55. How naturally do those who experience such a change imagine that all sin is gone! That it is utterly rooted out of their heart, and has no more any place therein! How easily do they draw that inference, ‘I feel no sin; therefore I have none.’ It does not stir; therefore it does not exist: it has no motion; therefore it has no being.
602:1596. But it is seldom long before they are undeceived, finding sin was only suspended, not destroyed. Temptations return and sin revives, showing it was but stunned before, not dead. They now feel two principles in themselves, plainly contrary to each other: ‘the flesh lusting against the spirit’
Cf. Gal. 5:17.
Cf. Rom. 8:16.
Cf. Ps. 118:13 (BCP). See Nos. 13, On Sin in Believers; 14, The Repentance of Believers; and 41, Wandering Thoughts.
77. How exactly did Macarius, fourteen hundred years ago, describe the present experience of the children of God! ‘The unskilful (or unexperienced), when grace operates, presently imagine they have no more sin. Whereas they that have discretion cannot deny that even we who have the grace of God may be molested again…. For we have often had instances of some among the brethren who have experienced such grace as to affirm that they had no sin in them. And yet after all, when they thought themselves entirely freed from it, the corruption that lurked within was stirred up anew, and they were wellnigh burnt up.’
There was a fourth-century Egyptian hermit with this name who was renowned for his miracles and spiritual counsel. He was, however, probably not the author of the homilies and other pieces attributed to him in Migne, PG, XXXIV; neither Palladius nor Rufinus makes any mention of them. Cf. Werner Jaeger, Two Rediscovered Works of Ancient Christian Literature: Gregory of Nyssa and Macarius (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1954). Still, Wesley knew and loved the ‘Macarian homilies’; he extracted and published twenty-two of them in Vol. I of the Christian Lib. (1749); for the passage cited here, cf. Homily IX, pp. 95-97. But cf. Migne, PG, XXXIV.623-34, and the Eng. tr. (which Wesley knew), ‘By a Presbyter of the Church of England’, The Spiritual Homilies of Macarius the Egyptian (1721), Homily XVII, ‘Concerning the Spiritual Unction and Glory of Christians. And that without Christ it is Impossible to be Saved, or to be made Partaker of Eternal Life’, p. 267: ‘But the unsteady and unskilful, whenever grace operates, tho’ but in part, imagine presently they have no more sin. Whereas they that have discretion and are prudent, never have the confidence to deny that we who even have the grace of God, are molested with obscene and filthy thoughts. For we have often had instances of some among the brethren, that have experienced such a degree of joy and grace, as to affirm that for five or six years running, concupiscence had withered quite away; and yet after all, when they thought themselves freed entirely from it, the corruption that lurked within, was stirred up anew, and they were even burnt up.’ See also No. 112, On Laying the Foundation of the New Chapel, II.3.
802:1608. From the time of our being ‘born again’ the gradual work of sanctification takes place. We are enabled ‘by the Spirit’ to ‘mortify the deeds of the body’,
Cf. Rom. 8:13.
1 Thess. 5:22.
Titus 2:14.
Cf. Gal. 6:10.
Cf. Luke 1:6.
See John 4:23, 24.
99. It is thus that we wait for entire sanctification, for a full salvation from all our sins, from pride, sell-will, anger, unbelief, or, as the Apostle expresses it, ‘Go on to perfection.’
Heb. 6:1.
Cf. 1 Thess. 5:16-18.
II. But what is that ‘faith through which we are saved’?
Cf. Eph. 2:8.
11. Faith in general is defined by the Apostle, ἔλεγχος πραγμάτων οὐ βλεπομένων—‘an evidence’, a divine ‘evidence and conviction’ (the word means both), ‘of things not seen’
Cf. Heb. 11:1; this, obviously, is a quotation from memory, since even TR here reads πραγμάτων ἔλεγχος. See No. 3, ‘Awake, Thou That Sleepest’, I.1 and n.; also, An Earnest Appeal, §§6-7 (11:46-47 in this edn.).
Cf. 2 Cor. 4:6.
Eph. 1:18.
Cf. 1 Cor. 2:9.
An echo of Addison’s Cato; cf. No. 117, ‘On the Discoveries of Faith’, §8 and n.
Rom. 8:18. Yet another instance of the theory that our knowledge ‘of God and the things of God’ is a sort of sight, a direct intuition of ‘the eternal world’. See No. 10, ‘The Witness of the Spirit, I’, I.12 and n.
22. Taking the word in a more particular sense, faith is a divine evidence and conviction, not only that ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself,
2 Cor. 5:19.
Gal. 2:20.
Cf. Col. 2:6.Cf. Col. 2:6.
For this Reformed concept of ‘offices’ and its import for Wesley’s Christology, see Deschner, Wesley’s Christology, chs. ΙII-VI.
Cf. 1 Cor. 1:30.
33. ‘But is this the “faith of assurance” or “faith of adherence”?’ The Scripture mentions no such distinction. The Apostle says: ‘There is one faith, and one hope of our calling,’ one Christian, saving faith, as ‘there is one Lord’ in whom we believe, and ‘one God and Father of us all.’
Cf. Eph. 4:4-6.
1 John 5:10.
Rom. 8:16.
Cf. Gal. 4:6.
44. It is by this faith we ‘are saved’, justified and sanctified, taking that word in its highest sense. But how are we justified and sanctified by faith? This is our third head of inquiry. And this being the main point in question, and a point of no ordinary importance, it will not be improper to give it a more distinct and particular consideration.
31III. 1. And first, how are we justified by faith? In what sense is this to be understood? I answer, faith is the condition, and the only condition, of justification. It is the condition: none is justified but he that believes; without faith no man is justified. And it is the only condition: this alone is sufficient for justification. Everyone that believes is justified, whatever else he has or has not. In other words: no man is justified till he believes; every man when he believes is justified.
22. ‘But does not God command us to repent also? Yea, and to “bring forth fruits meet for repentance”?
Matt. 3:8.
Cf. Isa. 1:16-17.
God does undoubtedly command us both to repent and to bring forth fruits meet for repentance; which if we willingly neglect we cannot reasonably expect to be justified at all. Therefore both repentance and fruits meet for repentance are in some sense necessary to justification.
Elsewhere, Wesley stresses repentance as the normal preparatory state for the reception of justifying faith and, in that sense, ‘necessary’; cf. No. 14, The Repentance of Believers, II.6 and n. See also Law’s insistence in A Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection (1726), in Works (1762), III.84-86, that ‘Repentance and sorrow for sin are [strictly] necessary to salvation.’
See Matt. 27:38 and Mark 15:27. The ‘late writer’ was not Bengel, Burkitt, Heylyn, Henry, or Poole—and Wesley makes nothing of the idea that one of the λῃσταί was ‘very honest and respectable’. This interpretation goes back, of course, to Josephus’s account of the Zealots in his Jewish War, II. Josephus’s first English translator, William Whiston (1737), may have been Wesley’s ‘late writer’; cf. his Six Dissertations (1734), No. I. See also Karl Rengstorf’s article on λῃστής in Gerhard Kittel, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, IV.262: ‘When Jesus was crucified and was thus punished as a political rebel against Rome, two others condemned as λῃσταί suffered with him. The title on the cross marked him as one of them.’ Cf. also Haim Cohn, The Trial and Death of Jesus (New York, Harper and Row, 1967), p. 208.
33. ‘But do you believe we are sanctified by faith? We know you believe that we are justified by faith; but do not you believe, and accordingly teach, that we are sanctified by our works?’
So it has been roundly and vehemently affirmed for these five and twenty years.
I.e., approximately from 1739, with Wesley’s insistence in his preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems on good works following upon faith (see Bibliog, No. 13; and Vol. 12 of this edn.).
Cf. Wesley’s repetition of this emphasis on the close correlation between justification and sanctification in No. 107, ‘On God’s Vineyard’, I.5-6.
44. ‘But is there not a repentance consequent upon, as well as a repentance previous to, justification? And is it not incumbent on all that are justified to be “zealous of good works”?
Titus 2:14.
Cf. 1 John 2:5; 4:12, 18.
2 Pet. 3:18.
55. I do allow all this, and continually maintain it as the truth of God. I allow there is a repentance consequent upon, as well as a repentance previous to, justification.
See Nos. 14, The Repentance of Believers, proem, §2, and n.; 13, On Sin in Believers; and 8, ‘The First-fruits of the Spirit’, for other versions of this notion of ‘repentance consequent upon justification’. The idea goes back to the poenitentia secunda of Tertullian (at least) and is a correlate of the doctrine of double justification.
See Phil. 2:5.
What is the inference we must draw herefrom? Why, that both repentance, rightly understood, and the practice of all good works, works of piety, as well as works of mercy (now property so called, since they spring from faith) are in some sense necessary to sanctification.
66. I say ‘repentance rightly understood’; for this must not be confounded with the former repentance. The repentance consequent upon justification is widely different from that which is antecedent to it. This implies no guilt, no sense of condemnation, no consciousness of the wrath of God. It does not 02:165suppose any doubt of the favour of God, or any ‘fear that hath torment’.
Cf. 1 John 4:18.
Cf. John 9:41.
Cf. No. 13, On Sin in Believers, intro., I.3, III.1-9, and IV.1.
Rom. 8:7.
Cf. Art. IX, ‘Of Original or Birth Sin’.
Cf. No. 13, On Sin in Believers, intro., I.6, and n. This distinction between ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ sins is crucial. Voluntary sins (‘sins properly so called’) generate guilt and alienation; their ‘reign’ must be broken by God’s pardoning mercy. The φρόνημα σαρκός remains, but has lost its dominion in the believer’s heart; it does not, therefore, annul his assurance that God will pardon subsequent sins on the basis of ‘consequent repentance’.
Hos. 11:7.
Cf. Gal. 5:17.
Heb. 3:12.
77. With this conviction of the sin remaining in our hearts there is joined a clear conviction of the sin remaining in our lives, still cleaving to all our words and actions. In the best of these we now discern a mixture of evil, either in the spirit, the matter, or the manner of them; something that could not endure the righteous judgment of God, were he ‘extreme to mark what is done amiss’.
Ps. 130:3 (BCP).
Exod. 24:8; Heb. 10:29.
802:1668. Experience shows that together with this conviction of sin remaining our hearts and cleaving to all our words and actions, as well as the guilt which on account thereof we should incur were we not continually sprinkled with the atoning blood, one thing more is implied in this repentance, namely, a conviction of our helplessness, of our utter inability to think one good thought, or to form one good desire; and much more to speak one word aright, or to perform one good action but through his free, almighty grace, first preventing us, and then accompanying us every moment.
Cf. above, I.2 and n.
99. ‘But what good works are those, the practice of which you affirm to be necessary to sanctification?’ First, all works of piety,
Cf. No. 14, The Repentance of Believers, I.13 and n.
1010. Secondly, all works of mercy, whether they relate to the bodies or souls of men; such as feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, entertaining the stranger, visiting those that are in prison, or sick, or variously afflicted; such as the endeavouring to instruct the ignorant, to awaken the stupid sinner, to quicken the lukewarm, to confirm the wavering, to comfort the feebleminded,
1 Thess. 5:14.
See Heb. 2:18.
1111. Hence may appear the extreme mischievousness of that seemingly innocent opinion that ‘there is no sin in a believer; that all sin is destroyed, root and branch, the moment a man is justified.’
I.e., the view of men like Philip Molther (and, thereafter, of William Cudworth and James Relly); cf. No. 40, Christian Perfection, II.10 and n. And, since it denied the necessity of a ‘second repentance’, Wesley regarded it as a premise for antinomianism.
I.e., ‘second repentance’; cf. No. 14, The Repentance of Believers, proem, §§1-3, et seq.
Cf. 1 John 4:18. to which that repentance is indispensably necessary.
1202:16712. Hence it may likewise appear that there is no possible danger in thus expecting full salvation. For suppose we were mistaken, suppose no such blessing ever was or can be attained, yet we lose nothing. Nay, that very expectation quickens us in using all the talents which God has given us; yea, in improving them all, so that when our Lord cometh he will ‘receive his own with increase’.
Cf. Matt. 25:27.
1313. But to return. Though it be allowed that both this repentance and its fruits are necessary to full salvation, yet they are not necessary either in the same sense with faith or in the same degree. Not in the same degree; for these fruits are only necessary conditionally, if there be time and opportunity for them. Otherwise a man may be sanctified without them. But he cannot be sanctified without faith. Likewise let a man have ever so much of this repentance, or ever so many good works, yet all this does not at all avail: he is not sanctified till he believes. But the moment he believes, with or without those fruits, yea, with more or less of this repentance, he is sanctified. Not in the same sense; for this repentance and these fruits are only remotely necessary, necessary in order to the continuance of his faith, as well as the increase of it; whereas faith is immediately and directly necessary to sanctification. It remains that faith is the only condition which is immediately and proximately necessary to sanctification.
The parallel here between faith and repentance in relation to both justification and sanctification is important for Wesley’s solution to his problem of ‘the remains of sin’; it is his alternative to the Lutheran simul justus et peccator. Faith is the only and equally necessary condition in both cases.
1414. ‘But what is that faith whereby we are sanctified, saved from sin and perfected in love?’ It is a divine evidence and conviction, first, that God hath promised it in the Holy Scripture. Till we are thoroughly satisfied of this there is no moving one step farther. And one would imagine there needed not one word more to satisfy a reasonable man of this than the ancient promise, ‘Then will I circumcise thy heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul.’
Deut. 30:6. An echo of No. 17, ‘The Circumcision of the Heart’.
1515. It is a divine evidence and conviction, secondly, that what 02:168God hath promised he is able to perform. Admitting therefore that ‘with men it is impossible’ to bring a clean thing out of an unclean, to purify the heart from all sin, and to fill it with all holiness, yet this creates no difficulty in the case, seeing ‘with God all things are possible.’
Cf. Matt. 19:26, etc.
Cf. Gen. 1:3.
1616. It is, thirdly, a divine evidence and conviction that he is able and willing to do it now. And why not? Is not a moment to him the same as a thousand years?
See 2 Pet. 3:8; Ps. 90:4.
2 Cor. 6:2.
Heb. 4:7.
Matt. 22:4.
1717. To this confidence, that God is both able and willing to sanctify us now, there needs to be added one thing more, a divine evidence and conviction that he doth it. In that hour it is done. God says to the inmost soul, ‘According to thy faith be it unto thee!’
Cf. Matt. 9:29.
Cf. 1 John 1:9.
1 John 1:7.
1818. ‘But does God work this great work in the soul gradually or instantaneously?’ Perhaps it may be gradually wrought in some. I mean in this sense—they do not advert to the particular moment wherein sin ceases to be. But it is infinitely desirable, were it the will of God, that it should be done instantaneously; that the Lord should destroy sin ‘by the breath of his mouth’
Job 15:30; Ps. 33:6.
1 Cor. 15:52.
Eph. 2:10.
See Heb. 10:37.
Rom. 5:6, 8, etc.
See Rev. 3:20.
Cf. Wesley, Hymns on God’s Everlasting Love (II), London, Strahan, 1742 (Bibliog, No. 47), Hymn 8, p. 25 (Poet. Wks., III.66); the orig. has been slightly retouched.
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Entry Title: Sermon 43: The Scripture Way of Salvation