Objections to Entire Sanctification Answered (Rewritten)

My dear fellow believer in Christ: 

You have sincere objections to entire sanctification as a distinct blessing. Let me try to help remove them. 

Maybe you have been troubled by the obvious imperfections of some people who claim to be walking this higher path of Christian life. First, remember that people who have not repented use that very same argument against every effort we make to lead them to Christ. You regularly tell them that Christianity can be counterfeited by hypocritical professors; that all valuable things are exposed to cheap imitations; and that the most valuable things are the most likely to be imitated. Please apply that same reasoning to yourself when you think about the higher Christian life.

Growth in Grace (Rewritten)

We are urged to grow in grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ. Some people say the real logic of Christian growth works better if we reverse that order, putting the knowledge of Christ first as the way to grow in grace. But the apostle’s order—grace first, knowledge second—is actually the deeper and more natural one. 

We come to know Christ through the heart, not merely through the mind. We do not truly know Jesus until we love him; and the more we love him, the more closely we know him. 

The more we study the perfect character of Jesus, the more we admire him, just as studying Michelangelo’s works can make us admire him more. But admiration is not love. Admiration does not set the affections burning like a furnace; it does not drive the soul forward through loss and labor, self-denial and persecution, all the way to the martyr’s stake. As Christ’s character unfolds its splendor under the long, earnest gaze of the student, that student may grow aesthetically through contact with so much moral beauty. He may also become more firmly settled in his theological beliefs about the divinity of the man of Nazareth. And yet, in his own heart, he may still be refusing to receive and enthrone Christ as his rightful king.

We can go a step further and say that growth in grace, while it is accompanied by increasing power to avoid outward acts of sin, does not have the power to destroy the spirit of sin itself, commonly called original sin. 

Love Enthroned PDF

I have added a digital edition of Daniel Steele's book Love Enthroned to my Ko-Fi shop. It is in PDF form because that's all I can manage right now and because all e-readers can recognize and display that. 

This is the first of Steele's "Holiness books" and serves as an excellent introduction to his thought — and to the teachings of the Methodist Holiness movement in the Nineteenth Century. 

The page of "Definitions" alerts the reader to the distinctive way certain terms are defined and used by advocates of Christian Perfection. 

Chapter nine is a very helpful discussion of John Fletcher's doctrine of Dispensations — quite a bit different than the doctrine currently known as "Dispensationalism." Understanding Fletcher's doctrine of Dispensations also helps to explain why the Methodists commonly referred to "Entire Sanctification" as the "Baptism in the Holy Spirit." 

The book was originally published in 1875. This digital edition is from the 1908 revision, which contains an additional essay entitled “Love as a Principle and Love as a Passion.” 

For this digital edition, I have added a short autobiography, which was written in 1888.

It can be found here: Love Enthroned. 

For those who might be wondering: my old web site is coming down sometime at the end of November or the beginning of December. The Holiness books that I have hosted there will be unavailable after that time, but digital downloads like this will be available — but not for free! I am learning the digital formats and hope to make the books available in EPUB and AZW3 at some point in the near future.