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.

Also, even when the Holy Spirit gives the deepest illumination, that does not guarantee infallible moral judgment. John Newton, while he was captain of a slave ship and blinded by the darkness of his age, said that while enjoying close communion with God, "he never had the least scruple as to the lawfulness of the slave-trade;" and the deeply devout George Whitefield was not kept from arguing before the trustees of Georgia for the introduction of slaves, on the ground of "the advantage of the Africans." So a person whose heart is full of love, but whose mind is darkened by ignorance, may appear unconscientious to someone who has been blessed with greater moral understanding.

You should keep this fact constantly in mind: no person can ever live beyond the criticism of others. Did Christ, the absolutely sinless man, escape hostile criticism? Was he not called a winebibber, a Sabbath-breaker, a Beelzebub, and a subverter of the law? The problem was not in Jesus, but in his suspicious critics. Perhaps this explains your confusion about imperfect examples of the love "that passeth knowledge." God once said to Abraham, "Walk before me and be thou perfect." He did not command him to be perfect in the eyes of fallible people. Suppose Abraham had understood that command as including human judgment as well as the searching eye of Jehovah. He is told to go to Mount Moriah and offer Isaac as a sacrifice. He goes, and before God he shows a heart perfectly obedient, proven by the severest test. God is satisfied. But suppose some jealous neighbors of Abraham wonder what that mysterious three-day journey means, follow the patriarch from a distance, and finally see him seize his son and cruelly bind him hand and foot. Then, O horrible! he draws a great sheath knife from his belt, lifts it high, and appears ready to plunge it into the throbbing heart of innocence. Something stops the terrible act — the spies are too far away to see what it was—but they have seen enough of Abraham’s harsh conduct in his family to convince them that his claim to be a special "friend of God" is a staggering piece of hypocrisy. "Perfection on earth," they say, "is all a myth; we have proved it." Yet while this damaging misunderstanding of Abraham’s conduct is whispered among the neighboring Canaanites, the patriarch is enjoying the inward testimony that his ways please Jehovah; he walks before him and is perfect. It may be the same with many living friends of God, criticized by people while approved by Heaven.

False professions of this blessed experience should be expected, and every fair-minded person should make room for that fact. But when someone secretly dislikes such a high experience, it is natural to magnify those false examples far beyond their proportion compared with the genuine ones—just as unbelievers magnify hypocrisy in the Christian Church until it hides the multitude of true Christians.

Are you troubled by the fact that many people seek the fullness of Divine love and do not find it? Do not many people weakly seek regeneration and fail? There are no cases of people seeking with their whole heart, with an unappeasable hunger and tireless persistence, who have failed to receive this greatest of Divine gifts. In giving his spiritual blessings, God shows no partiality. "Every one that asketh receiveth."

Fanaticism has sometimes accompanied the profession of this high grace. That is true. But extremists and unbalanced minds have also abused justification by faith, and yet that doctrine is still proclaimed in all our churches. Whenever people try to promote lived, experimental godliness, there is always a danger that someone may wander away from sobriety. Our Protestantism gives every soul the right to study the Bible and to come directly to God without the intervention of a Latin-mumbling priest; because of that, it must accept the risk that some will misuse freedom and develop eccentric beliefs. The only alternative is the iron railroad track of papal infallibility, prescribing the exact grooves in which all religious thought and devotion must run. That cure is a thousand times worse than the disease. The fanaticisms connected with those who have given themselves wholly to Christ and been filled with the fullness of the Spirit have been greatly exaggerated by the imagination of unsympathetic opponents. They are not half as disastrous as the heresies that spring up in a cold, worldly Church that lacks the Spirit of Truth.

Again, people who profess holiness are usually unpopular. They are secretly disliked. One very sharp observer of human nature suggested the reason. He asks and answers this question:

"Are we not apt to have a secret distaste to any who say they are saved from all sin?" Answer: "It is very possible we may, and that upon several grounds; partly from a concern for the good of souls, who may be hurt, if there are not what they profess; partly from a kind of implicit envy at those who speak of higher attainments than our own; and partly from our natural slowness and unreadiness of heart to believe the works of God."

— Wesley's "Plain Account of Christian Perfection."

This answer could easily be understood to include other reasons for this distaste. A holy life rebukes everything unholy. Jesus was a continual rebuke to the Jews. In the intense light of his pure life, their stains showed through the whitewash of ceremonialism. Their hatred of the light turned against the light-bearer, and Jesus of Nazareth became the most abused man of his time. In this respect, the servant should not expect to be above his Lord. A person who is entirely dead to the world and thoroughly alive to Christ in every fiber of being will make those who conform to this world so uncomfortable that they may begin to hate him and search for every possible flaw in his life. They do not want to give up their idols, and holiness comes to set a destroying fire among them. They dislike strenuous effort and earnest wrestling with God at Peniel, so they resent those who point to the sunlit heights of life above the clouds and urge them to climb there, as though such people were disturbing their rest. Again, since all love for God stands against the spirit of this world, the greater the love, the stronger the opposition.

Another reason may be found in the activity of Satan, who tries to rob the Gospel of the very element that gives it its greatest power in the fight against his kingdom. He blinds the minds of unbelievers so that the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ will not shine on them. Since he succeeds so well with unbelievers, he uses the same method with believers, blinding them to their highest Gospel privilege — the fullness of the Spirit — so that the light of this blessing will not gladden their eyes, strengthen their hearts, and intensify their zeal against his kingdom. John Wesley wrote the following to a Christian woman about her preacher in 1771:

I hope he is not ashamed to preach full salvation, receivable now by faith. This is the word which God will always bless, and which the devil peculiarly hates; therefore he is constantly stirring up both his own children and the weak children of God against it.

This explains the difficulty the great Head of the Church has in keeping this doctrine in the pulpit. It disappeared from the English pulpit, and Methodism was raised up to bring it back. Wesley, faithful to the great light, "the grand depositum intrusted to the Methodists," found that his preachers were inclined to abandon this precious theme. Even now, after interest in this subject among laypeople has become so widespread, most preachers pass over it like a slurred note in music, as if it were a tiny demi-semi-quaver in the joyful song of Christianity rather than its very keynote.

Some believers may be misled by the influence of people who are mistaken in claiming this blessing. Many, stirred and cheered by some manifestation of the Savior's love, quickly conclude that they have been entirely sanctified through the fullness of love poured into their hearts. Then, under unwise advice, they rush into declaring full salvation before they have the witness of the Spirit to this great work. (1 Cor. 2:12.) Such people soon become what Mr. Fletcher calls "land-flood" or freshet "professors," left high and dry by the temporary emotions they have experienced.

Some advocates have also presented this blessing unwisely, which has helped eclipse faith in its reality. They have preached from Mount Sinai instead of Mount Calvary, thundering the terrors of the Lord upon the Lord’s own children, though they are heirs of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ. Do not let this offend you. The wise counsel of Methodism’s founder has not always been followed when preaching on this subject: "Always by way of promise; always drawing rather than driving." In this way, unwise advocates have stirred up prejudice. Together, all these causes have almost torn this doctrine — as a great, living, practical truth — from the pulpits of Christendom and driven it into private meetings in parlors; from the candle-stick to the bushel. O Lord! how long, how long, must this precious light be hidden from the faith of thy people? Speedily lift it up from under the bushels to the candle-sticks, there to shine till its splendors blend in the brightness of thy coming!

Are you afraid that if you embrace Jesus as a complete Savior, you will lose broad sympathy for the whole body of believers and become clannish? Are those who have found full salvation clannish by choice, or because they must be? Is there not such a cold atmosphere in many Churches that ardent believers can no more live safely in them than they can in a tomb? They prefer the light and warmth of sympathetic Christian fellowship. Suppose, now, that the whole Church were rejoicing in the increased grace given to each victorious soul, and, as in the case of St. Paul who had been caught up to the third heavens, they were glorifying God in him. Then we would hear no more about the separation of those who are fully saved than we hear in the New Testament Church about the Spirit-baptized withdrawing from new believers who had not yet received the Holy Ghost since they believed.

My dear brother or sister in Jesus, the fault may lie more in your prejudice, your apathy, your love of the world, and your lack of consecration to Christ than in the souls drawn together by the mighty magnetism of love for Christ, the ruling passion of their hearts. Do you not suppose the Jews accused the disciples of clannishness when they persisted in their ten-day upper-room meeting before Pentecost, and afterward in breaking bread from house to house? The cure for the fault-finding Jew would have been to receive the pentecostal blessing and feel the mighty attraction of Christian love. Your remedy is to attain that perfect love which will bind you to all believing souls with a threefold cord.

But this intense fellowship, which has been labeled clannishness, may actually be one of the strong scriptural signs of Christian purity. Listen to what St. John says will always happen when a group of fully consecrated souls walk arm in arm with Jesus, dressed in the spotless linen of his righteousness: "But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin." Those whose bond of Christian communion is so weak that Church socials must be used to create Church feeling—because true spiritual sympathy died with the forgotten prayer meeting and the abandoned class meeting—may well wonder at the mysterious magnetism that draws devout people together and holds them with hooks of steel, without ice cream, oysters, smokes, or any other sensory attractions of the club-room.

Let any Church that is frustrated by a clique devoted to the higher Christian life take the following course, and the clique will be killed and buried beyond hope of resurrection. Let them stop neglecting their own gatherings and instead exhort one another daily, while with one accord and in one place they seek to be filled with the Spirit. Then let them freely express His voice within them — not through a paid quartet, but by speaking to one another "in psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs," making melody in their hearts to the Lord. (Eph. 5:18, 19.) Let them prove the genuineness of Spirit-baptism by a life always victorious over the world through faith in Jesus Christ, by generosity that comes from "first giving yourselves unto the Lord," and by daily practice that agrees with the moral code of the Gospel. Under that kind of treatment, clannishness would quickly disappear, and the longest-running "holiness meeting" would not survive a month. Again, you may be troubled by people who profess full trust in Christ yet still keep their purse strings tightly closed. The secretaries of our various benevolent societies do not make this sweeping charge against those who have claimed to find Jesus as a complete Savior. They know that recently, because of the revival of this doctrine and experience, living springs of generosity have opened and are pouring steady streams into the Lord’s treasury. Here and there, a narrow-minded person has not been raised to the standard, either because the mind has not been sufficiently enlightened or the heart richly anointed.

But you may see no reason why, after twenty years in the average Christian life, you should now rein in your soul toward one definite aim — full salvation through the blood of Jesus Christ — and pass through a serious struggle to obtain what only a minority of justified believers profess to receive before they are laid on their deathbeds. You may think that if such a glorious experience had been meant for you, you would have been led into it long ago, especially since in your daily prayers you have constantly asked for the fullness of the Spirit. It may be that a subtle skepticism has kept you from making vigorous efforts to grasp this great prize, which you might have received at any point in your past Christian life if you had sincerely believed in Christ’s power to do this work and clearly aimed at it with all the intensity of spirit you possessed. The fact that you have gone so long without this pearl of great price is all the more reason to seek it earnestly now, so that your own happiness and usefulness to others may increase, and your God may be honored. The heaven on earth of heart purity is not entered by accident. There must be a definite aim that gathers all the forces of the soul. "And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart." Jer.29:13.

 

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This is a revision of Chapter 18 of Love Enthroned: Essays on Evangelical Perfection (1875 revised 1908) by Daniel Steele, completely rewritten with the assistance of Microslop CoPilot. While some PDF scans of this book may be found at the Internet Archive, a more readable digital edition (PDF) of the 1908 version is available here at a nominal cost: Love Enthroned.