“What do you mean...? Are you trying to say that it is possible to not sin?”
I remember that night well. I wrote down my account of it in my journal and refer back to it several times a year. I was at a Bible study on Romans at the Wesley Foundation at Louisiana Tech University. Surrounded by a bunch of quasi-baptists reading through the book one of the guys mentioned how it wasn’t really worth it to fight sin. The director then said “You don’t have to sin”. The response in the quote above is a summary of the confusion and amazement that we all had. For a group of 200 college misfits that spent approximately 75% of their time trying to not get drunk, smoke pot or chase the opposite sex around it was pretty mind blowing.
That was my first introduction to Christian Perfection. It changed my life. At that moment I understood what it really meant to be a Christian, or more precisely to understand the power that had been given to me at justification that enabled me to be a Christian. By the grace of God alone, I am now empowered to strive further and further after him.
When we look at what really moved the original Methodist movement, Christian Perfection is on the top of the list. Every organizational move was designed to better facilitate perfection. It was a huge message, most commonly directed at the hell raisers of the day, those that thought their sins were so great not even God could forgive them. When the establishment attacked Wesley and said he was attempting to break up the Church of England he always reinforced how Anglican he was and how he encouraged the societies to remain active in their local parish. After this formal answer he usually finished up by reminding his accusers that many in the societies weren’t ever in church before and completely belonged to the Devil. Perfection was truly changing not just these people, but the social and cultural landscape of Great Britain.
And it wasn’t something that was just passing in Wesley’s mind. He really thought about the role sin had in the believer. He broke away from his Moravian friends, his spiritual mentors, because they thought sin was completely abolished in the heart at the moment of justification. Wesley understood that for sanctification to really be a process of holiness, sin was only abolished at the moment of heavenly glorification. Humans are creatures of a free will, and the nature of free will will never leave us. It is a blessing and a curse. Because of free will, we make the decision to accept the grace of God and therefore adopted into his family. But because of free will we can leave this family. Because of free will, it is possible for us to be free from enslavement to sin and instead grafted into the kingdom actions of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Wesley formed his entire theology around Christian Perfection. Many of these pieces seem life changing to us now, probably because they were to John, Charles and friends in the 18th century. They taught lives of complete dedication, and what it meant to be an “almost Christian” (read that sermon if you want to be convicted). As John put it in “A Plain Account of Christian Perfection” there is no medium between serving God and serving the Devil. Perfection is the path for all those desiring to truly know the truth as it is in Jesus Christ.
It is funny to think of battling sin to be a point of evangelism, but for that group that night it was. I can think of many people whose lives were changed because of that impromptu lesson on Christian Perfection, mine included. Perhaps we should allow perfection to enter our preaching and teaching schedules as often as we talk about popular culture. What would our churches look like then?`
Several years ago I read an account from John Wesley concerning this very topic. Someone asked him if he believed you could be entirely sanctified and of course he said he did. They followed up and asked if he was entirely sanctified and he said something to the effect of "Oh dear, no, not yet..." The person then asked if he knew anyone who was and his response, after thinking about it for a bit was, "Hmm... The apostle John... he might have been."
ReplyDeleteThat helped me immensely in understanding this idea of Christian Perfection. In my life I may not attain it, but to know that it is possible gives me reason to strive for it.