By Ryan Danker, Juicy Ecumenism.
“By holiness I mean, not fasting, or bodily austerity, or any other external means of improvement, but that inward temper to which all these are subservient, a renewal of soul in the image of God.” -John Wesley
The quote above comes from a letter written by John Wesley to his father, Samuel, in 1734. John was 31 at the time and the Methodist movement still a fairly new enterprise. But at the heart of it, from the beginning, was the call to holiness of heart and life.
As Wesley said, holiness is nothing less than “a renewal of the soul in the image of God,” or put differently, a restoration of God’s original intention for humanity. It’s not a list of “do’s and don’ts” as if it were simply an external reality, but a distinctly internal one, a cleansing of the heart made possible by the power of the Holy Spirit that makes us Christlike.
Christ’s life is the very pattern of holiness and the means by which it is attained.
It was the doctrine of holiness that first led me to John Wesley. I was a high schooler at the time, and I heard sermon after sermon about entire sanctification. It didn’t make sense to me, so I asked my pastor for books that I could read. I quickly noticed that they all cited Wesley, so I decided to go to the source. I’ve been stuck with Wesley ever since.
But not everyone has the time to dive headlong into Wesley, so books on Wesleyan doctrine are needed. They’re also needed to make the insights of the eighteenth century available in our own time.
Resource from JWI here (To Spread Scriptural Holiness)