Holiness movement

Yes, I am very excited about the topic today.

You have given me a new appreciation for this doctrine of entire sanctification, and just holiness in general, and really even the Christian faith in general.

I first heard about you when I came across a book that you wrote with Matt Ayers and Caleb Friedemann titled Holiness.

And it was going around in some of the circles that I come from.

And since then, I have scoured the Internet for every sermon and lecture I can find of you.

Once a year, a group of two hundred or three hundred Negroes give a religious camp meeting in a field on the Canton Pike about one mile southeast of Hopkinsville.

There is quite a settlement of Negroes call themselves or their church the Holiness Church.

They claim to be sanctified and cannot sin.

A few nights ago, I was invited to attend one of these meetings.

But I'd like to put that remark in a context.

Of course, around the turn of the last century, 1900, something began in Topeka, Kansas, within Protestantism, within the Protestant Holiness Movement, that evolved into what became modern Pentecostalism.

A little background on that, okay? So, in the Reformed tradition of Protestantism, the teaching is that everybody is totally depraved, and everything you do is radically sinful to the day you die, and your only hope is to be saved by faith alone, and However sanctified you get, you're not nearly sanctified enough, and God would still find something in you intrinsically hateful that would be worthy of sending you to hell.

That's the Reformed position.

That becomes part of the mindset.

When that mindset takes hold in the Wesleyan tradition, with its tradition of holiness, they think that, okay, now maybe Christian perfection, Wesley's idea of Christian perfection, can take place through a revival, that you can have a kind of blow-up experience and go from mundane Christian to holy Christian.

And thus is born the holiness movement.

The holiness movement comes out of that.

It's just as it was.

You who are Wesleyites, Methodists, Holiness Church is here.

And here is his room at Oxford, just as it was with his desk and his inkwell.

And you can go up the stairs in that room in Oxford College.

Not only did he believe what Luther had been teaching, but he also said, God wants us to live holy lives.

And so his movement was known as the Holiness Movement.

And today we have here in Australia the Uniting Church, which really arose from John and Charles Wesley.

We sing many of the hymns, songs.

Across the Eastern US, especially in Appalachia and the South, Methodists and Baptists gathered for huge outdoor revivals, and at these meetings, worship could get ecstatic and physical.

This was the Second Great Awakening in American religious history, and it gave birth to what became known as the Holiness Movement.

Emerging mostly out of Methodism during this revival era, the Holiness Movement taught that believers could live free from sin through a profound personal experience of sanctification, a spiritual transformation they called a second blessing of the Holy Spirit.

Once you had this second blessing, you were no longer sinful by nature.

Some Holiness believers taught that this was followed by a third work of grace, sometimes called spirit baptism.

Most of us that came up through the ranks of religion came down the very same route.

I mean, we might've been a Baptist, a Charismatic, Pentecostal, Holiness Church, but we pretty much all heard the same message, and that is you have to accept Jesus into your heart.

Now, how he gets into your heart, I don't know to this day.

Where he comes from to get into your heart, I don't know.