Wesley on the Christian Life Quotes

“it is impossible to separate works from faith, as impossible as to separate heat and light from fire.”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“rule of Wesley”: Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“He apparently scoured the news reports to find exciting stories of God doing great things among Baptists and Calvinists, and then made it a point to read these reports to his Methodist Anglicans. It was not a weekly event, but it was often enough:”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“Law and gospel are not identical, because command is not promise. But they are unified because the God who commands is the God who, in the very same words, promises.”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“On the one hand, the height and depth of the law constrain me to fly to the love of God in Christ; on the other, the love of God in Christ endears the law to me “above gold or precious stones”; seeing”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“The righteousness of Christ is necessary to entitle us to heaven, personal holiness to qualify us for it. Without the former we could have no claim to glory; without the latter we could have not fitness for it.”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“But the grand radical defect in the practical system of these nominal Christians, is their forgetfulness of all the peculiar doctrines of the Religion which they profess—the corruption of human nature—the atonement of the Saviour—and the sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit.” Following”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“According to Wilberforce, slavery was permitted in England and America because this real Christianity had cooled; and real Christianity had cooled because essential Christian doctrines had been abandoned. If the nominal Christians of Britain were ignoring gross institutional wickedness like race-based chattel slavery, it was because their hearts were cold; and their hearts were cold because their heads were empty. What Dr. Wilberforce prescribes is a big dose of “the peculiar doctrines of Christianity”: not morality or piety in general, but the core doctrines that we know only from special divine revelation in Scripture. Wilberforce’s”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“the hymns that the Methodists sang, like all effective hymns must be, were emotional, but their content throughout was scriptural and doctrinal. They did not merely stir emotion, but caused their singers to contemplate religious truth and meditate upon it.”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“Faith, says Wesley, is not only an assent to the whole Gospel of Christ, but also a full reliance on the blood of Christ; a trust in the merits of his life, death, and resurrection; a recumbency upon him as our atonement and our life, as given for us, and living in us. It is a sure confidence which a man hath in God, that through the merits of Christ, his sins are forgiven, and he reconciled to the favour of God; and, in consequence, hereof, a closing with him, and cleaving to him, as our “wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption,” or, in one word, our salvation.”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“Wesley insisted on preaching the law to Christians because the law is God’s means of crafting a holy people. But Wesley knew the perils of the law as well as any Lutheran ever did. He was well aware that the preaching of the law brings with it certain dangers: legalism, condemnation, and pharisaic judgmentalism. So he placed his preaching of the law in the context of free grace. Grace first, then law. The result of this combination, in this order, is the dynamo that drives Wesleyan spirituality.”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love

“Preach our doctrine, inculcate experience, urge practice, enforce discipline. If you preach doctrine alone, the people will be antinomians; if you preach experience only, they will become enthusiasts; if you preach practice only, they will become Pharisees; and if you preach all of these and do not enforce discipline, Methodism will be like a highly cultivated garden without a fence, exposed to the ravages of the wild boar of the forest. 31”
― Fred Sanders, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love