by Jonathan Powers | Sep 23, 2026 | Uncategorized
When God Meets His People
by Jonathan A. Powers
The CBS television interviewer, Dan Rather, once asked Mother Teresa of Calcutta: “When you pray, what do you say to God?” Teresa replied, “I don’t say anything, I listen.” Rather pressed further: “Well okay, when God speaks to you, then, what does he say?” Teresa answered, “He doesn’t say anything. He listens. And if you don’t understand that, I can’t explain it to you.”
Mother Teresa’s response here is quite cryptic, but if we sit with it for a moment, we can see that it says something profound about prayer. Prayer is, at its core, an act of attention. It is not just about speaking but about listening, about being fully present before God. It is a turning toward God and an awareness that God, in love, attends to us.
Worship shares this character as prayer. When we gather to offer God our praise, prayers, and devotion, we turn our attention toward God. But worship does not begin with our decision to turn toward him. Rather, it begins with the God who has already turned toward us.
That truth matters in a world where attention is continually divided. Screens, responsibilities, anxieties, and the ordinary demands of life leave many of us restless even when we enter a place of worship. However, to worship is to turn our hearts and minds toward God once again. As we sing, pray, listen to Scripture, and come to the Lord’s Table, we make ourselves attentive to the One who sees us more fully than we see ourselves.
This attention is more than an exercise in concentration, however. In worship, we remember that we do not have to strive to earn God’s notice. We come before a God who knows and loves us, who hears both our spoken prayers and the needs we cannot yet put into words. Such an encounter can reshape our sense of who we are. Our achievements and failures do not have the final word about us. We belong to the God who receives us in grace.
The Manifest Presence of God
Scripture assures us that God is always present. “Where can I go from your spirit?” the psalmist asks. “Or where can I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139:7). Yet Scripture also describes particular occasions when God makes his presence known to his people. His glory fills the tabernacle in Exodus 40; Isaiah encounters him in the temple; and at Pentecost, the gathered disciples experience the coming of the Holy Spirit.
These accounts are good and important, especially as they help us distinguish between affirming that God is present everywhere on the one hand and becoming aware of his presence in a particular moment on the other. When Christians speak of God’s manifest presence, they are speaking of this gracious disclosure of his nearness. Worship offers a setting in which we turn toward God with the expectation that he may make himself known to us.
The 2023 Asbury Outpouring in 2023 brought this distinction and a longing to encounter such manifest presence into view. What began in a chapel service continued for sixteen days as people gathered in Hughes Auditorium to pray and worship. Many traveled long distances and waited for hours to join them. They came because they longed for an encounter with the living God.
Of course, the Outpouring was a particular event, and no congregation can arrange for the same experience to happen again. God’s manifest presence cannot be manufactured through music, atmosphere, or the removal of every distraction. Nor is God confined to an auditorium or an extraordinary gathering. Yet the desire that drew people to Hughes was familiar to the church across its history: the desire to meet with God. The Outpouring invited many of us to ask whether we approach ordinary worship with that same expectation.
Worship as Homecoming
The desire to encounter God is bound up with another deep human longing, i.e., the longing to be known and loved. Many people come to worship carrying loneliness, disappointment, or a diminished sense of belonging. Some have been hurt by the very communities in which they hoped to find welcome. In this context, the promise of God’s presence is more than an abstract assurance but speaks to the longing for a place where we can come as we are and be received in love.
Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son gives us a vivid image of that kind of welcome. The son returns home uncertain of how he will be received, but his father sees him while he is still far away and runs to meet him. The son’s homecoming begins with the father’s gracious and loving character and his desire to be present with his son.
Worship can be understood in a similar way. We come before God with all that we carry and discover that he has already come toward us in grace and mercy. We hear again the story of his faithfulness. We confess our sins and receive the promise of forgiveness. We join our voices with others and remember that we have been gathered into a people. At the Lord’s Table, we receive the grace of Christ, who gives himself for us.
To call worship a homecoming, then, is to say it is meant to be more than a service that offers comfort or a sense of belonging. Instead, it is an encounter with the God who welcomes us into communion with himself and with one another. In his presence, we are reminded who we are and whose we are.
Making Room to Meet with God
Those who plan and lead worship have a responsibility to help their congregations attend to worship as a meeting between God and his people. We gather with the expectation that God may make his presence known to us, drawing us into deeper communion with him and with one another. This expectation changes the questions we ask when planning a service: Do our postures, practices, and patterns help the congregation recognize and respond to God’s presence? Do our songs and prayers give people language for praise, confession, lament, and thanksgiving? Does the reading and preaching of Scripture invite them to hear and answer God’s Word? Are we making room for silence as well as speech, for receiving as well as offering? These questions concern more than the shape of a single service; they concern the kind of worshippers we are helping people become.
Over time, such worship forms people who come prepared to offer themselves to God and receive his grace. We can cultivate expectancy by reminding people that God is present and active among them. We can shape services so that prayers, songs, readings, preaching, and silence draw attention to Christ. And we can model attentiveness ourselves, listening for the Spirit rather than treating each element of worship as something to complete before moving to the next.
This work also calls for trust in the practices Christians have received through the centuries and how God meets us in and through them. The church has gathered around Scripture, prayer, praise, confession, and the Eucharist through seasons of renewal and seasons that felt quite ordinary. In these familiar acts, we learn to listen for God’s Word, bring our whole lives before him, and receive the grace Christ offers his people. Their value does not depend on whether each gathering feels extraordinary. God has met his people through these practices across generations, often in ways that become clear only as their lives are shaped by them over time. We cannot use them to summon or control God’s presence, but can only return to them with faith, trusting that the God who has promised to be with his people will meet us there.
Mother Teresa’s answer to Dan Rather returns us to the heart of the matter. In prayer, she listened and knew herself to be heard. In worship, the church does the same, though never in silence alone. We sing, speak, listen, confess, and come to the Eucharist because we believe the living God meets his people and wants to be with them. Whether his nearness comes with extraordinary intensity or through the steady grace of familiar words and actions, worship invites us to turn regularly and continually toward the One who has turned toward us in Christ.
Jonathan Powers is the Associate Professor of Worship Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, KY and the Editor-in-Chief for Good News magazine.
by Jonathan Powers | Sep 15, 2026 | Uncategorized
Good News Re-visted: Is Evangelism Relevant?
June 1967
By Leighton Ford
To many modern observers, evangelism seems like an antique chair in a museum: a curious relic of the past and an interesting phenomenon for study, but not to be sat on, not fit to bear the weight of today’s burdens — a hopeless anachronism in the twentieth-century world.
What is the use, ask such critics, of a church on its knees praying for lost souls, while a blinding population explosion dooms 100,000 new babies every day to slow starvation? What good is it for a vast throng to jam a stadium and listen to a sermon, while red-raw festering wounds of racial hatred blister the hide of civilization? Isn’t it worse than futile to take a man into a corner and ask if he’s “saved,” while a terrifying arms race spawns mass terror weapons? Evangelism seems a ridiculous — yes, downright dangerous — misdirecting of our energies.
Even some Christians have had their zeal for evangelism hamstrung by these doubts. They wonder whether, as W. E. Sangster put it, “an aspirin as a cure for cancer would be less ridiculous than evangelism as the answer to the world’s present ills. The human situation is so urgent. Talk of ‘world revolution by individual conversion’ is like talking about a long endowment policy to a man sitting on a time bomb.” Is evangelism really relevant amidst the tangled complexities of our modern dilemma?
Let me confess at the outset that I make no pretense of being objective. I write as a committed Christian and a committed evangelist. “Is evangelism relevant?” My answer is a resounding Yes! When people inquire as to the relevance of our Gospel, we must not be tricked into going on the defensive. We must immediately take the offensive, for our Lord Himself has promised that the gates of hell shall not withstand the assault of His Church. In this light, we need to rethink the question itself.
First, we need to define the subject of this question. “Is evangelism relevant?” really means “Is the evangel relevant?” For the genius of Christian evangelism is not in its method, but in its message. There are many “evangelistic” techniques. Communism has its brainwashing; Islam its proselytism; the commercial world its hidden persuaders. But the relevance of Christian evangelism really concerns not its means, but its content. The message of evangelism is simply — Jesus Christ. Christian evangelism does not depend on any given technique; but it does depend on one given message-that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. So, when we ask “Is evangelism relevant?” we are really asking, “Is Jesus Christ relevant?”
Second, we need to determine the thrust of this question, “Is evangelism relevant?” Relevant for what? And for whom?
I was asked recently to engage in a panel TV discussion on the topic “Is Religion the Answer?” My answer was blunt: No! And I answered “No” because the question itself involved a misunderstanding of our real situation before God.
Certainly Christ is the answer to ultimate questions! But our man-centered, earth-centered outlook tries to put God, as it were, “on the spot”! It is as if we present God with certain problems, grant Him a polite hearing, and then if He can supply reasonable solutions, we consider the possibility of taking His advice.
The whole idea is absurd! It is God who is asking the questions: from the beginning of Scripture, God addresses men and demands their response, calls to Adam “Where art thou?” and to Cain “Where is Abel, thy brother?” Is evangelism relevant? Again we ask, for what? Our purposes or God’s?
The charge that Jesus Christ is irrelevant is not new. Indeed, people made the same accusation during His lifetime. John, in his gospel, tells of a great crowd which followed Jesus because they had seen His miracles, and says that He took some loaves and fishes from a little boy and fed the multitude with this tiny lunch. Because the people did not understand this sign, they tried to seize Jesus and make Him king by force. But when Jesus realized their plan, He withdrew to the hills by Himself.
It is noteworthy that Jesus declined to be king on their terms. If He had wished to, He could have begun at that very moment a popular uprising against the Roman forces of occupation. But He refused to be “relevant.” Why? As William Barclay has commented, “They wished to use him for their own purposes and to mold him to their own dreams. They looked for a messiah who would be king and conqueror, who would set his foot upon the eagle’s neck and drive the Romans from Palestine, who would change Israel from a subject nation to a world power.”
“What a king he’d make,” thought the crowd. “Let’s harness his power to our plans and purposes.” That attitude still lingers. We want Christ’s gifts without His cross. We want to use Christ instead of allowing Him to use us. Our humanistic, man-centered age habitually thinks more of what we want than of what God wants. The real question is not “ls Jesus Christ relevant to us?” but “Are we relevant to the purposes of Christ?”
Third, we need to decide the perspective from which we can answer this question. Our personal commitments are involved. A southern historian once wrote what he called “an unbiased history of the Civil War from the southern point of view”! If a man does not believe in God, nothing we can say is going to convince him that evangelism matters. The man who is opposed to the Gospel because he realizes its disturbing claims on his life cannot be neutral. He has a built-in hostility. Only the Holy Spirit can make evangelism relevant to him.
Much of the talk of making Christianity relevant is 2,000 years old. Like the crowd who followed Jesus because they ate their fill of the loaves but were not interested in “the food which endures to eternal life,” the ungodly man assumes that nothing is relevant unless it gives first place to the material. The secularist says we no longer need God to fill the gaps in our knowledge; the Communist, that religion is an opiate; the sophisticate, that faith is fine for children but excess baggage for grown-ups.
But what man thinks is relevant and what really is relevant to God may be very different things. Repentance, regeneration, and conversion mean a change of attitude and an inversion of values, without which men will still follow the mob that acclaimed Jesus when He offered them bread for their stomachs, but when He talked about eternal life, murmured, “This fellow isn’t relevant anymore,” and went on looking for a more popular prophet.
It is only the man who has fed his hungry soul on Christ, the Bread of Life, who appreciates His true relevance and is able, like Peter, to answer Jesus’ poignant question “Will you also go away?” with a firm “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
Even the committed Christian has a problem in getting the whole picture. Eternity is the only adequate perspective from which to view the relevance of evangelism because there are eternal issues at stake. In evangelism we have to walk by faith and not by sight. We must evangelize not because we can see our success and prove our relevance, not because we can ferret out all the implications of our witness today for personal and social life tomorrow, but because our Lord Jesus Christ, Himself the great Master Strategist, commands us to do so, and we believe that He will not let His Word return void.
History is helpful here. Looking back, we can see how God has blessed His Word in a way that would have been obscure to the people of a past age. What would the critics have said if they had seen that Jewish carpenter preaching from a boat and hanging from a cross? Would they have guessed that He, and not the Roman legions, would be the “hinge of history”? Can you imagine how contemptuously they would have dismissed Paul’s preaching in Athens? Could they have guessed that the message he preached would smash paganism and turn the Parthenon itself into a Christian church for centuries to come?
Which event would they have picked as most relevant in the early years of the fifth century: Alaric’s sacking of the city of Rome in 410, or Augustine’s writing of The City of God in 413? Yet it was the bishop’s book, not the barbarian’s bands, that controlled the Middle Ages.
Suppose they had lived in eighteenth-century England while revolution was brewing across the Channel and threatening in their own land, and had heard John Wesley preaching in a field. They would have cried, “Come down to earth! Problems enough here. Forget heaven. Be relevant.” But Lecky has said that the Wesleyan revival saved England from the French Revolution.
If we are tempted to think our Gospel is too puny for this spinning age of space and new revolutions, then let us remember that Paul and Augustine and Wesley were relevant because they preached Christ — and Christ is always relevant …
How then are we to present the relevance of Christ for personal need? Certainly not as a Christ who is only a crutch for the maimed. Most assuredly not as a beggar Christ, seeking for man’s condescending patronage. We shall present Him as the Imperial Lord — “for we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord.” We shall present Him as Lord over death — “I am the resurrection and the life.” We shall present Him as Lord over sin and guilt — “I am come to give my life a ransom for many.” We shall proclaim Him as Lord over the meaningless — “I am the Way — follow me,” remembering that at the bottom it is not the fear that Christ is irrelevant that makes men turn from Him. Rather, it is the knowledge that He is too relevant, too disturbing, too demanding. And it is only when men see His total Lordship, His claim to all of life, that they will see His relevancy as their Savior.
The Christian life must begin with personal experience, but it must not end there. If Jesus Christ is Lord of all, then He is Lord of our relationships to others in society. It is a scandal when we as Christ’s disciples compartmentalize our lives, putting our personal piety in one segment and our social responsibility in another.
Think of John Campbell White, the Scottish chemical manufacturer, who was influenced by Moody to become an evangelical leader in missions, revival, Sabbath observance, and abstinence. What a scandal it was when Keir Hardie showed that White’s employees were paid only three to four pence an hour, worked twelve hours a day with no time off for meals, had for the most part not one day off a week, and worked in horrid filth! White’s defense was that he was so busy with his religious activities that he left the direction of his business to others!
White is not the norm. One need not search far through history to find the social impact of the Gospel — as in the abolition of slavery. “The two doctrines which contributed most to the abolition of slavery,” declared Benjamin Kidd in his Social Evolution, “were the doctrine of salvation and the doctrine of the equality of all men before the Deity.”
John Howard, the great champion of prison reform, was quick to recognize John Wesley’s influence on his life. “I was encouraged by him to go on vigorously with my own designs,” he wrote of a meeting with Wesley in Dublin. “I saw in him how much a single man might achieve by zeal and perseverance; and I thought, why may I not do as much in my way as Mr. Wesley has done in his, if I am only as persevering? And I determined that I would pursue my work with more alacrity than ever.”
Like our Lord, who healed the sick and fed the hungry, we must see men as whole men, not as disembodied souls to be prepackaged for heaven. Evangelicals today must be deeply concerned to stand in the great tradition of those who down through the centuries have given the lie to the charge that we are simply promoting “pie in the sky.” …
We know that Jesus Christ is relevant to this burdened, bleeding, broken world. The point is that Christ wants to use us to show the world that He is relevant, that He does matter to them, and that they do matter to Him. He has given to us this ministry of reconciliation.
In the year 1909, the Hon. Earl Balfour was lecturing at the University of Edinburgh on “The Moral Values Which Unite Nations.” He had mentioned diplomatic contacts, commerce, common knowledge, common friendships. At the end there was applause and a question period. Then a Japanese student rose and asked, “But, Mr. Balfour, what about Jesus Christ?”
There was dead silence. Everybody felt the irony of the question as a foreign student from a far-off non-Christian land inquired of one of the great diplomatic leaders of the greatest Christian nation of that day, “What about Jesus Christ?”
This is how we make evangelism relevant. We ask of a world wistfully searching for security, forgiveness, purpose, peace, and love, “What about Jesus Christ?”
Leighton Ford is an Associate Evangelist, Billy Graham Evangelistic Assn. This article is condensed from The Christian Persuader. Copyright © 1966 by Leighton F. S. Ford, used by permission Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
by Jonathan Powers | Sep 8, 2026 | Uncategorized
A Name for Being Alive, But…
By Stephen Rankin
A group of people in the church I serve is reading through the Bible in a year. In the New Testament section of the schedule we’re following, we’ve made it to Revelation. We recently read through those letters to the seven churches. For a long time, Laodicea held my attention, with its warning about lukewarmness. But lately, our Lord’s words to Sardis have been gripping my attention:
And to the angel of the church in Sardis write: “I know your works; you have a name of being alive, but you are dead…If you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I come to you” (Revelation 3:1,3).
“You have a reputation for being alive but are dead.”
Ouch. Would you want Jesus to say that about your church?
If a church is dead, how does it manage to look alive? We could answer several ways, but this essay is one article, not a book, so let me focus on one serious problem. It’s the old assumption of quantity over quality, or “more is always better.” If a church’s membership is rising, if worship attendance numbers are climbing, then God must be blessing, right? And bigger is always better, too, isn’t it? Bigger scope, bigger budget, bigger outreach (more people reached), bigger building, then the church must be alive, right?
Let’s contemplate this assumption about more is better to help us see how the Lord’s criticism of Sardis might apply to us today. Of course, the deeper problem is not quantity, not numbers per se, but the value we associate with the numbers. On certain topics like worship attendance, more just seems better. We take increases as a sign of God’s blessing, and if God is blessing, then we must be doing something right, right? We must be bearing fruit. And if so, we should do more of it, right?
As Coach Lee Corso of “College Game Day” is famous for saying, “Not so fast, my friend!” Let’s think about the problem in the assumption. Consider, for example, the importance of small groups in the life of a congregation. Small groups are understood to be the places of intimate fellowship, of going deep, of transparency and transformation in community. A church with an active small group component to their ministries seems to epitomize health. Indeed, most Christians recognize that real discipleship requires this sort of participation. And growing churches always have a healthy small group ministry.
Notice, though, the question that gets all of our attention. “How many small groups do you have?” Whatever the answer, more will always be taken as better. The brute fact of increasing the number of small groups is taken as surefire proof of church vitality. What might happen, however, if we asked, instead, “What is happening to people because of their small group experience?” “What changes do you see in your community life that seem connected to small groups?” The “how many” question shows up on church reports. The “what is happening” question does not. No church official has ever asked me to assess the quality of experience small groups members are having, no query as to whether my people are demonstrating a greater degree of Christlikeness. Such questions are too cumbersome and, by comparison to numbers, too “fuzzy.”
Given the real possibility that we can look alive and still be dead, we should ask the question that presses upon this situation, but which can feel too intimidating to ask. Whether our numbers are big or small, are we producing fruit, the “fruit that will last,” as Jesus put it in John 15:16? The sheer fact of a growing number of small groups or an increase in the number of participants is worth celebrating, but we should not stop with a fixation on the numbers. They might tell us something about church vitality, but not much.
I think what is happening in most small groups is a bigger problem than we realize, because, if we have them at all in our churches, the brute fact of their presence gives the impression of vitality. In my experience, however, small groups suffer too much from consumerist felt needs. They’re tailored to personal interest rather than aiming at the goal of maturity. They also easily drift from their original purpose. Again, what is lost, if it ever was present to begin with, is the vision of scriptural holiness. If our small groups are not stimulating growth in Christlikeness, then they are not producing the peaceful fruit of righteousness (Hebrews 12:11) normative for Christian discipleship. Unless Christlikeness is the goal of our small groups, then whatever other benefits we can derive from them, they fall woefully short of the goal of the Christian life. We should notice.
Maybe our failing to assess the faithfulness of our churches by using misleading measures puts us in the same category as the Sardis church. If so, how might we find Jesus’ words applying to us when he says, “I have not found your works perfect in the sight of my God” (v. 2). The Greek word for “perfect” carries the sense of being fulfilled or brought to completion. Had Sardis run out of steam, somehow? Had they suffered mission drift? Whatever the case was for Sardis, it’s clear that they had found faithfulness to the Lord too difficult and had begun to blunt the sharp edges of holiness. On the other hand, verse 4 says that some in the Sardis church had not “soiled their clothes.” Clothing (robes) in Revelation is a symbol for good works done in faith, that is, works done with the character of Christ and in line with the mission of Christ. Some remained faithful. We can learn from them, too.
As I said, as a believer in Christ and as a pastor of a church, reading about Sardis pulls me up short. Every time I read the words, “You have the name of being alive, but you are dead,” I feel convicted. Jesus’ admonition thus calls: “Remember, then, what you have received and heard; obey it, and repent.” Lord, let it be so in us.
Stephen Rankin is the Contributing Editor for Good News Magazine.
by Jonathan Powers | Sep 1, 2026 | Uncategorized
Sanctification and the Sacraments: Encountering the Transforming Presence of God
By Jonathan A. Powers
This article is the fourth in a four-week series on sanctification drawn from the webinar sponsored by the John Wesley Institute, exploring the biblical and Wesleyan vision of a life made holy by the power of God.
One of the great challenges facing the modern Church is that many Christians have come to think about holiness or sanctification primarily in moral terms. Sanctification becomes reduced to “being a good person,” avoiding certain sins, or trying harder to live the Christian life faithfully. While morality certainly matters, the biblical, theological, and historic vision of sanctification is much richer and deeper than mere rule-keeping.
At its heart, sanctification is about communion with God and transformation into the likeness of Jesus Christ. When we look at the word “holy” in Scripture, we find that it refers first and foremost to God Himself. God is holy because He is perfect in love and utterly good (which are two central characteristics of holiness). Holiness is therefore not simply one attribute of God among many. Rather, it is the beauty and fullness of God’s own life.
The astonishing message of Christianity is that God desires to share His holiness with us humans. What that means for us, then, is that the story of salvation is not merely about forgiveness; it is about transformation. God is not simply interested in pardoning sinners. He is committed to restoring humanity into the image of Christ. And he does this by continually pouring out His grace, drawing us to Himself. Sanctification, therefore, is the gracious work of the Holy Spirit in making us holy, reordering our loves, desires, habits, and lives toward God. It is learning to love what God loves and growing in the way that God loves. It is about becoming fully alive in Christ.
John Wesley understood this deeply. For Wesley, sanctification was not optional for the Christian life. Instead, it was the very goal of salvation. He believed God’s grace not only forgives us but transforms us. Wesley often described sanctification as being renewed in the image of God and filled with holy love. When Wesley spoke of “entire sanctification” or “Christian perfection,” he did not mean flawlessness or spiritual superiority. What he meant was that the entirely sanctified person was one with a heart fully surrendered to God and filled with love. Entire sanctification is the work of God cleansing the heart from inward sin and reordering our desires so that love for God and neighbor becomes the governing principle of life.
For Wesley, sanctification is always relational before it is moral. Holiness is not to be some kind of cold perfectionism, but it is to be perfect love. And this is where the sacraments become so important. The sacraments remind us that Christianity is not merely mental or spiritual affirmations but an embodied, lived out reality.
In a world that often separates the spiritual from the physical, the sacraments declare that God is deeply involved in both, and they remind us that He meets us in the ordinary realities of life. The God who became flesh in Jesus Christ continues to use created things to draw us into communion with Himself. He offers these means of grace through which He nourishes, strengthens, and sanctifies His people. He works through ordinary things like water, bread, wine to communicate extraordinary grace. He is in the business of making physical things holy. If he can do it to bread, wine, and water, then He can do it in us.
This sacramental vision begins with the Incarnation itself. Christianity proclaims that God did not save humanity apart from our world but entered into it. He took on flesh. He touched lepers, washed feet, broke bread, and suffered on a cross. The material world became the arena of redemption because Christ Himself entered it. This means sanctification is not an escape from embodied life. Rather, sanctification is the redemption and transformation of embodied life.
Christians often can imagine holiness as withdrawing from ordinary existence. But biblical sanctification touches every part of life: our speech, our relationships, our worship, our suffering, our work, our habits, and our communities. The sacraments train us to see all of life through the lens of grace.
Baptism, for example, is far more than a religious ceremony marking a public profession of faith or church membership. Baptism is the Church’s participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul writes in Romans 6 that through baptism we are buried with Christ so that we may also rise with Him into newness of life. Baptism therefore reveals something profound about sanctification: sanctification always begins with dying. Something within us must die. In particular, sin must be put to death. And to understand what this means, we first have to understand that sin is not merely bad behavior; it is disordered love. It is the heart curved inward upon itself. Therefore, sanctification requires the crucifixion of the false self so that the life of Christ may emerge within us.
In baptism, the Church proclaims that our identity is no longer rooted in our failures, fears, ambitions, addictions, politics, or achievements. Our identity is now rooted in Christ. This is why the early Church often connected baptism with new creation imagery. Christians emerged from the waters as people entering a new way of life. Baptism is not merely about a moment in the past. It becomes a continual pattern of dying and rising with Christ every day.
Martin Luther famously said that the Christian life is a daily return to baptism. Every act of repentance is a return to baptism. Every confession of sin is a return to baptism. Every surrender to grace is a return to baptism. Holiness is not perfectionism. Holiness is continual surrender.
And the Church must remember this because many Christians carry exhausting burdens of shame and spiritual anxiety. They believe holiness means never struggling, never failing, never wrestling with temptation. But the saints throughout Christian history remind us that holiness is not the absence of struggle. It is learning to continually turn toward Christ within the struggle. The sacraments continually reorient us toward grace.
This is especially true in the Eucharist (also known as Communion or the Lord’s Supper). Throughout Christian history, believers have understood the Eucharist as a central place of encounter with Christ. Christians have differed in how they explain Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, but the Church has consistently affirmed that something holy happens. In the Eucharist, we remember Christ, we proclaim Christ, we receive Christ, and we are united to one another through Christ. The Eucharist reveals that sanctification is fundamentally relational. Jesus did not say, “Think about this in remembrance of me.” He said, “Take, eat.” Christianity is not merely intellectual assent to theological ideas. It is participation in the very life of the living God.
For Wesley, the Lord’s Supper was one of the chief means of grace through which God sanctifies His people. Wesley thus encouraged frequent Communion because he believed Christ truly meets believers in the Eucharist and strengthens them in holy love.
One of the tragedies of modern life is that people are spiritually starving while being endlessly distracted. We consume information constantly yet remain deeply malnourished in soul. The Eucharist stands as a counter-formation to this fragmented existence.
As we regularly partake in the Eucharist, it forms us over time. Week after week, Christians gather to confess sin, hear Scripture, pray together, exchange peace, receive bread and wine, and be sent back into the world. Over time, these rhythms shape the heart. The sacraments work patiently.
Modern culture is obsessed with instant transformation and visible success. But God often works gradually, and through ordinary faithfulness over long periods of time, such as a prayer prayed daily, confession honestly spoken, bread received with humility, Scripture heard week after week, a community carrying one another through suffering. This slow work of grace is deeply countercultural.
The sacraments teach us to pay attention again. They train us to recognize that God is present in ordinary things. Water becomes the sign of new life. Bread becomes the sign of divine nourishment. Wine becomes the sign of joy and covenantal love.
Therefore, when we gather for corporate worship we do not simply come for inspiration or religious education. Rather, we come to worship understanding that we are participating in the very life of God. In worship, the Church learns to see reality truthfully again. We confess our sins because we need hope. We hear Scripture because we need truth. We pray because we must learn dependence. We receive Communion because we need grace.
Worship invites us into the ongoing process of sanctification because worship, when done faithfully, forms and orients our love. What we repeatedly give ourselves to eventually shapes us. Every culture has liturgies—patterns and practices that train desire. Social media has liturgies. Consumer culture has liturgies. Politics has liturgies. These practices shape what we love and long for. Christian worship exists to retrain our love toward God. It is work we do together as the church, because, importantly, sanctification is never merely individualistic.
One of the dangers in modern spirituality is reducing faith to “my personal relationship with God.” While personal faith matters deeply, Christianity is profoundly communal.
John Wesley captured this beautifully when he said, “There is no holiness but social holiness.” Wesley did not simply mean social activism. He meant that sanctification cannot happen in isolation. Love requires other people. It needs a community. The Church, therefore, is where we learn patience, forgiveness, humility, compassion, and reconciliation. Community exposes our selfishness, but it also becomes the place where grace transforms us.
The sacraments reinforce this truth. No one baptizes themselves. No one serves themselves Communion in isolation from the Body of Christ. The sacraments remind us that salvation incorporates us into a people. This communal vision of sanctification is especially important in a fragmented and lonely age. Many people today are spiritually hungry for belonging, rootedness, and authentic community.
Which is why the Church has something profound to offer here. When the Church lives faithfully, it becomes a visible sign of God’s kingdom: a community shaped not by outrage, competition, or tribalism, but by grace, truth, forgiveness, and love. And this leads us to one final point: sanctification is always missional.
We must remember that the purpose of entire sanctification is not spiritual self-improvement. Rather, the end of entire sanctification is love. As we are transformed by God’s presence, we become witnesses to His presence in the world. The movement of worship itself is always outward. We gather to encounter Christ, we are fed by Word and sacrament, and then we are sent into the world as ambassadors of Christ’s love. Sanctification should therefore make Christians more compassionate, not less. More patient. More merciful. More joyful. More attentive to suffering. More willing to serve.
True sanctification does not withdraw from the world but moves toward the suffering of the world with the love of Christ. This is ultimately the goal of sanctification: union with Christ and being transformed into His likeness. The sacraments continually draw us into this mystery. Through water, bread, wine, worship, prayer, and community, God forms ordinary people into saints. And perhaps this is the greatest reminder we need today: sanctification is not about becoming less human. It is about becoming fully human in Christ.
The God who sanctifies us continues to meet us through Word and sacrament. He continues to form us through the life of the Church. And every time we come to the waters of baptism, every time we gather at the table, every time we worship together, we are invited again into the beautiful mystery of dying and rising with Jesus Christ.
That is the gift offered to us in the sacraments, and that is the heart of sanctification.
Jonathan Powers is the Associate Professor of Worship Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, KY and the Editor-in-Chief for Good News magazine.
by Jonathan Powers | Aug 25, 2026 | Uncategorized
Made Perfect in Love: A Theological Understanding of Sanctification
By Jason Vickers
This article is the third in a four-week series on sanctification drawn from the webinar sponsored by the John Wesley Institute, exploring the biblical and Wesleyan vision of a life made holy by the power of God.
How ought we to think about sanctification theologically? Let us begin with an analysis of the word itself. The verb to sanctify simply means “to make holy.” On this definition, to sanctify is very close in meaning to the verb to consecrate. To sanctify or consecrate something is to designate it as holy and set it apart for God’s use. Having been set apart, holy things are understood to belong to God.Any number of things can be sanctified or consecrated in this sense, including physical spaces, texts, and objects. For example, we sometimes dedicate or consecrate sacred spaces such as tabernacles and sanctuaries. In doing so, we declare a space to be set apart from other spaces for God’s use, and we approach it accordingly.
Something similar happens with the Bible and the elements in Holy Communion. We set apart certain books to be read in worship, and we consecrate bread and wine. The books of the Bible can be read by atheists or historians in the same way they would read or study other books. For believers, however, the Bible cannot be approached that way. It is Holy Scripture. Similarly, atheists can approach the Communion bread and wine as simply bread and wine. For believers, they are more than that—hence Holy Communion or Holy Eucharist. The books of the Bible and the elements of Communion have been set apart for God to use as he sees fit. We approach them accordingly.
We also consecrate persons, setting them apart for God’s use. This happens in ordination and in election to the episcopacy. Thus, we have special services in which we ordain people to holy orders.
The same can be said for the whole people of God. In 2 Corinthians 6:17, we are called to come out from the world and to be separate—separated unto God. Time and again, the Scriptures declare that we belong to God.
Sanctification as consecration for God’s use is not something we do on a whim. We consecrate things or people because we believe God has commanded us to do so. God directs Israel to consecrate the Sabbath as well as all firstborn males, both human and animal, as belonging to God. In other words, consecration is not something that merely reflects our personal opinions or tastes. It is a matter of obedience to God.
There is, however, a problem with thinking of sanctification strictly in terms of consecration. We should think—and think often—about sanctification as consecration. But consecration cannot carry all the freight in response to the divine commands, “Be holy, for I am holy,” and “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Why is consecration insufficient for understanding and responding to the call to holiness? How should—and should not—we think about holiness in connection with the commands to be holy and perfect as God is holy and perfect? And what is the importance of consecrated things for answering the call to holiness when holiness is understood in this other, non-consecratory way?
More Than Consecration
First, consecration for God’s use is not sufficient because we are called to emulate God’s holiness. God’s holiness is not a matter of consecration. God does not need to set himself apart for his own use.
The exception to this occurs in John 17:19, where Jesus sanctifies himself. This text arguably should be read in a consecratory way. The event takes place on the eve of Jesus’ arrest and eventual crucifixion. Thus, his act of self-sanctification can be viewed as an act of consecration for a specific purpose or use—namely, becoming a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. Jesus himself tells us that he does this so that we might be sanctified.
But the sanctification that Jesus makes possible for us cannot be identical to Jesus’ self-sanctification. On the one hand, Jesus is not calling us to consecrate ourselves for use as a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. On the other hand, Jesus himself does not need to be otherwise sanctified. He is, after all, without sin.
What Does It Mean to Emulate God’s Holiness?
This brings us to another meaning of holiness in connection with entire sanctification and specifically with the call to be holy. To put the issue in the form of a question: Just what are we being called to when we are called to emulate God’s holiness? To answer this question, we need to explore what it means to say that God is holy.
We have already ruled out a consecratory view of holiness, and we must now rule out a few other dimensions of God’s holiness—namely, majesty and glory, and mystery or transcendence.
In Scripture and Christian worship, God’s holiness is closely associated with his majesty and glory. In the Song of the Sea in Exodus, God is said to be “majestic in holiness.” In Christian worship, Isaiah’s thrice-holy is followed by the formula, “Heaven and earth are full of your glory.” Yet the call to be holy is not a call to be majestic or glorious. God is not saying, “Be glorious and majestic, for I am glorious and majestic.”
The same holds for God’s transcendence and mysteriousness. Holiness is a way of denoting the absolute difference between God and creation. To say that God is holy is to say that he is altogether different from all creaturely reality. Again, God is not calling us to be transcendent or mysterious.
What, then, is left? Throughout both Scripture and the Christian theological tradition, God’s holiness is intimately related to God’s love, goodness, and moral purity. In the simplest terms, God is love and not hate. He is good and not evil. He is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. These are the aspects of God’s holiness that Scripture says are possible for us humans.
Thus, we are called to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves. We are called to purify ourselves and to abstain from every form of evil. We are called to love the good. We are called to embody goodness, mercy, and love in all our relationships. We are called from darkness to light.
The biblical call to holiness is a call to be made perfect in love. It is a call to be conformed to the image and likeness of Christ. It is a call to moral purity, not as a basis for our acceptance, but as the promised fulfillment of God’s purpose for us from the beginning.
We were made by love, and we were made for love. We were made good, and we were made to be good and to love goodness. Entire sanctification is nothing more and nothing less than the realization of God’s creative purposes for our lives.
The Gift and Work of God
How do we answer the call to holiness? God and God alone is the source of all holiness. He is also the sole source of all goodness and love.
Holiness, or entire sanctification, cannot be purchased with money. It cannot be earned like a college degree. It can only be received as a gift. The transformation of our minds and hearts is something God does for us and in us.
But God has not left us simply to sit around waiting for the day when, while we are otherwise minding our own business, he will instantly make us perfect in love. Rather, God has blessed us with powerful provisions by which the Holy Spirit works to sanctify us—most notably the provisions of Word and sacrament.
Through the proclamation of the Word, the Holy Spirit awakens us to the terrifying reality of our sinfulness and waywardness, as well as to the amazing reality of God’s free grace and forgiveness available in Christ.
In Baptism, the Holy Spirit joins us to Christ, knitting us together with other believers in him. In Holy Communion, the Holy Spirit deepens our love for God and confers all the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice, including all theological and spiritual virtues.
Through Word and sacrament, the Holy Spirit forms the mind of Christ in us, inflames our hearts with love for God and neighbor, and enables us to join with other believers in attaining the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.
Consecrated Means and Moral Transformation
The call to holiness, then, cannot be reduced to consecration for God’s use. Consecration is crucial, but the holiness to which we are being summoned has an unmistakable and irreducible moral dimension.
To make the point most forcefully, when Israel consecrates its livestock to God, the livestock do not undergo any metaphysical or moral change. The sheep do not glow.
And yet God works through consecrated means to bring about a deep and profound moral change in us. Through Word and sacrament, as well as other means of grace such as prayer and fasting, God confers saving and sanctifying grace upon our souls. In the words of the Collect for Purity, he cleanses the thoughts of our hearts, enabling us to perfectly love him and worthily magnify his holy name.
Speaking of magnifying God’s holy name, we should now recall those aspects of God’s holiness that we cannot emulate: majesty and glory, transcendence and mystery. These bear directly on human holiness.
To be made holy involves coming to know that we are not God—that, as creatures, we are made to worship God and enjoy him forever. In this life and in the life of the world to come, the entirely sanctified will behold the beauty of God’s holiness. In the words of Charles Wesley, we will be “lost in wonder, love, and praise.”
Jason Vickers is the Professor of Christian Theology and Holder of the Wesley Endowed Chair of Christian Theology at George W. Truett Theological Seminary in Waco, Texas.
