Full Salvation Now

And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:23

The phrase that runs through Julia Foote’s memoir more than any other is full salvation. It named what she had missed in her months of struggle, and what she preached for the rest of her life. When her father lay dying, she records, the charge he laid on her was to fear not to preach full salvation. Her last chapter is a plain answer to a plain question: how is sanctification to be obtained?

Two works of grace

She believed, with the Methodist holiness tradition that shaped her, that God does two distinct things for a believer. The first is conversion: the forgiveness of sins and the new birth, which she received at fifteen. The second is sanctification: the cleansing of the heart from the inward sin that remained after conversion, which she received some two years later. In Boston she testified to her sanctification as a second, distinct work of the Holy Ghost.

When her pastor came to see her about what he called her new religion, she read him the thirty-second Psalm and felt the glory of God fill her. “Glory to Jesus!” she cried. He had freed her from the guilt of sin, and sin no longer had dominion over her; and then came a sentence that sums up her whole message: “Christ makes me holy as well as happy.”

Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. PSALM 32:1

Then she read him the promise in Ezekiel. She quotes it in full in her memoir, and it may be the nearest thing to a text for her whole ministry.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes. EZEKIEL 36:26–27

She asked him to explain it. He told her that the verses were all very well, but that she was too young to dictate to her elders, and that many in the church were dissatisfied with the way she was talking. He could not deny the text, so he changed the subject to her age.

The texts she was taught

The old woman who led her into the experience did so, she says, by reading and explaining many passages of Scripture and carefully marking them in her Bible. Julia lists some of them: the seventeenth chapter of John, two verses from First Thessalonians, a passage from First Corinthians, and the second chapter of Hebrews.

For this is the will of God, even your sanctification. 1 THESSALONIANS 4:3

For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren. HEBREWS 2:11

All this, she says, had been a sealed book to her until then. The old saint’s method was sensible: she did not ask the girl to have an experience, but took her to the promises of Scripture and left them marked. Two days later, while Julia was waiting on the Lord, her large desire, as she puts it, was granted through faith in her precious Saviour. She had not climbed up to it. She had received it.

By faith, and now

The last chapter of her book is the closest thing she wrote to a doctrinal statement, and it is striking how short and simple it is. How is sanctification to be obtained? Her answer: “Faith is the only condition of sanctification.” She did not mean a thin assent. She meant a faith that dies to the world and every form of sin, that gives up the sin of the heart, and that believes God is able to do what He has promised and will do it now.

That word now is everywhere in her writing. She could not bear the idea that holiness was reserved for the aged and dying. The old woman had told her that it was for the young believer as well as the old, and she spent her life telling others the same. So her book ends not with an argument but with an invitation: “Why not yield, believe, and be sanctified now — now, while reading?”

Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation. 2 CORINTHIANS 6:2

Just before that invitation she prints a hymn which catches, better than any argument, the experience she was trying to rescue people from. It describes a believer tossed to and fro: sometimes in the valley and sometimes on eagle’s wings, sometimes finding a blessing in the Bible and sometimes finding it a sealed book, sometimes praying with joy and sometimes finding it almost a task. And it asks why. Its answer is that the blood of Jesus has not yet washed the heart white as snow. She wanted such readers to know it need not be the last word.

How to hold her teaching

Here the reader must be careful, and fair. Julia Foote’s doctrine of sanctification as a second, instantaneous work of grace, in which the root of sin is destroyed, is not shared by most Christians, and she knew it. Many who love holiness as much as she did believe that sanctification begins at the new birth and goes on by degrees until glory, and that Scripture’s commands to put off the old man and put on the new describe a daily work rather than a single crisis. They would point to Paul, who wrote that he had not yet attained, and to John’s warning that if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves.

Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus. PHILIPPIANS 3:12

She went further than some in her own tradition when she wrote that in the sanctified, sin does not exist. That claim has led sincere people either into despair or into calling their sins by softer names. But the heart of what she taught can be held by Christians on either side of the debate. God wills our sanctification. It is His work, received by faith and not achieved by striving. He means to do far more in us than we expect, and He means to begin now. Whether He does it in a moment or over a lifetime, a Christian who is not seeking it has missed the point of being saved.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read Ezekiel 36:25–27 aloud, slowly, as a promise addressed to you. Which part of it do you most need God to do?

2. Look up the passages the old saint marked in Julia’s Bible (John 17, 1 Thessalonians 4:3 and 5:23, Hebrews 2:11) and mark them in yours.

3. Ask whether you have treated holiness as something for later — for the old, the dying, the specially devout. Confess it, and ask for it now.

4. If you recognise yourself in the hymn of the believer tossed to and fro, tell God so plainly, and ask Him to settle you.

5. Whatever your view of a second blessing, name one concrete way in which you will yield yourself to God today, and do it.

A PRAYER

Holy Father, You have said that this is Your will, even my sanctification. I believe it, and I ask You to do it.

I am tired of being tossed to and fro. Give me a new heart, and put Your Spirit within me, and cause me to walk in Your ways.

I give up the sin of my heart. I do not ask for later. I ask for now.

Faithful is He that calleth me, who also will do it. Amen.