In this sermon, the preacher focuses on Galatians 5:17, which states that the flesh and the spirit are in constant conflict with each other. The preacher acknowledges the difficulty in understanding and interpreting this passage, attributing it to the linguistic and cultural differences between the original Greek text and modern translations. The sermon also touches on the concept of power, particularly in relation to living for Christ and being a witness for Him. The preacher briefly mentions the historical context of America in the 19th century, highlighting the concern among evangelicals regarding the issue of power. Additionally, the sermon briefly mentions the personal experience of Phoebe Palmer, who faced the tragic death of her child but found solace and strength through the Holy Spirit.

And I'm going to have some critical remarks about what we looked at last week, and so on. But very important that in criticizing the holiness movement, we be those who are committed ourselves to holiness. Easy to be able to say, well, they were wrong on this or that, but are we equally committed to the pursuit of holiness as they were? Romans 6 picks up the theme of the importance that if you have confessed Christ in the waters of baptism, if you have professed to faith in Christ, you are committed to living a holy life. What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not. How shall we who die to sin live any longer in it? Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized in Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore, we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead for the glory of the Father, even so He also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should be no longer slaves of sin, for he who has died has been freed from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, does not, or rather dies no more. Death no longer is dominion over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all, but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Likewise, you also reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts. Do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law, but under grace. What then? Shall we sin, because we are not under law, but under grace? Certainly not. Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one slave whom you obey, whether sin leading to death or obedience leading to righteousness. But God be thanked that though you were the slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine to which you were delivered. Now that being set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. But just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness and of lawlessness, leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness or holiness. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now having been set free from sin, and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness and the end everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. That's a very dense text, but it basically is arguing that those who have put their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ have been freed from the dominion of sin. Obviously, as Paul will go on in the next chapter, chapter 7, to indicate that sin is still something that which they struggle with. However, the dominion of bondage and slavery that sin brings into human life has been broken for the Christian, irrevocably broken. And their public confession in the waters of baptism, which is the normal New Testament way in which we profess faith in Christ, is illustrative of that. That they died with sin, going down into the waters of baptism of our Lord Jesus, and being raised to newness of life. And therefore, Paul's argument is, on the basis of who you are, you are now one in whom the dominion of sin has been broken. Live that way. The argument is not what you sometimes might think. Well, if we live this way, then we'll become holy. No, no, you are holy. God has made you holy. He's broken the dominion of sin in your life. Therefore, be who you are. Live that way. And it's a very dense argument, but it's a very powerful reminder to us that as we think about this whole area of holiness, we are called to live holy lives. And I will have some critical remarks about the holiness movement in the 19th century, but always coming back to me is, am I as committed to a holy life as they were? Granted, they've got certain areas that would be concerned from a biblical standpoint, but is I committed to holiness as the Methodists were in the 19th century? Now, just very, very quickly, to sum up what we were looking at last week, we got into looking at the way in which John Wesley's teaching, which was that there are two distinct moments in the Christian life. There is the moment of conversion, and then Wesley believed there is a second distinct work of grace that takes place. So distinct that he could talk about it as a second blessing, or so distinct that he could describe it as Christian perfection. His argument on that level, that this second experience, which a Christian would experience after a lifetime of pursuing God, is what he would argue, 15, 20, 30 years of pursuing God, then God would meet you in a way in which He took away from you, or at least remove for as long as you held on to it, the possibility of sinning in thought, word, or deed. Now, he redefined the word sin to kind of accommodate that, but nonetheless, there was this second distinct experience. You need to press on to, that you experience what 1 John says, that he who is born again does not sin, or you experience what the Sermon on the Mount says, in terms of being blessed of the pure in heart, so they shall see God. Purity of heart was a possibility that Wesley held out as he preached. He preached the new birth, but he also preached this other experience called entire sanctification. Wesley himself never claimed to have experienced it. I think that's because he knew himself all too well. But he said, as I preach it, people should come up and tell me. It must be biblical, because God gives it as I preach it. It got him into a huge controversy in his life. His own brother, eventually, parted company with all this, at least quietly, he didn't make it public. John kept him quiet. John wrote him a letter and said, look, you got to hang with me on this one. If you disagree publicly, we'll lose the whole movement. The Methodist movement, which is very much... John was kind of coming out of the Anglican church. Methodism was hierarchical, and John was the kingpin. And a good example, fascinating sort of way John ran the movement, in this late 1740s, he came down to Bristol. There were 900 Methodists in Bristol. Methodism was a movement all through the 18th century within Anglicanism. And the Methodists would be at the parish church on the Sunday morning, and then the Sunday evening, they'd go to their own Methodist meeting. John came down to Bristol, and he was presented with the ledger of the members, about 900. As he went through with what were known as the Methodist stewards, they would say to him, well, we haven't seen so-and-so for a month and a half, and so on. That weekend, he kicked out half the Methodists out of the movement in Bristol. 450 says they're out. And a very tight ship. But by the end of the... He began in 1738, when he was converted, with a handful. By the time of his death, you're looking at around 120,000 committed Methodists in about 60 years, 50 years. It's a remarkable movement, and very tight in terms of the commitment to gathering together, to holiness, and so on. Anyway, so John taught this idea of a second blessing. He had one of his lieutenants, a man named John Fletcher, and the man who he wanted to take over the movement when he died, but Fletcher died before him. A man who was a remarkably holy individual. He said, what John calls the second blessing is actually the baptism of the Holy Spirit. And the evidence of it is this remarkable love for others and for God. John didn't agree with him in terms of terminology, but that terminology becomes the dominant way the 19th century Methodists talk about this second experience. It is the baptism of the Spirit. Thus, if you went to a Methodist meeting in the early 1800s, here in Ontario, for instance, over in Ancaster, 1806, on a farmer's land in Ancaster was held the first camp meeting in Ontario. Camp meetings become one of the major vehicles between 1800 and 1850 for the spread of Methodism. A camp meeting was held during the late spring, summer, and very early autumn, where on the Friday afternoon you'd all trundle over in your wagons or your horses to the assigned spot and you'd spend the whole weekend there until Monday morning. And you'd have about five to six preachers. And you'd be preaching all day, all day Saturday, all day Sunday, ending in what was known as the Methodist love feast, which was the Lord's table, but actually a meal as well. And it was a way of, you'd invite your neighbours who are not Christians. And looking at it from our point of view, there was a psychological element there. They're taken out of their normal environment and they're put into this environment of kind of round-the-clock praying and preaching. And the Methodists were not hesitant to bring to bear all of their human resources on bringing somebody to conversion. So, if a person was identified as not being a believer, what might happen, unbeliever, what might happen during a camp meeting was you wonder if anybody would go to this knowing this, but they did. Believers would gather around them impromptu and they'd begin to pray for the person to be converted. They might be there for an hour, an hour and a half. And undoubtedly some people made emotional decisions that were manipulated, but undoubtedly others were converted despite the Method. And in Ontario, the big place where they used to meet was over in, it's a place called Hay Bay. As you go towards Kingston, there's a little portion of land, I forget the name of the land, I was going to say Peelee, but it's not Peelee, that's over near Amherstburg and that way, but it's a little portion of land just out into Lake Ontario. And there's a meeting house there called the Hay Bay Meeting House. And it still exists. The Methodists put it up around 1812, 1816. And if you go there, that was a place of huge Methodist camp meetings and they sometimes get 2,000 to 3,000. That is awesome when you think of the population of Ontario being probably at the time maybe 30,000, 40,000 people. And during the 19th century, one in every three Ontarians was a Methodist. And a very much crucial part of Methodism is this second experience. Yeah, their roots go back to that. Whether or not Methodism today in the States is in a complete shambles. The one denomination, I'll mention this at the end, the one denomination that retains Wesley's teaching of the Church of the Nazarene. So I don't know whether the camp meetings are the same sort of thing, but their roots would go back to this period. They were very popular in the States. For instance, the President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, after the American Civil War when he became the President, he regularly went to these camp meetings. He wasn't a Methodist, but he went. And so they did attract significant numbers of people during the 19th century. The key person who promotes Wesley's doctrine in the 19th century is Phoebe Palmer. She was born in 1807. Her father had been converted under Wesley in 1785. He was 15 years of age, had gone out to hear Wesley preach one morning on you must be born again, and God saved him that day. He eventually moved to the United States, had a number of children, one of whom, Sarah, who became Sarah Lankford by marriage, started in the 1820s a meeting, 1830s, a meeting called the Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness. And it was mostly attended initially by ladies. And then, as we looked at last week, Phoebe Palmer had that experience where her daughter died tragically in a fire in the house, and she felt that God telling her in that to commit herself completely wholly to God. And that actually is biblical in Romans 12.1, that we are to commit ourselves completely to God, that he might do with us as he pleases. And all that we have and own is his, and our plans and ambitions are his. As she does that, she has an experience, an overwhelming experience of peace and love. And one of the things I don't want to deny is that a number of these Methodists did have, I think, genuine encounters with God. My problem is how they interpret them, the framework in which they interpret that experience, and then the way that they make that experience a kind of obligation for everybody to go through. But there's no doubt, when you read Phoebe Palmer's diary about what God did for her, the peace he gave to her, just the horror of the freakishness of the accident, the nurse was turning down the lamp. Instead of turning it down, she opened it, and the lamp burst into flame, and she threw it across the room and it landed in the baby's crib. And Eliza, the little baby, died of burns within a few hours. This is the third death of a child that Phoebe Palmer had. There's no doubt, as you read her diary and her account of what God did for her, that he did meet her powerfully. And communicated to her by the Spirit of God's love for her, and a peace, and an ability to live with that, and to move on from that, and not to question the goodness of God. But the question is that, for Phoebe Palmer, she believed that what happened to her is the entire sanctification that John Wesley talked about. She'll talk about an entire consecration. And she begins to promote this. The Methodists did allow, well, they didn't allow women preachers. She and her husband used to go around to camp meetings, and Walter, her husband, who wasn't a great speaker at all, he was a medical doctor, he'd come on first, and he'd be at the pulpit. And he'd read a portion of Scripture, and then say a few words, maybe five, ten minutes, he would be an introductory act. And then Phoebe would come on, she wouldn't stand behind the pulpit, she'd stand exactly here in relation to the pulpit. And what she was doing was exhorting. She wasn't preaching, she was exhorting. Later, she will argue for the fact that in 1 Corinthians 11, it talks about women prophesying within the congregation. At Corinth, and she'll say, what I'm doing is prophesying. I'm not preaching, I'm prophesying. Like it or not, she was preaching. There is an biblical element in that, I would argue, on a violation of 1 Timothy 2, 11 to 12, but be that as it may. Anyway, Phoebe's theology is something I want to look at, and I want to do a little bit of an evaluation. And what I'm trying to do here is get you to think about this whole area of holiness and sanctification. First of all, Phoebe followed John Fletcher, and not John Wesley, but John Fletcher, in arguing that this experience was the baptism of the Spirit. It's what happened in Acts 2. Acts 2, then, she would argue that the disciples are converted already. If you ask her for proof, well, John 20, 22, did not Jesus grieve on them and receive the Holy Spirit? They were already converted. They then had a second experience, which all of us need to have, she would argue. She used the language of Pentecost, she actually would talk about it, this is a Pentecostal experience. One of the things we have to remember is that before, in 1906, when the Pentecostal movement began, evangelicals used that term broadly, and we've lost the use of that term. And if I told you, without qualifying, if I said to you, I'm in favor of Pentecostal experiences, well, you've immediately, the guy's lost it. He's gone off and joined those people who think in speaking in tongues, and all that sort of stuff. But before, in 1906, you can find Baptists, like Charles Spurgeon, preaching, we need a Pentecost again. What he means by that is we need the outpouring of the Spirit and revival, that's all he means by it. But we've lost that language because of the Pentecostal movement. So, she could argue that we needed, she would use the language of Pentecost and Pentecostal experience. There was this second word. She stopped using the language of Christian perfection because that caused so much controversy in the 19th century. And rightly so. I mean, to claim, I've experienced Christian perfection. And to mean more than simply, I'm perfect in Christ, as we all are if we are in the Lord Jesus. We are clothed with His perfect righteousness. But she meant more than that, I've experienced it. No longer sin in thought, word, or deed. That's the problem to that. So, obviously, she switches, she uses John Fletcher's language of Pentecost. That's important because all of the early Pentecostal preachers come out of the holiness movement. They come out of the movement in which they were used to using this language. Secondly, she argued that the main thing that this gives us, she shifts again from Wesley. For Wesley, this is an experience that gives us holiness. Phoebe, yes, but the main thing it gives us is power. Power to live for Christ. Similar, but not exactly the same. Power to live for Christ. Power to be a witness for Christ. And power is a big issue that evangelicals in the 19th century, the mid-19th century, when Phoebe is preaching this, are very concerned about. And I very quickly, last week, went through three things as to why this is so. Number one, in America, America up until the 1840s was a land in which there were three basic ethnic groups. There were the first people who were there, the Indians. There were, secondly, the African-Americans who had been brought over during the 19th century as slaves and were still, during this period up until 1861, the Civil War began, still enslaved. And then there's the white, or all of them are Europeans, Northern Europeans. You have really no Jews. I think the first Jewish settlement in New York City probably does go back into the 1700s, but the Jewish people are very sparsely represented in America. Until the middle of the 19th century. And they're all Northern Europeans. Britain, being a major constituent, Germany, Holland, Scandinavia. They're all people who share a Protestant worldview. Now, they thought of themselves sometimes as living in a very multicultural environment. When Esther Edward Burr, Esther Edward's, Jonathan Esther's daughter, went to live in New Jersey, she'd been used to living among people, all of whom came from Britain. Well, suddenly she met people whose origin was French Protestants, French Huguenots, and Dutch and German Protestants. And man, she thought it was multicultural. And it was, to some extent. But from our perspective, it's hardly multicultural at all, because everybody looks pretty similar, you know. They're all white, and they share a common Protestant background. But in the 1840s, there began to come into America large numbers of other types of Europeans. The Irish, at first. Potato famine in Ireland ravaged the country. Millions died. It was a horrific, absolutely horrific period. Millions died. And thousands, tens of thousands, decided, we're not going to wait here and die. We'll go to the United States. And in fact, during the 19th century, there was a dance called America. That immigrants would dance on the dock, as they were getting ready to board the ship. It's hard for us to imagine, you know, in our world, in which you can fly over there in six or seven hours. These people are leaving forever. They'd come over in whole communities. Not just individual families, whole communities would get up and leave. The Scottish, this also impacted Scotland as well, and the Scottish Inner Hebrides. If you go through little islands like Mull today, they're completely deserted. But in the 19th century, there were thriving communities there. But because of the potato famine coming in, whole communities just got up, left everything, and came across to all of the wonders of the New World. All the wealth, and the riches, and the land, and so on. And it didn't always work out that way. A lot of the Irish came initially into places like New York, and Boston. That's why Boston today used to be the heartland of Puritanism. It's become a heartland of, at least broadly speaking, Irish Roman Catholicism. And as all these people started to come in, well, once the Irish started coming, then others started coming. Eastern Europeans with their Eastern Orthodoxy, and Southern Europeans with their Roman Catholicism, especially the Italians. And it just deeply disturbed the Protestants, all these Catholics coming into the country. We're losing control of our culture. And then you've got, at the same time, T.B. Palmer preaching this message of, this second blessing gives power. Power to live for Christ. Power to be a witness for Christ. And what the Evangelicals in America realized, we need to witness these people. If they come in in floods and so on, and we don't win them to Christ, they'll submerge us. So that's a big concern. Second major concern is the emergence of Darwinism. 1859, Darwin writes Origin of Species. Then in the 1870s, The Ascent of Man. And this completely... Darwin, whatever he started as, he would have started as a professing member of the Church of England. He ended, really, as agnostic. There are stories that went around all through the 19th century. Then his last days, he became a Christian. They're completely false. He died the way that those books emphasize. Those books were devastating to many in America. They overturned. There was a direct attack on Genesis, at least that's the way many perceived it. And that also was a great concern for Evangelicals. We're losing control of our intellectual dominance. In American culture. The third thing that was very devastating, and it's hard to imagine this period, is the American Civil War. 1861, 1865. And whatever the causes of the war, and certainly a central cause was the issue of slavery. And the abolitionists in the North, many of whom were fired up by Evangelical theology, and rightly so, but the means they chose led the nation down a war. John Brown, of the John Brown's body fame, regularly read a number of the 18th century Calvinists. Jonathan Edwards was one of his favorite authors. And he felt Edwards' theology was pushing towards, we need to liberate the slaves. And once they had tried political means and it didn't come, finally there was a raid on Harpers Ferry, and war is ignited between the South and the North. And what was so disturbing about that is Christians killing each other on the battlefield. And the carnage, if you know anything about the Civil War, it's kind of a roll up, or a kind of a first play through of the First World War. Where you have often men in fortified areas and wave at the wave of attackers. Like at Fredericksburg, where the Confederates were behind a row of ramparts, and within the space of 15, 20 minutes, the Union General committed about 20,000 men to attack that. He lost 12,000. He could see what was going on, just wave at the wave getting mowed down. Very hard for us to imagine. There's a bravery there that one wonders if is the sort of thing that men would sustain today. Standing there, waiting until a line faced you, walked up and faced you, and then he started blasting away at each other. But what's deeply disturbing from the Christian point of view is these were Christians. General Lee, the remarkable Southern general, and Stonewall Jackson. These were godly men. Neither of them, interestingly enough, believed in slavery. What they didn't believe in was the right of the federal government to impose on the state what they believed was right. And they argued they were fighting for states' rights. But then on the other side, you've got a man like Joshua Chamberlain, who was professor of theology at Bedouin College in Maine, and signed up, he'd never fought in his life, and became a general. And just the idea of Christians killing Christians. C.S. Lewis, I don't know if you've read this, and I think it's in Near Christianity, Lewis says, you know, it's quite possible in the Second World War, which was raging at the time, that a Christian in the German army and a Christian in the British army could kill each other on battlefield and then find themselves in heaven and laugh about it. I don't think that's a laughing matter. I think that's appalling, personally. I'm not arguing here for a pacifist position at all, but for Americans, they thought they had a Christian culture. How did they end up in a war in which they lost more people percentage-wise than any other war in American history? How did that happen? We've got a Christian nation. And then Phoebe Palmer, then, is preaching this message. And after the war, her camp meetings, in terms of numbers, sometimes camp meetings would have 20,000 would go out to a camp meeting. And people were ready to hear, we've lost something, we need something more. And Phoebe had the answer. And then, so, Phoebe also argued that when God did this, sanctification was instantaneous, and it often happened at the beginning of the Christian life. For John Wesley, if John Wesley, if somebody came to him and said, look, I've just been converted, and I've just experienced the second blessing, he'd laugh it off. He'd say, there's no way. It doesn't happen that way. You've got to be striving to live a holy life. Maybe 15, 20 years, God will give you this second experience. Phoebe said, no, you can be converted, and the next moment, you've got this entire sanctification where you're no longer sinning in thought, word, or deed. And there's a cheapening there. If you think about that. So, she'd call people forward. You need to come forward to be converted. You need to be saved. Please come forward. And when people would come forward as they're prayed for, and some would profess faith in Christ, you now need to go on. You need to have the second blessing. And they'd have a second blessing there. For Phoebe, it was not so much an experience. It was, if you gave yourself entirely to Christ, that was it. That was the second blessing. And so, there's a number of areas of difference with John Wesley. She also argued that this was the way to Christian unity. Why do we have all these denominations? Baptists, and Methodists, and Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, and Moravians. If you have this experience, it breaks down the barriers between denominations. This is the way in which we can come into the unity in which Jesus prayed in John 17. At one point, she also argued, if you've not had this experience, I fear you may not be a Christian. And sometimes she preached it like, you either have to enter our sanctification, or hell. Now, one final point is that she also advocated preaching by women. And she wrote a book in 1859 called The Promise of the Father, in which she said this was a neglected aspect of Christian teaching, and the church had failed to realize that in 1 Corinthians 11, the door was open for Christian women to prophesy. Not preach, but prophesy. But basically, it turned out to be the same. Now, how do we evaluate all this? You've been sitting there, I think. How would you evaluate it? Biblically. She had texts. I didn't go through all the texts she could have used, but she had texts. But how would you evaluate this biblically? I think it's worth saying there's passages. Now, you're thinking of passages like the ones in Acts? Acts 2 and then Acts 10. Oh, okay. Well, I mean, John Wesley, of all people, I mean, he used to read his Greek New Testament regularly. He didn't read the English Bible. He just read the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament. He should have known that in those passages in John, and if you want to turn to it, it's 1 John 3, verse 9. Actually, begin at verse 7. Little children, let no one deceive you. He who practices righteousness is righteous, just as he is righteous. He who sins is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning. For this purpose, the Son of God has manifested. He might destroy the works of the devil. Whoever has been born of God does not sin. Most people are dealing with the King James Version, and especially when you get into the holiness movement in the United States, you're dealing with a frontier mentality. These people aren't reading the Greek and Hebrew. They're not interested in a learned ministry at all, but they're reliant completely upon the King James Version translation, and what I read was the New King James, and I'm assuming the KJV is pretty similar. The underlying Greek emphasizes the idea that he who is born of God does not continue in sin. It's what's at the present tense, so it's got to do with the whole ongoing life and experience. John should have known that, but he takes this as a very clear text. He takes it literally. It's obviously what I read is what it exactly means, and that becomes part of the thinking of Methodists, that this text clearly indicates that there's a possibility of coming to a point where you no longer sin. But actually, from another perspective, this is too broad for John, because it says everyone who's born of God does not sin. And there's no need for a second blessing. This text actually doesn't support a second blessing. Well, they would argue it's... I mean, if you press Wesley, he would argue it's a matter of grace. But he is building... I mean, even the Puritans would recognize that a Christian is now alive in a way that he or she was not before conversion. Before conversion, we can do nothing to bring us to the point of conversion. Absolutely nothing. Though we are responsible to believe. After conversion, you're now alive. And that's why Paul can say, work out your salvation. And so Wesley wouldn't... Even those who disagree to Wesley would recognize that after conversion, we can still do something towards... We're now alive. Our minds are alive. Our affections are alive, and so on. And so it needn't fall back into a kind of a works righteousness. Yeah, Romans 7, 14 to 25. We don't have the time to read it, but we want to read it later. What's that describing? It's actually summed up in one little verse in Galatians 5. If you turn to Galatians, Paul says in this one verse, all that he says in one respect in Romans 7, 14. In Galatians 5 and verse 17. The flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh. And these are contrary to one another. So you do not do the things that you wish. The mark of the new birth is changed affections. But the critical thing that happens in the new birth is the heart is alive now in a way it wasn't before. You now love the Lord Jesus Christ. And you love his words, and you love his people. And you do love holiness. And the great dismay of Christians is that sometimes we walk in paths of sin, or allow sin to be in our minds and hearts and so on. But deep down, that's not what we love. And we do that which we do not want to do, and Paul expresses it here. In other words, I think the main problem with Phoebe Palmer's theology, and the whole movement's theology, is it has not weighed the gravity of sin. It has the idea that you can pull sin out of your life like a rotten tooth. But it's not so easily extricated in terms of, what are you thinking there? Which assumes that Christians will from time to time fall into sin. But we have an advocate, namely the Lord Jesus. Yeah, I mean, John's treatment of this text is very inadequate. I'm not sure how Phoebe Palmer deals with it. John Wesley says, well, this is all true, but that doesn't mean I have to sin. If it's sin, you know, he himself is a propitiation for our sins. Well, yeah, he is, but that doesn't mean I have to sin. And so John would sometimes say when he was arguing against George Whitefield, who was the standard view that we would hold, he'd say, I'm the holiest of Georgians for sin. Kind of inflaming the discussion. But again, I think it comes back to the point you're making, is that they have a way to grab it. Sin is not so easily gotten rid of, you know. Those deeper sins, like pride, are so difficult to find. That sin that creeps in the back door and exalts you because of your walk with God. Or the man who, you know, he's proud of his humility. Sin is, you walk in a Christian way for any length of time, it's insidious. There's constant vigil that is demanded of us, constant warfare. So I think that's the major problem. I don't have problems with some of these people having an experience. What did they experience? They didn't experience the second blessing, but they did experience the love of God. From time to time he showers us, he surprises us. I forget the line from William Cooper, it's him, about the surprise of the saint sometimes as he's reading the words. Sometimes, you know, in the most unlikeliest of places, you suddenly are overwhelmed with realizing who the Lord is and what he has done for you. He comes, not always at times, we hope in times of worship, but often you're walking along a road and suddenly your thoughts, and it overwhelms you. This is real, this is solid. He's died for my sins and I'm forgiven. I have a place in glory. And sometimes those experiences are very powerful and very overwhelming. I think Phoebe Winslow identified as one distinct second experience, kind of Methodist camp meeting model, but the only ones who experienced it. Now, it's not surprising, I'm going to move very quickly. It's not surprising there was a reaction to this in Methodist circles. There began to be some Methodists who began to argue, no, no, no, Phoebe's wrong. And in the 1880s, 1890s, there was a major theological controversy within the Methodist ranks and within the holiness movement, and certain groups started to preach, we need to come out of Methodism, Methodist church. It is becoming worldly. And in the 1880s, a number of groups come out. You'll recognize some of these names. In 1887, A.B. Simpson, who was actually a Canadian, went to school at Knox College in Toronto, was ministering down in New York City, very much part of the holiness movement. He came out and said, the Methodist movement, God is leaving it. And he founded in 1887, the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Phineas Bresley in 1895 was saying, we need to come out of Methodism. Methodism has become worldly. And he founded the Church of the Nazarene in LA. And the Nazarenes are the only ones I think who still hold Wesley's doctrine. I still remember being at a wedding beside a Nazarene, and I was starting to study Wesleyan. I had no idea what the Nazarenes believed, so I started telling them. I said, right line, you believe what John Wesley did. And he was strangely silent. And he, after I'd gone, he let me go on and hang myself for a while. And they looked at me, and he said, I'm not going to do this. The Pilgrim Holiness Church in 1897. One of the first books I ever read was by a man named Martin Knapp on spiritual guidance. Actually, these tattered, kind of falling apart, late 19th century books. I didn't know Martin Knapp was a man of faith. But the big group of Salvation Army come out of this period. They come out of British Methodism. But the big group that come out are the Pentecostals. Very quickly, between Methodism, the Holiest Movement, and Pentecostalism, there is one little group that is very important. And it was founded in 1895 by a man named Benjamin Irwin, the fire-baptized Holiness Church. And Benjamin Irwin claimed, there are, yes, two experiences, but there is a third you have to have. You have to have conversion. You have to have entire sanctification, Christian perfection. And then God gives you the baptism of fire. And he actually had it. He had some sort of experience where he was in a room and he said, my fingertips were aflame. And the whole room, I was like swimming in a lake of fire. And he preached this. And all of the two main early Pentecostal leaders, William Seymour, African-American Methodist Holiness preacher, and Charles Parham, who is a Baptist who went into the Holiness Movement, both of them had the three experiences. In early Pentecostalism, you have to have three experiences. You have to have conversion, entire sanctification, and then a baptism of fire. What is the evidence of the baptism of fire? Well, you start to read through the New Testament. It's not surprising, men like Benjamin Irwin. Charles Parham actually listened to Benjamin Irwin. Benjamin Irwin went on to kind of discredit himself. He argued that there's actually five or six more. There's Oxidite, Lidite, Selenite, and I forget what the other one was. There was another one. Also, there are certain sins that you should be very aware of. One of them I'm committing right now, which is I'm wearing a necktie. That is a major—Irwin would—that is a major sign of worldly—I like that kind of approach. I love neckties, so I—anyway, it's a major—I was going to say major, a minor doesn't even rank to be a minor. I don't know where you get that from the Scriptures. So, it's not surprising that Benjamin Irwin kind of went off into silliness, but he had laid the foundation that there is a third experience. It is the baptism of fire, and it's evident. All of the early Pentecostals believed in three experiences. When we look at early Pentecostalism— Now, I'm going to stop here, and if you want, we can take questions next week, if you can mull them over. Next week, I'm going to comment the same issue of holiness from a very different angle. I'm going to look at it from a Reformed perspective. I'm going to look at the life of Robert Murray, because it's very easy to go through the Methodist movement and the Holiness movement and say, ah, they're wrong on this, they're wrong on that, they're wrong on this. But that call to holiness, it's not so easily written out of the Word of God. And how do men and women who have a Reformed view of the world, as we do, how do they understand it? And we want to look at McShane, and then the week following that, Horatius and Andrew Bonner. Let's close in prayer. Our Father, we thank You that we can indeed learn from the past, and our prayer is that as we have thought about those who have gone before us, these Methodists, that their desire to live holy lives would be that which grips us. We do pray that we might learn from their mistakes, that we might root our thinking deeply in Your Word. But we also pray that You would, by Your Spirit, enable us to live lives that bring honor. And glory to our Lord Jesus, and in no way cause Him shame. We ask these mercies for Jesus' sake. Amen.