WesleyGospel Ministries

As for me and my house,
we will serve the Lord.
–Joshua 24:15 (ESV)–

These words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.
–Deuteronomy 6:6-7 (ESV)–

²² Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. ²³ For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. ²⁴ Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. ²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, ²⁶ that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, ²⁷ so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. ²⁸ In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, ³⁰ because we are members of his body. ³¹ “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” ³² This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. ³³ However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
–Ephesians 5:22-33 (ESV)–

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William Gouge, Building a Godly Home, 3 vols (Reformation Heritage Books, 2013-14).

Richard Baxter, The Godly Home (Crossway, 2010).

J. C. Ryle, Duties of Parents (Evangelical Press, 2023).

John Wesley, “On Family Religion.”

WHOA.

Why do you make the imperfection of Christian obedience an argument against Christian obedience at all? Does the inability of fallen human beings to merit or earn salvation by good works, mean that they’re released from the responsibility to love God and keep His commandments? NO WAY! We’re not initially brought into right standing with God by the merit of any of our works, but neither does the grace of the Gospel of Christ authorize us, permit us, nor excuse us, to the point of continuing to knowingly live in willful, intentional, and blatant mortal sin that we can actually do something about.

The same Lord Jesus Christ who forgives sinners also calls them to Bible holiness. The same faith that receives the righteousness of Christ must work by love (Galatians 5:6). Don’t confuse your inability to earn or merit salvation because of your imperfection:–with the total absence of needing to obey God in your life! (Romans 15:18). Nor should you falsely assure a man into a false security of salvation, who stubbornly holds onto his beloved vices: that simply because he’s convinced Jesus is real, and says that he believes in God’s existence, that this somehow makes his final salvation from Hell totally certain, regardless of how he lives his life or doesn’t live his life for God (James 2:19). Preach free grace to the unconverted sinner! Yes sir! But preach the Bible grace that leads people to deny ungodliness and worldly lusts (Titus 2:11-14).

Because if you don’t do this, then you’re as guilty as sin, a total false teacher, and criminally insane enough to say that unchanged and unrepentant sinners–not born again of the Holy Spirit–will inhabit Heaven with the holy God that gave us life, men and women completely unchanged in their hearts–fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, girly men, homosexuals, thieves, greedy, alcoholics, mean people, swindlers, witches, fight pickers, people without self-control, antinomians, universalists, agnostics, atheists, evolutionists, jealous people, murderers, partiers, people who never share Christ with the lost, pimps, pornographers, human traffickers, and habitual liars–that all these people will definitely go to Heaven when they die…simply because they believe Jesus is real. NO! You’ve got to be joking. Your theology is laughably false. Such people will “have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone” (Revelation 21:8; rf. 1 Corinthians 6:9-10; Galatians 5:19-21).

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ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Taken together, the writings below argue that God’s grace does not abolish God’s moral law, excuse deliberate sin, or remove the believer’s responsibility to live in obedience to Jesus Christ. John Fletcher’s Checks to Antinomianism, John Wesley’s two Dialogues Between an Antinomian and His Friend, Daniel Steele’s A Substitute for Holiness, and Martin Luther’s Against the Antinomians all challenge the idea that justification by faith makes obedience, holiness, repentance, or the moral commandments unnecessary for the Christian life. They emphasize that salvation is not earned by good works, BUT genuine saving faith produces a changed lifestyle. The believer is called to resist sin, pursue holiness, obey God’s commandments, and continue in faith. Dr. Harald Lindstrom’s Wesley and Sanctification further explains Wesley’s understanding of sanctification, emphasizing the transforming work of the Holy Spirit and the believer’s growth in holiness. The central Wesleyan-holiness message is that we are saved by grace through faith, not by good works, BUT we are saved from the power of sin, and are NOT given permission to just continue living in it on purpose.

The remaining works apply these principles to the modern Lordship Salvation controversy. Mark Jones’ Antinomianism argues that Christ is not merely our Substitute for justification, BUT ALSO our example for sanctification, and that God’s moral law remains a guide for Christian living (that is, the third use of the law as taught by John Calvin). David Cloud’s “Repentance and Lordship Salvation” challenges any type of evangelism, that leaves out the call to repentance, or separates receiving Christ from acknowledging Him as your personal Lord. John MacArthur’s The Gospel According to Jesus and his “15-Year Retrospective” both argue that genuine saving faith always includes repentance, submission to Christ’s authority, and a transformed life; obedience is always the fruit of salvation, just not its initial purchase price. Robert Lescelius’ Lordship Salvation: Some Crucial Questions and Answers defends this teaching against common objections. Their collective warning is against any false assurance of salvation, that’s based on a superficial profession of faith, while deliberately continuing in unrepentant sin. Although these authors differ in their theological traditions, they share the conviction that grace and holiness cannot be separated, that real repentance from vice matters in salvation, and that genuine saving faith produces sincere but imperfect obedience to the commands of Jesus Christ, and never to be separated from His atoning blood.

While the Calvinists would lean towards John MacArthur (Grace to You), David Cloud (Way of Life), some conservatives in the Southern Baptist Church (SBC), or the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)–the Wesleyan-holiness advocates like myself would lean towards Church of God (Cleveland), Church of the Nazarene, the Wesleyan Church, the Bible Methodist Church, the Free Methodist Church, Church of God (Holiness), the Evangelical Methodist Church, the Christian & Missionary Alliance (A. W. Tozer people), Assemblies of God (David Wilkerson and Leonard Ravenhill people), the International Pentecostal Holiness Church (IPHC), and the Foursquare Church. On the Calvinist side, it would be the Master’s Seminary to train Calvinistic lordship preachers; on the holiness side, it would be God’s Bible School & College, Wesley Biblical Seminary, and the Pentecostal Theological Seminary that would have the strongest alignment against antinomian ideas.

John Fletcher, Checks to Antinomianism (Beacon Hill Press, 1948).

John Wesley, “A Dialogue Between an Antinomian and His Friend” (1745).

—. “A Second Dialogue Between an Antinomian and His Friend” (1745).

Daniel Steele, A Substitute for Holiness: Antinomianism Revived (Schmul, 1980).

Mark Jones, Antinomianism (P&R Publishing, 2013).

Martin Luther, “Against the Antinomians.” Luther’s Works, vol. 47 (Fortress Press, 1971).

David Cloud, “Repentance and Lordship Salvation” (Way of Life, 2010).

John MacArthur, The Gospel According to Jesus (Zondervan, 1994).

—. “A 15-Year Retrospective on the Lordship Controversy” (Grace to You, 2003).

Dr. Harold Lindstrom, Wesley and Sanctification (Zondervan, 1984).

Robert Lescelius, Lordship Salvation (Revival Literature, 1992).

This is the best movie about
the Book of Acts I’ve ever seen.
–J.B.–

I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience—by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God—so that from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the Gospel of Christ; and thus I make it my ambition to preach the Gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation.
–Romans 15:18-20 (ESV)–

A revival is nothing else than a
new beginning of obedience to God.
–Charles Finney–

A WORD ABOUT STUDY BIBLES:
WILL THEY BUILD YOUR FAITH OR HARM IT?

I personally recommend spiritually-minded study Bibles like the Fire Bible because they’re focused on the devotional life, holy living, and a personal relationship with Christ through encounters with the Holy Spirit. Its not a NAR Bible; its an Assembly of God and Church of God type of Bible, or classical Pentecostal. Its also a big improvement on the Dake Annotated Reference Bible, or even worse The Expositor’s Study Bible by Jimmy Swaggart, which are just not the best Pentecostal study Bibles for lots of reasons. The Fire Bible, while affirming Biblical inerrancy to say that the Bible is true, the Word of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit, authoritative for preaching righteousness, and sufficient for understanding salvation from Hell–it will not run off like the Southern Baptist study Bibles often do–such as The Apologetics Study Bible and The MacArthur Study Bible–into a kind of academically technical hyperinerrancy; the kind of perfectionistic Baptist hyperinerrancy teaching that might lead a Bible student into an all-or-nothing, hyperinerrancy-or-atheism mindset called precisionism. The risk to a Christian’s faith in reading these kinds of study Bibles is very high. This is similar to how Muslims view the Koran, as 100% totally perfect down to the smallest detail, because every vocabulary word came direct from God’s mouth. Because they attempt to answer every single skeptic’s critique with complex logic, they train the reader that their Christian faith literally depends on these hyper-technical, academic explanations being 100% accurate and 100% true. If a philosophical explanation ever feels strained, overly rigid, or far-fetched to a reader, then the whole house of cards for their faith can fall into agnosticism.

Hyper-apologetics Bibles are mind factories for Christian deism and agnosticism. By forcing the reader into the “academic weeds” to defend every single tiny detail about Bible difficulties, they create a fragile, anxious faith, that often waffles because its based entirely on logical arguments or scientific certainty levels. The moment the reader encounters a secular Bible critic on the History Channel, or a National Geographic article, or an internet critique that easily blows up one of the study Bible’s strained, hyper-logical explanations, the reader panics. They feel that if the apologists had to stretch the truth to make it fit, then Christianity must be a hoax. They backslide out of sheer intellectual exhaustion. They leave zero room for mystery, nuance, or human errors like the patriarchs committing polygamy in the Old Testament. If a believer begins to have a normal human doubt about one small peripheral issue, the notes will tell them that to doubt that point is to compromise the Gospel and become a Hell-deserving unbeliever. Faced with an all-or-nothing choice, many thinkers choose “nothing” and will just backslide into a state of agnosticism. While a Baptist study Bible focused on apologetics–like The Evidence Study Bible by Ray Comfort–might be very helpful in many ways to strengthen a believer’s faith against the assaults of unbelievers–I would recommend that it be used along with the Fire Bible: King James Version (Hendrickson, 2012) and other devotional study Bibles that are aimed at spiritual and moral growth. Especially Wesleyan-holiness ones like The A. W. Tozer Bible: King James Version (Hendrickson, 2012), The Wesley Bible: New King James Version (Thomas Nelson, 1990), and the Reflecting God Study Bible: New International Version (Zondervan, 2000). These four bold texted Bibles would be agreeable to the Assemblies of God, the Church of God (Cleveland), the Church of the Nazarene, the Christian & Missionary Alliance, the Free Methodist Church, the Wesleyan Church, and the Global Methodist Church. That’s about 4 million Bible believing Arminians in America and 100 million internationally.

While the Wesleyan-holiness study Bibles comfortably allow for ancient literary conventions–like numerical rounding, topical timelines, and textual variants–without fearing a loss of Scripture’s authority, the hyperinerrant study Bibles treat any historical or textual tension as a catastrophic, existential threat to your faith. This creates a brittle, all-or-nothing binary where the whole Christian belief system has to be treated like its based on an airtight flawless legal document, which constructs a high risk “house of cards,” that can drive struggling Bible students straight into skepticism, if a single technicality fails for them. Apologetics is totally dangerous to anyone’s quality of faith, if it is cooked up with Baptist hyperinerrancy, hypercessationism, or anti-charismatic beliefs, which would lead the reader away from personal experiences of the Holy Spirit. While such study Bibles are always safer to read than blatantly anti-supernatural, agnostic, deconstruction study Bibles such as The New Oxford Annotated Bible, The HarperCollins Study Bible, The SBL Study Bible, The New Interpreter’s Study Bible, or the out-and-out atheistic and anti-Christian Skeptic’s Annotated Bible–on the other hand, the Southern Baptist apologetics Bibles often take the same hyper-intellectual approach to truth claims, but its just about switching sides or changing teams: you’re not agnostic anymore, now you’re a Christian because you made a logical decision. That’s a shaky and deistic foundation to build on. I prefer study Bibles that point people to the new birth and keep them on that track. My concern is that some apologetics-oriented study Bibles can encourage an overly intellectualized approach to Christianity. While defending Biblical reliability is important, Christians should not become so dependent on academic explanations and apologetic arguments that their spiritual confidence becomes unsettled whenever they encounter a difficult passage or an unanswered question. Our faith must be rooted in trusting the person and Spirit of Christ, the new birth, the authority of Scripture, and the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. Apologetics should strengthen that foundation, not replace it.

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
–1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (ESV)–

A VISION OF HELL.

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He also will drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night.
–Revelation 14:10-11 (ESV)–

The devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.
–Revelation 20:10 (ESV)–

As for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable,
as for murderers, the sexually immoral,
sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars,
their portion will be in the lake
that burns with fire and sulfur.
–Revelation 21:8 (ESV)–

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HELLFIRE PREACHING.