Entire sanctification and Christian perfection are not ideas at the edges of Nazarene theology. They are the reason we exist as a denomination. The entire holiness movement from which we grew was built on one conviction: that God does not only forgive sin, but transforms the heart that produces it.
Yet these terms are among the most easily misunderstood in our tradition. Get them wrong in one direction and you preach an impossible standard that crushes people. Get them wrong in the other direction and the doctrine disappears into something so mild it means nothing. What follows is an attempt to give you a clear, honest foundation so you can carry this into your ministry with confidence.
To understand entire sanctification you need to understand the problem it is answering. The holiness movement did not invent a new doctrine. It recovered an old one that American Christianity had quietly set aside.
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism and the theological grandfather of the Church of the Nazarene, was troubled by a gap he observed in Christian experience. People were converted, genuinely saved, made new in Christ, and yet they kept struggling with something deeper than individual sins. There was a pull toward self, a resistance to full surrender, a divided loyalty that kept even sincere believers from the whole-hearted love Jesus described in the Great Commandment.
Wesley believed Scripture promised something more than that. Not just forgiveness of what you have done, but cleansing of what makes you keep doing it. He read Ezekiel 36, where God promises a new heart and a new spirit. He read Paul’s prayer in 1 Thessalonians 5, asking God to sanctify believers wholly. And he concluded that a God who commands whole-hearted love must also provide the grace to make it possible.
That conviction became the center of Methodism, then the American holiness movement, and eventually the Church of the Nazarene. By 1867, the first National Holiness Camp Meeting drew thousands in Vineland, New Jersey. Groups and independent congregations multiplied. By 1908, enough had merged to form a denomination whose stated purpose was to proclaim holiness as doctrine, press it as experience, and require it as practice.
This history matters because entire sanctification is not an idea that Nazarenes invented. It is the idea around which the denomination was built.
“Our denomination heeds the Biblical call to holy living and entire devotion to God, which we proclaim through the theology of entire sanctification.” — Church of the Nazarene Manual, Historical Statement
The word perfection causes more confusion about this doctrine than anything else. When modern people hear it, they picture a Christian who never makes a mistake, never loses patience, never has a bad day. That is not what Wesley meant, nor is it what the Church of the Nazarene teaches. Being clear on this is not hedging on the doctrine. It is the doctrine.
The English word perfection translates the Greek word teleios, which means whole, complete, or fully mature, not morally flawless. When Jesus says in Matthew 5:48, “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” he is calling his followers to a wholeness of love that reflects God’s character. He is not demanding that they never make an error. He is describing a life fully oriented toward love.
Paul uses the same word in Philippians 3. In verse 12, he says he has not yet been made perfect in the sense of final arrival. Then, in verse 15, he uses the same word to describe those who are mature. He can hold both without contradiction because teleios describes the direction you are walking, not a destination you reach and stop. Christian perfection is a way of life, not a status you achieve.
Matthew 22:37–40 “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Wesley returned to this text constantly because he believed it was the clearest definition of Christian perfection available. The wholly sanctified person is not someone who never errs. They are someone whose love for God and neighbor has become the center that shapes everything else. The phrase “all your heart” leaves no room for a competing loyalty. It does not mean the person is incapable of failing. It means there is no altar in the heart built to anything other than God.
Here is the clearest way to understand what entire sanctification is addressing. Picture two people who both lose their temper. The first person feels immediate remorse, turns back toward God and the person they hurt, and wants to make it right. The second person excuses themselves, nurses the grievance, and sees nothing worth repenting. Both failed. But their hearts are oriented completely differently. The first person’s outburst was a failure of human weakness. The second person was a failure of the heart’s direction. Entire sanctification addresses the second problem, not the first. It does not make you incapable of the frustration that produced the outburst. It reorients the heart so that when you fail, you run toward God rather than away.
Wesley’s definition was precise: Christian perfection is loving God with all the heart, mind, soul, and strength, leaving no room for cherished sin. He was equally precise about what it does not mean. The entirely sanctified person may still make mistakes of judgment, still have imperfect knowledge, still fall into what he called sins of infirmity, meaning failures that arise from human limitation rather than from a heart that has chosen against God. Entire sanctification deals with inward rebellion. It does not remove human limitation.
The difference Wesley was drawing is between a heart that loves God and sometimes fails, and a heart that is divided between God and self. One of those is sanctified holiness working itself out in an imperfect human being. The other is the divided condition that entire sanctification is meant to resolve.
Entire sanctification is not a standalone experience. It fits within a larger map of how God works in a person’s life. Understanding where it sits on that map is essential for teaching it, because if you lift it out of context, it becomes either confusing or extreme.
Before any human being repents or believes, God is already at work. Wesley called this prevenient grace, which simply means the grace that goes before. It is why people who have never heard the gospel still have a conscience, still recognize right from wrong, still sense something beyond themselves. God is pursuing every human being before they pursue God. Nobody arrives at faith from a standing start. Grace was already moving.
When a person responds to God’s call with repentance and faith, three things happen at once. God justifies them, which means he fully pardons their guilt and receives them as righteous through Christ. He regenerates them, which means he gives them new spiritual life, the capacity to love and obey in ways that were not possible before. And he adopts them, bringing them into the family of God as his children.
2 Corinthians 5:17 “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
This is real, complete salvation. A justified, regenerated believer is truly a child of God. The new birth is not a preliminary or partial work. It is full. The problem is not that something is missing from their salvation. The problem is what remains in their heart.
Even converted Christians experience what Wesley called inbred sin or original sin. This is not about specific sinful acts. It is about a tendency at the level of the heart itself, a pull toward self, a resistance to complete surrender, an inclination that keeps even sincere believers from the whole-hearted love the Great Commandment describes. Paul describes this experience in Romans 7 as knowing what is right, wanting to do it, and finding an opposing force within.
This is not a deficiency in the new birth. It is the remaining effect of the Fall that the new birth has not yet fully addressed. Wesley believed Christians did not have to remain in this condition indefinitely. God’s grace is sufficient not only to forgive the acts of sin but to deal with the condition that produces them.
Entire sanctification is what happens when a believer fully surrenders to God and the Holy Spirit completes the cleansing the new birth began. It is a second, distinct work of grace, subsequent to conversion, in which the heart is freed from the inward division and brought into full devotion to God. The Manual describes it as being freed from original sin and brought into entire devotement to God and the holy obedience of love made perfect.
Two things are worth holding together here. First, this is a crisis moment, a point of full consecration and surrender, not simply the slow accumulation of spiritual progress. Second, it is received by faith, the same mechanism that brings justification, not earned through effort or discipline.
1 Thessalonians 5:23–24 “May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.”
Paul’s prayer is not for gradual improvement. It is for complete consecration. And his confidence is not in the believer’s effort. It is in God’s faithfulness.
Acts 15:8–9 “God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith.”
Peter’s language is striking. God purified their hearts by faith, the same mechanism that brings justification. Entire sanctification is a gift received, not an achievement earned.
“We believe that entire sanctification is that act of God, subsequent to regeneration, by which believers are made free from original sin, or depravity, and brought into a state of entire devotement to God, and the holy obedience of love made perfect. It is wrought by the baptism with or infilling of the Holy Spirit and comprehends in one experience the cleansing of the heart from sin and the abiding, indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, empowering the believer for life and service.” — Church of the Nazarene Manual, Article of Faith 10
This is where the most important pastoral clarification lives. Getting this wrong in either direction causes real harm to real people. Overstate what entire sanctification does and you create a culture where people fake testimonies they do not have or give up on the doctrine when they inevitably stumble. Understate it and you describe something so modest it is barely worth pursuing.
What entire sanctification changes is the direction of your life. The Manual draws a clear distinction between a pure heart and a mature character. A pure heart is what entire sanctification produces. It is the reorientation of the will, the cleansing of the inward division, the alignment of desire toward God. Before entire sanctification, a person is pulled in two directions at once: toward God because they are regenerate, and toward self because of what Wesley called inbred sin. After entire sanctification, that division is resolved. The heart is no longer running two loyalties at the same time.
Romans 6:6–14 “For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin… In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.”
Paul is not describing a state in which the body no longer feels temptation. He is describing a change of lordship. Sin no longer reigns. The entirely sanctified person is not someone who cannot sin. They are someone who no longer lives under sin’s dominion. That distinction is enormous, and your congregation needs to hear it clearly.
Here is what entire sanctification does not do, and being honest about this is not weakness; it is faithfulness to the doctrine. It does not remove human limitations. A sanctified person still makes mistakes in judgment. They still have imperfect knowledge. They still get tired, frustrated, and confused. They still face temptation. They still need to grow.
A pure heart is the work of an instant, wrought by entire sanctification. A mature character is the result of growth in grace over time. You can have the first without the second. An entirely sanctified person may still be emotionally young, limited in wisdom, or immature in how they handle pressure. Holiness is not a substitute for spiritual formation. It is its foundation. Entire sanctification opens the door. Growth in grace is the life you live through it.
Yes. The will remains free. A sanctified person can still choose against God, still walk away from the grace they have received, still fall. What changes is not the capacity to sin but the desire. The heart that has been fully given to God does not want to sin. When an entirely sanctified person begins to find sin desirable again, something has shifted in the heart’s orientation.
The sanctified person cannot continue in deliberate, willful rebellion against God without it being sin. But the mistakes of judgment, the failures of knowledge, the imperfections that arise from human limitation, those are real, and they do not mean the person is not sanctified. They mean the person is sanctified and still human.
Be careful how you talk about this from the pulpit. If people hear you claiming sanctified believers simply do not fail, they will either perform a testimony they do not have or abandon the doctrine when they stumble. Be honest about the difference between what changes and what does not. That honesty does not water down the doctrine. It makes it credible.
One feature of holiness theology that surprises new students is that this single experience goes by many names. The Manual lists them deliberately, and as a pastor, you need to understand why, because each name opens a different door into the experience for different people.
Think of it like this: if you describe the same landscape to several different people, you might say it is a mountain, or a wilderness, or a watershed, or a high place. Each description is true. Each one communicates something the others do not. The names for entire sanctification work the same way.
Christian perfection emphasizes the wholeness and maturity of love that results. This is Wesley’s own preferred term, and it is theologically precise, but it requires explanation because perfection means something different in common speech.
Perfect love is often the most accessible in a pastoral setting. It strips away the philosophical vocabulary and gets to what the experience produces: love as the governing motive rather than fear, self-interest, or divided loyalty.
Heart purity focuses on the cleansing work itself. It can be powerful in an altar service because it speaks directly to what people feel: the sense of something in them that is not fully clean, not fully surrendered.
Baptism with the Holy Spirit connects the experience to Pentecost and to the empowering presence of the Spirit. It communicates that this is not just moral renovation but the Spirit taking up active residence in the life. However, this phrase requires caution when used with people from Pentecostal backgrounds.
Infilling of the Holy Spirit describes the ongoing quality of the Spirit’s presence after entire sanctification. The Spirit is not a visitor who arrives at a moment of crisis and departs. He abides.
No single name captures everything. That is why there are many. As you grow, you will learn which language connects in which contexts. The experience is the same, no matter what you call it. Your job is to find the door that opens for the person in front of you.
In Pentecostal theology, the baptism with the Holy Spirit is a third experience after conversion and sanctification, evidenced by speaking in tongues. In the Wesleyan-holiness tradition, the baptism with the Holy Spirit is another name for entire sanctification itself, the second work of grace. We share the terminology but not the meaning. When you use this language with people from Pentecostal backgrounds, name the distinction clearly before it becomes a source of confusion.
The biblical case for holiness is sometimes made too narrowly, resting on two or three texts. The witness of Scripture is much richer. Here is a broader picture.
Ezekiel 36:25–27 “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.”
God is not promising to improve behavior from the outside. He is promising a new heart and the Spirit living within to move the person toward obedience. This is not just forgiveness. This is the kind of interior transformation that entire sanctification describes. Wesley read this promise as pointing toward something the New Testament announces is now available through the Spirit.
Jeremiah 31:33–34 “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people… For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”
The new covenant promise includes forgiveness, but it does not stop there. The law written on the heart describes a condition in which doing God’s will is not a burden or duty but the deep inclination of the person. That is an internalized transformation, not just an external pardon.
1 John 4:17–18 “This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”
John describes love being made complete among believers now, not only at the end of history. Perfect love drives out fear. The person whose love for God has been made whole does not relate to God through anxiety about punishment but through the confidence of love. That is the experiential mark of entire sanctification: a relationship with God no longer dominated by fear or self-protection.
Hebrews 12:1–2 “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.”
The writer of Hebrews calls believers to an active, deliberate laying aside of what impedes full surrender. The sin that so easily entangles is not just external temptation. It is the inner clinging to what has not yet been surrendered to God. And the one who enables this laying aside is Jesus himself, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.
Understanding entire sanctification theologically is necessary but not sufficient. As a pastor, you will be called to lead people into this experience, not just explain it. That is a different skill, and it requires being honest about how holiness preaching tends to go wrong.
The first failure mode is making the standard so high that people either fake a testimony to fit in or give up on the doctrine entirely when they stumble. When preachers describe entire sanctification as a state in which the believer does not sin, they create a culture of pretense. People who have surrendered their hearts to God start to wonder why they still need to apologize for losing patience with their children, and they conclude either that they are not really sanctified or that the doctrine is not real. Both conclusions are wrong, and both come from a failure to accurately describe what entire sanctification is.
The second failure mode is the opposite. The doctrine gets defined so carefully, so hedged with qualifications, that it loses its edge. If entire sanctification is another phrase for ongoing growth, if it offers nothing experientially distinct from being a maturing Christian, it has lost the crisis moment Wesley believed was at its heart. Wesley was clear that entire consecration precedes entire sanctification, that there is a specific moment of full surrender in which the heart is cleansed and reoriented. That moment matters. Do not define it away.
The most effective invitations to entire sanctification are not primarily doctrinal, though the doctrine must be understood. They speak to the experience people already have: the sense of incompleteness, the nagging awareness that something is still held back, the exhaustion of living with divided loyalties. You do not need to explain the doctrine first. You need to name what people feel.
The invitation is not: let me explain a complex doctrine and ask if you want it. The invitation is: you already know what it feels like to want to love God completely and find that something in you keeps holding back. God has not left you there. There is a grace that goes deeper than forgiveness. There is a grace that reaches the place in you that forgiveness alone has not touched.
The altar moment for entire sanctification is first a moment of giving, not of receiving. Entire consecration precedes entire sanctification. The experience is not given to those who have not yet surrendered. It is the confirmation of a surrender already offered. Your part as the pastor is to help people identify what they are still holding back.
It is rarely dramatic. It is usually the quiet, ordinary, stubborn parts of the self that have not yet been placed on the altar. The career plan that God might redirect. The relationship pattern that feels safe but is not holy. The identity built on something other than being God’s child. The invitation is to bring it all, not as an act of religious effort, but as a response to a God who has already fully claimed you.
Romans 12:1–2 “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God — this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is — his good, pleasing and perfect will.”
This is Paul’s altar call for entire sanctification. Present your whole self as a living sacrifice. Your part is the offering. The transformation that follows is the Spirit’s work of reorientation, not something you produce.
When you sense the Spirit prompting a moment of decision in a service, do not rush past it with more explanation. Slow down. Give people space to respond. The altar call for entire sanctification is not primarily a doctrinal moment. It is an invitation to a relationship. Let the silence do its work. Trust the Spirit to name what each person needs to surrender.
Entire sanctification is one of the most hopeful doctrines in the Christian tradition. It says that God’s grace is not limited to forgiving what you have done. It reaches the place in you that keeps producing it. The divided, exhausted experience of wanting to love God completely and finding yourself pulled back is not the permanent condition of the Christian life. There is a grace deeper than guilt management.
It is also a realistic doctrine when understood correctly. It does not promise the end of struggle, limitation, or growth. It promises the reorientation of the heart. A person who has been entirely sanctified is not finished. They have been set free to begin.
Preach it that way. It will change people.