What is the Keswick movement, and is it biblical?

But God is working, I trust, amid the present state of distraction in the Church. Yet at such a time it is, that all sorts of false things are set up, sometimes by man's wit, and sometimes by Satan. And honest souls are trying to satisfy themselves with utter worldliness; consciences are troubled about it, and saying we must have a higher life, and so on, and very earnest souls some of these are.

And I will ask here - for it is very current in some places, called "higher life," and truly alas! for so many Christians follow the world - what is true Christian life? It is "higher life," and no mistake, for our calling is a "calling above" - that and no other; I have no calling to anything down in this world. There is no calling for the Christian according to the word of God but the calling to a risen and glorified Christ. What is put before us is a glorified Christ; we are going to be like Him; and you cannot have a right object except as that object is a glorified Christ, because that is the only Christ. Christ down here is a pattern for our walk, but there is no such Christ now to attain to. I cannot win Christ down in this world, because there is no Christ to win. Attempting it only lowers the standard of holiness, and, instead of being "higher Christian life," it is lower. It is the hope of being like Him in glory that makes a man now "purify himself even as he is pure." The object, that I get before my soul in this race that he speaks of, is a glorified Christ, and that only; that is what I am going to attain to; I am going to be like the Christ that I have seen. Whatever progress Paul made, he was so much the nearer to Him, but he had not got Him; he would only get Him when in his glorified body. There is no other Christ to run after or win; not that our affections do not cling to Him in humiliation, but it is a glorified Christ only who is the object of our hearts. I may get to heaven now in spirit, and be happy there with Him, but I never attain to Him, I never win Him, until I am with Him in the glory; it is then I shall have won Christ.

And I will ask here - for it is very current in some places, called "higher life," and truly, alas, for so many Christians follow the world - what is true Christian life? It is "higher life," and no mistake, for our calling is a "calling above" - that and no other; I have no calling to anything down in this world. There is no calling for the Christian according to the word of God but the calling to a risen, glorified Christ. What is put before us is a glorified Christ; we are going to be like Him; and you cannot have a right object except as that object is a glorified Christ, because this is the only Christ. Christ down here is a pattern for our walk, but there is no such Christ now to attain. I cannot win a Christ down in this world, because there is no Christ here to win. Attempting it only lowers the standard of holiness, and, instead of being "higher Christian life," it is lower. It is the hope of being like Him in glory that makes a man now "purify himself even as he is pure." The object that I get before my soul in this race that he speaks of is a glorified Christ, and this only; that is what I am going to attain; I am going to be like the Christ that I have seen. Whatever progress Paul made he was so much the nearer to Him, but he had not got Him; he would only get Him when in his glorified body. There is no other Christ to run after or win; not that our affections do not cling to Him in humiliation, but it is a glorified Christ only who is the object of our hearts. I may get to heaven now in spirit, and be happy there with Him, but I never attain to Him, I never win Him, until I am with Him in the glory; it is then I shall have won Christ.

294 I admit fully the work of deliverance distinct from forgiveness; the Epistle to the Romans elaborately teaches the two. And I believe all this stir as to a higher life has done good, in awakening souls to the need of something better than current Christianity, and I bless God for it.

It will have many supporters in this, because unbelief as to it is the prevailing state; but it is sorrowful when the pretension to a higher life is the support of unbelief.

I am quite aware that what I have said on the Spirit for sanctification will seem very incomplete and unsatisfactory for those who believe that there is a certain definite experience through which a saint passes into a wondrous life of enlarged liberty. Now, I have said that there is such a fact as deliverance by the law of the Spirit of life in Christ. But this is not sufficient for many. They claim, with more or less objectionable statements, that something is necessary on the part of the believer, and that is usually defined as a full surrender. Let the believer make the surrender, and he will experience the blessedness of the new life. Such terms as "a baptism of the Spirit," "the second blessing," "higher life," "perfect love," "perfect sanctification," "a Spirit-filled life," have been applied to this experience, but under whatever name it is an experience, and it is made dependent upon the surrender of self, as it is called.

Ah, beloved, it is not a surrendered self, but a crucified self that the Spirit of God fills and uses. The sixth of Romans comes before the twelfth. In the latter we have the surrender, but it is not to get, or to attain; it is because he has entered into what is his; he has accepted the precious and wondrous fact of his death with Christ, and of the Spirit's presence and power. A crucified man has no experience to speak of. To him Christ is all. How different — how radically different from every form of sanctification that devout minds have ever devised!

A. I will tell you. They say, "We ought not to seek sanctification by human effort; but that by receiving Christ as our sanctification the germ of sin is destroyed, and we are perfectly holy, and without sin or evil concupiscence." It is true that we shall never, by any strength or effort of man, attain to sanctification; and that if we look to Christ, we shall find an abundant spring of life and holiness. I grant also that a soul which is under the law, and groaning beneath the burden of its wretchedness, will get no blessing by useless struggles for deliverance. But all this does not hinder the doctrine, as a whole, being false. For it is false to say, that by receiving Christ as our sanctification we can ever, on earth, attain to perfection, and extirpate entirely sin from our nature. It is an error which connects itself with a host of other errors, destructive of the most precious truths and consolations of the gospel; and which injures, in a high degree, our sanctification itself.

The other tract - though I doubt not the sincerity of either - is more mature, and goes further; but with more light, the root of bitterness still there. I agree with it that the only normal state of Christians is what they call perfection, but this is merely the deliverance of Romans 6 and 8; falsified by calling it perfection, with which it has nothing to do, and thereby most mischievously lowering the estimation of sin. It tries to ground this by distinguishing in the same passage perfected and perfect, and giving the latter a sense it never has in Scripture.*

Then he tells us that by the baptism of the Holy Ghost the soul is freed from the dominion of sin. Now this I fully admit, but free from dominion of sin, and freed from sin, so as to be pure as Adam, are two different things. "Victory" is anything but the absence of an enemy. The life of a Christian is a life of faith, moment by moment, but his being purged from his sins by Christ's blood is once and for ever, if Scripture be true. He did not sit down on the throne on high till "he had by himself purged our sins," or, as it is said in Hebrews 9, "must he often have suffered"; but, as to the conscience, "by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified," so that "the worshippers once purged" should, as to imputation, "have no more conscience of sins," but "boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus." Then let the believer, knowing that his old man has been crucified with Christ, seek to grow up to Him who is the Head in all things, and walk as Christ walked, "changed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord." The evil one cannot touch him, if he walks with Christ in lowliness and diligence of heart, "always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body."