Best Christian Books on Holiness: 15 Classics on Living Holy
If you want one book on holiness, start with Horatius Bonar's God's Way of Holiness. It is short, it is warm, and it gets the foundation right: holiness grows out of peace with God through Christ, not the other way around. Then read Andrew Murray's Humility: The Beauty of Holiness, which takes about two hours and will search you more than most books ten times its length.
The classics all agree that God means His people to be holy. "Be ye holy; for I am holy" (1 Peter 1:16) was not a suggestion to them. They agree that holiness is the work of God in the believer, through Christ and by the Spirit, and that it shows up in ordinary things: temper, speech, money, time, how we treat people at home. And they agree it is never the ground of our acceptance with God. Christ's righteousness is that.
Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.
Hebrews 12:14
Where they differ is in how holiness comes and how far it goes in this life. Reformed writers like Bonar, Owen and Ryle teach a lifelong fight with remaining sin, won day by day through union with Christ. Wesleyan writers like Wesley, Phoebe Palmer and Samuel Brengle teach a second work of grace, a clean heart received by faith. The "higher life" writers, among them Murray, Hannah Whitall Smith and F. B. Meyer, stress full surrender and a life of trust. This guide includes the best of each, marked so you know what you are reading. Here are fifteen, all free in TheWay Library.
Start here
1. God's Way of Holiness, by Horatius Bonar
Bonar holds together Christ's work for us and the Spirit's work in us. Peace with God is the root of holiness and the soil it grows in. Union with Christ in His death and resurrection is our strength against sin, and the cross, far from letting us off, is the power of a holy life.
The cross makes us whole; not all at once indeed, but it does the work effectually.
God's Way of Holiness, chapter 5
2. Humility: The Beauty of Holiness, by Andrew Murray
Twelve short chapters arguing that humility is not mainly sorrow for sin but the creature's glad dependence on God, and that pride is the root of every sin. Murray even tests the holiness teaching of his day by whether it made people humbler.
Humility is the blossom of which death to self is the perfect fruit.
Humility, chapter 10
See our summary of Humility, or read Humility.
3. Absolute Surrender, by Andrew Murray
Murray's best-known addresses. The title talk turns a strange text, Ahab's words in 1 Kings 20, into the answer every Christian should give God. And Murray insists God does not ask us to surrender in our own strength.
God does not ask you to give the perfect surrender in your strength, or by the power of your will; God is willing to work it in you.
Absolute Surrender, Address I
See What Is Absolute Surrender? and our summary of the book. Read Absolute Surrender.
4. Kept for the Master's Use, by Frances Ridley Havergal
A chapter for each line of her hymn "Take my life, and let it be": moments, hands, feet, voice, lips, silver and gold, intellect, will, heart, love and self, all kept for Jesus. Practical, warm and searching. Her point is that the Lord who takes our life also keeps it.
Whatever you did really trust Him to keep, He has kept, and the unkept things were never really entrusted.
Kept for the Master's Use, chapter 1
Read Kept for the Master's Use.
5. Thoughts on Christian Sanctity, by H. C. G. Moule
About an hour of reading. Moule says plainly that the believer remains a sinner to the end and must never claim to be sinless, and yet God's promises can be taken as they stand. The heart of the book is three chapters on Christ as Master, Keeper and Friend. Read Thoughts on Christian Sanctity.
The fight with sin
6. On Temptation and the Mortification of Sin, by John Owen
The great Puritan's two short classics. Of Temptation teaches how to watch and pray. Of the Mortification of Sin teaches that even the holiest believer must put sin to death daily, and that only the Spirit can do it, through faith in Christ who died to destroy it.
be killing sin or it will be killing you.
Of the Mortification of Sin, chapter 2
For more like it, see our guide to the best Puritan books. Read Owen.
7. Personal Declension and Revival of Religion in the Soul, by Octavius Winslow
For believers who have grown cold. Winslow shows how decline starts unnoticed, in love, in faith and above all in prayer, and then how the Lord Himself restores His wandering people.
Love to God will expel love to the world; love to the world will deaden the soul's love to God.
Personal Declension and Revival, chapter 2
Read Personal Declension and Revival.
8. Practical Religion, by J. C. Ryle
Not a book on holiness doctrine but on its practice, by the bishop who wrote the most famous Victorian book on the subject. Read the papers on real and sham religion, private prayer, Bible reading and separation from the world. Ryle is blunt, clear and always pointed at the reader's heart. Read Practical Religion.
The life of trust
9. The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, by Hannah Whitall Smith
Smith starts by admitting that many Christians seem to have a religion that makes them miserable. Her answer: our part is to trust and God's part is to work. The most helpful chapters deal with real difficulties: the will that seems unchanged, doubts, temptations mistaken for sin, and what to do after failure.
It is not the feelings of the man God wants, but the man himself.
The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, chapter 7
Read The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life.
10. Back to Bethel, by F. B. Meyer
Addresses on separation from sin and fellowship with God, starting from Jacob putting away strange gods before returning to Bethel. The talk on "Holiness unto the Lord" brings holiness into everyday things, and "The Rule of Our Thoughts" draws a helpful line between temptation and sin. Read Back to Bethel.
The Wesleyan teaching
11. Christian Perfection, by John Wesley
Extracts from Wesley arranged by subject, with his Plain Account of Christian Perfection at the end. Wesley defines perfection as pure love filling the heart and teaches that entire sanctification is a work of God received by faith, distinct from the new birth. If you want to know what Wesley actually taught, read him here. Read Christian Perfection.
12. The Way of Holiness, by Phoebe Palmer
The American Methodist's account of how she came into the experience she taught: laying herself on the altar, Christ, and trusting God's promise without waiting for feelings. It shaped the holiness movement of the 1800s. Read The Way of Holiness.
13. Heart Talks on Holiness, by Samuel Logan Brengle
Short, practical talks by a Salvation Army officer: what holiness is and isn't, how to get it, how to keep a clean heart, and down-to-earth chapters on evil-speaking and Bible study. Full of stories from his meetings. Read Heart Talks on Holiness.
Another view
14. Holiness: The False and the True, by H. A. Ironside
Ironside spent his teen years chasing "the second blessing" and tells honestly how it went. Then he found that holiness is found in Christ, not in a state of his own. The second half teaches sanctification from Scripture: by the Spirit, by the blood and by the Word. Read it alongside the Wesleyan books above to see both sides argued by men who lived them.
One may be set apart to God in Christ, and yet need exhortation to a practical separation from all uncleanness and worldliness.
Holiness: The False and the True, Sanctification: Its Meaning
Read Holiness: The False and the True.
A holy life
15. The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne, by Andrew A. Bonar
The Scottish pastor who died before he was thirty and left a name for holiness that has lasted ever since. Long passages from his journals show his habits of solitude, prayer and the steady pursuit of a holy life, and the revival that came to his church.
He felt meditation and prayer to be the very sinews of his work.
The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne, chapter 3
Where to go from here
- New to the subject: Bonar, then Murray's Humility.
- Struggling with a besetting sin: Owen, then Moule.
- Grown cold: Winslow, then Meyer's Back to Bethel.
- Wanting to hear each tradition in its own words: Bonar, Smith and Wesley, then Ironside.
More books are on the holiness topic page, and more of Murray's work is on his author page.