Underground Exiles

As I’ve read The Mortification of Sin, I’ve certainly been humbled.  While John Owen is ponderous and weighty as a theologian, his pastoral heart shines through this particular work.

And God has been especially gracious - I’ve been given grace to mortify a particular habitual sin three times in just one week!  This just proves to me that today’s grace is sufficient.

So now I go a little further on into Owen’s work, and find this:

“When God stirs your heart about the guilt of your sin, concerning either its root and indwelling, or its breaking out, be careful you do not speak peace to yourself before God speaks it.  Listen closely to what He says to your soul.”

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So as I continue reading The Mortification of Sin by John Owen, I find my self struck by this statement:

You cannoy mortify a specific sin that is troubling you, unless you are seeking to obey the Lord from the heart in all areas!

Let me be frank; that statement hurts.  When I first read it, it was like a hard punch to the stomach.

In reality all John Owen is doing is being plain about what is apparent all throughout the Gospels.  Jesus is absolutely ruthless about going after the heart, and anything less just isn’t on His radar.

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“Do you mortify? Do you make it your daily work? Do not take a day off from this work; you must always be killing sin or it will be killing you.” — John Owen,The Mortification of Sin

The honest answer to Owens’ question is “No”.  Killing my sin is not something that even crosses my mind.

I’m so full of sin that I’m not even aware of my sin the majority of time.  Sure, I’m pretty good at confessing the small stuff - but what about anger?  Or pride?  Or lust?

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That’s me to the left, and I thought I’d bring y’all up to date on the latest reading material that I’m perusing.

I was told a good number of years ago by the late, great Rev. Leon Nicholson to feed myself a steady diet of dead men’s brains.  What my wonderful, now deceased pastor was trying to impart to me was really quite simple: if a book has lasted for over 200 years, it stands to reason that it has something to say worth reading.

This advice from my pastor lead to me trying to read as much as I could from dead thinkers.  My first great love was with the works of Charles Spurgeon.  I found his sermons to be phenomenal, and when I was 13, Pastor Leon gave me a copy of Spurgeon’s Lectures To My Students.  I don’t think I actually read it all until I was 23.

Then…oh, then I discovered the Puritans.  The Puritans were men that thought deeply, loved Christ greatly, and suffered well.  All of which are goals of my own.

So right now I’m reading:

• An Humble Attempt To Promote Explicit Agreement And Visible Union Of God’s People In Extraordinary Prayer For the Revival of Religion And The Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom On Earth, by Jonathan Edwards
• The Mortification of Sin, by John Owen

as well as

• The Doctrine of Repentance, by Thomas Watson.

So, I’m hoping to blog my way through at least one, if not two, of these books.  I rarely write anything about my personal life, so maybe this will give you a bit of a window into my head.

“A minister may fill his pews, his communion roll, the mouths of the public, but what that minister is on his knees in secret before God Almighty, that he is and no more.” - John Owen, D.D.

This quote is one of many from John Owen, who is generally regarded as perhaps the greatest English speaking theologian ever. As a pastor and theologian, Owen was a man intimately acquainted with controversy, and wasn’t shy about meeting it head on. His style of writing is, frankly, hard to read, as it is ponderous and quite weighty, but slogging through it is well worth the effort.

Owen is perhaps best known for his works on sin in the life of the believer, as well as his Brief Declaration and Vindication Of The Doctrine Of The Trinity. It’s his work on the believer and indwelling sin, however that have moved me the most profoundly.

“The custom of sinning takes away the sense of it, the course of the world takes away the shame of it.” - John Owen, D.D.

Owen was a man that wrote prolifically on the believer’s need to put sin to death, and his works on personal holiness are some of the most practical and sound that I’ve ever read. If I can recommend one great Puritan to you, it would be John Owen.