Along the Way

A Journey of Death

I’ve been reading John Owen’s Overcoming Sin and Temptation. Here's some personal reflections.

Our life in Christ calls for a constant vigilance to the work of death. The old English term is “mortification.” It is our duty to daily put sin to death in our life. “Sin sets its strength against every act of holiness and against every degree that we grow to. . . . He who does not kill sin in his way takes no steps toward his journey’s end.” If we are not killing sin it is killing us. The principle of the flesh is always at work in our life. It relentlessly beckons for us to forsake the path of righteousness. If we are not ruthless with the old nature, it will have its way with us. “Where sin, through the neglect of mortification, gets a considerable victory, it breaks the bones of the soul (Psalm 31:10; 51:8), and makes a man weak, sick, and ready to die (Psalm 38:3-5), so that he cannot look up (Psalm 40:12; Isaiah 33:24); and . . . expect anything but to be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin and that his soul should bleed to death (2 John 8).” The sin principle is never satisfied in me. It is like a great yawning hole; ever rumbling to be filled. Give it a taste and it wants everything. “Sin aims always at the utmost. Every time it rises up to tempt or entice, might it have its own course, it would go out to the utmost sin in that kind. Every unclean thought or glance would be adultery if it could; every covetous desire would be oppression, every thought of unbelief would be atheism, might it grow to its ultimate outcome. . . . It is like the grave that is never satisfied.” “There is not a day but sin . . . prevails or is prevailed on; and it will be so while we live in this world.”

Thank God there is another principle at work within the life of the Follower of Jesus. That is the Spirit of the Living God and the new nature of Christ (Galatians 5:17). “There is a propensity in the Spirit, or spiritual new nature, to be acting against the flesh . . . It is our participation of the divine nature that gives us an escape from the pollutions that are in the world through lusts . . . If we neglect to make use of what we have received, God may justly hold his hand from giving us more. . . . Not to be daily mortifying sin is to sin against the goodness, kindness, wisdom, grace, and love of God, who has blessed us with a principle of doing it.” I want to be always about the duty of “perfecting holiness in the fear of God” (2 Corinthians 7:1), and “growing in grace” (1 Peter 2:2; 2 Peter 3:18).