Woe to the believer who does not make mortification of sin his high priority in living. It is a betrayal of grace and a betrayal of the regenerating work of God and the atoning work accomplished by Christ to not submit oneself to this daily task of advancing in holiness and putting to death one’s sins!
In this excerpt, John Owen continues to discuss the relation of indwelling sin in light of the New Nature given us through Christ, the results of neglecting this task of mortification and our duty to be perfect in holiness in the fear of God as we grow in grace daily.
Dear Reader,
Do you mortify?
Do you make it your daily work?
Be always at it while you live.
Cease not a day from this work.
Be killing sin or it will be killing you!
Indwelling Sin Is to Be Opposed by the Spirit and the New Nature
This is one main reason why the Spirit and the new nature are given unto us— that we may have a principle within us whereby to oppose sin and lust. “The flesh lusts against the Spirit.” Well! and what then? Why, “the Spirit also lusts against the flesh” (Gal. 5:17).
There is a propensity in the Spirit, or spiritual new nature, to be acting against the flesh, as well as in the flesh to be acting against the Spirit (2 Pet. 1:45). It is our participation of the divine nature that gives us an escape from the pollutions that are in the world through lust; and there is a law of the mind (Rom. 7:23), as well as a law of the members.
Now this is, first, the most unjust and unreasonable thing in the world, when two combatants are engaged, to bind one and keep him up from doing his utmost and to leave the other at liberty to wound him at his pleasure; and, secondly, the most foolish thing in the world to bind him who fights for our eternal condition and to let him alone who seeks and violently attempts our everlasting ruin.
The contest is for our lives and souls.
Not to be daily employing the Spirit and new nature for the mortifying of sin is to neglect that excellent succori which God has given us against our greatest enemy. If we neglect to make use of what we have received, God may justly hold his hand from giving us more. His graces, as well as his gifts, are bestowed on us to use, exercise, and trade with. Not to be daily mortifying sin is to sin against the goodness, kindness, wisdom, grace, and love of God, who has furnished us with a principle of doing it.
The Results of Neglecting the Mortification of Indwelling Sin
Negligence in this duty casts the soul into a perfect contrary condition to that which the apostle affirms was his: “Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day” (2 Cor. 4:16). In these the inward man perishes, and the outward man is renewed day by day. Sin is as the house of David, and grace as the house of Saul.
Exercise and success are the two main cherishers of grace in the heart; when it is suffered to lie still, it withers and decays: the things of it are ready to die (Rev. 3:2); and sin gets ground toward the hardening of the heart (Heb. 3:13). This is that which I intend: by the omission of this duty grace withers, lust flourishes, and the frame of the heart grows worse and worse; and the Lord knows what desperate and fearful issues it has had with many.
Where sin, through the neglect of mortification, gets a considerable victory, it breaks the bones of the soul (Ps. 31:10; 51:8), and makes a man weak, sick, and ready to die (Ps. 38:35), so that he cannot look up (Ps. 40:12; Isa. 33:24); and when poor creatures will take blow after blow, wound after wound, foil after foil, and never rouse up themselves to a vigorous opposition, can they expect anything but to be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin, and that their souls should bleed to death (2 John 8)?
Indeed, it is a sad thing to consider the fearful issues of this neglect, which lie under our eyes every day. See we not those, whom we knew humble, melting, brokenhearted Christians, tender and fearful to offend, zealous for God and all his ways, his Sabbaths and ordinances, grown, through a neglect of watching unto this duty, earthly, carnal, cold, wrathful, complying with the men of the world and things of the world, to the scandal of religion and the fearful temptation of them that know them?
The truth is, what between placing mortification in a rigid, stubborn frame of spirit—which is for the most part earthly, legal, censorious,ii partial, consistent with wrath, envy, malice, pride—on the one hand, and pretenses of liberty, grace, and I know not what, on the other, true evangelical mortification is almost lost among us: of which afterward.
It Is Our Duty to Perfect Holiness in the Fear of God and Grow in Grace Every Day
It is our duty to be “perfecting holiness in the fear of God” (2 Cor. 7:1); to be “growing in grace” every day (1 Pet. 2:2; 2 Pet. 3:18); to be “renewing our inward man day by day” (2 Cor. 4:16). Now, this cannot be done without the daily mortifying of sin. Sin sets its strength against every act of holiness and against every degree we grow to.
Let not that man think he makes any progress in holiness who walks not over the bellies of his lusts.
He who does not kill sin in his way takes no steps toward his journey’s end
He who finds not opposition from it, and who sets not himself in every particular to its mortification, is at peace with it, not dying to it.
This, then, is the first general principle of our ensuing discourse: Notwithstanding the meritorious mortification, if I may so speak, of all and every sin in the cross of Christ; notwithstanding the real foundation of universal mortification laid in our first conversion, by conviction of sin, humiliation for sin, and the implantation of a new principle opposite to it and destructive of it—yet sin does so remain, so act and work in the best of believers, while they live in this world, that the constant daily mortification of it is all their days incumbent on them.
—John Owen, Overcoming Sin and Temptation (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2006), p53-55
Read more of “Overcoming Sin and Temptation” here.
You can also purchase the book in paperback here, or read it in pdf here.
