We come now to the penultimate chapter of John Owen’s classic, The Mortification of Sin. In this chapter Owen concludes his nine directions for making ourselves ready to mortify sin. Next week, he will conclude the book with two final directions for killing our sin before it kills us. The 9th Direction and subject of …
Here in chapter 12, Owen presents us with his 8th Direction for mortifying sin, which is to “use and exercise thyself to such meditations as may serve to fill thee at all times with self-abasement, and thoughts of thine own vileness” (119). This is to build up within us a hatred against the sin that …
With Owen’s first two directions for mortifying sin covered by the previous two chapters, our present chapter continues with not one but five more directions to follow (3-7). Direction 3, as alluded to last week, is to “load thy conscience with the guilt of it. Not only consider that it hath a guilt, but load …
Having established the first direction for mortifying sin in the previous chapter, Owen now moves on to discuss the second direction: “Get a clear and abiding sense upon thy mind and conscience, first, of the guilt, secondly, of the danger, thirdly, of the evil, of that sin wherewith thou art perplexed” (99). The chapter is …
Having explained mortification and given principles and general rules to mortifying sin, Owen now begins in this chapter to give specific directions for killing sin. Chapter 9 is devoted entirely to the first direction, which is that we must consider a few dangerous symptoms of sin in order to see if it is particularly deadly. …
In this chapter, Owen discusses the second general rule for mortifying sin: “Without sincerity and diligence in the universality of obedience, there is no mortification of any one perplexing lust to be obtained” (81). In other words, if we are not striving to obey Christ with every aspect of our lives, we will never properly …
Moving on from Owen’s description of what mortification is and is not in the previous two chapters, he now proceeds into two “general rules and principles, without which no sin will be mortified” (69). Our present chapter will deal with the first, and chapter 8 will discuss the second. This first general principle is simple …
As we noted last week, chapters 5 and 6 are tied together as in them Owen is defining for us what exactly mortification means. In the previous chapter he dismantled a few of the false notions and imitations of mortification, here he moves onto what it is positively. He lays the answer out into three …
Having addresses three big principles (that all Christians must mortify sin, that mortification is only accomplished by the Spirit, and of mortification’s usefulness), Owen now moves into his “principal intention,” which is to show how Christians should mortify our sin (53). In order to show this, he explains that the remainder of the book will …
In this chapter, Owen discusses the third and final basic principle for mortifying sin, which “is that the life, vigour and comfort of our spiritual life depend much on our mortification of sin” (47). Or as the summary at the top of the chapter calls it: “of the usefulness of mortification” (47). Of all these …
