In his day John Owen was called the “prince of the English divines,” “the leading figure among the Congregationalist divines,” “a genius with learning second only to Calvin’s,” and “indisputably the leading proponent of high Calvinism in England in the late seventeenth century.”
Have you read any of his works?
“HEAVY AND HARD TO READ”
If you haven’t, you are in the vast majority. Owen is notoriously hard to read. Spurgeon said, “I did not say that it was easy to read [Owen’s works]!—that would not be true; yet I do venture to say that the labour involved in plodding through these ill-arranged and tediously-written treatises will find them abundantly worthwhile.” To discover Owen’s abundant usefulness you simply need to read his timeless work The Mortification of Sin. Just how helpful is this “little” book?
Jerry Bridges said, “John Owen’s treatises on Indwelling Sin in Believers and The Mortification of Sin are, in my opinion, the most helpful writings on personal holiness ever written.” JI Packer feels indebted to Owen, for he once wrote, “I owe more to John Owen than to any other theologian, ancient or modern, and I owe more to this little book [The Mortification of Sin] than to anything else he wrote.”
Around this time last year I had a few dozen men in my church read The Mortification of Sin (the Puritan Paperback version from Banner) a good handful of them said something to the effect of, “This is one of the most useful books I’ve ever read!”
Indeed.
LAY DOWN THE AXE
The book is also oh so useful for pastors in their personal pursuit of holiness and faithfulness in pastoral ministry. Here’s what I mean. Chapter seven closes with a luscious aside directed to preachers who aim to be instruments of mortification in the hearts of their hearers. The Prince of Puritans warns,
Let me add this to them who are preachers of the word, or intend, through the good hand of God, that employment: It is their duty to plead with men about their sins, to lay load on particular sins, but always remember that it be done with that which is the proper end of law and gospel;—that is, that they make use of the sin they speak against to the discovery of the state and condition “wherein the sinner is; otherwise, haply, they may work men to formality and hypocrisy, but little of the true end of preaching the gospel will be brought about. It will not avail to beat a man off from his drunkenness into a sober formality.
A skillful master of the assemblies lays his axe at the root, drives still at the heart . . . To break men off particular sins, and not to break their hearts, is to deprive ourselves of advantages of dealing with them.
. . . Can sin be killed without an interest in the death of Christ, or mortified without the Spirit? . . . If such directions should prevail to change men’s lives, as seldom they do, yet they never reach to the change of their hearts or conditions, they may make men self-justiciaries[sic] or hypocrites, not Christians.
I believe the margin next to this section in my copy reads, “Boom! and Amen.”
