Introduction

That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ. 1 JOHN 1:3

Most Christians who know the name of John Owen know one sentence of his, and it is a hard one. It comes from a little book of 1656, The Mortification of Sin in Believers, and it has been quoted in pulpits and books for more than three centuries: “be killing sin or it will be killing you.” It sounds like the motto of a grim man. It is not. The same man spent the best of his life writing about the love of the Father, the beauty of Christ and the comfort of the Holy Spirit, and he died dictating a book on the glory of the Saviour he expected to see within days. The sentence about killing sin is true, and Owen meant every word of it. But it is only half of him.

He was the greatest theologian of the English Puritans, and very likely the most learned. Born in 1616, he rose from a country parsonage to be chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, Dean of Christ Church and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford. When the monarchy returned and the Act of Uniformity drove some two thousand ministers out of the Church of England in 1662, he lost everything he had held and spent the rest of his life as a Nonconformist pastor in London, preaching to gathered congregations, writing without pause, and burying nearly all his children.

Why he still matters

Owen matters because he understood the inner life of a Christian with a precision that almost no one else has matched. Other writers tell you that you ought to be holy. Owen shows you, with the patience of a physician, how sin actually behaves in a believing heart: how it hides when it is watched, how it trades one form for another, how it borrows the language of grace to excuse itself, how it grows by inches until a tender conscience has become a hard one.

He matters, too, because he never lets that honesty end in despair. Every searching page in Owen turns sooner or later to Christ — to His blood, His fulness, His tenderness as a High Priest who was tempted like us.

The one thread

If you are looking for the single thread that runs through everything Owen wrote, you find it in the word communion. God has made Himself known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and in Christ He has brought sinners into real fellowship with Himself. That fellowship is the whole point of the Christian life. Sin is dreadful chiefly because it spoils it; holiness is precious chiefly because it is the atmosphere in which it flourishes; heaven is glorious chiefly because there it will be complete.

Owen made the connection himself. In the preface to The Mortification of Sin he explains that he had long promised some friends a treatise on communion with God, and had not yet written it; he offers them this smaller book in the meantime, calling it “this discourse of variance with themselves, as interest for their forbearance of that of peace and communion with God.” The war against sin and the enjoyment of God were, for him, two halves of one life. You fight the one because you want the other.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. MATTHEW 5:8

How this book is arranged

The second chapter tells the story of his life. The fifteen chapters that follow each take one of his key teachings. The first eight stay close to The Mortification of Sin in Believers, which is in the Ochorus library, and follow its argument from the necessity of the work, through the Spirit’s part in it, to the marks of a dangerous sin and the directions Owen gives for dealing with it, ending where he ends, with faith fixed on Christ. The remaining seven turn to his other great works: Communion with God, The Glory of Christ, Of Temptation, Indwelling Sin, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded, and his writings on the church and liberty of conscience. A short conclusion and a reader’s guide close the book.

Where Owen is quoted directly, the words come from The Mortification of Sin as Ochorus hosts it. His other books are described in plain modern prose, and not quoted, because his seventeenth-century English, long sentences and piled-up clauses are better served by a faithful summary than by a fragment torn from its setting. Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer.

Reading him with care

This is not a book of hero-worship. Owen was a great man and a sinner, and he would have said so first. Four cautions in particular should be named at the start.

The first is his style. Owen is hard to read. His sentences run on, his arguments divide and subdivide, and his vocabulary belongs to the lecture halls of seventeenth-century Oxford. But the difficulty is mostly on the surface, and it is worth persevering.

The second is his doctrine of the atonement. In The Death of Death in the Death of Christ Owen argued that Christ died with the definite intention of saving His elect, and actually secured their salvation. Many faithful Christians, including other Puritans who loved him, have read the Scriptures differently, and a chapter of this book tries to set out his case fairly and to be fair to theirs.

The third is his part in the Commonwealth. Owen preached before Parliament the day after King Charles I was beheaded, went with Cromwell’s army to Ireland and to Scotland, and held high office under a government that many of his fellow Christians regarded as illegitimate. He used his power at Oxford fairly; but he stood close to power in a violent time, and his readers should not look away from that.

The fourth is his tone towards Roman Catholics, which is often harsh in the manner of his age, and his view of toleration, which was generous for his century but narrower than ours. Where he is simply unkind, we need not follow him.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

None of this is said to put you off. It is said so that you can read him the way he read everyone — with the Bible open. Where he is faithful to it, and on the deceitfulness of sin, the sufficiency of Christ and the sweetness of communion with God he is wonderfully faithful, let him search you, and then let him lead you to the Saviour he loved.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Before you read further, write down the one sin in your life that you have most often promised to give up and have not. Keep the paper; this book will return to it.

2. Ask yourself honestly whether your picture of the Christian life has more to do with fighting sin or enjoying God. Owen would say that you need both, held together.

3. Read the preface and first chapter of The Mortification of Sin in Believers this week, slowly, and note one sentence that stops you.

4. If you have avoided Owen because he seemed too difficult, resolve to read him in small portions, a few paragraphs at a time, with prayer.

5. Think of one Christian teacher you admire and one point on which you believe he or she was wrong. Practise holding both judgements without letting go of either.

A PRAYER

Father, Son and Holy Spirit, You have called us into fellowship with Yourself, and we have so often lived as though sin did not matter and You were far away.

Thank You for Your servant John Owen, who knew the deceit of the heart and the greater depth of Your grace.

Search me as You searched him. Show me the sins I have made peace with, and do not let me make peace with them any longer.

And as You show me my sin, show me Christ, His blood and His fulness, until I want You more than anything that stands between us. Amen.