The Deceit of Indwelling Sin

I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. ROMANS 7:21

In 1667, five years after the Great Ejection, Owen published a book with a characteristically long title: The Nature, Power, Deceit, and Prevalency of the Remainders of Indwelling Sin in Believers. It is usually called simply Indwelling Sin. If The Mortification of Sin tells a Christian what to do about the sin within him, this book tells him what that sin is and how it works. It is Owen at his most analytical, and to many readers it has been the most unsettling of all his writings, because it describes what goes on in their own hearts with such accuracy.

Its text is Paul’s confession in Romans 7. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. Owen takes Paul to be speaking as a believer, and he builds the whole book on the word law.

Sin as a law

Why does Paul call indwelling sin a law? Owen answers that a law is a power that moves and inclines a person in a settled direction. Indwelling sin is not a series of isolated lapses; it is a steady pressure, a bent in the soul, always pulling the same way. The believer finds it, Paul says, especially when he would do good. It is present exactly when he least wants it. It presses hardest against the things that matter most.

But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. ROMANS 7:23

Owen observes that this law has its seat in the heart, and he takes the heart in the full biblical sense: the mind, the will and the affections together, the centre from which a person lives. And the heart is not easily known. It is deep, and it is deceitful.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? JEREMIAH 17:9

Enmity against God

What is the nature of this law? Owen’s answer is stark: it is enmity against God. Not merely weakness, not merely imperfection, but hostility. The carnal mind, Paul says, is enmity against God. Even in a believer, what remains of sin has this character.

Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. ROMANS 8:7

Owen draws out the implications with care. Enmity is universal; it opposes God in everything, not only in one area. It is constant; it never takes a day off. And it shows itself especially in an aversion to God Himself, and to those duties that bring the soul nearest to Him. Owen notices, with a kind of grim precision, that indwelling sin tends to resist most strongly the most spiritual duties: private prayer, meditation, self-examination. A person can often manage public religion more easily than secret communion, because the flesh has less to gain in the closet. The reluctance many Christians feel towards private prayer is, Owen suggests, exactly what Paul was describing.

How deceit works

The heart of the book is its analysis of the deceit of sin. Owen takes the pattern from the Epistle of James: every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed; then lust conceives and brings forth sin. He sees in this a progression through the faculties of the soul.

First, sin draws the mind away. Its first aim is not to make us do evil, but to make us stop paying attention: to distract the mind from its watch, to make it careless of God, forgetful of the danger, occupied with other things. Owen believed that a great many falls begin here, long before any temptation is felt.

Second, sin entices the affections. Once the mind is off its guard, sin presents its object attractively to the desires, dressing it up, making it seem sweet. In The Mortification of Sin Owen had already warned that sin is subtle in how it begins: “it is modest, as it were, in its first motions and proposals, but having once got footing in the heart by them, it constantly makes good its ground.”

Third, sin conceives in the will. The will consents, and the sin is conceived, even if it has not yet come to birth in action. And fourth, sin brings forth; the inward consent becomes outward deed, and the deed, if it runs its course, brings death.

That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts. EPHESIANS 4:22

Owen shows how sin uses every tool. It abuses the doctrine of grace, whispering that since God forgives, sin is less serious. It takes advantage of weariness in duty. It works by degrees, so that each step seems small. And, as Owen had put it in the earlier book, the two processes feed each other: “As sin gets ground in the affections to delight in, it gets also upon the understanding to slight it.” The more we enjoy a sin, the less serious it seems.

Decline and great falls

Two of Owen’s observations in this book are particularly sobering. The first is that indwelling sin explains the decline that is sometimes seen in older Christians. Men and women who were zealous and tender in their youth grow cold, worldly and formal in their age, not through any single great sin, but through the slow, steady working of this law against which they have stopped watching.

Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. REVELATION 2:4

The second is that it explains the great falls of great saints. Noah drunk, Lot in the cave, David with Bathsheba, Peter at the fire. Owen does not treat these as inexplicable. They are what indwelling sin does when it is not watched and mortified. No one is beyond it.

Why this is good news

It may seem strange to call such a book encouraging, but in an important sense it is. Many Christians are bewildered by their own hearts. They have trusted Christ, they want to please Him, and yet they find a stubborn resistance within them, a reluctance to pray, a pull towards things they hate. They wonder whether they were ever converted at all. Owen tells them that this is exactly what Scripture leads us to expect. Paul felt it. The struggle is not a sign that grace is absent; it is a sign that grace is present and at war.

Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me. PSALM 19:12–13

At the same time Owen will not let anyone rest in the struggle as if it were the whole story. The law of sin is real, but so is the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, which has set the believer free from the law of sin and death. To understand the enemy is the first step to fighting him. And the fight, as the last chapters of The Mortification of Sin have shown, is won by looking to Christ.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Notice this week which spiritual duties you find hardest to begin. Owen suggests that resistance to secret prayer is a sign of the law of sin at work. Pray anyway.

2. Trace a recent sin back through Owen’s stages: when was your mind first drawn away, when were your affections enticed, when did your will consent?

3. Ask whether you have grown colder than you once were. If so, what small, steady neglects have brought you there?

4. If you have been troubled by the persistence of sin in your heart, read Romans 7:14–8:4 and take comfort that Paul knew the same struggle and the same deliverance.

A PRAYER

Lord, I find a law in me that when I would do good, evil is present with me. You know my heart better than I do, and it is deceitful above all things.

Keep my mind awake and watchful. Guard my affections from the things that entice them. Hold my will fast to You.

Cleanse me from secret faults, and keep me back from presumptuous sins. Do not let me grow cold as the years go by.

Thank You that the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death. Let that freedom be seen in my life. Amen.