Through the Spirit

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. EZEKIEL 36:26

If the first word of Romans 8:13 that Owen presses on us is mortify, the second is Spirit. If ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body. Everything turns on that little phrase. It is what divides Christian holiness from every other kind of moral effort in the world, and Owen will not let his readers pass over it.

He states the principle bluntly. The Holy Spirit alone is sufficient for this work; all other ways and means without Him are nothing. And then he adds a sentence that could stand over the door of every church: “Mortification from a self-strength, carried on by ways of self-invention, unto the end of a self-righteousness, is the soul and substance of all false religion in the world.”

The remedies that do not heal

Owen knew the false remedies well, because the seventeenth century was full of them. He looks first at the Roman Catholic system of his day, with its vows, penances, rough garments and monastic disciplines. His complaint is that they had mistaken the enemy. They attacked the natural body instead of the corrupt heart, and so wore themselves out fighting the wrong foe. They also took things God has appointed, such as prayer and fasting, and treated them as if they worked by their own power, so that they were always mortifying and never came to any sound mortification.

Owen’s language here is often harsh, as Protestant polemic of his age commonly was, and a modern reader need not share his contempt for men and women who were, many of them, seeking God with great seriousness. But his theological point stands, and he turns it at once on his own side. There is, he says, a natural popery in every heart. A man falls into a sin, is ashamed, promises God he will never do it again, watches himself for a while, and prays hard until the sense of guilt fades; then the resolution fades with it and the sin returns. Owen’s verdict is one of his best lines: “Duties are excellent food for an unhealthy soul; they are no physic for a sick soul.” Prayer, reading and self-denial nourish a healthy Christian. They cannot, by themselves, cure a diseased one.

Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances, (Touch not; taste not; handle not; … Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body; not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh. COLOSSIANS 2:20–23

How the Spirit does it

How, then, does the Spirit put sin to death? Owen answers in three ways.

First, He makes the heart abound in grace. The fruit of the Spirit is the opposite of the works of the flesh, and as love, joy, peace, patience and self-control grow, the lusts that oppose them lose room to live. Pride is weakened by humility, anger by patience, love of the world by a heavenly mind. The Spirit kills sin partly by crowding it out.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. GALATIANS 5:22–24

Second, He works directly on the root of sin itself. Owen calls the Spirit a fire that burns up the very root of lust. The same almighty power that gave the new heart in the first place goes on weakening the old habit by degrees.

Third, He brings the cross of Christ into the heart by faith, and gives the believer fellowship with Christ in His death. This is the deepest of the three, and Owen keeps it for the last chapter of his book, to which the tenth chapter of this one returns.

Many years later, in the long work usually called Pneumatologia, Owen traced the Spirit’s work from creation to the new creation. The Mortification of Sin shows that same Spirit at work in the most private place of the Christian life.

Still our work

If only the Spirit can do it, Owen imagines someone asking, why are we told to do it? Why not leave it to Him? His answer is balanced and important. The Spirit works in us as all His graces work in us. He works in us to will and to do, and yet we are commanded to work out our salvation. He is the Spirit of prayer, and yet we are commanded to pray. He does not treat us as stones. In Owen’s phrase, “he works in us and with us, not against us or without us.”

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. PHILIPPIANS 2:12–13

So the Christian neither sits back waiting to be made holy nor strains to make himself holy. He fights, prays, watches and refuses, and he does all of it leaning on a strength that is not his own.

Believers only

This leads Owen to his first general rule, which he states without softening: unless a man is a believer, truly joined to Christ, he can never mortify any sin. An unbeliever may do something that looks like it, as the ancient philosophers did with their fine discourses on self-control; but Owen says their maxims differed from true mortification as much as the sun painted on a signboard differs from the sun in the sky. “There is no death of sin without the death of Christ.”

But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. ROMANS 8:9

What, then, should an unconverted person do who is troubled by a particular sin? Owen’s answer is pastoral and searching. Conversion comes first. When the crowd at Pentecost were cut to the heart and asked what they should do, Peter did not tell them to go and master their pride or their anger. He called them to repent and turn to Christ. To press a man to fix one habit while his whole heart remains unchanged is to deal with a sore finger when he has a fever. “Thou settest thyself against a particular sin, and dost not consider that thou art nothing but sin.” Owen has a word here for preachers too: it does no good, he says, to beat a man off his drunkenness into a sober formality. The axe must be laid to the root.

Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do? Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. ACTS 2:37–38

Owen thanks God for every restraint that keeps the world from being worse; but he refuses to let restraint pass for renewal. “To kill sin is the work of living men.” Only those made alive in Christ can do it, and they can do it only through His Spirit.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Think back over your last serious attempt to overcome a sin. Was it fuelled mainly by shame and resolution, or by dependence on the Spirit? What happened when the shame wore off?

2. Name one good practice, such as a fast, a rule or a promise, that you have been relying on as though it had power in itself. Keep the practice if it helps, but move your trust to God.

3. Pray each morning this week for the fruit of the Spirit opposite to your most troublesome sin: patience against anger, humility against pride, contentment against covetousness.

4. If you are not sure that you belong to Christ, stop fighting single sins for a moment and settle the greater question first. Read Acts 2:37–41 and respond to it.

A PRAYER

Spirit of the living God, I confess that I have tried to make myself holy by my own strength and my own inventions, and I have failed.

You alone can put sin to death. Make my heart abound in the graces that crowd it out, burn at the root of what is evil in me, and bring the cross of Christ close to my heart.

Work in me and with me, not against me or without me, so that I may work out what You are working in.

And where there is anyone reading these words who does not yet belong to Christ, draw them to Him first of all. Amen.