The Mortification of Sin in Believers

Owen's subject is Paul's clause in Romans 8:13 — “if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live” — and his thesis is the line everybody quotes: be killing sin, or it will be killing you. What follows is the most careful anatomy in English of how a besetting sin actually works, what pretends to be its cure, and why willpower and self-hatred are not the same thing as mortification.

It began as sermons to Oxford undergraduates while Owen was vice-chancellor of the university — young men, mostly, being told that sin is not managed by resolutions. That audience shows: the book is direct, unromantic, and assumes its hearers are already trying and already failing.

The book falls into three parts, and the third is the useful one: having established that the duty is lifelong and that the Spirit does the work, Owen turns to directions — how to load the conscience with the guilt of the sin, how to trace it back to what it actually wants, how to tell a wounded sin from a dead one. It is the section that reads least like theology and most like diagnosis.

Owen's prose is the hardest going of any book on this shelf; the sentences are long and the clauses stack. It is also the one readers most often say changed how they fight. Take it slowly — a section a sitting — and it opens.