Presbyterian & Reformed

I struggle with inertia. It creeps up on me in many facets of my life. My wife well understands the fact that the hardest part about getting me to do anything is to actually get me started. I enjoy going with her to see a movie, but it’s a hard road to plough to actually get me motivated enough to get up and moving towards the door. I have a great time wherever we wind up together, but grumble in an unfair way during the first few minutes of motion.

So what? Well, I tend to be this way in my spiritual life also. I tend to get to the point where I don’t feel I have any great (public) sins - so can’t I just take a break from all this flesh-mortificating? Owen helps me see in chapter two of his treatise on mortifying the flesh, our June Puritan Paperback, that no, no I can’t.

1. We will never be sinless this side of life. Sin will continue to infuse our person-ness as long as we draw breath.

Indwelling sin always abides whilst we are in this world; therefore it is always to be mortified. The vain, foolish, and ignorant disputes of men about perfect keeping the commands of God, of perfection in this life, of being wholly and perfectly dead to sin, I meddle not now with. … We have a “body of death,” Romans 7:24; from whence we are not delivered but by the death of our bodies, Phil. 3:21.

2. This indwelling sin is not some sort of passive, inert thing. I sometimes see this sin as like a stain on a countertop. It lays there and pollutes the surface of the kitchen by its presence, but it does not penetrate through. Moreover, it does not activelyburrow through the countertop. It’s just ‘there’. Owen disabuses me of this foolish (and dangerous) notion:

Sin doth not only still abide in us, but is still acting, still labouring to bring forth the deeds of the flesh. When sin lets us alone we may let sin alone; but as sin is never less quiet than when it seems to be most quiet, and its waters are for the most part deep when they are still, so ought our contrivances against it to be vigorous at all times and in all conditions, even where there is least suspicion. Sin doth not only abide in us, but “the law of the members is still rebelling against the law of the mind,” Rom. 7:23; and “the spirit that dwells in us lusteth to envy,” James 4:5. It is always in continual work;

Sin will not only be striving, acting, rebelling, troubling, disquieting, but if let alone, if not continually mortified, it will bring forth great, cursed, scandalous, soul-destroying sins. The apostle tells us what the works and fruits of it are, Gal. 5:19-21, “The works of the flesh are manifest, which are, adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like.” You know what it did in David and sundry others. Sin aims always at the utmost; every time it rises up to tempt or entice, might it have its own course, it would go out to the utmost sin in that kind. Every unclean thought or glance would be adultery if it could; every covetous desire would be oppression, every thought of unbelief would be atheism, might it grow to its head.

3. The dangers are real, says Owen, in the neglect of this struggle. By laying downs arms against a yet remaining, vigorous enemy, we forfeit the battle. If you and I rest against mortifying sin and we are not completely swept aside into destruction and ruin, it is purely by the restraining grace of God and NOT because we have so perfected ourselves as to be immune to the workings of sin.

Where sin, through the neglect of mortification, gets a considerable victory, it breaks the bones of the soul, Ps. 31:10, and makes a man weak, sick, and ready to die, Ps. 38:3-5, so that he cannot look up, Ps. 60:12, Isa. 33:24; and when poor creatures will take blow by blow, wound after wound, foil after foil, and never rouse up themselves to a vigorous opposition, can they expect any thing but to be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin, and that their souls should bleed to death? 2 John 8. Indeed, it is a sad thing to consider the fearful issues of this neglect, which lie under our eyes every day. See we not those, whom we knew humble, melting, broken-hearted Christians, tender and fearful to offend, zealous for God and all his ways, his Sabbaths and ordinances, grown, through neglect of watching unto this duty, earthly, carnal, cold, wrathful, complying with the men of the world and things of the world, to the scandal of religion and the fearful temptation of them that know them? 

 4. Given the danger, given the risk, given the price for sleeping on watch, it is a most urgent duty to continue to mortify sin. Owen posits this at the beginning of the chapter and summarizes it again at the end:

Do you mortify; do you make it your daily work; be always at it whilst you live; cease not a day from this work; be killing sin or it will be killing you. Your being dead with Christ virtually, your being quickened with him, will not excuse you from this work.

[Y]et sin doth so remain, so act and work in the best of believers, whilst they live in this world, that the constant daily mortification of it is all their days incumbent on them.

5. Owen speaks directly to my heart thereafter and, I believe, puts his finger on the pressing sore of the church today. He points out that we are saturated with blessings and opportunity that have greatly expanded the bounds or freedoms of both believers individually and the broader faith they adhere to. And yet where we would expect to see a great flourishing of righteousness, we see rather the opposite in our churches. And if amongst those who are truly saved we see such poverty of spritual fruit and abundance of unmortified hearts, how can be shocked if our communities reflect this same uncircumcised lifestyle?  We pray for revival, yet feel it for ‘the other guy’ and not for us ’saved’ folks already in church. I think perhaps rather than praying for revival to see outsiders gathered in, we should pray for persecution, to see the dross burned off. Then, I think, revival will come.

Where almost is that professor who owes his conversion to these days of light, and so talks and professes at such a rate of spirituality as few in former days were, in any measure, acquainted with (I will not judge them, but perhaps boasting what the Lord hath done in them), that doth not give evidence of a miserably unmortified heart? If vain spending of time, idleness, unprofitableness in men’s places, envy, strife, variance, emulations, wrath, pride, worldliness, selfishness, 1 Cor. 1, be badges of Christians, we have them on us and amongst us in abundance. And if it be so with them who have much light, and which, we hope, is saving, what shall we say of some who would be accounted religious and yet despise the gospel light, and for the duty we have in hand, know no more of it but what consists in men’s denying themselves sometimes in outward enjoyments, which is one of the outmost branches of it, which they will seldom practice?

Anyway, I still struggle with Owen exploding my meager intelligence and the need to read and re-read (and re-re-read) Owen to get what he is saying. But like my need to overcome that initial resistance to get up and do something with my wife, I find that once I make that effort and start moving, the time together (with her or J.O.) is richly rewarding.