Fighting and Killing Sin V: Applying Mortification

For the Whole Council Podcast, I'm Jon Snider, and with me is

Jeremy Walker, pastor at Maiden Bower Baptist Church in Crawley, England, so that's south of London, and Jeremy's here in North Mississippi with us for a few days preaching, and after a number of podcasts in this room today, and Teddy keeps turning the air conditioner off because he doesn't want the buzz, we've run out of oxygen and become ludicrous, but Teddy promises to cut all of those parts out because we are actually looking at a very serious topic.

This is our last episode on temptation of sin and the mortification of sin, and we've been using books from John Owen, and you can find the links to those.

Boehner Truth publishes these really well -done, slightly edited and abridged versions, or you can get in the big

John Owen set, I think it's volume six, that contains both of those. So we come to the end of the topic of the mortification of sin, and we can only hit just kind of some of the high points because Owen, as we mentioned in our last podcast,

Owen does give kind of nine concluding remarks before he gives his two main conclusions.

So while we have these nine pre -concluding conclusions, right before that,

Owen talks about a thing called universal obedience, and that is a phrase that the

Puritans used a lot. It's a very helpful phrase, if understood correctly. So Jeremy, let's hit that, and then you can kind of take us through those, what he calls preparatory directions, and then we'll hit those final conclusions.

Well, his point with regard to universal obedience is basically you cannot pick and choose which sins you're going to strive against.

Holiness is a likeness to God in the whole of our humanity.

Christ does not redeem us piecemeal. All that I am, body and soul, belongs to him, and so the contention against sin and for righteousness needs to be in my mind and my heart and my soul and my strength.

It is with all that I am that I'm to love the Lord my God. There's another

Puritan by the name of Richard Baxter, has this great treatment, the

Christian directory, and it's, again, this exhaustive breaking down of aspects of Christian character, how to pursue godliness.

And he has an interesting expression of this principle. In the section where he's dealing with lust, he says you should eat more lettuce.

And you read that and think, what? I thought I just read eat more lettuce. His point is that if you want to control your appetites in this area, you can't afford to indulge your appetites in other areas.

And it's really quite striking. So he says don't expect that if you're indulging gluttony, that you'll actually be able effectively to control your sexual desires.

You're going to need to exercise self -control across the range of your appetites, and then you'll be able to make real advance at any point.

Owens, using this slightly different language, suppose a man finds a particular lust to be powerful, strong, and violent.

Again, worth remembering that a lust here is a sinful desire, not inherently a sexual desire.

This lust takes him captive. He's troubled by it, and it takes away his peace. He's not able to bear it and sets himself against it, prays against it, groans under it, and sighs to be delivered.

All of that sounds great. But, says Owen, in the meantime, perhaps in other duties, in constant communion with God, in reading, prayer, and meditation, and in other ways, he is loose and negligent.

He will not then be able to gain the victory over that troubling lust. So Owen's point is that we've got to be pursuing holiness across the board.

The war is on every front in our humanity. And without that conviction and without that pursuit, we're not going to make progress at any one point.

We'll always be beaten back. If you think of a very simple physical illustration, you know, with our kind of preoccupation with how we look and, you know, so we start to hit a certain age and we think,

I need to take a few pounds off. And, you know, and we all have body types and the pounds hide in different places.

And you think, well, I'd like to just work this. And, you know, and there are, you know, especially in older days, there would be, you know, things that you could buy.

They would say, if you put this cream here, you wrap this wrap here, if you do this one exercise, you'll reduce all the fat in this one section.

But that's not really how the body deals with excess fat. And there's no spot reduction of sin.

One way we might think of universal obedience is with the motif of love. If you love me, you will keep my commandments.

You know, we love Him because He first loved us. That's not the beginning place of the Christian life. It is

God's love pursuing the unlovely. God choosing all the reasons to love us from within Himself.

But when that does take hold of us, when true conversion occurs, then love to the one that has forgiven us so much moves us to obey.

But without love, obedience is very spotty. Right. You know, if we think of just in relationships, my wife, there's certain things, you know, that would hurt her.

I'm not okay with saying, well, of the four or five things that would deeply wound my wife,

I'm going to get rid of three and keep two. You know, well, why not? Will she leave you?

Well, no, love. And so love to God makes the believer unwilling to be at ease with any offensive, anti -Christ kind of behavior or thought.

But an unbeliever is glad to give the least. Just tell me what

I have to do not to go to hell. Are you saying if I did this, I'd go to hell? I mean, I get that question a lot, you know, in pastoral counseling, especially in the early years of the church.

Someone would say, so are you saying if I do this, if I leave my husband, do I go to hell? And, you know, you know what they're wanting to hear?

Like, well, actually, and then they say, okay, that's it. That's all I needed to know. So if that's the kind of approach we have, you know, can

I keep this? Or as you've mentioned in previous podcasts, how close can I get to the edge and not fall off the edge?

If that's our idea of, you know, the Christian life and what's great about it, then we don't love the

King. Owen's point is that this is all in across the board.

I desire to be holy and therefore there is no sin that I am prepared to countenance.

Once I see it, I'm against it and that I cannot indulge at any point lest I open the door and sin come in and weaken me across the board.

So let's just kind of run through, Jeremy, if you'll help us run through the dangerous symptoms of sin.

And he gives these preparatory directions, preparing us for the final conclusion.

Yeah. So what Owen's trying to do here is setting us up with the assumptions, the scriptural assumptions or perspectives that we need to have in mind in order then effectively to use those two primary means for putting sin to death.

So as you said before, it's that puritanical thoroughness. Let's prepare the ground.

These are the foundations that you need to lay in order really to begin building this house of holiness.

So just very briefly and from the notes that we've got here. First of all, he says, consider the symptoms that accompany these sinful lusts, the marks of them.

You need to know what you're looking for. If there's going to be this weakening of those habitual inclinations, you need to know what those habitual inclinations really look like.

And so he talks about things like when sin frequently succeeds in obtaining the consent of the will, when you've got a desire for something or when you fight against a sin only because of the consequences or penalty of that sin.

He says, figure out what that looks like in your experience. Then the second direction, get a clear and abiding sense upon your mind and conscience of the guilt, danger and evil of the sin with which you are troubled.

And again, he's going to develop some of this and dig down pretty deep. But he's basically saying here, you need to understand the sinfulness of sin.

If you treat it lightly, you'll never be against it in the way that you should be. Then charge your conscience with the guilt of indwelling sin.

And this is very contrary to the modern mindset. Don't build your self -esteem.

Don't tell yourself you're OK. Don't excuse yourself and explain it all away. The third direction, not only should you acknowledge that this sin brings guilt upon you, but you should charge your conscience with the guilt of its actual risings and outbreakings.

Owen says, look yourself in the eye, in the mirror, and deal honestly with the fact of your sinfulness.

Then seek a constant longing and thirsting to be delivered from the power of sin.

And you notice he doesn't just say long and thirst, but seek that. Again, cry out to God for a greater appetite for holiness and a greater hatred of sin.

Do not let your heart be happy even for a moment with your present condition. Don't settle on your lease in this state.

Don't grow satisfied or content with where you are. Then consider whether the trouble that you are perplexed with, this is the fifth, is related to your particular makeup, your constitution, and your nature.

We've talked about this before. Understand yourself in relation to these particular temptations and struggles.

The sixth, consider what occasions your sin has taken advantage of to exert itself in the past and watch carefully at such times.

If you always get tripped up at the same point, then watch out when you reach that point.

If you know that there's always ice on the corner on a certain road in winter, next time you're driving down that road in winter, slow down at that corner.

Don't just keep doing the same thing with the same consequences over and over again. Then, this one's helpful, the seventh direction, rise mightily against the first sign of sin.

Most of us lose our battles against sin in large measure because we don't kill it while it's small.

We let it fester and grow and develop. But Owen says, don't allow it to gain the smallest ground, that the least suggestion or inclination of sin is sin still.

Stamp it out as it begins. The eighth direction, we need to be exercised with such meditations as will fill us at all times with self -abasement and thoughts of our own vileness.

Again, you're not going to read that in many self -help manuals today. And he says, that's not just trample yourself in the dust and despise yourself.

Meditate upon the excellence and the majesty of God and our distance from him. It's man in relation to God.

This is a healthy self -emptying. This is an awareness of how little acquainted we really are with God.

You know enough to keep you low, but there's so much more you haven't grasped. And he deals with a couple of objections.

And then the last of these directions is that when God stirs your heart about the guilt of your sin concerning either its root and indwelling or its breaking out, be careful you do not speak peace to yourself before God speaks it.

Listen closely to what God says to your soul. So with Owens, and again, it sounds so modern.

It's so up to date because of, again, as we've said before, God is still God. Human nature is still human nature.

Sin is still sin. And the devil is still against us. But don't be too quick to tell yourself it's okay.

Don't be too swift to say we've got this sorted. Don't soothe your conscience before actually your conscience is secure.

Don't imagine that you've accomplished this putting of sin to death until you really have made this kind of progress with it.

Otherwise, you'll rest on your laurels. You'll start taking it easy and that sin will still be bubbling under, still working itself up.

And Owens saying, I mean, he gives us then five rules by which men may know whether God speaks peace to them or whether they're speaking peace to themselves.

So this is that thoroughness again. And I know we don't have time to dig into all of this, but for Christians who are fighting against sin and saying, how do

I really make progress? All this theory, we know what it is, but how do we do it? I would say this would be a really helpful study for a

Christian or for a church, a Bible class or whatever, because Owen is saying, if you're really going to overcome sin, if you're really going to use these two primary weapons well to put sin to death, actually you need to be in this disposition first.

You need to cultivate these attitudes. You need to have these awarenesses. You need to understand these dynamics.

You need to be in the right state, the right situation, have the right outlook on these things, because until really you're in this, you've got this kind of poise, you're not going to be balanced for the fight.

You're not set up for this combat and you need the motivations. You need the appetites.

You need the direction that allows you then under God to properly engage.

Otherwise, you'll either not press on far enough or you'll give up too quickly or you'll be striking at the wrong targets or you'll be satisfied with the wrong things.

So it's, I mean, this is why the Puritans are called the physicians of the soul, rather than just sort of cutting to the chase and saying, so this is what you want to do and here's a couple of things to help you do it.

Owen's saying your whole soul needs to be primed for this endeavor. And these are the foundations.

These are the piles that you need to drive down in order that when you're engaged, you're not going to drift away before the job is done.

Yeah. And then, you know, when we come to his concluding remarks, that is the two directions, he says for killing sin, the first being setting your faith upon Christ and then considering the work of the

Spirit. Those are phrases that church folks are used to. You know, we're accustomed to those.

And so, you know, we could be going along and becoming slightly uncomfortable and we think, well, that's conviction.

It's had its full course and we can then admit, yes, I've been careless here.

And we think, well, that was repentance. And then we say, and then what are my final two points? Well, I've got to trust the

Lord and I've got to depend upon the Spirit. And all of that, you know, in a 20 -minute, you know, talk and we say, well, great.

Okay, I did it. Whereas, you know, Owen is guarding us against a self -deceptive and, you know, surface level dealing with God, which guarantees, as you mentioned, you know, in a previous episode with your backyard, your back garden, with the brambles that keep growing up, never getting to the roots.

You just continue to see these grow up and you cut off the tops because it's ugly.

But, you know, do you end up thinking, maybe I'm not a Christian or do you end up thinking that, well, maybe the gospel isn't the power of God unto salvation.

And I've just got to become, you look around and everyone else seems to be kind of haphazard as well, you know, in your church.

And you say, well, this is as good as Christianity gets. The things I read about in scripture, that was back then, you know, and then we reduce our expectations of our

Lord. And, you know, and we have, you know, what Spurgeon called that poor dying rate of Christianity.

So when we take those nine things and, you know, we take time personally to really work through those, and these aren't steps that we're climbing up, you know, to God, to earn his love.

And check these boxes and all of a sudden you're there. Right. And these aren't things that if you do this perfectly, A, B, and C is done perfectly, then, you know,

D and E follow. But these are really, these are just ways of asking myself, am

I really being very honest with God? Am I serious about this?

Am I in earnest about this? Or do I, would I just like to finish the Bible study, you know, or just get rid of this pain?

Do I want a cure or relief? And that prepares us though, for that sweet two part application.

Why don't you give us that? I wonder if at this point, maybe someone's been listening like, okay, you know,

John Snyder's told us at the end of this podcast, these two things. And if we can just do those, faith in Jesus Christ and dependence, oh, is that it?

Again, we've said, well, I was looking for the answer. I was looking for that golden key that turns in the lock.

And all of a sudden, you know, the door opens and all spiritual life falls into place. We've got to remember,

Owen said, this is a lifelong battle. And I think this is where this is so helpful.

Christianity isn't something that has happened to me. Full stop. It has happened, is happening.

What salvation is in, often salvation's in three tenses. I have been saved. I am being saved.

And I will be saved. And Owen's really here right with us in the present. And he's reminding us here that salvation is not just salvation from the punishment of sin, but from the pollution and the power of sin.

Don't diminish, don't underestimate, don't shrivel the work of Jesus Christ.

So set your faith. And again, don't, what he doesn't say here is, set your faith upon Jesus Christ to be saved from your sins.

But set your faith upon Jesus Christ for the killing of your sin. These are the ongoing realities of union with the

Saviour. His blood is the great sovereign remedy for sin sick souls.

Live in the light of Christ's great work and you will die a conqueror. You have to understand the full orb nature, what it means for this finished work of Christ to have been accomplished for you.

That it's not just now your sins can be forgiven, but using the language carefully, you can live a triumphant life.

Now Christ has conquered sin and death and hell for you. Now you need to lay hold upon that reality that you may engage wholeheartedly against sin and day by day, degree by degree, moment by moment, mercy by mercy, make progress in the battle against sin and toward godliness.

And I think this is what he has in mind in this first main direction. He says, expect relief from Christ.

Where are we looking when we're in this battle? You quoted the Amy Carmichael poem earlier.

You look to Christ. That's where your strength is. That's where your sustenance is.

He will raise you up. He will sustain you. That sort of beautiful language in the

Proverbs, the path of the just shining ever brighter unto perfect day.

Yes, we stumble, but we don't fall. Look to Jesus Christ and expect him to help you.

The faithfulness of God. He is faithful who has promised.

And it's sending us back to the cross, to the cross, to the cross. That living close to Jesus Christ, we might hate sin, we might love righteousness, and we might draw from him who was crucified and who rose again.

Christ is not just dead on our behalf. He is risen on our behalf.

And in the power of that new life, I am now living. So Owen's emphasizing here, not just the once for all aspects, as you mentioned before, justification, but the ongoing fruits of my lively union with my saviour.

And again, it's that grand view of God in Christ. That's not just transformative intellectually.

Living upon him, it transforms the way that we then live for him.

Yeah, I think, you know, it's always good. We back up from our particular struggle, our fears, our, you know, our awareness of our inadequacy.

And instead of, you know, trying to start there. Okay, God save me from this one sin or whatever it is.

We back up and we look at, like you said, the biggest picture, the canvas, the wide canvas of redemption.

And we place our daily battles as believers. We place them in the great picture of Christ's ultimate triumph.

And, you know, and that helps us to hold a balance, to avoid despair, to avoid viewing our life as insignificant.

What does it matter if I progress in holiness? I'm not the preacher, you know, maybe nobody even notices me.

And yet I am part of this unfolding of the tapestry of the wisdom and the perfection of our

God. And, you know, people are viewing him as they see me. And so it does matter.

But also, you know, when we think of faith, the nature of faith, faith is not hopefulness.

So Owen is not saying, look, as I close down my book, I know I've hit you with a lot of, you know, some pretty heavy matters and there's some pretty steep climbs and, you know, the feet will get sore at times.

But don't worry, I want to end with this statement. Just believe in hopefulness, you know, have a hopeful, you know, positive attitude.

It'll all work out in the end. Yeah, yeah. So all that stuff we said about, if you don't do it, that's it. But just be hopeful.

I know it's rough, but maybe it'll get better. Right, yeah. But faith is the believer being enabled by God, by the spirit of God, to believe what

God reveals and then to live on it as if God cannot lie to us.

And so it is the realities, you know, as you mentioned, it is this boundless reality, this infinite reality of my

Redeemer, all of God united to true humanity for our rescue that I am coming to again and again.

And it is specifically revealed things about Christ that I am holding to and crying out to God and saying, you gave me this.

I need this if I'm going to live for you today. Right. God will perfect what he has begun.

If God is at work in me to will and to do for his good pleasure, then I will therefore work.

The indicative to the imperative, the accomplishments of God, and then the commands of God to me that rest upon those accomplishments with this believing and hopeful expectation that the purposes of God and the promises that are in Christ will come to their full accomplishment in me.

So as you were speaking, I was thinking of Titus chapter two, for the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously and godly in the present age.

It doesn't stop there. Looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and savior,

Jesus Christ. And it doesn't stop there. Who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for himself his own special people, zealous for good works.

And Christ has undertaken that his bride will be with him spotless, pure, unblemished.

He is working that in us. Now I put my faith in that Jesus and in union with and dependence upon him,

I set out to be what he intends me to be. Relying, and this is where Owen comes to his second direction, relying on the very spirit that he has given in order that those things may be accomplished in us.

So in that second direction, he says that we are to consider the part that the

Holy Spirit plays in mortification and the effects that are particularly ascribed to him.

So while we're not, you know, we're not dividing our one God into three little gods, one

God manifested in three persons. And we look to the work of the spirit.

How has he come in glorious harmony with father and son from eternity past?

Where, you know, if we tried to think of, you know, millions and millions, that doesn't work. This is before time.

This is timeless. This is above time. This is infinite, boundless, you know,

God existing prior to everything. Tozer says, if you just, if you try to think of that, you know, you go back in your mind in history, human history, all the way back, back beyond Rome, beyond Greece.

Okay, Genesis 1 .1. And you stand at Genesis 1 .1 and still you look back into the past and your mind is just, you know, confounded by the mystery.

God has always been. But one of the wonderful things about the immutability of God, we can look back at that and we can say, so I'm to understand that it has always been, always in the existence of God.

Always. Not a moment existed, so to speak, before this began. Always it has been the great delight of the holy

God, all three persons in union to rescue sinners and magnify himself through our rescue.

Yes, and so the spirit has been sent to apply everything that the father has, in a sense, as the architect planned.

The son has purchased and the spirit gives and gives. So how, in a practical way, do we see that influencing mortification of sin?

There's something here that is the outflowing of Owen's conception of communion with God and his wonderful treatment on that.

We have communion with the father as the father and with the son as the son and with the spirit as the spirit.

And I think here, this is a practical demonstration or outworking of that.

Really important to remember that when Owen says, consider the part that the Holy Spirit plays, he doesn't mean sit back and think about this.

Again, this is experiential. This is experimental consideration.

Get a hold of this. Understand in practice what it means for the

Holy Spirit to be the one who, to use his language, this work which

I have described as our duty, this work is effected, carried on, and accomplished by the power of the spirit in all its parts and all its degrees.

And Owen's saying, you need to get a hold of that if you're going to make the progress that you want to make.

Unless you are relying upon and enjoying those inward operations of the

Holy Spirit, and I think he's drawing on some of the say Corinthian and Galatian language, you know, the spirit lusts against the flesh.

There is this contention within us. This is the indwelling spirit of holiness.

This is the one who's taken up residence in you. And there are some of those beautiful sort of illustrations, not always scriptural illustrations, but, you know, the man who moves into a home, and it's his home, it really is.

But the last homeowner had the most dreadful taste. And the place is foul, it's skanky, there's mold and damp and the decorations are dreadful.

He needs to renovate this place. And he begins. And it's not, as we've said before, it's not that the

Holy Spirit wants to renovate one room in the house. The whole of the building of our humanity needs to be thoroughly made new.

We belong to God. And now there's this wholesale reworking. And Owen's saying, you need to understand that that's distinctly the spirit's work, and you cannot accomplish it apart from him.

And so he gives these directions. You'll not know the evil of sin, the sinfulness of sin, and the danger and the guilt and the horror of this lust, unless the

Holy Spirit opens your eyes. Now you go back to those preparatory directions. We wanted that.

That helps us. So who do you ask? Oh God, open my eyes. Well, which of the persons are you particularly pleading?

Who is the illuminator? That's the Holy Spirit. He says, the spirit alone reveals to us the fullness of Christ.

How will you understand how the finished work of the dying, but risen and ascended and reigning

Lord aids you in this work? Unless the spirit takes the things that belong to him and shows them to you.

The spirit alone establishes the heart in the expectation of relief. Why do you have hope?

The spirit has given you this hope. He's shown you what is in Christ. He brings the cross of Christ into our hearts, says

Owen, with its sin -killing power. How can you gaze on a crucified

Christ and then go away and embrace the knife which stabbed him to his heart?

And then the spirit is the author and finisher of our sanctification. He's its originating force.

And notice I'm not saying it, but he. He is not the force, but by his power, this is at work in us.

And he is the one who brings it to completion in accordance with the prayers of the son, the purposes of the father, and all our souls' prayers to God in our need are supported by the spirit.

When you're crying out those feeble groans, when you're in your folly, you've danced on the edge of the cliff, you're about to fall over, and you barely know what to say.

And you just say, you fool, you can't escape now. Your power's gone.

Without divine help, you're over the edge. And you say, Father, help me.

Who aids you? Who's groaning in your groaning? The spirit of God is there with you.

So Owen is not for one moment saying, sit back and think about the fact that there's a Holy Spirit, and that's a good thing.

And there's help there. No, no. Consider. You might almost say, plug into this reality.

Understand the person and the work, not just of the son in delivering you from sin's punishment and pollution and power, but the operations of the spirit in your experience as a new creation fighting against sin.

And so, as we said, believe in Jesus and trust in the Holy Spirit.

No, no, that would be shallow and twee if we left it at that point. Owen says, understand how these persons of the

Godhead, in who they are and in what they are doing, have undertaken to work in you to accomplish the saving purposes of the

Father. And that's where you begin to begin to put your sin to death.

So many helpful things from John Owen in these two books on temptation and the mortification of sin, really books that help give us a right measure, the right perspective, not the perspective perhaps that we get from the world, not the perspective we get perhaps from the pulpits.

Um, if a man, a woman, a young person would dare look at the right, the accurate biblical pictures and descriptions of the nature and extent of sin, of God and His holiness, but also to have a right understanding, a right expectation of the provisions of the new covenant and how those actually, actually become things

I'm living on. If a person is in earnest about those things, these two books are so helpful.

Yeah, this, the spiritual dynamics and mechanics of Christian life.

Owen, as we've said, Owen's on the front line of this kind of battle. He's speaking to people like us.

He's speaking to these young university students. They're away from home. They're, you know, in some ways the world is spread before them.

And he's bringing these realities to bear upon our souls. It's, it's eminently practical.

Yes, it is. And really worth our time. We recommend these two books to you. The podcast, we really only just kind of skipped along some of the high points, things that perhaps we haven't considered before.

And if you can get these books and, you know, to devote some time to those, you know, take a year, work through those, but they really do merit a very careful, slow working through, not, not just so that you understand his argument and, you know, where is he getting this from the scripture?

Why does he say it this way? But you're actually walking, you know, use

Owen as a friend to walk alongside you as you labor to walk in the path of Christ.

How am I to walk as near as a saved sinner can walk to this

King? We hope that these have been helpful for you. And you can go back if you missed the earlier episodes and find them.

And you can, we'll have links to these books and where you can find them in the show notes.