Great Christian Biographies with John Piper: John Owen, Part 2

Oxford Responsibilities, Family Burdens, and Early Publications

At Oxford, his responsibilities were for the services of worship. He preached in the cathedral and the college chapel. He was responsible for the choice of the students, the appointment of the chaplain, the provision of the tutorial facilities, the administration of discipline, the oversight of the property, the collection of the rents and tithes, the gift of the livings, and the care of the almsmen of the church hospital.

And he was trying to establish the whole thing under the word of God with frequent ministry of the word. His life was simply overwhelmed with pressure. I can't imagine what his family life must have been like.

He was losing children. 1655 was the middle of his tenure at the university, and we know two of his sons died in the plague that year. In his closing address, when he was relieved of his duties, finally, when the end of the interregnum came and Charles II returned, he gave this closing address.

Labors have been numberless. Besides submitting to enormous expense, often when brought to the brink of death on your account, something you'd say to a university community, I have been brought near to death on your account.

I have hated these limbs and this feeble body which was ready to desert my mind. The reproaches of the vulgar have been disregarded. The envy of others has been overcome. In these circumstances, I wish you all prosperity and bid you farewell.

Twenty-two published works during those nine years. I don't think he slept. I really believe, in fact, we know that he recorded at age 56 that he regretted as a student at Oxford only sleeping four hours a night because it was taking its toll on his health as a middle-aged man.

So I assume the same thing was probably true. When did he write his books? When everybody else went to bed. That's my guess. I don't know how else he might have done it. One of the books that he published during that time was The Saints' Perseverance.

I don't think I brought that along. Six hundred and sixty pages to settle that issue. And one biography called it the most masterly vindication of the perseverance of the saints in the English tongue.

While he was dean and vice-chancellor and losing his children and disciplining vulgar students who made him want to die, he was so depressed. Most of us, you know, think if we experience something like that, we'd have to ask for a leave of absence.

We couldn't preach the next Sunday, let alone write six hundred and sixty pages. This man was made of something strange, or God was doing something unusual. He wrote The Mortification of Sin during those years.

This is where I recommend that you start if you haven't read any of Owen. He wrote Of Communion with God, one of the sweetest of books during those Oxford years. He wrote Of Temptation, the nature and power of it during those years.

In other words, he wasn't just writing doctrinally controversial stuff. He was writing stuff that when you read it, make you feel like he was a monk exulting in his personal communion with God, which is in fact what he was doing.

I'm going to get to that later on. Well, he was fired because when the king returned, his standards of Puritan life and thought were no longer what the king wanted and he was relieved. And for the next twenty years, 1660 until he died, twenty-three years, he was a kind of fugitive pastor.

Hard to get a handle on how it worked in those days. But evidently he kind of moved around because it was dangerous to be a Puritan pastor. You couldn't preach to more than X number of people and you couldn't preach within certain miles and so on.

And so he just kind of moved around, which must have also destroyed his family life. But he didn't ever go to jail like John Bunyan did. We'll talk about that in a minute too. One of the interesting things that happened during his life was that he shifted from being a Presbyterian to a Congregationalist.

He did this by reading John Cotton, pastor in Boston, John Cotton's book, The Keys of the Kingdom. And when he read it, he was changed. He gave up his Presbyterianism. He embraced Congregationalism and became known as the Atlas and Patriarch of Independence.

It also bumped him up very high in the echelon of those who were crying out for toleration. Nothing like the toleration we would think of today, toleration within orthodoxy. He basically wanted Anglicans, Presbyterians and Congregationalists, Baptists and so on, to be able to be free to worship according to their own desires in England.

And he wrote books, you can find them in the Collected Works, arguing for this. One of his students was William Penn, who became a Quaker, who came over and preached toleration in the States. And another interesting thing for me, a Baptist, is that there's a letter in here written to the governor of Massachusetts in 1669 pleading with him and his Congregational peers to stop making life hard for the Baptists.

So that gives you a flavor. Back when he was dean, he had total legal authority to put a stop to all Anglican worship as a Puritan in Oxford. And he permitted, right across the hall from his own rooms, a little Anglican conventicle to worship every Lord's Day.

So Owen was an interesting guy. He'll preach a sermon after the execution of Charles I and call it the will of God. But he has this tolerant strain in him that says, within orthodoxy, we shouldn't persecute Presbyterians or Congregationalists or Anglicans.

He was a pastor during these years and he loved his people, even though he was on the run, moving around. And even when he couldn't be with them, he wrote things like this to them. Although I am absent from you in body, I am in mind and affection and spirit present with you and in your assemblies, for I hope you will be found my crown and rejoicing in the day of the Lord.

He said the first and principal duty of every pastor is to feed the flock by diligent preaching of the Word of God. And I assume that's what he made his top priority and that's where many of these works come from.

It isn't clear to me why he didn't go to jail. I can't figure out how it worked that some Puritans and independents in those years between 1660 and 1689 when the Act of Toleration was passed, why some of them went to jail and some didn't.

For example, John Bunyan was a contemporary and spent, as you know, 12 years in the Bedford jail. Now, there's a really interesting story here I've got to tell you because this is another glorious illustration of behind a frowning providence, there hides a smiling face.

And we need all the stories we can get because we are spring-loaded not to believe that. John Bunyan was a great preacher, but he was a tinker. He was simple. He had no education. And King Charles, who for one reason or another did respect Owen, even though he didn't like his principles, asked him one time, why do you go to hear Bunyan preach?

An educated, university-trained, world-class scholar like you. And his answer was, could I possess the tinker's ability for preaching, please your majesty? I would gladly relinquish all my learning.

Owen finds out that Bunyan is in prison. He works and works and works with all his connections in high places to get him released. And he fails. Bad, right? The biography I was reading that told this story said, and after his failure in 1676, Bunyan walks out of the bed for jail with a manuscript, the worth and importance of which can scarcely be comprehended.

Was the failure to get Bunyan out of jail a failure? Ask yourself. After the Bible, there is no other book in the world, I believe, printed so often or having such a widespread Christian influence as Pilgrim's Progress.

Had Owen succeeded, we wouldn't have it. Probably. Brothers, you must not judge quickly your prison experiences. You must not judge them quickly. This morning I learned within ten minutes the smile behind the frowning phone call.

I bet Bunyan died, he died five years after Owen, without knowing that it would have been worth it. The story is not over. Owen reads the manuscript and says, I think this is worth something. Here's a tinker.

He knows zero about the publishing industry. He doesn't know any, got no connections. Owen knows everybody in London. He's a big wheel. He doesn't get persecuted because he's got such connections. He finds Nathaniel Ponder, who's been publishing his books now for, what, a dozen years, and he says, Ponder, publish this book.

And Ponder makes a myth and sends John Bunyan's book into orbit. So Owen succeeded after he failed, or succeeded. He succeeded painfully and he succeeded pleasantly. And life is just made up like that for Christians.

That's all we do is succeed, either painfully and regretfully or pleasantly. He died 1683, August 24, was buried in Bunhill Fields, and five years later Bunyan is buried in the same place today. Which I thought was just a tremendous little providence of the Lord to say, here's a man who lived his whole life for toleration's sake, and here's a Baptist tinker and they're lying dead beside each other, and both of them today speaking majestically, but Bunyan speaking a lot louder than the scholar.

The Heart of John Owen’s Life: Holiness and Communion with God

Now I want to step back from this life and ask this question. What made him tick? What was the core, what was the center, the essence of the man's life? J. I. Packer and Sinclair Ferguson say that they were most influenced by his spiritual insight into the nature of the heart and how it works in holiness.

In fact, Packer, you may have heard this story. You can read it in the introduction to Houston's edition of Mortification from Multnomah. When Packer was a student at Oxford, I believe, not sure about that, a new convert, young adult, he came under the influence of some very perfectionistic people in the holiness movement.

He had no categories for understanding his ongoing temptations and sins in this group. He said he came this close to suicide, and the rescue was John Owen. He tells that story. I've heard it on tape. I've seen it in two books.

He loves that story. I'll read you, I think I have a sentence here. No, I don't. I've lost it. It's way back at the beginning. But he says, I think I would have lost my head or either gone into some kind of crazy fanaticism if it hadn't been for John Owen on the mortification of sin and the nature, power, and prevalency of indwelling sin.

Owen gave him a category to understand his heart. I think what made Owen unique was his mingling of holiness with his great achievements. Here's his own testimony to what is main in his life. This is from the preface to the mortification of sin, volume six.

If you're going to get one volume of the works, get volume six. I hope I may own in sincerity that my heart's desire unto God and the chief design of my life. When I ever read something like that, I underline it.

That's a big statement. The chief design of my life and my heart's desire are that mortification and universal holiness may be promoted in my own and in the hearts and ways of others to the glory of God that so the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ may be adorned in all things.

And the same note was struck 25 years later in 1681 when he published The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded. So for 25 years, at least, he was driven by this passion to mortify the sin in his life and to grow in holiness and to do whatever he could do in parliament, among the military, among the university, in the churches, among the independents, to foster holiness.

To adorn the gospel to the glory of God. That's his life. Sinclair Ferguson says in this little book that I held up here, everything he wrote for his contemporaries, in other words, both the controversial things and the practical things, everything he wrote had a practical and pastoral aim in view.

The promotion of true Christian living. In other words, mortification of sin and holiness. And it was his burden for the university as well as everywhere else. He talked about aspiring after godliness with the students.

It was his aim in politics. If you ask, why would this man so schooled in theology, a born pastor, preach to parliament and get so involved with the military and do all that? His answer was, the people of Israel were at the height of their fortunes when their leaders were godly.

He did not have a mainly political agenda. He had a godliness agenda. When he preached to parliament, his point was, if I can get you men to be godly, God will be upon this nation. So that's why he preached to parliament.

Godliness, holiness was his passion. Same thing with missions. When he went to Ireland, Cromwell took him along to look at Trinity College, Ireland, in Dublin. Any hope for this university? Can we do anything here?

And while he was looking at the university, Cromwell took his army out and actually decimated an army. They slaughtered them. The blood ran thick. And Owen came back and he preached to parliament these words.

How is it that Jesus Christ is in Ireland only as a lion staining all his garments with the blood of his enemies and none to hold him out as a lamb sprinkled with his own blood to his friends? Is this to deal fairly with the Lord Jesus?

Call him out to do battle and then keep away his crown? God has been faithful in doing great things for you. Be faithful in this one. Do your utmost for the preaching of the gospel in Ireland. Now, we may not like the entanglement of that politics and religion, but I think you can hear coming through the heartbeat of this man.

Okay, he was there. He analyzed the university. He preached to the troops. He said, God's hand is on Cromwell. Yes, providence brought the victory. Maybe it was to be done that way, maybe not. But one thing was for sure.

He wanted to know, how is the gospel faring in Ireland? Do these poor souls out here have anybody preaching the truth of the gospel? Let Christ get his crown now that he has won the victory over his enemies.

And so, the preaching of the gospel to the end of holiness was a missionary passion as well. And in his own life, his funeral sermon by David Clarkson, his ministerial associate, the key sentences in it, I think, are this.

A great light has fallen, one of eminency for holiness, learning, hearts, abilities, a pastor, a scholar, a divine of the first magnitude. Holiness gave a divine luster to his other accomplishments. I think that's a very, very essential statement.

Holiness gave a divine luster to his other accomplishments. It shined in his whole course and diffused through his whole life. So what I want to do now, if we're on to the right track here, that the key to this man's life, what made him unique, what gave luster to all his accomplishments was his passion for holiness in himself and others.

I want to ask the question next, well, why should we listen to this man? Why should his talk in life about holiness arrest our attention more than other holy people that we know about in life or in church history?

And here's my answer to that question. There aren't many people today who say what he said. Namely, personal holiness is an essential component of worthy leadership. Our president certainly does not believe that.

I hope I'm not saying anything than what I read on the front page of the Tribune. When our president refused to deny the allegations of his own misconduct, lack of holiness, and simply said, that's irrelevant.

John Owen would have dropped dead. If he stood up before the Congress of the United States of America, the issue would be adultery. The issue would be holiness. God will not bless, he would say, a nation whose leaders are unholy, no matter how much savvy they have in the world.

That's one reason I think we need to take a man like this seriously. There aren't many around. Not in the church either. I mean, who would you look to today as statesman-like church leaders who are known for the fact that they put personal holiness above church growth?

There are many pastors who believe that. But where are the leaders who are known for that note?

There aren't many.

You've got to go to dead people to get heroes. Well, Owen is a good one, I think. A third reason why I think he's valuable today to listen to is because he achieved his holiness not as a hermit. I mean, when I get excited about holiness and spiritual mindedness and communion with God, my first inclination is, take a break.

Ask for a month off.

Go away from the trouble.

He never went away.

Richard Baxter didn't like Owen. They were contemporaries. Hidden heads. He called him the great doer. It was a scornful word.

This guy's always doing.

Who's Baxter to tell? Good night. What he achieved, he wrote a lot more than Owen did. He was involved in academic administration. He was involved in politics up to his ears. He was involved in the leading military officers.

He formed a little church out of the leading military officers. He was embroiled in every controversy from the authenticity of the Hebrew vow points. He wrote an awful work on that, which history has wonderfully buried.

And the authenticity of the epistle to Ignatius, all the way up to whether or not a church should be congregational or Presbyterian and whether the doctrine of justification should be Catholic or Protestant.

He was embroiled in almost every controversy of his day. He'd hear John Goodwin say something about perseverance, and boom, he'd dash off 660 pages to prove that he's wrong. This man was just constantly churning stuff.

He was looked to by thousands of congregational independents as the main spokesman in England of his day, while all the while pastoring people in the last 23 years of his life. So my point is, the holiness of this man was not cultivated by having long summer breaks, which a lot of senior pastors enjoy.

Take 10, 12 weeks off because the pressures are heavy, and then you can be holy. You can get more holy because you've got more time on your hands. Something is fishy here. If Owen can pull this off and have him known so that commentator after commentator says his holiness equaled his erudition, that's one quote I saw around.

Why? How did he do it?

Not only that, add this to it. When you have that kind of leadership, and you're embroiled in those kinds of controversies, you are absolutely stormed with criticism. And it can really hurt. For example, he was in an argument with a fellow named Parker, and he bested him.

Parker got worsted. Those are words I read in these books. He got worsted because he was bested by Owen, and so he resorted to doing what most people today do when in the public arena they get bested.

I mean, we don't even have discourse to get bested in today. We just start with name calling. The great bellwether of disturbance and sedition. A person who would have vied with Mohammed himself both for boldness and imposture.

A viper so swollen with venom that it must either burst or spit its poison. Now, how much of that can you take in public before people start believing it about you? And you start trying, like Jonathan Edwards said, to take every criticism seriously and find the germ of truth in it.

You know, and you stay up half the night saying, now, is what that person said true? I mean, how do you survive that kind of... And add this to this. This is all just to show you how the achievement of holiness blows my mind away.

Not only did he experience criticism from his enemies, he got a letter. This is just a little example. From John Elliot, the missionary in New England. Another one of my heroes. And he had misunderstood Owen.

I mean, I don't know what all the facts were. There's just a letter in here, and you don't know what's behind it. But he criticized Owen for something unholy. And Owen is so stung, he writes,. What I have received from you has printed deeper and left a greater impression upon my mind than all the virulent revilings and false accusations I have met with withal from my professed adversaries.

That I should now be apprehended to have given a wound unto holiness in the churches, it is one of the saddest frowns in the cloudy brows of divine providence. So he didn't just have to deal with his enemies.

He was being misunderstood by his friends. And that went deeper, he said, than anything the enemies said. Add this to it. It was a pre-technological age. He had no lights. He had no indoor plumbing. He had no computer, no pens, no ordinary paper that we have.

Add that, the plague, two plagues, one in 55, one in 65. In 65, 70 ,000 people out of a half a million died in London, many in his parish among them. Add that, that he was living outside the law this whole time.

Couldn't settle down into an ordinary ministry and let the church grow too big because then he's going to go right to jail between 62 and 89. And I conclude, he's worth listening to. If this man becomes holy and is known for his communion with God and his spiritual mindedness and his purity of heart and his integrity above his erudition, I want to know how.

That's the kind of question I ask when I'm reading about him. So that's my closing thing here. How did he pursue salvation?