The following is taken from\u00a0Puritan Portraits\u00a0by J. I. Packer, published by Christian Focus (192pp, paperback, ISBN 9781845507008). There are seven Puritan leaders who are evaluated and commended by Dr. Packer in this fine book. The notes have been added.<\/i><\/p>\n
I owe more, I think, to John Owen than to any other theologian, ancient or modern, and I am sure I owe more to his little book on mortification1<\/a><\/sup> I was converted \u2013 that is, I came to the Lord Jesus Christ in a decisive commitment, needing and seeking God\u2019s pardon and acceptance, conscious of Christ\u2019s redeeming love for me and his personal call to me \u2013 in my first university term, a little more than half a century ago. The group nurturing me was heavily pietistic in style, and left me in no doubt that the most important thing for me as a Christian was the quality of my walk with God: in which, of course, they were entirely right. They were also, however, somewhat elitist in spirit, holding that only Bible-believing evangelicals could say anything worth hearing about the Christian life, and the leaders encouraged the rest of us to assume that anyone thought sound enough to address the group on this theme was sure to be good. I listened with great expectation and excitement to the preachers and teachers whom the group brought in week by week, not doubting that they were the top devotional instructors in Britain, perhaps in the world. And I came a cropper.<\/p>\n Whether what I thought I heard was what was really being said may be left an open question, but it seemed to me that what I was being told was this. There are two sorts of Christians, first-class and second-class, \u2018spiritual\u2019 and \u2018carnal\u2019 (a distinction drawn from the King James rendering of\u00a01 Cor.<\/i>\u00a03:1-3). The former know sustained peace and joy, constant inner confidence, and regular victory over temptation and sin, in a way that the latter do not. Those who hope to be of use to God must become \u2018spiritual\u2019 in the stated sense. As a lonely, nervy, adolescent introvert whose new-found assurance had not changed his temperament overnight, I had to conclude that I was not \u2018spiritual\u2019 yet. But I wanted to be useful to God. So what was I to do?<\/p>\n There is a secret, I was told, of rising from carnality to spirituality, a secret mirrored in the maxim: \u2018Let go, and let God\u2019. I vividly recall a radiant clergyman in an Oxford pulpit enforcing this. The secret had to do with being Spirit-filled. The Spirit-filled person, it was said, is taken out of the second half of Romans 7, understood (misunderstood, I would now maintain) as an analysis of constant moral defeat through self-reliance, into Romans 8, where he walks confidently in the Spirit and is not so defeated. The way to be Spirit-filled, so I gathered, was as follows.<\/p>\n First, one must\u00a0deny self<\/i>. Did not Jesus require self-denial from his disciples (Luke<\/i>\u00a09:23)? Yes, but clearly what he meant was the negating of carnal self \u2014 that is to say self-will, self-assertion, self-centredness and self-worship, the Adamic syndrome in human nature, the egocentric behaviour pattern, rooted in anti-God aspirations and attitudes, for which the common name is original sin. What I seemed to be hearing, however, was a call to\u00a0deny personal self<\/i>, so that I could be taken over by Jesus Christ in such a way that my present experience of thinking and willing would become something different, an experience of Christ himself living in he, animating me and doing the thinking and willing for me. Put like that, it sounds more like the formula of demon-possession than the ministry of the indwelling Christ according to the New Testament. But in those days I knew nothing about demon-possession, and what I have just put into words seemed to be the plain meaning of \u2018I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me\u2019 (Gal.<\/i>\u00a02:20, KJV) as expounded by the approved speakers. We used to sing this chorus:<\/p>\n O to be saved from myself, dear Lord, Whatever its author may have meant, I sang it whole-heartedly in the sense spelled out above.<\/p>\n The rest of the secret was bound up in the double-barrelled phrase\u00a0consecration and faith.<\/i>\u00a0Consecration meant total self-surrender, laying one\u2019s all on the altar, handing over every part of one\u2019s life to the lordship of Jesus. Through consecration one would be emptied of self, and the empty vessel would then automatically be filled with the Spirit so that Christ\u2019s power within one would be ready for use. With consecration was to go faith, which was explained as looking to the indwelling Christ moment by moment, not only to do one\u2019s thinking and choosing in and for one, but also to do one\u2019s fighting and resisting of temptation. Rather than meet temptation directly (which would be fighting in one\u2019s own strength), one should hand it over to Christ to deal with, and look to him to banish it. Such was the consecration-and-faith technique as I understood it \u2013 heap powerful magic, as I took it to be, the precious secret of what was called victorious living.<\/p>\n But what happened? I scraped my inside, figuratively speaking, to ensure that my consecration was complete, and laboured to \u2018let go and let God\u2019 when temptation made its presence felt. At that time I did not know that Harry Ironside, sometime pastor of Moody Memorial Church, Chicago, once drove himself into a full-scale mental breakdown through trying to get into the higher life as I was trying to get into it; and I would not have dared to conclude, as I have concluded since, that this higher life as described is a will-o\u2019-the-wisp, an unreality that no one has ever laid hold of at all, and that those who testify to their experience in these terms really, if unwittingly, distort what has happened to them. All I knew was that the expected experience was not coming. The technique was not working. Why not? Well, since the teaching declared that everything depends on consecration being total, the fault had to lie in me. So I must scrape my inside again to find whatever maggots of unconsecrated selfhood still lurked there. I became fairly frantic.<\/p>\n And then (thank God) the group was given an old clergyman\u2019s library, and in it was an uncut set of Owen, and I cut the pages of volume VI2 <\/a><\/sup>more or less at random, and read Owen on mortification \u2013 and God used what the old Puritan had written three centuries before to sort me out. Here was God\u2019s chemo for my cancered soul.<\/p>\n Reaching across those three centuries, Owen showed me my inside \u2013 my heart \u2013 as no one had ever done before. Sin, he told me, is a blind, anti-God, egocentric energy in the fallen human spiritual system, ever fomenting self-centred and self-deceiving desires, ambitions, purposes, plans, attitudes, and behaviours. Now that I was a regenerate believer, born again, a new creation in Christ, sin that formerly dominated me had been de-throned but was not yet destroyed. It was marauding within me all the time, bringing back sinful desires that I hoped I had seen the last of, and twisting my new desires for God and godliness out of shape so that they became pride-perverted too. Lifelong conflict with the besetting sins that besetting sin generates was what I must expect.<\/p>\n What to do? Here was Owen\u2019s answer, in essence: Have the holiness of God clear in your mind. Remember that sin desensitises you to itself. Watch \u2013 that is, prepare to recognise it, and search it out within you by disciplined, Bible-based, Spirit-led self- examination. Focus on the living Christ and his love for you on the cross. Pray, asking for strength to say \u2018no\u2019 to sin\u2019s suggestions and to fortify yourself against bad habits by forming good ones contrary to them. And ask Christ to kill the sinful urge you are fighting, as the theophanic angel in C.S. Lewis\u2019s\u00a0The Great Divorce<\/i>\u00a0tells the man with the lizard to do.<\/p>\n Does it work? Yes. Nearly seventy years on, I can testify to that.<\/p>\n Does Owen\u2019s book minister to others as it ministered to me? Yes. From prison just recently came the following:<\/p>\n I found this book \u2026 near a toilet on the floor \u2026. Immediately after I finished reading Owen\u2019s\u00a0Mortification of Sin<\/i>\u00a0I got on my knees on the floor of my cell and begged for Jesus to come into my miserable life and redeem me \u2026 and for the first time in my entire life I meant every single word that I professed \u2026. Thank you, Jesus!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Owen is one of the dead who still speak.<\/p>\n Photo of Oxford, where Owen was based at the time he wrote\u00a0Mortification,<\/em> by Liv Cashman<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The following is taken from\u00a0Puritan Portraits\u00a0by J. I. Packer, published by Christian Focus (192pp, paperback, ISBN 9781845507008). There are seven Puritan leaders who are evaluated and commended by Dr. Packer in this fine book. The notes have been added. I owe more, I think, to John Owen than to any other theologian, ancient or modern, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":216792,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19473],"tags":[],"resource-author":[19571],"topic":[4905],"class_list":["post-216789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-excerpts","resource-author-j-i-packer","topic-christian-living-3"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nthan to anything else he wrote. Let me explain.<\/p>\n\u2018LET GO, AND LET GOD\u2019<\/h2>\n
\nO to be lost in thee;
\nO that it may be no more I
\nBut Christ who lives in me!<\/p><\/blockquote>\nNotes<\/h3>\n
\n