I’ve always loved to read. My son is learning to love to read, too. By far some of the best days of the year in my elementary school years were those days when the beloved BookMobile would deliver the dozen or so 45 cent paperbacks I had ordered earlier in the year through the Scholastic Book Service. And as a growing Christian in high school, the church library was a frequent haunting of mine, as I devoured all kinds of books on prophecy, theomatics, spiritual warfare, the Ark of the Covenant, the antichrist, cults, and a variety of other admittedly somewhat sensational subjects.
But as strong as my love for books was, for some reason I tended only to read contemporary authors, even after graduating from college. Perhaps it was due in part to biases against old literature developed from being required to stumble and mumble through Beowulf and Canterbury Tales in college literature classes. Somehow anything older than 5 years old just didn’t seem relevent when I was in my twenties, and the King James Bible was the only book I read without a final exam hanging over my head that wasn’t punctuated with modern phrases and contemporary english. Indeed, my Scofield KJV even itself at times taking a back seat to the stick people and hip language populating the childish and somewhat loose Bible translation called Good News for Modern Man popular in the 1970’s. For crying out loud, why would someone long dead who had experienced almost nothing of modern life have to say to me?
I still have no interest in reading Beowulf again. But about dead people not having anything of value to say to my (at the time) barely twenty-something self I could not have been more wrong. Sadly, as a twenty-something I thought old dudes had little to say that would be of much value to me, and I’m quite sure I thought dead people had even less to say. Truthfully, though I had never heard of John Owen in my hometown southern Baptist church, had I heard of him I would not have even cracked any of his works upon learning of the era in which they were written; and even if I had, the old language would have quickly had me running back to the simpler, contemporary, feel-good positive thinking that was more easily readable and readily found in libraries, if not the sometimes creepy and always bizarre Jack Chick comic tracts sold in the local Christian bookstore down the street in Merritt Island, Florida.
It was only several years ago that I discovered John Owen, after zipping through my twenties and thirties. I had heard someone say — though I don’t recall who — that John Owen understood the tension and conflict in the human heart like no other. Well, at forty that sounded to me like something I needed to understand, for thus far no one I had read had had anything to say that seemed to make any sense of both my life experiences and the Bible. Up to that point I had been left scratching my head, wondering why the struggle with temptations had intensified with age and “spiritual maturity” rather than decreased. And so it was with much unquenched thirst and hunger that I ventured into Owen for the first time. And in Owen I found someone who seemed able to articulate the tension in my heart between the old self and the new self–the same tension, I believe, that the Apostle Paul wrote of in Romans 7.
In today’s evangelical landscape, our obsession with being stress-free has left us with a tendency to opt for one of a variety of different mental exercises when confronted with the discomfort of stress and tension in our souls and hearts. Two approaches to resolve this tension allow us to convince ourselves that we feel better about ourselves but do little to fight against the root issue at work in our hearts, and thus are of no long-term value. The third recognizes the seriousness of the issue but leaves us in deep discouragement. Sadly, if we were farmers working the field for physical sustenance, we’d probably rather cover giant boulders found in the field with a ground-colored blanket and pretend they aren’t there than to work hard to remove them from the field and experience true relief and the resulting increase in productivity. Here’s a quick look at these three escape methods, and then we’ll bring Owen in at the end.
First, some of us who tend to be legalistic in nature deal with this tension between our old self and self by simply identifying activities in our lives that cause tension once we have begun to sense that our lives are in conflict with the written Word of God. We then lower or raise the performance bars of these activities in the direction that allows us to soothe our conscience. We may take some sins we conservative types commit frequently–maybe gluttony, gossip, materialism, lust–and we move the bar away from the biblical standard, in effect declaring that these sins are not so bad or, even worse, that they aren’t big sins at all, opting for American definitions of sins rather than Biblical ones. We rationalize, rename, and spiritualize our failures in these areas. Then we go to the other corner of our heart and identify activities we don’t struggle with and adjust the bar on those in the other direction, so at the end of a day we can take a mental inventory and proudly say “I’m OK.” These sins on the list in this corner are usually a combination of big sins like extreme immorality, murder, or thievery that we don’t struggle with, mixed in with a few other activities that may not even necessarily be sins at all that we can easily abstain from while criticizing those who don’t abstain. Again, it gives us the list we crave to be able to refer to and say “I’m holy and acceptable to God, living in victory” while unwittingly disregarding sins hidden in the depths of our heart that are easily disguised to those around us but which destroy our souls from the inside, leading into two other egregious but good-looking sins: pride and self-righteousness.
Others opt to remove the bar altogether. They camp out in a perverted definition of grace. They just assume they’re forgiven, and God understands after all, so it doesn’t really matter what we do. Just do the best you can, they say, and don’t worry about it, you’ll be forgiven in the end. Eat, drink, have sex but help the poor, be merry, for you’re forgiven in the end and we don’t know for sure if the Bible really forbids many of these specific activities, they say. This allows those of us with more liberal inclinations to get rid of the nagging feelings of guilt, to a degree, but it comes at the perilous cost of a hardened heart, and it fuels idolatry as we end up enjoying everything except God and real peace.
So thus far on one hand we have the legalists who think they are holy but aren’t, and on the other, the grace abusers who know they aren’t holy but don’t much care since they still think they are going to heaven when they die. Neither view is taught in Scripture. But both views have been internalized by many people in the church: Those who grew up on a form of perfectionism, believing that ultimately you can reach a state of holy sinlessness in this life. Those who have pursued the deeper life relentelessly and think there is a state this side of eternity where one should no longer be temptable. Those who grew up with well-meaning pedllers of principles-based legalism who purported to impart biblical secrets that would guarantee positive resolution to all basic conflicts in life. Those who believe they are to be wealthy, healthy and prosperous in every single thing they touch and constantly enlarge their territory with no setbacks whatsoever in life. Those who disdain doctrine and holiness, practicing a form of universalism, believing that nothing that happens in this life matters since Jesus died for the world. Those who don’t believe that God has spoken clearly enough in His Word and that we can’t really know Truth and should not worry about our misgivings. There are more. But they are all wrong, and they all ultimately lead to either deep discouragement or deep callousness. And it is often those who have journeyed into one of these distorted views who often end up in the third camp.
The third camp is where people who are truly regenerate and love Jesus find themselves when they run out of runway pursuing one or both of these two extremes. It’s a place born out of a sense of pain and failure that comes when one gets a glimpse of the depth of their depravity and the purity of God, acknowledges that their sin grieves God, yet deeply want to please Him and know they are accepted by Him regardless of what they do or don’t do. They become deeply discouraged…depressed, maybe…and they convince themselves that God could never use someone as sinful as they are. They hang it up, so to speak, and put themselves on the proverbial shelf, giving up on the dreams of being used by God because no one has taught them what real holiness is and how to fight for it. Indeed, it is likely no one has even told them they should need to fight for it. They just conclude that if they have lost some moral battles in the past, and they know they will lose some more in the future, then there’s no point in lining up on the front lines for more.
Then along comes John Owen, with a fourth option in which to pitch camp. Owen, a guy who lived hundreds of years ago and who is able to describe and explain the tension and the struggles of the 21st century human heart like no other. A guy with no TV, no internet, no cool clothes, no hip music, no sexy magazines, who describes exactly what is going on in the human heart. How is it that in all the wisdom of the ages today, only a guy who lived hundreds of years ago has been able to describe what any true believer has experienced in their heart as they strive to live a life of holiness pleasing to God? I don’t know. Perhaps it is a function of a brilliant man who loved Jesus more than we do, and who had no TV, video games or iPods to distract his attention and consume his mind. But regardless, John Owen helps us understand that there is a fight to be had, and provides Biblical insights to keep us from losing the war in spite of losing some battles. We should take advantage of the work God did in his life.
It should be noted that Owen is not easy reading. You won’t knock the book out on your next vacation flight to Orlando. Nor is it easy to summarize. You’ll find no quick summary here of John Owen’s writing and what you’l learn there. There are no “Ten Tips to Perfect Peace” I can bullet point for you here. And honestly you probably won’t try real hard to get through his work unless you are aching over your sin and hungering to know God better…but, if you’re a believer, you’re supposed to long for the answers John Owen mines from God’s Word, so it should be satisfying work. This is the spiritual equivalent of steak and Powerade, not soda and cotton candy.
Fortunately for all of us non-academics with day jobs, mortgages and families to support, you don’t have to wade through the archaic language from the early days of the English language to get to Owen’s wisdom. There are two versions available in modern english that contain Owen’s famous Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers, as well as Of Temptation and The Nature, Power, Deceit, and Prevalency of Indwelling Sin. Through these three works Owen describes precisely just what is going on in the human heart when temptation is at work, how it affects our lives and why it exercises such power on our lives.
If you’re not a reader and you struggle with lengthy tomes, you might want to try to find an abridged and condensed version edited by James Houston, who took Owen’s work and essentially reduced it in size and then translated it into modern english. The book, called Triumph Over Temptation: Pursuing a Life of Purity contains an introduction by J.I. Packer that by itself is worth the purchase of the book, in which he gives a testimony of God’s work in his life through John Owen (a testimony that many who grew up in holiness or legalistic churches will find refreshingly honest and familiar). It’s not readily available at most bookstores but you can find it online if you look hard enough, and you may be able to get it from Victor Publishing.
If you really want to dig for the gold, Crossway Books has published an unabridged version called Overcoming Sin and Temptation that retains all of the original material but changes only the language to reflect contemporary usages. Editors Justin Taylor and Kelly Kapic have cleared out the brush along the trail to the Owen gold mine, but you’ll still need to do considerable heavy digging once you get there. But if you persevere, you’ll leave with gems that will last you a lifetime. John Piper said recently that when you rake you get leaves, and when you dig you get diamonds. This is digging, and the diamonds you find will carry you through many trials and tribulations for the rest of your life.This publication should be must-reading for anyone striving to understand the struggles in the human heart between the old self and the new creation. [UPDATE 1/25/2007: a PDF of this book is now available for download at JohnOwen.org]
It’s no wonder why J.I. Packer and John Piper credit this book for helping them understand the depths of the human heart, or why Tim Keller recently said his life would have been “shipwrecked” by now had he not read this book in the mid-seventies. If you have struggled to understand the issues of the human heart, and you seek to reconcile Scripture against some teachings in the church today that suggest that we should never struggle with sin once spirit-filled, or the other extreme view that one can never experience any measure of victory against sin and temptation, this book will be of considerable value to you. Not only does Owen describe beautifully the questions many of us don’t have the capability to put into words, Owen also articulates answers for those willing to read and study. Your head will hurt, and you might have to read some of the pages a few times to get through sections of it, but you will be rewarded and your will be encouraged to know that great men of God have felt what you feel when tempted, and that one of them has written and preserved a theological framework to understand it based on the word of God. This is a book to keep for a lifetime and to read more than once. You’ll be richer for it next week, next year, and next decade.
I’ll close with words from John Piper (emphasis mine), who authored the foreward for Taylor and Kapic:
What Owen offers is not quick relief, but long-term, deep growth in grace that can make strong, healthy trees where there was once a fragile sapling. I pray that thousands—especially teachers and pastors and other leaders—will choose the harder, long-term path of growth, not the easier, short-term path of circumstantial relief.
. . . We cannot properly estimate the blessing of soaking our minds in the Bible-saturated thinking of the likes of John Owen. What he was able to see in the Bible and preserve for us in writing is simply magnificent. It is so sad—a travesty, I want to say—how many Christian leaders of our day do not strive to penetrate the wisdom of John Owen, but instead read books and magazines that are superficial in their grasp of the Bible. We act as though there was nothing extraordinary about John Owen’s vision of biblical truth—that he was not a rare gift to the church. But he was rare. There are very few people like this whom God raises up in the history of the church. Why does God do this? Why does he give an Owen or an Edwards to the church and then ordain that what they saw of God should be preserved in books? Is it not because he loves us? Is it not because he would share Owen’s vision with his church? Great trees that are covered with the richest life-giving fruit are not for museums. God preserves them and their fruit for the health of his church.
I know that all Christians cannot read all such giants. Even one mountain is too high to climb for most of us. But we can pick one or two, and then ask God to teach us what he taught them. The really great writers are not valuable for their cleverness but for their straightforward and astonishing insight into what the Bible really says about great realities. This is what we need.
Owen is especially worthy of our attention because he is shocking in his insights. That is my impression again and again. He shocks me out of my platitudinous ways of thinking about God and man.
. . . For me, to read Owen is to wake up to ways of seeing that are so clearly biblical that I wonder how I could have been so blind. May that be your joyful experience as well.
—John Piper, Pastor for Preaching and Vision
Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis