Crossroads

Next week our pastoral team will be taking a class on John Owen at Sovereign Grace Ministries’ Pastors College, taught by Dr. Carl Trueman from Westminster Seminary. For this course we are reading John Owen on the Christian Life by Sinclair Ferguson. Chapter 6 entitled "Conflicts with Sin" is worth the price of the book. In this chapter Ferguson synthesizes Owen’s teaching on sin and temptation. If you are intimidated by Owen’s Temptation and Sin, I suggest you read this chapter. It’ll give you an easy intro to Owen’s teaching on this topic. Here are some choice quotes by Owen:

"It is in vain for a man to have any expectation of rest from his lust but by its death; of absolute freedom but by his own.

"What a man is in secret, …that he is in the eyes of God and no more."

"Mortification from a self-strength, carried on by ways of self-invention, unto the end of a self-righteousness, is the soul and substance of all false religion in the world." 

"Store the heart with a sense of the love of God in Christ, with the eternal design of his grace, with a taste of the blood of Christ, and his love in the shedding of it; get a relish of the privileges we have thereby, — our adoption, justification, acceptation with God; fill the heart with thoughts of the beauty of holiness, as it is designed by Christ for the end, issue and effect of his death; — and thou wilt, in an ordinary course of walking with God, have great peace and security as to the disturbance of temptations."