The Guilt of Your Sin

This is my once-monthly post on the Puritan John Owen. In this series of posts I am sharing some of what John Owen says about putting sin to death, or what he calls mortification. I have been going through his book Overcoming Sin and Temptation and trying to distill each chapter to its essence—to a few choice quotes that capture the flavor of what Owen is trying to communicate.

So far we’ve looked at The Foundation of Mortification, we’ve been encouraged to Daily Put Sin to Death, to understand that It Is the Holy Spirit Who Puts Sin to Death and to acknowledge that Your Spiritual Life Depends Upon Killing Sin. Then we saw What It Is Not to Put Sin to Death and What It Is to Put Sin to Death. Then, at least, he began to move to the actual instruction on putting sin to death. First he dealt with a couple of foundational issues and then with dangerous sin symptoms. Last month he told us that when you identify a sin in your life you need to get a clear and abiding sense upon your mind and conscience of the guilt, danger, and evil of your sin. Now he adds that you need to load your conscience with the guilt of sin and that you need to long for deliverance from sin’s power.

Load Your Conscience with the Guilt of Sin

 

Owen is going to take you to the gospel to put your sin to death, but he doesn’t want to get there too quickly. Before you begin to put that sin to death, he wants you to acknowledge the actual guilt of that sin, not just your guilt in a general sense. Here is how to do that:

Charge your conscience with the guilt which comes when you compare your sin with God’s holy law. You need to ponder God’s holiness as reflected in his revealed will, admit how far you have missed the mark, and then allow yourself to acknowledge the weight of that guilt. “Bring the holy law of God into your conscience, lay your corruption to it, pray that you may be affected with it. Consider the holiness, spirituality, fiery severity, inwardness, absoluteness of the law, and see how you can stand before it. Be much, I say, in affecting your conscience with the terror of the Lord in the law, and how righteous it is that every one of your transgressions should receive a recompense of reward. … Persuade your conscience to harken diligently to what the law speaks, in the name of the Lord, unto you about your lust and corruption. Oh! If your ears be open, it will speak with a voice that shall make you tremble, that shall cast you to the ground and fill you with astonishment.”   Continue at Tim Challies