Can a Christian Be in Habitual Sin?

John Owen, with great pastoral care and sensitivity, answers the question:

Discourse IX (Delivered April 19, 1677)

 
Question. Whether lust or corruption, habitually prevalent, be consistent with the truth of grace?
 

Answer. This is a hard question; there are difficulties in it, and, it may be, it is not precisely to be determined. I am sure we should be wonderfully careful what we say upon such a question, which determines the present and eternal condition of the souls of men.
Supposing we retain something of what was spoken in stating a lust or corruption so habitually prevalent, because this is the foundation of our present inquiry, I shall bring what I have to say upon this question to a few heads, that they may be remembered.
 

I say, then, --
 

First. It is the duty of every believer to take care that this may never be his own case practically. We shall meet with straits enough, and fears enough, and doubts enough about our eternal condition, though we have no lust nor corruption habitually prevalent; therefore, I say, it is the duty of every believer to take care this may never be his case. David did so, Ps. xix. 12, 13, "Who can understand his errors?" saith he, "Cleanse thou me from secret faults. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins: then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgression."    Continue at Underdog Theology

W.E.B DuBois Would Not Vote in This Election

I know. I was surprised at the notion myself. A tireless champion of Civil Rights, a participant of the Niagra Movement and one of the founders of the NAACP, one would expect DuBois to argue the moral responsibility of voting–particularly for a people recently disenfranchised.

But in a piece entitled, “Why I Won’t Vote,” delivered on October 20, 1956, DuBois made an eloquent case for not voting at all.  The entire speech really should be read; it’s haunting in its description themes and tensions in 1956 that could as easily apply to 2012. DuBois begins with a kind of biography of his voting record:

Since I was twenty-one in 1889, I have in theory followed the voting plan strongly advocated by Sidney Lens in The Nation of August 4, i.e., voting for a third party even when its chances were hopeless, if the main parties were unsatisfactory; or, in absence of a third choice, voting for the lesser of two evils. My action, however, had to be limited by the candidates’ attitude toward Negroes. Of my adult life, I have spent twenty-three years living and teaching in the South, where my voting choice was not asked. I was disfranchised by law or administration. In the North I lived in all thirty-two years, covering eight Presidential elections. In 1912 I wanted to support Theodore Roosevelt, but his Bull Moose convention dodged the Negro problem and I tried to help elect Wilson as a liberal Southerner. Under Wilson came the worst attempt at Jim Crow legislation and discrimination in civil service that we had experienced since the Civil War. In 1916 I took Hughes as the lesser of two evils. He promised Negroes nothing and kept his word. In 1920, I supported Harding because of his promise to liberate Haiti. In 1924, I voted for La Follette, although I knew he could not be elected. In 1928, Negroes faced absolute dilemma.   Continue at Gospel Coalition

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