At the end of chapter 7 of John Owen’s Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers [Kapic and Taylor], Owen anticipates an objection to his first principle of how to mortify sin (one must be a true Christian). Does the suggestion that one must be a true Christian mean that unregenerate men should not be exhorted to avoid or cease from evil? Owen answers, “no.”
It is to be looked on as a great issue of the wisdom, goodness and love of God, that by manifold ways and means he is pleased to restrain the sons of men from running forth into that compass of excess and riot which the depravity of their nature would carry them out unto with violence (84).
However, in his exhortations to preachers, Owen warns: It will not avail to beat a man off from his drunkenness into a sober formality.
To break men off particular sins, and not to break their hearts, is to deprive ourselves of advantages of dealing with them (85).
Can sin be killed without an interest in the death of Christ, or mortified without the Spirit? If such directions should prevail to change men’s lives as seldom they do, yet they never reach to the change of their hearts or conditions. They may make men self-justiciaries or hypocrites, not Christians. It grieves me oftentimes to see poor souls, that have a zeal for God and a desire of eternal welfare, kept by such directors and directions under a hard, burdensome, outside worship and service of God, with many special endeavors for mortification, in an utter ignorance of the righteousness of Christ and unacquaintedness with his Spirit all their days (86).
Chapter 8 brings a second principle for mortification: Without sincerity and diligence in a universality of obedience, there is no mortificaion of any one perplexing lust to be obtained (86).
My understanding of what Owen is saying is that if a man has zeal toward overcoming one particular sin and strives hard to overcome that one particular sin, but does not have a general and universal hatred of sin or a complete yearning to overcome all sin, he will never mortify any sin. In other words, if you live a life of carelessness, do not think you will be able to overcome a particular area of sin, simply because that one sin troubles you.
Owen describes such an approach to mortification as self-love:
Hatred of sin as sin, not only as galling or disquieting, a sense of the love of Christ in the cross, lies at the bottom of all true spiritual mortification. Now, it is certain that that which I speak of proceeds from self-love. You set yourself with all diligence and earnestness to mortify such a lust or sin; what is the reason of it? It disquiets you, it has taken away your peace, it fills your heart with sorrow and trouble and fear; you have no rest because of it. yea, but friend, you have neglected prayer or reading; you have been vain and loose in your conversation in other things, that have not been of the same nature with that lust wherewith you are perplexed. These are no less sins ad evils than those under which you groan. Jesus Christ bled for them also. Why do you not set yourself against them also? If you hate sin, every evil way, you would be no less watchful against everything that grieves and disquiets the Spirit of God, than against that which grieves and disquiets your own soul (87).
