Overcoming Sin and Temptation
Book Review • John Owen, Overcoming Sin and Temptation, ed. Kelly Kapic and Justin Taylor (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006). Kindle Edition. 466 pp. $22.
Read time: 18 min
Seventeenth-century English Puritan, John Owen (1616–1683), studied the human soul like a physician studies the body. In 1656, he published Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers. In 1658, he followed his first work with Of Temptation: The Nature and Power of It. Finally, nearly a decade later, he produced The Nature, Power, Deceit, and Prevalency of Indwelling Sin (1667). Owen’s classic trio on Christian spirituality have been compiled and lightly edited for readability in this present volume by Kelly Kapic and Justin Taylor, titled Overcoming Sin and Temptation. Herein, Owen dissects indwelling sin in the human heart and “delivers both a terrifying diagnosis and the means of a miraculous cure” (24).
Jeremy P. Pierre, professor and chair of Southern Seminary’s Department of Biblical Counseling, formulated a Dynamic Heart Model for personal change, which he describes in The Dynamic Heart in Everyday Life (Pierre, Jeremy. The Dynamic Heart in Everyday Life: Connecting Christ to Human Experience. Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press, 2016). Focusing on the inner workings of sin and faith in the human heart, Pierre equips Christians and counselors to understand and address the human heart’s response to its context at the level of beliefs, desires, and actions. This book reflection attempts to bring John Owen into insightful conversation with Pierre’s Dynamic Heart Model. First, I will acquaint the reader with Owen’s three works under consideration. Second, I will demonstrate how Owen’s theology of indwelling sin informs our understanding of sin’s effects on the cognitive, affective, and volitional processes of the human heart. Third, I will interact with Owen’s thought in relation to four areas of context emphasized in the Dynamic Heart Model: the dynamic heart in relation to God, self, others, and circumstances.
An Introduction to John Owen on Indwelling Sin, Temptation, and the Mortification of Sin
This section introduces the reader to Owen’s three books written about the mortification of sin, temptation, and indwelling sin. According to Kapic, Owen was serving as Dean of Christ Church at Oxford University during the time he published the first two of the three books. The content, then, “grew out of brief sermons that Owen delivered during his tenure there. Young students were most likely the bulk of his original audience” (25).
Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers (1656)
Owen structured this work by addressing three aspects of the subject matter: the necessity, nature, and means of sin’s mortification. Relying on Romans 8:13, Owen argued that the mortification of sin is a necessary part of living in the Spirit. The continual task is, in fact, tied to a believer’s possession of eternal life (46). Because “sin does not only still abide in us, but is still acting, still laboring to bring forth the deeds of the flesh,” we must be killing sin or it will be killing us (51). Ultimately, mortification is the work of God’s Spirit (60-62). Believers, nonetheless, are responsible for the work of sin’s mortification, being freed by the Spirit to both oppose and overcome the impulses of sin (62).
The nature of the mortification of sin is the habitual (even daily) weakening of sin by constantly fighting and contending against it and being frequently victorious over it (73-77). Owen carefully warned against false substitutes of the work: mortification is not “the utter destruction and death of sin,” a mere change in external demeanor, distracting oneself from sinning, or mere occasional conquests over sin (69-71). Mortifying sin, for Owen, involved as many as nine processes, including a firm sense of (1) the vileness of the sin and (2) one’s guilt, (3) a longing for deliverance, and awareness of (4) how sin exploits our personality (89-119).
In part three, Owen elaborated the means of mortification. Fundamentally, he urged that a believer’s faith must be set “on Christ for the killing of [their] sin” (131). The Spirit of God goes to work through faith in the gospel, weakening the impulses and power of sin over our minds, affections, and wills (138). The Spirit convicts believers of the evil of the sin to be mortified, reveals the fullness of Christ for relief, fixes the heart in expectation of deliverance, and ushers in the power of Christ’s atoning work on the cross (138-139). Owen concluded, then, that the Spirit himself is the Author and Completer of a believer’s sin-slaying faith.
Of Temptation: The Nature and Power of It (1658)
Owen depicted temptation as lying in wait to destroy and as capable of being conquered only by watchful prayer, quoting Christ’s words in Matthew 26:41: “Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation.” Following a basic outline on the matter, Owen spoke to (1) the nature of temptation, (2) the true danger in temptation, (3) the vital duty of believers to war against it, and (4) examples of tempting moments in the life a believer.
Of Temptation explored the nature of temptation by contrasting Jesus’ watchful and tearful agony in the garden with his disciples’ somnolence. Despite the risk of sinful entrapment, Scripture teaches that God directs our temptations to reveal our sinfulness and God’s righteousness (154). Satan, by contrast, wields temptation through the allurements of the world by appealing to our innate sinful desires—the classic world, flesh, and Devil trilogy. Owen wrote, “Every great and pressing temptation has its hour, a season wherein it grows to a head, wherein it is most vigorous, active, operative, and prevalent” (161). By this he meant to say that although temptation itself is not a sin, the one who falls therein, being truly pushed to the brink of moral compromise, may be overcome.
Consequently, Owen called upon believers to give all diligence to avoid falling into temptation (167). Even as Jesus urged his disciples to pray for deliverance from temptation, so also Scripture promises a reward to those who faithfully endure in the face of it (Jam 1:13). Believers must prepare for temptation, considering their own vulnerability, especially in seasons of prosperity, neglect of communion with God, great spiritual enjoyments, and self-confidence.
The Nature, Power, Deceit, and Prevelancy of Indwelling Sin (1667)
Indwelling sin is the universal malady of fallen humans. Citing Romans 7:21, Owen began his treatise on indwelling sin, rooting the idea in the fact that believers “find then a law, that, when [one] would do good, evil is present.” Both righteous and unrighteous desires coexist in believers. Because indwelling sin resides in the human heart even of believers, “contradictions abound” therein (253). Indwelling itself sin is a constant contrariness to God and the soul, involving the mind and affections, producing lusts eager for excitement and sinful action (264). Indwelling sin rebels against God’s grace and the redeemed mind (277), seeking to enslave the mind by the power of excited affections. Indwelling sin operates primarily in the “heart” (251). The forcefulness and power of indwelling sin is notable. Owen described how sin “rages” with madness, violently pressing the soul unto evil (288). It is triggered by temptation and strengthened by previous compromises (289). Unless God intervenes and prevents the onslaught of the rampage of indwelling sin in believers, even those in Christ would cast off the grace of God and inherit eternal death (291).
Believers, by God’s grace, are not alone or impotent in their fight against indwelling sin. Believers can “keep the soul unto a constant, holy consideration” to God (305). Prayer and meditation on God’s word arm the mind for action against the impulses of sin (307). Further, believers need not be taken off-guard by sin and can learn from their failures (308). By stirring up the heart to detest sin, believers “obtain strength and power against sin” (309).
The Cognitive, Affective, and Volitional Effects of Indwelling Sin in John Owen’s Theology
In the Dynamic Heart Model, everything that humans do may be understood in terms of heart responses to contextual factors. One’s context itself is not determinative. Rather, context shapes the environment to which the heart dynamically responds. By dynamic response, Pierre means to say that the heart responds to its context through an interplay of cognitive beliefs, affective desires, and volitional commitments. John Owen, too, wrote of such an interplay. This section will consider Owen’s contribution to the conversation about the effect of indwelling sin on each of three levels of dynamic heart responses.
The Cognitive Effects of Indwelling Sin
Owen emphasized the deceptive effects of sin on the mind. Biblically, the “mind” is synonymous with the cognitive process of the “heart.” In the Dynamic Heart Model, one’s cognition—core beliefs, convictions, and assumptions—expresses itself in interpretations about one’s context. So, Owen warned of the effect of “inadvertency,” a weakening of one’s sense of the evil of sin (324). Entrance into temptation occurs when “temptation comes in and parleys with the heart, [and] reasons with the mind” (160). When one believes sin to be of little threat or consequence, apathy towards repentance results. Sin draws away the mind from watchfulness and the duties required by God (326). For example, sin lulls the mind to a weakened state of prayer and meditation on God’s word (307).
Whereas sin lulls the mind to apathy, faith jolts the mind to watchfulness. God ordained faith—especially faith-filled prayer in what God has revealed about the sinfulness of sin—to rescue, through the Spirit, believers from the deceitfulness of sin (309–310). God commands that believers exercise themselves towards a constant and full sense of the vileness of sin and a detestation of it. Such an exercise of faith spells deliverance. In order to recover from the deceitfulness of sin, Owen recommended that a believer contemplate what God has revealed about the sovereignty of God and the deceitfulness of sin (321). That is, one should cognitively grasp that God’s in his sovereignty declared sin to be a great evil. Citing the story of Joseph, Owen exhorted the reader to see sin as a “great wickedness, and sin against God” (Gen 39:9). Furthermore, by fixing the mind on the love and kindness of God against whom sin is committed, sin loses its appeal. He further assured, “If there be any spiritual ingenuity in the soul while the mind is attentive to this consideration, there can be no prevailing attempt made upon it by the power of sin” (323). Because sin works by cognitively deceiving the mind, faith in what God has revealed about sin alone frees the heart’s cognitive processing from sin’s grip.
The Affective Effects of Indwelling Sin
In addition to deceiving the cognition, indwelling sin entices the affections (326). For Owen, the “affections are certainly entangled when they stir up frequent imaginations about the proposed object [towards] which this deceit of sin leads and entices” (327). This level of heart functioning involves finding delight in and desire towards the object of sin. Sin “proposes sin as desirable and exceeding satisfactory to the corrupt part of our affections” (329). As the eye looks “‘on the wine when it is red, when it gives its color in the cup” (Prov 23:31), so indwelling sin lures by “a pleasing contemplation on the invitations of sin” (328). Owen saw sin peddling not only false beliefs but also enticements towards the desirability of the object of sin.
Deliverance from sin involves a believer filling the mind with affections for heavenly things (331). Owen argued that “if the heart be filled with the cross of Christ, it casts death and undesirableness upon them all; it leaves no seeming beauty, no appearing pleasure or comeliness” (332). That is, the cross—the severe punishment of God’s Son in the place of sinners—reveals the sham and travesty of sin. When believers “consider the sorrows [Christ] underwent, the curse he bore, the blood he shed, the cries he put forth, the love that was in all this to your souls,” the “vileness, the demerit, and punishment of sin as represented in the cross” becomes clear (332). By looking in faith upon the cross, the affections thaw to see sin as hideous and grace as beautiful. In this way, believers inoculate themselves to the empty promises of sin.
The Volitional Effects of Indwelling Sin
The Dynamic Heart Model sees sin as moving along a trajectory from cognitive beliefs to affective desires to volitional actions. Owen, likewise, appreciated this deadly movement, speaking of the will as the final frontier of sin’s advance. Sinful action is finally conceived in the will, “the principle, the next seat and cause, of obedience and disobedience,” where moral actions take place (333). Unbelievers, lacking the Holy Spirit’s impulses and restraints, consent to sin, “as a ship before the wind with all its sails displayed” (334). In believers, however, “there cannot be an absolute, total, full consent of the will . . . unto any sin.” For as Paul wrote in Romans 7:21, there always abides yet a principle to do what it good and pleasing to God (334). Because the will chooses in accordance with what it deems good, the will chooses sin according to deceived beliefs and entangled affections.
In Owen’s theology, recovery of the heart from sin at the volitional level begins by deliverance of the mind and affections first (335). Because the will “cannot consent to anything under the notion or apprehension of its being evil in any kind,” right cognitive beliefs prove crucial: “Error is a worse part or effect of the mind’s darkness and gives great advantage to the law of sin” (341). Owen decried a partial gospel that celebrates God’s forgiveness while ignoring the hideousness of sin (336). The mind must apprehend truth and the affections the beauty of the ways of God before the will can choose what accords with righteousness.
The Effects of Indwelling Sin in Relation to God, Self, Others, and Circumstances, in John Owen’s Theology
The Dynamic Heart Model labors to understand the definite context to which the heart dynamically responds. In Pierre’s words, “What people respond to can be roughly categorized as four components: The dynamic heart responds to God, to self, to others, and to circumstances.” This section reflects on Owen’s theology of indwelling sin in terms of these four contextual relationships in a believer’s life and experience.
Indwelling Sin in Relation to God
Taking directives from Romans 8:7, Owen held that sin is fundamentally “enmity against God.” In contrast to the wholly pure and righteous nature of God, indwelling sin is entirely evil: “As every drop of poison is poison, and will infect, and every spark of fire is fire, and will burn, so is everything of the law of sin. . . . [I]t is enmity, it will poison, it will burn” (257). Owen, in large part, located the power of sin in false ideas of God. For instance, the cognitive belief (or implicit assumption) that God lacks the sovereign right to declare what is true, good, and beautiful begets sin (321). Likewise, blindness to the glory of God’s love in Christ towards sinners accounts for continued slavery to sin (322).
By God’s merciful intervention, sin can be mortified. Owen credited the Holy Spirit as the great Cause of the mortification of indwelling sin (57). Whereas all other remedies ultimately fall short of overcoming indwelling sin, the Spirit’s sanctifying work presses onward in the souls of believers. God promises transformation through the Spirit (60). Victory over the flesh belongs to God, who “caus[es] our hearts to abound in grace and the fruits that are contrary to the flesh, and the fruits thereof and principles of them” (61). Further, by taking away an unbeliever’s stony heart, God himself begins this work, as “the fire which burns up the very root of lust” (61). Herein lies the believer’s hope for ultimate victory over inveterate onslaughts of the impulses of indwelling sin. The Spirit will not fail to “bring the cross of Christ into the heart of a sinner by faith,” along with good works to which God’s elect have been foreordained (62).
Indwelling Sin in Relation to Self
Indwelling sin brings blindness and insensitivity to one’s own sin. One’s perceptions, feelings, and choices regarding oneself, in Owen’s thought, are corrupted by sin, so that the self declines from zeal for God and holiness (365). Owen leaves the reader no room to dismiss or elude responsibility for one’s own sin. Indwelling corruption resides within a person and is no mere matter of one’s context. Writing on the nature of temptation, Owen carefully pointed out that external temptation has no power but to appeal to sin within us: “Temptation will give oil and fuel to our lusts” (176). Thus, indwelling sin, in blinding the mind, exciting the affections, and bending the will to do its bidding, may be laid to the moral account of none but the sinner.
Consistently, for Owen, the mortification of sin in relation to oneself comes, in part, by God’s work to bring about personal humility. Such humility arises in believers by “a due consideration of God, and then of themselves—of God, in his greatness, glory, holiness, power, majesty, and authority; of ourselves, in our mean, abject, and sinful condition” (282). Persons overtaken by sin, then, must contemplate the desperate condition to which sin has brought them.
Indwelling Sin in Relation to Others
For Owen, indwelling sin is the root of social disfunction too: “[E]very day, every hour, [it] pour[s] forth wrath, revilings, hard speeches; breathe[s] revenge, murder, desolation, under the name perhaps of zeal!” (341). Despite the human tendency to deflect responsibility for destructive responses to others around oneself, sin within serves as the inward fountain of all outward vitriol. Owen said as much, quoting Jesus in Matthew 15:19: “out of the heart proceeds evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies,” and more. Owen laid blame firmly at the feet of indwelling sin: “There are many outward temptations and provocations that befall men, which excite and stir them up unto these evils; but they do but as it were open the vessel, and let out what is laid up and stored in it. . . . Temptations and occasions put nothing into a man, but only draw out what was in him before” (249–250). For those at war with others in their lives, the ultimate source of conflict may be said to lie within (cf. Jam 4:1–2).
Indwelling Sin in Relation to Circumstances
Circumstances form a large part of the context to which the heart dynamically responds. The heart responds by interpreting circumstances (cognitively), feeling certain ways about circumstances (affectively), and making choices in response to circumstances (volitionally). Owen saw circumstances as prime occasions for temptation. He remarked, “A man’s lusts and corruptions meet with peculiarly provoking objects and occasions, through the condition of life that a man is in, with the circumstances of it” (161). Kind David’s opportunistic sin of adultery demonstrates this idea. So also, Owen illustrated, “Abraham was the father of the faithful . . ., yet he entering twice into the same temptation, namely, that of fear about his wife, was twice overpowered by it, to the dishonor of God and no doubt the disquietment of his own soul” (169). In his preface to the present volume, John Piper calls attention to how Owen’s works prevent the error of situating the cause of sin in one’s circumstances—and the cure, likewise, in the rearranging of one’s circumstances: “We proceed to heal the wound of the people lightly. We look first and mainly for circumstantial causes for the misery—present or past. If we’re good at it, we can find partial causes and give some relief” (11). If one heeds Owen’s grasp of the pernicious evil of indwelling sin in every human heart, one’s circumstances can be seen as but testing grounds for the contents of the heart, rather than the root and cause of one’s maladies.
Conclusion
In this book reflection paper, I brought three of John Owen’s written works into conversation with Jeremy Pierre’s Dynamic Heart Model for personal change. I did this, first, by briefly introducing readers to Owen’s spiritual theology of indwelling sin in three books: Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers (1656), Of Temptation: The Nature and Power of It (1658), and The Nature, Power, Deceit, and Prevalency of Indwelling Sin (1667). Secondly, I reflected on Owen’s understanding of the effects of indwelling sin on the three levels of dynamic heart response, in Pierre’s model: the heart’s cognitive, affective, and volitional processes. Thirdly, I interacted with Owen on the effects of indwelling sin as it relates to the four aspects of the context to which hearts dynamically responds, in Pierre’s model: indwelling sin in relation to God, self, others, and circumstances. It is my conviction that John Owen provided categories for understanding and overcoming indwelling sin that Jeremy Pierre has helpfully clarified, expanded upon, and systematized in The Dynamic Heart in Everyday Life. ❖
