Here is the point that hit me square between the eyes:

When a man rights against his sin only with arguments from the issue or the punishment due unto it

Do I hate sin only because of the punishment that I will experience on account of it, or do I hate sin because I love Christ? In other words, even if I knew that I could “get away with it”, would the thought that my sin is injurious to the lover of my soul be enough to keep me from it?

Too often it’s all about me. Instead, it should be that my life is lived for His glory.

Owen has surely spoken into my life, and I can’t express how grateful I am, and yet how traumatic this has been. In this chapter especially, I am confronted again and again with my own sin, with how I’ve allowed sin to take me down its path. I’m confronted with the particular sins I’ve known seemingly all my life, which continue to assault me both in terms of guilt and by way of temptation.One of the hardest things for me to grasp is that God intimately loves ME, in spite of all that I’ve done, all my abominable transgressions. Yet I still confuse being tempted toward sin with actual sin against God, and I fear that the presence of the same temptations towards the sins I know Christ died for—and not only temptation, but failing to withstand them in my own heart—, is evidence of something inauthentic in me. I find that I tend to look past grace and towards condemnation:

“Try yourself by this also: When you are by sin driven to make a stand, so that you must either serve it and rush at the command of it into folly, like the horse into battle…what do you say to your soul? What do you expostulate with yourself? Is this all—‘Hell will be the end of this course; vengeance will meet with me and find me out’? It is time for you to look about you; evil lies at the door. Paul’s main argument to evince that sin shall not have dominion over believers is that they ‘are not under law but under grace.’ If your contendings against sin be all on legal accounts, from legal principles and motives, what assurance can you attain unto that sin that sin shall not have dominion over you, which will be your ruin?”

And from this passage alone I discover that there is a depth of God’s grace and mercy that I have not known, but that I pray God would sovereignly awaken in me.

Jason

”

Wow, wonderful questions and replies. Chuck and Thomas thank you -really liked the quote too from Robert Leighton. Thanks for all the insights and again Tim for this opportunity.

“Try yourself by this also,” Owen writes in this chapter. Chapter 9 is replete with warnings, encouragements, even rebukes to be watchful. I was convicted, but not significantly enough, so I developed application questions. I included only the beginning of the chapter here. I hope to review with my husband and pray over:

1. Are there any disquieting lusts or distempers in my soul that are dull, or familiar that should not be so?

2. Am I disquieted by attitudes, behaviors or thoughts the Bible addresses as sin; i.e., do I see sin as lust and distemper or have I allowed it to be an “acceptable” sin (side note: See: “Respectable Sins: Confronting the Sins We Tolerate” by Jerry Bridges for more.)

3. Am I considering dangerous symptoms of my sin? Do I think about, and really consider, the attitudes that I allow as symptoms of something greater (the nature of sinful symptoms is rebellion towards God - do I see them as outright rebellion)?

4. Am I taking, and am I willing to take, “extraordinary remedies,” to disquieting sin? What are these extraordinary remedies? What can I do differently to disallow disquieting sin?

5. Are there “dangerous marks and symptoms (the desperate attendancies of an indwelling lust)” that have long been corrupting my heart?

6. Is there any area of worldliness (areas that come to mind: media, purity, friendships (including, as Tim pointed out in another post, a lack of initiative in evangelism) that I am not vigorously attempting to kill and/or that are interfering with other duties, and especially those that interfere with communing with God and strengthening of my faith?

7. Is there any area of greed (areas that come to mind: food, materialism, lust) that that are interfering with other duties, and especially those that interfere with communing with God and strengthening of my faith?

8. Is there any area of my thought life that I have begun to ruminate or contemplate vain that would constitute foolish and/or wicked imaginations, and especially those that have been long-standing areas of sin?

9. Do I view all areas of wordliness and greed, especially as they interfere with communing with God as “dangerous”?

10. Do I really see lust as corrupting, festering, cankering, strange and unfamiliar and fully understand the consequences (woeful) or has lust become in any way sweet, acceptable, familiar or even compelling?

11. Do I accept, treasure or harbor sin and still expect peace?

12. What areas of sin are fixed and abiding and perhaps neglected, untouched, not even contemplated?

13. Am I alert - understanding that “lust is such an inmate as, if it can plead time and some prescription will not easily be ejected”? Does this make me hate it? Does it create a desire to kill it and then only by God’s gracious prescription, grace and the help of the Holy Spirit?

14. Am I making all vigorous gospel attempts at mortification, or does self-effort characterize my attempts at mortification?

15. Do I understand that my sins, unless I mortify them, are the very same, and the very same characterization, as the unregenerate person? If I do not mortify, I am not concerned, I do not see danger, and I have grown altogether soft in my approach, thoughts, and deeds in sin then what does this say about the state of my soul?

This chapter has not generated a lot of discussion, compared to former chapters. I am not sure why. It was the chapter that alarmed me most when I was listening to Les Walthers expound it, those messages are on Sermon Audio.

The word “inveterateness” alone is enough to make me quiver and shake.

It may help or be more of a warning, if you are aware that Owen wrote a book called, The Dominion of Sin and Grace. In it he writes at some length to help someone distinguish whether he is dealing with merely remaining sin, like all the saints in the world ever have done, or if sin still has dominion over him, which would show that he has never passed from death to life.

This is why Owen uses the word “dangerous”. If we realized the weight Owen gives to one or two words. By dangerous here he means, if you continue on that road, it leads to hell, not to heaven.

That is enough for me to want to search out the matter to the bottom, and I admit I have lost some sleep over this warning.

He wrote, “Inveterateness. — If it hath lain long corrupting in thy heart, if thou hast suffered it to abide in power and prevalency, without attempting vigorously the killing of it, and the healing of the wounds thou hast received by it, for some long season, thy distemper is dangerous.”

Then he gives the reason why, ‘For, first, How will he be able to distinguish between the long abode of anunmortified lust and the dominion of sin, which cannot befall a regenerate person?

Translation, if this sin in you is starting to mark your character, what proof do you have that you are in fact born again? If someone were to read the words of Jonathan Edwards in his Treatise on the Religious Affections, he would see an amplification of what Owen is talking about.

To understand Edwards you have to realize he is giving 12 positive signs that a person has passed from death unto life. But he says that a person who is living in sin can have no such evidence and should not have assurance.

This is in part 3 of this work by Edwards.

“No such signs are to be expected, that shall be sufficient to enable those saints certainly to discern their own good estate, who are very low in grace, or are such as have much departed from God, and are fallen into a dead, carnal, and unchristian frame. It is not agreeable to God’s design, (asalready observed,) that such should know their good estate: nor is it desirable that they should; but on the contrary, it is every way best that they should not. We have reason to bless God, that he has made no provision that such should certainly know the state they are in, any other way, than by first coming out of their ill frame and way.”

More on this later.

TMS

Several months ago I was cutting up an apple with a sharp knife. Carelessly I cut my finger deeply and that initial cut hurt and was hard to ignore. I was in a hurry, however, distracted by other “more pressing” issues and neglected to properly care for that cut. The initial pain wore off and I was off to other things ignoring my cut — at least for a time. Predictably that cut became infected and forced me to focus on that wound I had neglected to properly care for in the first place. You know, that cut ended up taking months to heal and required consistent care with the appropriate cleaning and ointments that needed to be applied. If I had dealt with that cut immediately the healing would have so much quicker and less painful.

In reading Chapter 9 I couldn’t help to think back to that neglected cut. The verse Owen’s quotes, “My wounds stink and are corrupt because of my foolishness” struck me as true in my spiritual life as well as the physical. Too often I am ignoring the initial “cuts” of sin in my life because I am busy and distracted with the urgent rather than the longer term important spiritual aspects of my life. Sins that could more easily be confessed and avoided right away become infected and my spiritual walk suffers sapping my energy for the things of God.

Owen repeatedly and practically wants us to deal with sin immediately. His phrases, “lain long, long season, habituate, familiar to the mind, long abode, done so for many days, old neglected wounds, distempers grow rusty and stubborn by continuance”, challenge me to pause and reflect more often and examine my heart and immediately take more decisive steps to deal with the sin I find.

I’m sorry I come to this discussion late, and T.S. and Carol, thanks for your resources and comments.

It is amazing how well Owen understands our minds, and how we can deceive ourselves. I feel I’ve had most of these seven discussions with myself before, which makes the warning at the end very scary. Am I a true believer if I’ve had indwelling sin? This is a troubling question.

I’m curious about what Owen is referring to when he distinguishes between an ordinary course of mortification and the special time of fasting and prayer that is required to battle this indwelling sin. Looking forward to how he differentiates these.