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John Owen: What It All Comes Down To



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The following passage is what Sinclair Ferguson chose to use for the postscript to his book, John Owen on the Christian Life. It can be found in volume XII of Owen's 16-volume collected works, §52, and summarizes well a great deal of his thought.

What am I the better if I can dispute that Christ is God, but have no sense of sweetness in my heart from hence that he is a God in covenant with my soul? What will it avail me to evince, by testimonies and arguments, that he hath made satisfaction for sin, if through my unbelief, the wrath of God abideth in me, and I have no experience of my own being made the righteousness of God in him, —if I find not, in my standing before God, the excellency of having my sins imputed to him and his righteousness imputed to me? Will it be any advantage to me, in the issue, to profess and dispute that God works the conversion of a sinner by the irresistible grace of his Spirit, if I was never acquainted experimentally with the deadness and utter impotency to good, that opposition to the law of God, which is in my own soul by nature, with the efficacy of the exceeding greatness of the power of God in quickening, enlightening, and bringing forth the fruits of obedience in me? It is the power of truth in the heart alone that will make us cleave unto it indeed in an hour of temptation. Let us, then, not think that we are anything the better for our conviction of the truths of the great doctrines of the gospel, for which we content with these men, unless we find the power of the truths abiding in our hearts, and have a continual experience of their necessity and excellency in our standing before God and our communion with him.

And to that, I can only add a resounding, "Amen!"