I know I've been saturating this blog with material from or about John Owen lately, but I hope reading the bits and pieces posted here has been a blessing to you. There is a great deal of wisdom in the writings of Owen, and though he can be difficult to read sometimes, he points us to Christ and equips us for the journey of faith.

When I was studying earlier today, I came across some of Owen's thought on sanctification and the distinctive marks that point to our regenerated hearts. For Owen, one of the things the process of sanctification involves is the renovation or renewal of the mind. This is key. He says that the spiritual character of a person is marked by the things that person's mind naturally drift to. The clearest sign of regeneration is seen in the mind.

As a litmus test, he poses a simple question: When your mind has nothing else to think about, what do you end up thinking about? The answer to that question, Owen says, will provide a very clear indication of our spiritual condition. Naturally, it is quite convicting when you begin to ask the question of yourself.

So, what kinds of things do you think about?

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Some good advice from John Owen on being modest and prudent when dealing with contentious theological issues:

I must desire you, that when ye hear an objection, ye would not be carried away with the sound of words, nor suffer it to take impression on your spirits, remembering with how many demonstrations and innumerable places of Scripture the truth opposed by them hath been confirmed, but rest yourselves until the places be well weighed, the arguments pondered, the answers set down; and then the Lord direct you to 'prove all things, and hold fast to that which is good' (1 Thess. 5:21).

While the context here is the discussion of universal redemption around which his treatise, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, centers, the point stands for dealing with any theological issue we may find ourselves confronted with.

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The subject of redemption has been coming up a lot in my reading and in my thoughts as of late, and I have been meaning to write a few things here about it. Time is not on my side right now, though, and so I will wait until 2009 to get into this in more detail. What my thinking on redemption amounts to so far is essentially that our common conception of redemption falls far short of what Scripture teaches.

To lead into this, I wanted to quote a piece from J. I. Packer, taken out of the introductory essay he wrote for John Owen's treatise on redemption, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ. I find his comments helpful as a springboard for discussing redemption and the message of the gospel, as he argues also that the Church has largely obscured the true meaning of redemption. Packer says,

[We have] lost our grip on the biblical gospel. Without realising it, we have during the past century bartered that gospel for a substitute product which, though it looks similar enough in points of detail, is as a whole a decidedly different thing. Hence our troubles; for the substitute product does not answer the ends for which the authentic gospel has in past days proved so mighty. The new gospel conspicuously fails to produce deep reverence, deep repentance, deep humility, a spirit of worship, a concern for the church. Why?...It fails to make men God-centred in their thoughts and God-fearing in their hearts because this is not primarily what it is trying to do. One way of stating the difference between it and the old gospel is to say that it is too exclusively concerned to be 'helpful' to man—to bring peace, comfort, happiness, satisfaction—and too little concerned to glorify God. The old gospel was 'helpful,' too—more so, indeed, than is the new—but (so to speak) incidentally, for its first concern was always to give glory to God. It was always and essentially a proclamation of Divine sovereignty in mercy and judgment, a summons to bow down and worship the might Lord on whom man depends for all good, both in nature and in grace. Its centre of reference was unambiguously God. But in the new gospel the centre of reference is man. This is just to say that the old gospel was religious in a way that the new gospel is not. Whereas the chief aim of the old was to teach men to worship God, the concern of the new seems limited to making them feel better. The subject of the old gospel was God and His ways with men; the subject of the new is man and the help God gives him. There is a world of difference. The whole perspective and emphasis of gospel preaching has changed.

Packer is clearly referring both to modern evangelicalism and mainline liberalism here, and I think he is quite accurate in his assessment. The Church in many respects has lost its grasp on the holistic and biblical understanding of redemption. As I read more on this I will have some further thoughts to post in coming weeks. For now, your thoughts?

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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!"

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Over the past week I have been studying a lot of the writings and theology of John Owen and I came across a few short quotes from Owen on preaching, which I think are well known. My pastor actually quoted the first to me when helping me prepare to preach back in July. The quotes are embedded in a short summary paragraph from Sinclair Ferguson's book, John Owen on the Christian Life:

[The] first responsibility [of the pastor] is to feed the flock of God...This the pastor will do from the word of God, first of all studying and applying its teaching to himself, and then sharing this with his people: 'a man preacheth that sermon only well unto others which preacheth itself in his own soul'; 'If the word do not dwell with power in us, it will not pass with power from us.

It is rumored that Jerry Bridges is the one who coined the phrase "preach the gospel to yourself." If that is so, I wonder if he got that from reading Owen. Whatever the case, they are both right. If you yourself have not been radically and completely transformed by the truths of the gospel (such as those found in Ps. 103:12; 130:3-4; Is. 1:18; 38:17; 43:25; 53:6; Mic. 7:19; Rom. 4:7-8; 8:1; Eph. 1:7; 2:4-9; Col. 2:13-14; Heb. 8:12; 10:17-18), how could you possibly proclaim them as Good News?

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