Alright everybody, good morning. Let's find our seats here, we'll get started. For those of you who weren't with us last week, we started taking a look at this book by Dr. John Owen, The Mortification of Sin. This is the abridged version, and even the title, if I remember correctly, is abridged. on the mortification of sin and the believer. I believe, yeah, I believe that's the whole title. But today we're on chapter two. And yeah, let's just get started. I think everybody's ready here. So in chapter 2, he lays out the first general principle. You'll remember that in chapter 1, if you were here, you're following along, that he kind of defined the problem. He rested his whole thesis on Romans 8, chapter 8, verse 13. And here he gets to the Puritan way of doing things, the first principle. And he's going to have several others, which we'll hear about in the coming weeks. But the first general principle is that despite the death of sin on the cross, sin remains. And then today, in this chapter two, we're going to go through these seven reasons why we need to mortify sin daily. Now, Nick said that I confused him last week. I'm sorry if I confused Nick and anyone else. But hey, good news, Nick. I'm going to go over the thick stuff again, because I think it's so important. Especially as we consider in the next few chapters, Owen is going to continually use terms like body of death, uh... mortified uh... sin indwelling sin body of sin he's gonna use a lot of these terms interchangeably and that's kind of what we looked at last week but the the point that we cannot miss is that he's not just talking about letting sin make us do things that are wrong. That's not all that he's talking about. He does not see, and he does not believe, he does not see in the scriptures, and he's not trying to tell us that sin is some outside force that we just have to either keep out, or restrain, or purify. I mean, all of those words are true in a sense, but this is not the whole story. What he's talking about is to mortify sin as a ruler, as a king, sin whose throne is in us and part of us, so that it would not even have life or power to produce sin or to produce what he sometimes calls the deeds of the flesh. So it's not just killing the outcome, but killing the underlying source and power that produces it. And so, as a summary there, this is kind of where we ended last week, or what we chewed on last week. This task is not only about minimizing the resultant sins, the deeds of the body in our life, or constraining wickedness to which we so often turn. It is about killing king sin, or in other words, unredeemed flesh. for the purpose of or so that it does not live and have power to produce those unrighteous deeds. Now I'm going to say the same thing in a bunch of pictures. And I think that they're helpful. They were helpful to me because rearranging them this week, I had to clarify my own thinking a lot. So here we go. This is how God started it. If you don't know, this is the way to write the Lord's name in Hebrew. And that's where we get the word Yahweh. So that's what that stands for. So in the garden, Yahweh was the ruler. His law is righteous and good, and we are the subjects. And God's law produced righteousness, life, and communion with him as his subjects followed his law. But as we all know, then sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned. So here we have the ruler, Yahweh, is still there. His law is still righteous and good. But we, as subjects, are dead to his rule. And so when we have his law applied to us, it is unresponsive, or we are unresponsive. We cannot please him. And of course, this disobedience leads to condemnation and death. And of course, being a ruler or without a ruler, something or someone will, of course, take charge. And in the case of the world, sin takes charge. Now, the Lord's Law does not go away. We, as fallen creatures now, are subject to sin. And when the Lord's law is applied, it produces unrighteousness, condemnation, and death. And this is what Paul's talking about here in Romans chapter 7, verse 10, and also in Romans 8, 5, where he says, for those who live according to the flesh, set their minds on the things of the flesh. That would be the bottom line, according to those who live according to the Spirit on the things of the Spirit. That would be something that's pictured like the top line there. And this is also what Paul's getting at in the end of Romans chapter 6. He says, Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one's slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness? But God be thanked that though you were slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart the form of doctrine to which you were delivered. And having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. For just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now, he's talking about the transition as we come to the Lord, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness. When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. And what fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? Of course, the end of those things is death. So the other thing that we must grasp, or we must not let go of, is that, again, the sin is not some outside force. So when we say in the last slide that sin is the ruler, What we're really saying is that we are a law unto ourselves, and that the dead subject is the alive ruler. And so we move down here, and pretty much whatever we say is the law. The master is ourselves. Sin resides, and it gets exactly what it wants. And so we are both the ruler and the subject. And if you're anything like me, and I think anything like Paul, this is the conclusion, right? Who will deliver me from this body of death? So we get to the cross. Knowing this, our old man was crucified with Him. The ruler sin of ourselves has been destroyed, or dethroned, rather. We are still dead to the Lord's law. And if we continue without life, we still produce unrighteousness, condemnation, and death. But He doesn't just crucify the old man for the purpose that the body of sin is done away with, and that we shall no longer be slaves of sin, and that death no longer has dominion over us. The life that He lives, He lives to God. So not only does the Lord, Jesus on the cross, dethrone us and sin as rulers, He brings us back to life so that we, the living subject, can serve the living God and His law and produce righteousness the way that the Lord intended. So the Lord is the ruler. His law is righteous and good. We are subjects alive to produce righteousness. And our fleshly desires, our sin, our indwelling sin, our bodies of death have been dethroned, but he still wants to be in charge. This is what Paul is getting at. Therefore, do not let your sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it and its lusts. And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but grace. And again, this is what Paul's talking about by the power of the Spirit. So then with the mind, I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh, the law of sin. There is still a war going on between the Lord and His law and that dethroned ruler within us that wants to be in charge. And here's the evidence. Paul continues on. He says, I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin, which is in my members. And of course, here, Romans 8, 12, and 13, this is where Owen starts. Therefore, brothers, we are debtors not to the flesh to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. And again, this is kind of what we chewed on last week. The reason I think that it's so important is that it's so easy for us to say that sin is outside if we just close the doors, get better locks. You know, change the carpet every so often. Sin won't ever get in here. And we can just all huddle in here and be fine. Or, you know, sin is out in the world. If we just close our doors or move to somewhere in middle Nebraska where nobody will bother us, we can defeat this problem. But this is not so. This is not what Owen is talking about, nor Paul at all. So you'll forgive me in advance. I hope I'm going to do a lot of reading to you when we get to these reasons. I just frankly could not think of a better way to say it than Owen said in most cases. So I'll do some reading. You all can sit back and enjoy the richness of what he has to say. His first reason for mortifying sin daily, he says, in dwelling sin stays with us. while we are in this world, therefore we always need to mortify it." And he's arguing against this idea that at some point we reach a state of some sort of perfection where we no longer have to mortify sin. And to that he says there on the right, it is more than probable that the people who promote such an idea being that about perfection in this life, never knew what it takes to keep any of God's commands. They are so far from perfection that they never sincerely strive for even partial obedience, much less universal obedience. Others have found a new way to perfection by denying original and dwelling sin. They bend the spirituality of God's law to men's carnal hearts. They realize that they are ignorant of the life of Christ and its power and believers, and so they've invented a new righteousness that the gospel knows nothing of. They are uselessly puffed up by their fleshly minds. Reason number two. Sin not only still abides in us, but still acts, still labors to bring out deeds of the flesh. And I hope those pictures kind of serve to illustrate how that works. But those desires, those disordered desires, and it's not just disordered desires. Those sinful desires still seek to be in charge. and they still appeal to the throne. And as subjects, we still are susceptible to following their rule. Reason number three, sin not only troubles us, but if left alone, it produces soul-destroying sins. Or in other words, this is one of my favorite parts, or the most clear parts to me, that Owen says, sin always aims at the extreme. Or as the saying goes, if you give it an inch, it'll take a mile. Sin is never satisfied with just a little part of your life, or a little part of your home, or a little part of your walk with the Lord. It always wants to be the ruler. It doesn't just want to be on the high court somewhere. It doesn't just want to be one of the administers of one of the departments. It wants to be king. completely. The way Owen says it is over here on the right again. Sin is subtle in its approach, and so we succumb to it. But once it has a hold of our heart by these little concessions, it gains a footing. And then it presses on in increasing degrees of the same kind. This continual pressing forward fools the soul into thinking that separation from God that has already happened is insignificant. And here I'll stop to say, again, if you're anything like me, this is where you feel it, right? You realize you've been in sin, and you know that the Lord is forgiving. You know that you have assurance in Him. But you feel the separation, right? You feel as if there's something you have to do to claw your way back into the Lord's good graces. You know that's not really how it works. But that's what it feels like. And rightfully so, if you turn away from the Lord, it will feel like you're not looking straight at him. That's just kind of how it works. But that's the part that hit me there. He goes on to say, it thinks that if there is no further progress, then nothing is different. To the extent the soul is made insensitive to a sin, insensitive to what the gospel requires of the believer, that is the extent to which the heart is hardened. But sin still presses forward, that because the only boundary it has is our complete relinquishment of God and our opposition to Him. Its ability to proceed towards this extreme end by degrees and to make good the ground it has gotten by hardness does not come from its nature, but from its deceitfulness. Nothing can prevent this infiltration but mortification. Mortification will wither the root of the sin and strike at its head every hour, so that whatever it aims at is thwarted. If the best saint in the world shirks this duty, he will fall into as many cursed sins as anyone else. Reason four. We must mortify sin daily because the spirit and the new nature are given to us for that reason, so that we have the moral strength to oppose sin. And here, I said that I couldn't think of anything better than Owen to say, but I think Paul said, I said it better in this case anyway. So in Galatians 5, and this is a very parallel line of thinking that Paul gives in Galatians 5 that we've been looking at in Romans end of 5, 6, and 7, and even into 8. It's a very similar line of thinking that Paul goes through here to the Galatians. He says, I say then, walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. for the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh, and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. If you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. And that's my note there, the law for righteousness, or for gaining righteousness, as Paul talks about in Romans 6. Now the works of the flesh are evident. These are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envies, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like, if that wasn't complete enough, of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past. Those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. On the other hand, but the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, against which there is no law. And those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, and we do, let us also walk by the Spirit. Reason number five, neglecting this duty renews the old man and rots the new man. And as you just heard Paul say, in a sense, of course you can't take any analogy too far, or you can always take analogies too far, in a sense we stand with a real ruler with a real law, whose law produces righteousness and life, and we have a defeated ruler who still wants to be in charge, and of course we are susceptible to follow him. And what Owen is saying is that when we do the one way or the other, whichever man we follow is strengthened, and the one that we neglect is left to ruin. He says, the Lord knows what desperate and fearful effects sin had with many people. When we neglect mortification, sin gets a substantial victory, and it breaks the bones of the soul. It makes a man weak, sick, ready to die so that he cannot look up. When we take blow after blow, wound after wound, foil after foil, and never rise up in vigorous opposition, can we expect anything but being hardened again through the deceitfulness of sin and finding our souls bleeding to death? And again, this strikes me as a way to say how it feels. How we feel when we have failed to mortify sin. Reason six, it is our duty to be perfecting holiness out of the fear of God. He says, anyone who does not kill sin that stands in his way is not taking any steps towards his journey's end. Anyone who finds no opposition for sin and does not take every opportunity to mortify it is actually at peace with sin. He is not dying to it. And finally, Owen breaks down two evils. There's a little part in between six and seven that I'm failing to grasp right now that I was gonna give you a summary of, but I'm sorry you'll have to, actually, we got time, let me just look at it real quick. He doesn't go right from six to seven. He stops briefly. He stops and he says, the main point thus far, probably something we should note, the main point thus far, even while we claim the meritorious mortification of our sin through the work of the cross of Christ, and though the implantation of our new life in Christ is in opposition to and destructive of the expression of sin, sin remains, acts, and works in the best of believers while we are yet in this world. It must be our constant daily duty to mortify it. Before proceeding, I cannot but note that even though there is in this generation a growing number of professors, a great noise of religion, religious duties in every corner, preaching in abundance, there is little evidence of the fruit of true mortification. And this is where then he goes on to this final reason that we should attend to the daily duty of mortifying sin. The two evils that accompany every unmortified professor are evils in himself and evil in relation to the others. An evil in himself, he says, the sign of unmortified sinful habit is being able to digest sin without any bitterness in the heart. A man may imagine the kind of grace and mercy that will allow him to swallow and digest his daily sins without bitterness when he does, He is at the brink of turning the grace of God into lewdness and of being hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. There is no greater evidence of a false and rotten heart than to be able to trade that grace and mercy for the sinful habit. And to others, this kind of professor who is unwilling to mortify sin, the sinful habits convince us that we rank higher in comparison to others. Of course, this ranking distorts grace and hardens us to the Lord's work in others. So we see Ourselves is better than we ought when we get to the point of accepting certain sins or certain kinds of sins. And we see ourselves better than we ought to, and then we, therefore, we fail to see what the Lord is doing in other folks. of course, that he put around us for the reason of glorifying him when we see that sort of thing. And then also, sinful habits make it easy to bring others in to minimize the dreadfulness of sin. And this is, you know, bad company ruins good morals kind of thing, right? So if I'm willing to accept a certain kind of sin, or a certain level of sin, or however you want to phrase it, and you think highly of me, and you learn about that, then you're tempted as well to think that that's acceptable. So, here we are, done early again, but before we move on to fellowship, Does anybody remember the illustration that I used last week? See, illustrations are only good if you remember them. And this is why illustrations tend to fail, and why they're dangerous sorts of things. So we'll review them, and that way maybe they'll be valuable. So last week we saw a picture of General Eisenhower. talking to the soldier before D-Day Now, that you have the picture in mind, you remember the point, which is even the more important part. The point is that this is war, that even though we know there is certain victory, just like those soldiers that he was appealing to on that day, we have to be willing to give everything. This is war. This is a battle to the death. literally to the death, not literally in hyperbole kind of sense, but actually literally. This is a fight to the death. So even though that one didn't work, I'm gonna give you another one, sorry. Maybe this one will stick. Because the war analogy only goes so far, again, I think it fails at the point where if we think of our engagement against sin as a battlefield, It's easy to think that, oh, that area over there is fortified. The enemy ain't ever getting over there. I'll move my attention over here at my weak spot. And I'll think about the weaknesses that I have. And so when the enemy comes, I'll be ready, because I got that part over there taken care of. And this is the exact point where the analogy fails. The battlefield does not have boundaries of good guy versus bad guy, of sin versus righteousness. Maybe you can't see it, and I'm no farmer, but there are weeds there. The battle is not lines on a map. The enemy comes up from within. And so there is no part that you can say is not susceptible any longer. The enemy grows up, and of course, I mean, for whatever level of agriculture knowledge you all have, you'll understand these. If you try to apply a topical solution, of course it can bat down the weeds for a while. And most of the topical solutions have some sort of effect on the good fruit that you're trying to produce, right? Really, the only way you can take care of a problem like this is, as Owen said, one by one, destroying it at the root, constant vigilance. Knowing that the problem is not somewhere out there, like if you just build a wall, the neighbor's weedy field won't magically hop over the wall and get into your field. No, the weeds are there. The roots of sin are there. And it takes constant vigilance. to address them when they come up, to destroy them one by one. And there's no section that is no longer susceptible. So again, the reason illustrations are dangerous or perhaps superfluous and a waste of time is because the point that you have to remember is the most important thing. But if nothing else, maybe something to chew on this week. the nature of sin. And as we go on to taking Owen's advice as to how, again, by the Spirit to address the sin in our lives, we can remember these pictures so that we understand where he's going. Any questions or comments? She was pulling up weeds. I knew she was pulling up weeds, but I thought I was going to say, hey, honey, what are you doing? She said to me, I'm mortifying my sins. As she picked each one of those, she said, there's another one that goes. The reality was, when I went out a day later, as you say, I went out there and I said, honey, I thought you mortified that sin. Well, it came back up. And I think the difficulty is that when there's never-ending conflict in this war that says, right when we think that we have mortified this sin, we've killed it once and for all. It rears up its ugly head. And it is rather depressing to know that The mortification of sin, in some cases, is not a permanent one as long as we live in the flesh. Absolutely. Yes, ma'am. I don't know how to say this exactly right, so I'm going to bear with my thinking. When I hear stuff like this, it kind of gets to the point where And we want to focus more on Christ than our sin all the time. Just like Ron just said, there's always going to be sin there. And if we're constantly looking at that, then that's all we see. And we never do anything else because, oh, I'm so bad. and us, there's sin everywhere that we need to be confronting, too, and we think we're so bad all the time that we don't go out and confront anything else that we should be. In other words, we're too focused on ourselves and how bad we are instead of reaching out and helping somebody else or helping the city or the nation or whatever. Sure. Sure, I do, yeah. I think you're onto something. Of course, there's a fine line, right? Yeah, I bore with you, so bear with me for a moment. It might sound like just a tangent at first, but we speak of, we think about frequently, what is the Lord's will for our life, right? And we go days or hours and days or sometimes weeks over a decision, and we're trying to think. as best we can, gain counsel and all these sorts of things about which decision is most aligned with what the Lord would have us to do. And that's all right and good. Of course, that's what he gave us, our fellow believers, for those sorts of things. But the clearest statement of what the Lord's will for us is to be conformed to the image of his Son. And so, yeah, and I agree with you. It is possible and it's easy to stay focused on ourselves, but it is also treacherous and easy to neglect ourselves for what we see as the Lord's work outside, and it's very easy to think that the sin and the evil is coming in. And of course, in a sense, there is evil out there, right? It's not It's not that there's not evil out there. It's just that this is not the evil and the sin that Owen is talking about. The devil made me do it is not an excuse. And ultimately, the devil can tempt you, right? And the world can tempt us. But ultimately, it's our own assent to our own desires. Yeah, I hear you. Yeah, I think Owen would say mortify it and then turn towards the door. I think that's what he would say, but I understand what you're saying. Yes, sir. And we're teaching the kids to pull up weeds. How do we do that? And we say, look at this. This is the plant. This is where our focus should be. It's not this. Pull it up. And so I think we can be ruthless in mortifying the flesh without our gaze being on ourselves as much as our gaze is on Christ and his law and his Sure. Ruben? And the purpose of focusing internally, mortifying the sin in us, is for a purpose. It's because I recognize that in the world where there are people who are blinded by sin, by their own sin, by the sin of the world, the sin of the flesh, and will remain defective in helping my brother What do you mean, you'll never do that? Right. Sure. Yeah, I see what you're getting at, but I think the analogy works on another level as well, is when you have a field that there are no weeds, or at least no visible weeds, the plants that you mean to make flourish get all of the nutrients from the soil. They get all of the sunlight. They get all of the water. But if you let weeds grow here and there, those weeds take all of those resources, and they use them for themselves. And so that weakens our work to the outside world. Yes, sir. or why we need to continue to be engaged in fortifying it because we're not done in this life. I think that from my own experience, my own life, as I was thinking about what was said, it hit me because sometimes when we have a procedure in our life where we're fervent in prayer I'm too busy to spend time at work, too busy to spend time at prayer, I'm too busy to do the things that I know will help. that we start to throw back, because we've ceased from the continual engagement of mortifying sin. So if you know what it is, we have to be constantly vigilant about that, constantly diligent in that activity, recognizing that we will never be able to do it. And of course, the next few chapters, he's going to flesh out exactly how he thinks practically we ought to do this. I just didn't want to say that all, and then nobody else had anything to say for the next few weeks. In talking about the racial worries, and that's important. I think people can talk about it, like, I mean, depending on the person, you can learn it from them easily. But it's not a clean yourself up. It's a spiritual lifestyle pattern, habit, where it's like struggling versus not struggling. I mean, we're going to struggle. We're not going to, it's not like, oh, are we struggling, are we working on it by a powerful spirit? So it's not like, you can think that we like, have to make ourselves holy or we're just like, Christ. Sure. Versus, did you have something? I guess it may be that, say, by Martin Luther Song, he says that, that if you're working on holiness, you're working on the announcement of sin. And we are on the way there is work plans because we won't see our lives spent. If we look at our lives, I mean, first of all, as unbelievers, but even as Christians, it's like His guidance is still open to us. You know, it's His goodness that opens up these areas in our lives that are still dead. So, on one hand, it's, you know, it shouldn't be a, oh no, if I don't do this, then I don't want us to miss the fact that the point of the mortification of sin is to honor God as King. That's what you're putting up here. So my focus on self to mortify my sin is to reverently put God in His place. So you're not in contradiction. It's not a, I'm self-reflecting myself. I'm mortifying my sin because I want to exalt God for who he really is. And so, if I mortify sin for the sake of mortifying sin, then I've missed the complete marker. If I'm mortifying sin because God Yeah, yeah, I hear ya. All right, maybe one more. Unless there are no more. That was a good discussion. Thanks for that. Let's pray and then we'll move on to fellowship and worship. Lord, thank you again for this time to gather together to look at your Word and to look at what John Owen has helped us to see in it. Lord, give us a sense of gravity about our sin and about our duty to always be fighting against it. Lord, help us to hate it the way that you hate it and to love righteousness the way that you love righteousness. And of course, Lord, as we've expressed here in a few different ways, help us to see that our own righteousness if there is ever a time that we could say something like our own righteousness. That is something that we mean to say, righteousness that has been bought and paid for by Jesus Christ. and that we strive for only to serve you and to honor you and to glorify you. Help us to continually think on these things, to mortify our sin, to encourage one another to do so as we go through the rest of this book. Amen.