The Mortification of Sin

By John Owen

John Owen’s Puritan classic The Mortification of Sin is now accessible to today’s readers in this translation and adaption of his original 1656 English text into our modern English. Owen expertly explains how to put to death sin through faith in Jesus Christ. He tells us why it is important for the Christian to be killing sin in his

• Language: English
• Publisher: Urbanophile, LLC
• Release date: Feb 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781951034023

John Owen

John Owen (1616–1683) was vice-chancellor of Oxford University and served as advisor and chaplain to Oliver Cromwell. Among the most learned and active of the Puritans in seventeenth-century England, he was accomplished both in doctrine and practical theology.

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cover.jpgThe Mortification of SinThe Mortification of SinThe Tears of Saint Peter by Jusepe de Ribera

A Modern English Translation and Adaptation of John Owen’s 1656 Puritan Classic Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers by Aaron M. Renn

Copyright © 2013, 2019 Aaron M. Renn. All rights reserved.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Published by TradLife Press, a division of Urbanophile, LLC New York

ISBN: 978-1-951034-00-9

Cover and frontispiece: The Tears of Saint Peter by Jusepe de Ribera

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Frontispiece

Copyright

Translator’s Introduction

Author’s Preface

Part One: The Foundation

1. The Foundation of Killing Sin – Romans 8:13

Part Two: Three Great Principles

2. Believers Must Always Be Killing Sin

3. The Holy Spirit Is the Only Way for Killing Sin That Actually Works

4. The Strength and Comfort of Our Spiritual Lives Depend on Killing Sin

Part Three: The Definition

5. What Killing Sin Isn’t

6. What Killing Sin Is

Part Four: Two Prerequisites

7. You Must Be a True Believer in Jesus Christ To Kill Any Sin

8. You Must Be Sincerely Pursuing Universal Obedience to God to Kill Any Sin

Part Five: Nine Preparatory Instructions

9. Ask Whether Your Sin Has Any Dangerous Symptoms

10. Get a Clear and Lasting Sense of the Severity of Guilt, the Danger, and the Evil of Your Sin

11. Load Your Conscience With Evidence of How Guilty You Personally Are

12. Be Constantly and Desperately Longing for Deliverance from the Sin

13. Ask Whether You Are By Nature Vulnerable to the Sin

14. Ask When and How the Sin Usually Attacks and Overcomes You

15. Fight Hard From the Very First Moment Your Sin Acts

16. Think About How Insignificant You Are Compared to God and How Little You Know Him

17. Don’t Speak Peace to Yourself Before God Speaks It

Part Six: The Killing

18. Killing Sin Through Faith in Jesus Christ

Complete Outline and Expanded Table of Contents

Translator’s Introduction

John Owen’s short book Mortification of Sin is excellent and a classic, but very difficult to read.¹ Owen wrote it in 1656 and his English and writing style are far removed from our contemporary English. He also wasn’t that great a writer to begin with. Reading Owen isn’t quite like tackling Shakespeare, but he’s still a heavy slog. I suspect this makes Mortification of Sin more admired than read, even though prominent pastors like John Piper and Tim Keller have touted it.

Two things inspired me to translate and adapt it into contemporary English. The first was an email thread from my men’s group at the church I attended in Chicago. The topic was how to overcome sin. I suggested they read Mortification of Sin. The group leader replied with a private email gently telling me that it would be over the heads of 90% of the guys in the group because the language is too old and difficult.

The second was an article² by linguist John McWhorter arguing that we should bite the bullet and translate Shakespeare into modern English because the language of Shakespeare is no longer the English we speak today. He observed that non-English speakers often have a better experience of Shakespeare precisely because they hear it in their own contemporary language. Why shouldn’t English speakers get the same privilege?

Thus was born my idea to translate Mortification of Sin into contemporary English so that it can be more broadly read. I did this translation with three main goals:

To create a book that is above all useful in the essential duty of killing sin.

To write in clear and readable English understandable by most adults today.

To include as much of Owen’s original content as possible within the bounds of clarity and readability without dumbing it down.

What I did not try to do is to be rigorously scholarly, to fully preserve every nuance of wording or the voice of the original, or to produce a word for word-type translation. This is basically an idea for idea translation at the paragraph, and partially at the sentence, level. While doing that I updated Scripture quotations using the English Standard Version rather than the King James Version, though I retained some King James Version quotes where they more clearly make his point.

Owen’s organization and presentation of content aren’t the greatest, and I made some adjustments to make it clearer. That’s why I said this is an adaptation as well as a translation. Here are some examples of the adjustments I made to the content:

I reordered the sections in Chapter 1 to line up with his bullet points, reordered the content at the end of Chapter 2, broke his original Chapter 11 into five separate chapters so that each of his main points became a chapter, and I re-outlined and re-numbered the entire book.

Owen frequently uses repetition and long chains of adjectives to emphasize his points. I have sometimes reduced and simplified these.

Like many Protestants in his day Owen had a very negative opinion of the Roman Catholic Church. I did not whitewash this by removing his negative comments, but I did remove a handful of gratuitous insults that did not contribute to the topic at hand.

In a handful of other areas I did delete small amounts of content that interrupted the flow of the work.

Despite changes like these, I tried to leave his flow of thoughts as is in most cases so that this remains a translation and an adaptation of his book, not my book based on his research. Please note that I added all the footnotes. They are not original to Owen’s work.

While Owen’s book is now much more readable for the average person, I won’t pretend it’s now light and breezy. This can still be challenging material. But I hope that it achieves my goal of making something that’s both readable and practical for dealing with the sin in our lives so that Owen’s book doesn’t just gather dust on people’s bookshelves.

I hope you find it useful.

Aaron M. Renn

[e-mail]

May 2013 (Updated January 2019)

1. See Is John Owen hard to read?, http://www.johnowen.org/faqs#owen_hard_read

2. McWhorter, John. The Real Shakespearean Tragedy, American Theater, January 2010. URL: https://www.americantheatre.org/2010/01/01/its-time-to-translate-shakespeare-into-contemporary-english/

Author’s Preface

Dear Christian Reader, Let me briefly tell you why I wrote this book. The biggest reason is the sorry state of most Christians today, who, as we can see in everything from their lack of personal peace to divisions in our churches, are far from killing sin in their lives. Changing this is so critically important that I’d consider this book a success if all it manages to do is make its readers consider their ways and give them an understanding how killing sin actually works.

Beyond this, I am also concerned that a number of Christian leaders today have been giving out bad advice on the topic. These people don’t really understand the gospel and the finished work of Christ on the cross at all. All of their prescriptions are based on self-help, self-improvement, and works righteousness. In other words, it’s all legalism. We know from generations of painful experience that the yoke of the law is simply too difficult to bear. When people ignore the gospel and follow this bad advice, they fail and end up feeling condemned. Worse yet, by pursuing these techniques they can even become self-righteous about what they are doing.

I humbly hope this small book will help people to understand what true gospel-based sin-killing is all about. Certainly something of this nature is desperately needed today to encourage and help people in the task of becoming more holy and finding peace with God through the gospel.

On a personal note, I have preached on this topic and by the grace of God it has borne fruit in people’s lives. A number of my Christian brothers suggested I should adapt my sermons on killing sin into a book. While I was thinking about their suggestion I remembered that I had already promised them a book on fellowship with God.¹ Since I haven’t yet paid off my debt to them by writing that book, I hope that by writing this one I will have at least paid them enough interest to earn a little more time to get it done. It also happens that the public has been interested in my work lately because of various theological debates I’ve been a part of. So I thought I could make use of the all the attention to put out something that would be a practical help to believers.

These and other reasons are why you are holding this book in your hand. I can truly say that the biggest desire of my heart toward God, and the biggest goal I have for the ministry God has blessed me with, is to encourage as many people as possible to be killing sin and striving for universal holiness – all for the glory of God. And by that to make the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ shine ever more brightly in the world. If this little book can play any role in helping believers accomplish that, then God has answered the small prayers of its unworthy author.

John Owen

1. Of Communion with God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (1657). John Owen published this book one year after Mortification of Sin.

Part One:

The Foundation

1. The Foundation of Killing Sin – Romans 8:13

I am going to first lay a simple foundation so that everything I have to say to you about killing sin in this book will be clear. That foundation is Romans 8:13:

If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.

This entire book will be nothing but one big discussion of the great truth and mystery contained in these words.¹

In Romans 8:13, there are five key points:

A duty is assigned: Put to death the deeds of the body…

A person is assigned this duty, namely you: You put to death…

A promise is given that will be received if the duty is performed: You will live.

The cause ormeans for carrying out the duty is provided: the Holy Spirit. By the Spirit…

Everything about this is conditional: If…

I will discuss each of these in more detail.²

1.1 The duty: killing sin

When examining the actual duty we are called to carry out – putting to death the deeds of the body – three things need to be considered, namely what Paul means by:

The body

The deeds of the body

Putting them to death

1.1.1 What Paul means by the body

The body is the totality of our corrupted nature that includes but is not limited to our physical body.³

The body in the second half of the verse is the same thing as the flesh in the first half: 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. In short, the body is everything that Paul has been talking about all along in Romans as the flesh. This is clear because it is presented in contrast with and in opposition to the Holy Spirit.

The body then is the corruption and depravity of our nature of which our physical body is to a great extent the seat and the means by which sin expresses itself. (For example, Paul talks about the members of our body being presented as slaves to impurity in Romans 6:19.) When Paul speaks of the body he means indwelling sin – the corrupted flesh or corrupted desires. There are many possible reasons why Paul used the expression the body as a shorthand for this that aren’t necessary to elaborate on here. The key is that the word body here is used in the same way as the old self or body of sin in Romans 6:6.

1.1.2 What Paul means by the deeds of the body

The deeds of the body are both our external sinful acts and our internal evil desires.

The Greek word Paul uses for the deeds of the body refers mostly to physical actions – the works of the flesh that Paul describes and lists in Galatians 5:19-21 for example.⁴ Although the word refers to the outward actions we take, inward evil motives and desires should also be included because they all always aim at producing outward sin. If in some cases we are lured and enticed by our own desire (James 1:14) and yet the physical carrying out of sin is somehow stopped, certainly that’s not because our inward sinful desires didn’t try to make us actually commit the sinful action – they always do. To kill outward sins we must make sure that the axe is laid to the root of the trees (Matthew 3:10), the root being our inward evil desires.

Having both in Romans 7 and the first part of Romans 8 talked about indwelling sinful and corrupted desires as the fountain and underlying cause of all sinful actions, Paul includes destroying these as part of destroying the actual actions themselves. He also highlights the results they produce, namely death – the body is dead because of sin (Romans 8:10).

Having both in Romans 7 and the first part of Romans 8 talked about indwelling sinful and corrupted desires as the fountain and underlying cause of all sinful actions, Paul includes destroying these as part of destroying the actual actions themselves. He also highlights the results they produce, namely death – the body is dead because of sin (Romans 8:10).

1.1.3 What Paul means by putting to death

Putting to death is the killing of the indwelling sin remaining

Reviews for The Mortification of Sin

[lachlanp-387269 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This edition was very easy to read. Owen's writing tends to be systematic in its explorations of a subject, as he doesn't want to miss a thing, and this book was no exception. But it was still helpful and searching, and stirred me up to pray on multiple occasions when I felt cold in heart.

[travis_carden-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Owen's Mortification was the first Puritan book I ever read, through which I fell in love with an author and with a genre. Owen isn't as easy to read as, say, Jonathan Edwards, but he is supremely worth it. He speaks on the sinfulness of the heart with such power and profundity, convincing you of the profanity and wretchedness of it and making it unthinkable. This may be the most impactful humanly authored book I've ever read.

[acotnoir-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'm thankful for this abridgment, easing my way into this difficult but enduringly helpful classic. I plan to re-read it in the future. It's a how-to manual for an exceedingly difficult procedure (killing sin) that we're constantly and insidiously bending away from; these short pages show you how and convince you towards action. Praise God for His sanctification work in His people!