John Owen Quotes

Do you mortify? Do you make it your daily work? Be always at it whilst you live; cease not a day from this work; be killing sin or it will be killing you.

Be killing sin or it will be killing you.

The choicest believers, who are assuredly freed from the condemning power of sin, ought yet to make it their business all their days to mortify the indwelling power of sin.

Sin will be always acting, if we be not always mortifying, we are lost creatures.

Sin may rebel, but it shall never reign in any saint.

He who finds not opposition from sin, and who sets not himself in every particular to its mortification, is at peace with it, not dying to it.

So great an advantage is given to sin and Satan by your temper and disposition, that without extraordinary watchfulness, care, and diligence, they will prevail against your soul.

Though Satan instils his poison, and fans the flames of our corrupt desires within us,we are yet not carried by any external force to the commission of sin, but our own flesh entices us, and we willingly yield to its allurements.

The true Christian's nostril is to be continually attentive to the inner cesspool.

A priest encounters temptation every day, and some of that desire is very natural.

My 12th was my most Christian and most boring year of my life. Try as I did, day after day, to cling to righteousness, I was washed down in suds of sinful surroundings.

We are all afflicted by original sin; people succumbing to temptations to do and to be.

All attempts, then, for mortification of any lust, without an interest in Christ, are vain.

Prayer will make a man cease from sin, or sin will entice a man to cease from prayer.

To kill sin is the work of living men; where men are dead (as all unbelievers, the best of them, are dead), sin is alive, and will live.

The Christian is to proclaim and prosecute an irreconcilable war against his bosom sins; those sins which have lain nearest his heart, must now be trampled under his feet.

The sad thing is that many of us come to Christ because we are sinners, and then spend the rest of our lives trying to pretend that we are not!

Sin also carries on its war by entangling the affections and drawing them into an alliance against the mind. Grace may be enthroned in the mind, but if sin controls the affections, it has seized a fort from which it will continually assault the soul. Hence, as we shall see, mortification is chiefly directed to take place upon the affections.

When we realize a constant enemy of the soul abides within us, what diligence and watchfulness we should have! How woeful is the sloth and negligence then of so many who live blind and asleep to this reality of sin. There is an exceeding efficacy nad power in the indwelling sin of believers, for it constantly inclines itself towards evil. We need to be awake, then, if our hearts would know the ways of God. Our enemy is not only upon us, as it was with Samson, but it is also in us.

Fire and water may as well agree in the same vessel, as grace and sin in the same heart.

Use sin as it will use you; spare it not, for it will not spare you; it is your murderer, and the murderer of the world: use it, therefore, as a murderer should be used. Kill it before it kills you.

We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.

I can't think of a greater single vehicle to goodness and a better world than if everyone battled their own natures

The mind is either at war with God or it is being renewed. There is no middle ground.

Temptation does not make the sin, it lies ready in the heart.