Some of us are on the shoulders of men who stopped on John Owen’s shoulders. JIPacker, Roger Nicole and Sinclair Ferguson, for example, are three contemporary pillars in building my thinking, and each has publicly testified that John Owen is the most influential Christian writer of their lives. This is surprising for a man who died more than three hundred years ago, and who wrote in such a difficult-to-read style that he even considered his work extremely demanding for his own generation.
In the preface to his book Death of Death in the Death of Christ, Owen does what no good marketing agent would allow today. Start like this 😕 Reader. . . If you are, like many in this age of appearances, critic or admirer of titles, and you enter the theater books like Caton, to leave?Did you have fun Goodbye!?
- However.
- J.
- I.
- Packer.
- Roger Nicole and Sinclair Ferguson did not say goodbye to Owen and stayed with him.
- And they learned.
- And today.
- All three say that no Christian writer has had a greater impact on them than John Owen.
Owen was born in England in 1616, the same year Shakespeare died and four years before pilgrims left for New England, it was practically in the middle of the great Puritan century (around 1560 to 1660). movement and became his greatest pastor-theologian, when the movement ended almost simultaneously with his death in 1683.
In 1642, a civil war broke out between Parliament and King Charles. Owen, a chaplain at the time, was in favour of Parliament against the king and Bishop Laud, so he was expelled from his chaplainy and moved to London, where several major events took place over the next four years, marking the rest of his chaplainy. Life.
The first is your conversion? Or perhaps the awakening of the certainty of salvation and the deepening of your personal communion with God. Owen was a convinced Calvinist with great doctrinal knowledge, but he had no sense of the reality of his own salvation.
When Owen was 26, he went with his cousin to listen to the famous Presbyterian Edmund Calamy in St. Louis. St. Mary’s in Aldermanbury, but it turned out that Calamy could not preach and a rural preacher took his place. Owen’s cousin wanted to leave. But something kept Owen in his place. The preacher took Matthew 8:26 as his basic text: “Why are they shy, men of little faith?”It was the word of God and the moment of Owen’s awakening.
His doubts, fears, and concerns about whether he was really born again by the Holy Ghost have disappeared. He felt liberated and adopted as the Son of God. When you read Owen’s practical and penetrating work on the work of the Spirit and the nature of truth communion with God, it is difficult to doubt the reality of what God did on this Sunday in 1642.
The second crucial event of those early years in London was Owen’s marriage to a young woman named Mary Rooke, with whom he was married for 31 years, from 1644 to 1675; we know almost nothing of it, but we know an absolutely impressive fact: It must have influenced Owen’s entire ministry for the rest of his life. We know that she gave him eleven children, and all but one died when they were children, and the only girl who survived childhood died when she was young. In other words, an average of one child born and lost every three years of Owen’s adult life.
We do not have, in all his books, not even a reference to Mary, the children or her pain, but knowing that this man has walked in the valley of shadow of death most of his life gives me a clue as to the depth of his relationship with God that we find in his works. God has his strange and painful ways of making his ministers the kind of pastors and theologians he wants them to be.
The third event of those early years in London was the invitation in 1646 to speak before Parliament, at that time, there were fast days during the year when the government asked some pastors to preach in the House of Commons, it was a great honor. This message catapulted Owen into political affairs over the next fourteen years.
Not only that, Cromwell, in 1651, appointed Owen rector of Christ Church College, Oxford, and the following year he also appointed him vice chancellor. He was involved with Oxford for nine years until 1660, when Charles II returned and things began to go well. very bad for the Puritans.
Despite all this administrative pressure and even hostility for his commitment to puritanical piety and cause, he studied and wrote constantly, probably late at night instead of sleeping, demonstrating how much doctrinal fidelity to the scriptures mattered to him.
During these administrative years, he wrote twenty-two published books, including From the Mortification of Sin in Believers (1656), Communion with God (1657) and Temptation: The Nature and Power of It (1658). books is that they are what I would call intensely personal and, in many very nice places, very nice. So he wasn’t just fighting doctrinal battles, he was fighting sin and temptation. And he wasn’t just fighting?
Owen was released as rector in 1660 (after leaving the vice chancellor in 1657). Cromwell died 1658. La the monarchy with Charles II being back. The Act of Uniformity, which pulled two thousand Puritans out of its pulpits, was near (1662). The days that followed for Owen were not the great academic and political days of the last fourteen years; he was now (from 1660 until his death in 1683) a kind of runaway shepherd in London.
Because of the political situation, he could not always stay in the same place for long and be with his people, but he seemed to carry them in his heart, even when he moved. Towards the end of his life he wrote to his flock: “Although I am absent from you in the body, I am present in spirit, affection, and spirit with you and in your encounters, because I hope that my crown and joy will be found in the Lord’s Day.
Let us walk away now and try to get to the heart of what made this man vibrate and what made him great. I believe that the words closest to revealing the heart and purpose of his life are found in the preface to the booklet The Mortification of Sin in Believers:
“I sincerely hope to have my heart’s desire for God and the primary purpose of my life. that mortification and universal holiness may be promoted in my heart and in the ways of others, for the glory of God, that the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ may be adorned in all things?
Mortification means war against our own sin to kill him. He paraphrased this truth in the memorable phrase: “Kill sin or it will kill you. “
Were Owen’s personal holiness and fruitful public life simply?With him. He chased them away. There were strategies of personal discipline and public legitimacy that God used to turn it into what it was. Throughout our lives and ministry, as we care about people and defend faith, we can learn a lot from Owen’s quest for holiness privately and privately. Public.
It is incredible that Owen was able, even under the pressure of his life, to continue writing books that were as deep as they were uplifting. Andrew Thomson, one of his biographers, wrote:
“It is interesting to find the many evidences that [his work in Mortification] provides, which even amid the noise of theological controversy, the complex and complex activities of a high civil service and the appalling discomforts of the university, always lived near God, and like Jacob among the stones of the desert, maintaining a private communion with the eternal and the invisible (Works by John Owen , I: lxiv?Lxv).
Writing a letter during an illness in 1674, Owen told a friend, “Christ is our best friend, and soon he will be our only friend. Do I ask God with all my heart to be tired of everything else except my conversations and communion with Him?(Statesman of God, 153). God was using Owen’s disease and all the other pressures in his life to bring him into communion with God and not far from him.
A great obstacle to holiness in the ministry of speech is that we are inclined to preach and write without insisting on the things we say and making them real for our own souls. Over the years, words become easy and we find out what we can talk about. mysteries without the necessary fear; we can talk about purity without feeling pure; we can talk about zeal without spiritual passion; we can talk about God’s holiness without shaking; you can talk about sin without sadness; we can talk about paradise without desire and the result is a growing hardening of spiritual life.
The conviction that supported Owen in these things was this
“A man can preach a sermon to others how much he preaches it to his own soul. And he who does not eat and does not prosper in digesting the food he offers to others is unlikely to make them tasty; yes, he doesn’t know, but the food he provided may be poison, unless he himself has tried it. If the word does not live with power in us, it cannot leave us with power (Works of John Owen, XVI: 76).
It is this conviction that has sustained Owen in his immensely occupied public life by controversy and conflict. Whenever he committed himself to defending a truth, he sought, first of all, to bring that truth to the depths of his heart and to extract from it a true one. spiritual experience, so there was no artifice in the debate or mere posture or ability to deceive.
The last thing Owen did, nearing the end of his life, was communion with Christ in a book later published as Meditations on the Glory of Christ, and his friend William Payne helped him edit the work. Towards the end, Owen said, “Oh brother Payne, has the long awaited day finally come, when I will see glory in a different way than I have ever seen or could ever see in this world? (Man of God State . 171).
John Owen defended the fulness of the biblical faith because he wanted the generations after him to enjoy the same “long-awaited day,” when would we see the glory of Christ, otherwise we’ve never seen him here. He has never made any controversy, nor of his victories, an end in itself. The purpose was to see Jesus Christ, be satisfied with him, and be transformed into his likeness.