Rooted & Unwithered

A discussion of chapter 3 from my 2021 series reading through John Owen's Mortification of Sin together.

The great sorrow of our sin is not primarily the punishment that it earned but the communion with God that it severed.

A discussion of chapter 2 from my 2021 series reading through John Owen's Mortification of Sin together.

God’s anger, even wrath, against our sin is righteous. It is right that He is angry, and it would be wrong if He were not. Our sin is an injustice against God our King and Creator, and God’s burning wrath against our sin is good.

A discussion of chapter 1 from my 2021 series reading through John Owen's Mortification of Sin together.

The introduction to my 2021 series reading through John Owen's Mortification of Sin together.

Whenever we reject or simply ignore God and His established order of creation, we are like a coffee mug that rebels against the potter by trying to be a frying pan. The whole situation would be laughable if the consequences were not so dire.

Therefore, let everyone that is out of Christ, now awake and fly from the wrath to come. The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over a great part of this congregation. Let everyone fly out of Sodom: “Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed.”

Rather than the gospel being an abolition of the law, as many Christians seem to think, the gospel eliminates our debt for breaking God’s law and writes His law upon our hearts, giving to us the freedom to actually choose obedience. Since we no longer have any fear of the condemnation that the law brings, we are free to see the beauty of the law as it reveals the will of our Father. Thus, it is in the law that we discover how to “be imitators of God, as beloved children” (Ephesians 5:1).

Notice that these are not programs to be implemented but rather a lifestyle to be lived. This makes things both easier and harder. It is always easier to blame Christians as a whole than to become the ideal yourself. However, you do not need pastoral or committee approval to implement these changes; you just need to love your church, love your family, and guard your eyes and heart.

Sadly, the world’s proclamation that kindness is everything only means that we must affirm all those who continue to drive their metaphorical cars off the broken bridge of their sin. As Christians, we must reject such a mockery of kindness and of love, for it is not kind or loving to pretend that unrepentant sin does not lead to death! Instead, we must imitate our Lord, who never flinched from exposing sin’s hideousness, while also never failing to love and serve those around Him. Such kindness is too deep for secular hearts to grasp; therefore, let us show them in word and deed the boundless kindness of our Savior.

Men, brethren, and fathers, you are called to a high and holy calling: your work is full of danger, full of duty, and full of mercy. You are called to the winning of souls; an employment near akin unto our Lord's work,—the saving of souls; and the nearer your spirits be in conformity to his holy temper and frame, the fitter you are for, and the more fruitful you shall be in, your work.

Like an athlete practices to compete or a soldier trains for war, we must devote ourselves to keeping the commands of our God. Diligence should mark the life of God’s people.

To keep the LORD’s testimonies, to hold onto them with all one’s might, seeking the Him with the entirety of the heart, must naturally lead to shunning all wrongdoing. 

Opening your home and providing for others is messy business; demanding the government to care for them is less intrusive to our personal lives while still feeling as if we have done something.

Here the first three commandments are fittingly presented together, for these first commandments deal directly with how we are to worship and honor God as the only true and living God.

The joy of the blessed is to seek Him, for all who seek will find.

True feminism (if there is such a thing) ought to celebrate the unique joys and trials of women, rather than simply trying to be one of the boys. Women’s rights are human rights, for God made humanity both male and female. Should we lose that distinction, women’s rights will be sacrificed in the very pursuit after them.

After declaring His purpose for their deliverance from that very mountain, God gave to His people the Ten Commandments. Although the LORD gave many more laws and commands to the Israelites, these ten were especially significant, which is testified by God speaking them directly to the people rather than through Moses and by their being etched into stone and kept in the ark. They received this special treatment because the Ten Commandments serve as a succinct summary of God’s expectations for His people.

Having the ideal Sunday is kind of like having only green lights on the way to work and then being surprised with a promotion: if it happens, we certainly ought to give thanks to God, but we ought also to remember that we should not call it normal.

Blessedness is hearing the same voice that formed light, say to us, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew 25:23).

Furthermore, we are not commanded to love our neighbor with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. That would be idolatry. Instead, we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves. That is, we are called to love them as fellow image-bearers of God, and especially of our brothers and sisters in Christ, we are to love them as those for whom Christ died.

Dead Men Preaching is a monthly series aimed at bringing sermons from the past into the ears of the present.

This month's sermon is by John Witherspoon, a pastor and American Founding Father, on Psalm 76:10: "Surely the Wrath of Man shall praise thee; the remainder of Wrath shalt thou restrain.”

What makes our pride so tragic is that God is joyous to exalt us so long as we are humble enough to bear His image rather than our own. Full submission to Him means becoming fully human and the earthly representative of God Himself.

Obedience without trust would indicate that we do not properly know God. As a father, I would grieve at my children’s suspicious distrust of me, even if they still obeyed what I told them to do. Such distrust would indicate that my children do not know or do not believe my affection and compassion for them. In the same way, our distrust of God is most fundamentally a failure to believe in His Fatherhood towards us.

More pride and self-esteem and affirmations and approvals are not the solution to our society’s divisive problem, for our elevating of pride into a virtue is precisely what foments divisiveness in the first place.

The present-day brand of Gnosticism is a variant that might be called Digital Gnosticism since it replaces the spiritual world with the digital one. Like our brothers and sisters of the early church, we must be prepared to resist the going appeal to transcend our physical bodies through ever advancing technology. God made all creation very good, and we ought to reject any attempt to be liberated from it.

Where did all of this come from, and how did it escalate so quickly? How did things go so far off the rails?

In asking such questions, we would do well to remember that fruit always begins as seeds. Or, to speak less cryptically, Pride Month did not happen overnight.

Only humility is wise enough to see fully how perilous each day’s path is.

Only the humble may avoid destruction by acknowledging how easily they may fall.

Being made in His image, it is right that we would seek to know Him, love Him, live with Him, and glorify Him with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our strength. In the end, that is what it ultimately means to be human and to be made in God’s image.

Dead Men Preaching is a monthly series aimed at bringing sermons from the past into the ears of the present. This month's sermon is by Charles Spurgeon on Hebrews 4:12: "For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”