We cannot enjoy peace in this world unless we are ready to yield to the will of God in respect of death. Our times are in His hand, at His sovereign disposal. We must accept that as best.
– John Owen
Peace | Death
In the divine Scriptures, there are shallows and there are deeps; shallows where the lamb may wade, and deeps where the elephant may swim.
– John Owen
Scripture
Satan’s greatest success is in making people think they have plenty of time before they die to consider their eternal welfare.
– John Owen
Satan | Eternity
There is only one way to be revived and healed from our backslidings so that we may become fruitful even in old age. We must take a steady look at the glory of Christ in His special character, in His grace and work, as shown to us in the Scripture.
– John Owen
Backsliding
Did you never run for shelter in a storm, and find fruit which you expected not? Did you never go to God for safeguard, driven by outward storms, and there find unexpected fruit?
– John Owen
Blessings
The foundation of true holiness and true Christian worship is the doctrine of the gospel, what we are to believe. So when Christian doctrine is neglected, forsaken, or corrupted, true holiness and worship will also be neglected, forsaken, and corrupted.
– John Owen
Holiness | Worship | Doctrine
Temptations and occasions put nothing into a man, but only draw out what was in him before.
– John Owen
Temptation
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.
– John Owen
Sin
We shall not benefit from reading the Old Testament unless we look for and meditate on the glory of Christ in its pages.
– John Owen
The Bible | Meditation
He who prays as he ought, will endeavor to live as he prays.
– John Owen
Prayer
There is no death of sin without the death of Christ.
– John Owen
Sin | The Cross
See in the meantime that your faith brings forth obedience, and God in due time will cause it to bring forth peace.
– John Owen
Faith | Obedience | Peace
Our great Pattern hath showed us what our deportment ought to be in all suggestions and temptations. When the devil showed Him “all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them,” to tempt Him withal, He did not stand and look upon them, viewing their glory, and pondering their empire…. but instantly, without stay, He cries, “Get thee hence, Satan.” Meet thy temptation in its entrance with thoughts of faith concerning Christ on the cross; this will make it sink before thee. Entertain no parley, no dispute with it, if thou wouldst not enter into it.
– John Owen
Temptation
If we do not abide in prayer, we will abide in temptation. Let this be one aspect of our daily intercession: “God, preserve my soul, and keep my heart and all its ways so that I will not be entangled.” When this is true in our lives, a passing temptation will not overcome us. We will remain free while others lie in bondage.
– John Owen
Temptation | Prayer | Freedom
When He took on Him the form of a servant in our nature, He became what He had never been before, but He did not cease to be what He always had been in His divine nature. He who is God cannot ever cease to be God.
– John Owen
God
The person who never meditates with delight on the glory of Christ in the Scriptures now will not have any real desire to see that glory in heaven. What sort of faith and love do people have who find time to think about many other things but make no time for meditating on this glorious subject?
– John Owen
Meditation
To suppose that whatever God requireth of us that we have power of ourselves to do, is to make the cross and grace of Jesus Christ of none effect.
– John Owen
The Cross
The nearer anyone is to heaven, the more earnestly he desires to be there, because Christ is there.
– John Owen
Heaven
Labor to grow better under all your afflictions, lest your afflictions grow worse, lest God mingle them with more darkness, bitterness and terror.
– John Owen
Affliction
The most tremendous judgment of God in this world is the hardening of the hearts of men.
– John Owen
Apathy | The Heart
For the most part we live upon successes, not promises: unless we see and feel the print of victories, we will not believe.
– John Owen
Success | Believing
A sermon is not made with an eye upon the sermon, but with both eyes upon the people and all the heart upon God.
– John Owen
Preaching
A man preacheth that sermon only well unto others which preacheth itself in his own soul… If the word do not dwell with power in us, it will not pass with power from us.
– John Owen
Preaching
God has work to do in this world; and to desert it because of its difficulties and entanglements, is to cast off His authority. It is not enough that we be just, that we be righteous, and walk with God in holiness; but we must also serve our generation, as David did before he fell asleep. God has a work to do; and not to help Him is to oppose Him.
– John Owen
Service | Authority | Righteousness
A minister may fill his pews, his communion roll, the mouths of the public, but what that minister is on his knees in secret before God Almighty, that he is and no more.
– John Owen
Preaching | Prayer
Unless we are thoroughly convinced that without Christ we are under the eternal curse of God, as the worst of His enemies, we shall never flee to Him for refuge.
– John Owen
Conviction
Love precedes discipline.
– John Owen
Love | Discipline
The greatest sorrow and burden you can lay upon the Father, the greatest unkindness you can do to Him is not to believe that He loves you.
– John Owen
Unbelief
When someone acts weak, negligent, or casual in a duty – performing it carelessly or lifelessly, without any genuine satisfaction, joy, or interest – he has already entered into the spirit that will lead him into trouble. How many we see today who have departed from warmhearted service and have become negligent, careless, and indifferent in their prayer life or in the reading of the Scriptures. For each one who escapes this peril, a hundred others will be ensnared. Then it may be too late to acknowledge, “I neglected private prayer,” or “I did not meditate on God’s Word,” or “I did not hear what I should have listened to.”
– John Owen
Prayer
He that hath slight thoughts of sin never had great thoughts of God.
– John Owen
Sin
It is not the distance of the earth from the sun, nor the sun’s withdrawing itself, that makes a dark and gloomy day; but the interposition of clouds and vaporous exhalations. Neither is thy soul beyond the reach of the promise, nor does God withdraw Himself; but the vapors of thy carnal, unbelieving heart do cloud thee.
– John Owen
God | Faith | Carnality
To believe that He will preserve us is, indeed, a means of preservation. God will certainly preserve us, and make a way of escape for us out of the temptation, should we fall. We are to pray for what God has already promised. Our requests are to be regulated by His promises and commands. Faith embraces the promises and so finds relief.
– John Owen
Temptation | Faith
All other ways of mortification are vain, all helps leave us helpless, it must be done by the Spirit.
– John Owen
The Holy Spirit
The custom of sinning takes away the sense of it, the course of the world takes away the shame of it.
– John Owen
Sin
We all profess that we are bound for heaven, immortality, and glory: but is it any evidence that we really design it if all our thoughts are consumed about the trifles of this world, which we must leave behind us, and have only occasional thoughts of things above?
– John Owen
Heaven | Worldliness
Common experience declares how momentary and how useless are those violent fits and gusts of endeavors which proceed from fear and uncertainty, both in things spiritual and things temporal, or civil. Whilst men are under the power of actual impressions from such fears, they will convert to God, yea, they will turn in a moment, and perfect their holiness in an instant; but so soon as that impression wears off (as it will do on every occasion, and upon none at all) such persons are as dead and cold towards God as the lead or iron, which but now ran in a fiery stream, is now when the heat is departed from it.
– John Owen
Rebellion
I wish thy lot, now bad, still worse, my friend, for when at worst, they say, things always mend.
– John Owen
Good and Evil
Without absolutes revealed from without by God Himself, we are left rudderless in a sea of conflicting ideas about manners, justice and right and wrong, issuing from a multitude of self-opinionated thinkers.
– John Owen
Truth
The best duties of unbelievers are but white lies.
– John Owen
Unbelief | Lying
If we do not have some knowledge by faith of the glory of Christ here and now, it means that we have no real desire for His presence in heaven.
– John Owen
Heaven
The chief design of my life in the station wherein the good providence of God hath placed me, are, that mortification and universal holiness may be promoted in my own and in the hearts and ways of others, to the glory of God; that so the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ may be adorned in all things.
– John Owen
Holiness | The Gospel
The choicest believers, who are assuredly freed from the condemning power of sin, ought yet to make it their business all their days to [put to death] the indwelling power of sin.
– John Owen
Perseverance | Sin
Poor souls are apt to think that all those whom they read of or hear of to be gone to heaven, went thither because they were so good and so holy. Yet not one of them, not any man that is now in heaven (Jesus Christ alone accepted), did ever come thither any other way but by forgiveness of sins. And that will also bring us higher, though we come short of many of them in holiness and grace.
– John Owen
Heaven | Salvation
Let no man think to kill sin with few, easy, or gentle strokes. He who hath once smitten a serpent, if he follow not on his blow until it be slain, may repent that ever he began the quarrel. And so he who undertakes to deal with sin, and pursues it not constantly to the death.
– John Owen
Sin | Gentleness | Quarreling
Your state is not at all to be measured by the opposition that sin makes to you, but by the opposition you make to it.
– John Owen
Perseverance
The purpose of our holy and righteous God was to save His church, but their sin could not go unpunished. It was, therefore, necessary that the punishment for that sin be transferred from those who deserved it but could not bear it, to one who did not deserve it but was able to bear it.
– John Owen
Atonement
I do not understand how a man can be a true believer, in whom sin is not the greatest burden, sorrow and trouble.
– John Owen
Conviction
The vigor and power and comfort of our spiritual life depends on our mortification of deeds of the flesh.
– John Owen
Sin | Repentance | Comfort
If we would talk less and pray more about them, things would be better than they are in the world: at least, we should be better enabled to bear them.
– John Owen
Prayer
The Scripture abounds in commands and cautions for our utmost diligence in our search and inquiry as to whether we are made partakers of Christ or not, or whether His Spirit dwells in us or not–which argue both the difficulty of attaining an assured confidence herein, as also the danger of our being mistaken, and yet the certainty of a good issue upon the diligent and regular use of means to that purpose.
– John Owen
Scripture | The Holy Spirit
Let our hearts admit, “I am poor and weak. Satan is too subtle, too cunning, too powerful; he watches constantly for advantages over my soul. The world presses in upon me with all sorts of pressures, pleas, and pretences. My own corruption is violent, tumultuous, enticing, and entangling. As it conceives sin, it was within me and against me. Occasions and opportunities for temptation are innumerable. No wonder I do not know how deeply involved I have been with sin. Therefore, on God alone will I rely for my keeping. I will continually look to Him.
– John Owen
Temptation
We are never nearer Christ than when we find ourselves lost in a holy amazement at His unspeakable love.
– John Owen
Worship
Think of the guilt of sin, that you may be humbled. Think of the power of sin, that you may seek strength against it. Think not of the matter of sin…lest you be more and more entangled.
– John Owen
Humility | Strength
Mortification from a self-strength, carried on by ways of self-invention, unto the end of a self-righteousness is the soul and substance of all false religion… The Spirit alone is sufficient for this work. All ways and means without Him are useless. He is the great efficient. He is the One who gives life and strength to our efforts.
– John Owen
Self-righteousness | The Holy Spirit
We admit no faith to be justifying, which is not itself and in its own nature a spiritually vital principle of obedience and good works.
– John Owen
Faith | Obedience | Justification
It is not the glorious battlements, the painted windows, the crouching gargoyles that support a building, but the stones that lie unseen in or upon the earth. It is often those who are despised and trampled on that bear up the weight of a whole nation.
– John Owen
Humility
Temptation is like a knife that may either cut the meat or the throat of a man; it may be his food or his poison, his exercise or his destruction.
– John Owen
Temptation
Only what God has commanded in His word should be regarded as binding; in all else there may be liberty of actions.
– John Owen
Scripture | Liberty
As rivers, the nearer they come to the ocean whither they tend, the more they increase their waters, and speed their streams; so will grace flow more fully and freely in its near approaches to the ocean of glory.
– John Owen
Grace
The nature and end of judgment or sentence must be corrective, not vindictive; for healing, not destruction.
– John Owen
Judging
And as men’s diversions increase from the world, so do their entanglements from Satan. When they have more to do in the world than they can well manage, they shall have more to do from Satan than they can well withstand.
– John Owen
Worldliness
If I have observed anything by experience, it is this: a man may take the measure of his growth and decay in grace according to his thoughts and meditations upon the person of Christ, and the glory of Christ’s Kingdom, and of His love.
– John Owen
Growth
Selfishness is the making a man’s self his own centre, the beginning and end of all he doeth.
– John Owen
Selfishness
All things I thought I knew; but now confess, the more I know I know, I know the less.
– John Owen
Humility
There is an infinite distance between God and His creatures, and it is an act of sheer grace for Him to take notice of earthly things. Christ, as God, is completely self-sufficient in His own eternal blessedness. How great, then, is the glory of His self-humiliation in taking our nature that He might bring us to God! Such humiliation was not forced on Him; He freely chose to do it.
– John Owen
Grace | The Cross
For no sin whereof men can be guilty in this world is of so horrible a nature, and so dreadful an aspect, as is this unbelief, where a clear view of it is obtained in evangelical light.
– John Owen
Unbelief
I do verily believe that when God shall accomplish [unity], it will be the effect of love, and not the cause of love. It will proceed from love, before it brings forth love.
– John Owen
Unity | Love
God speaks by the Church (the true Church we mean); but He speaks nothing by her but what He speaks in the Scriptures, which she does only ministerially declare to us; and therefore the authority of God and His law is above hers, who, though she publish, yet did not make it, but is herself subject to it.
– John Owen
Scripture
To labor to be acquainted with the ways, wiles, methods, advantages, and occasions of the success of sin, is the beginning to this warfare.
– John Owen
Sin | War
The house built on the sand may oftentimes be built higher, have more fair parapets and battlements, windows and ornaments, than that which is built upon the rock; yet all gifts and privileges equal not one grace.
– John Owen
Hypocrisy | Gifts
We ought as much to pray for a blessing upon our daily rod as upon our daily bread.
– John Owen
Prayer
If our principal treasure be as we profess, in things spiritual and heavenly, and woe unto us if it be not so! on them will our affections, and consequently our desires and thoughts, be principally fixed.
– John Owen
Worldliness
I will not judge a person to be spiritually dead whom I have judged formerly to have had spiritual life, though I see him at present in a swoon (faint)as to all evidences of the spiritual life. And the reason why I will not judge him so is this — because if you judge a person dead, you neglect him, you leave him; but if you judge him in a swoon,(faint) though never so dangerous, you use all means for the retrieving of his life.
– John Owen
Apathy | Rebellion | Judging
Steadfastness in believing doth not exclude all temptations from without. When we say a tree is firmly rooted, we do not say the wind never blows upon it.
– John Owen
Temptation | Believing
When sin lets us alone we may let sin alone; but as sin is never less quiet than when it seems to be most quiet, and its waters are for the most part deep when they are still, so ought our contrivances against it to be vigorous at all times and in all situations.
– John Owen
Sin