Kennystix's podcast
Reflections on the Life and Thought of John Owen
The following message is by Pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God is available at www.desiringgod.org. I wrote down four reasons why it is so good of God to make John Owen the topic of this talk. This is CJ's idea, not mine. And I'm going to give reasons now why I think God was in it. Number one, because it gives me an occasion to say what an odd thing it is for a person to ask anybody to speak about John Owen and what it says about CJ and this gathering and this movement, Owen. So what in the world is anybody doing asking to bore a whole room full of people with a 300-year-old, unreadable theologian? And it says a huge amount about CJ, it says a huge amount about what Sovereign Grace Ministries stands for, namely that you believe in it. What he stood for, how rare it is that anybody would want Owen, how rare it is that anybody would want anything 300 years old, how rare it is that anybody would want theology, how rare it is that anybody would want God-centered theology, Christ-exalting, Bible-saturated theology. So CJ, the very fact of the topic is a celebration in my mind of what God has done in you and this group because when I think of the big movements among evangelicals in this country right now, this is the last topic that I could name names, right? I could name the big names. This is the last topic they would ask anybody to speak on. So something weird is going on here and I am here to celebrate it. And I hope you'll see why before we're done. So that's reason number one for why I think it's of God that I would be asked to speak on John Owen. And the second is that I am on a writing leave and just finished a book called The Fourth Volume in the Swans are not silent, contending for our all, and in it are three little biographies of Athanasius, John Owen, and J. Gresham-Macon. And it's all about the importance of defending, contending for doctrinal faithfulness, which is our all when it's Jesus Christ and a right understanding of his gospel. And so Owen was fresh on my mind because of working on that book. And now the book I'm working on is called, perhaps, God is the gospel and Owen is figuring very largely, mainly because, as Justin and I were just talking in our hotel room, it seems like, as you take the orbit of his 22 volumes of published works, 23, maybe, if you take biblical theology into account, probably the most integrating text is the God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God. And that verse is the pivotal verse in this book, the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God. And the point of the book is, if you preach the gospel and the glory of Christ does not shine off the things you celebrate in that gospel, you haven't communicated good news. The subtitle might be something like, "Meditations on God's love as the gift of himself." And I fear for our evangelical world that it isn't God's self for our everlasting enjoyment that is generally offered in the gospel. So that's reason number two, why it feels so urgent, present, immediately relevant for me to be talking about John Owen, and the third reason is that as of last week, Justin Taylor and Josh Sowin at Desiring God Ministers created a website, www.JohnOwen.org, where you can go and find everything you need to know about Owen. So that's easy to remember, JohnOwen.org. So if you go to JohnOwen.com, you get an architect, I think. And if you go to JohnOwen.org, you'll get the 322-year-old greatest British theologian. That's the third reason. Here's the last one. This morning, Justin handed me this letter in the car on the way to the airport, which is tallied with the star article. Our church has a newsletter called The Star, and Cody Peekney wrote it this week, who is one of our church plants in Charlotte. Desiring God Community Church in Charlotte, Pastor Cody Peekney wrote the star article for us, and this letter and that article are about the same thing, namely pastoral plagiarism. One of the largest churches in Charlotte, Calvary church, lost its pastor, I believe last September, because of preaching other people's sermons, a 3,000-person church. And this letter is a confession, and I get these periodically from a pastor in South Carolina confessing preaching my sermons. JohnOwen devoted his entire life to holiness in the ministry, not success, not popularity, but purity, integrity, and holiness was his passion. And I think if he looked at the lay of the land in America politically, it's happening in the Congress, this very moment, as they investigate delay, and what's happening in the church as adultery and plagiarism and materialism bring down pastor after pastor, or exalt pastor after pastor, I think he would have regarded it as unrecognizable. And so it's an unbelievably relevant thing that we should talk about, JohnOwen, and I'd like to pray before I launch. Father in Heaven, I ask now that you would help me be faithful to the gospel, which I believe JohnOwen saw probably more clearly than almost anybody in the last 400 years. We want to exalt Christ tonight, like we have in song and testimony, now we want to exalt Christ in a biographical study of JohnOwen. And I know that the devil would hate me to succeed at that, and so therefore I ask for affection, humility, faithfulness to Scripture, truth to history, and an anointing Lord to do this with a right affection. And I ask for these who listen that their hearts would be made right and that they would be able to benefit from this story. Let the ripple effect of C.J. and I and Justin pray a little while ago, let the ripple effect be for decades, deed till Jesus comes, for thousands of miles, and in children and teenagers, and old people, dying people, sick people, well people, all let the ripple effect of this conference, including this little piece, be great. In Jesus' name I pray, Amen. It's amazing that the three of the speakers who have come to the Desiring God pastors' conference, J.I. Packer, Sinclair Ferguson, and Roger Nicole, all said in their keynote messages over the last years, nobody had influenced them more than JohnOwen. The picture that, these three giants of our day, these are my heroes. Packer, Ferguson, Nicole, say out loud, nobody influenced them more than John Owen outside the Bible, of course, which is a remarkable thing to say about a person who's been dead for 322 years, whose prose is so demanding, he thought it was. For example, in the preface to his book, which one, the death of death in the death of Christ, he wrote this, now picture how unreader-friendly this is, reader, if thou art as many in this pretending age, a sign or title-gazer, and come us into books as Cato into the theater to go out again, thou hast thy entertainment farewell. Amazing, and that's the mind and the man that these three men said nobody has shaped my thinking more than, "Owen, let's just give you the specifics." J.I. Packer has told the story in several publications, and to me personally, that he probably would have committed suicide as a student in Britain had he not been pointed to John Owen because he had gotten mixed up with a perfectionist group that was so out of touch with the reality of indwelling sin that he was being made to believe he could not be a Christian if he were who he was, and he said fortunately he found on the mortification of sin, discovered what indwelling sin in Romans 7 is really about, the nature of the warfare in the Christian life, and his life was spared, and then he went on and studied Owen in great detail, so he gives never-ending tribute to Owen. Nicole said, out loud, that no theologian of the English-speaking tongue is greater, and he paused, knowing in his church he was, and said even then Jonathan Edwards, then John Owen, well maybe, but that he would even rank Owen above Edwards is breathtaking to me. When I heard that, which was quite a few years ago, I was really taken back, but that was Nicole's judgment, and then Sinclair Ferguson, most perhaps remarkably at all, of all encountered Owen as a teenager. I do not recommend that you give teenagers John Owen unless you have a very extraordinary reading teenager, but he was exposed to Owen as a teenager, and he wrote this, "My personal interest in Owen as a teacher and theologian began in my late teenage years. When I first read some of his writing, like others before and since, I found that they dealt with issues which contemporary evangelical literature rarely, if ever, touched." That is one of the great advantages of moving back several hundred years, is because we all have our blind spots, every generation does, and Owen dealt with things that are of vital importance that you don't find many people writing on today. And then of course there were other testimonies. Ambrose Barnes said he was the Calvin of England, and Anthony Woods said he was the atlas of the independency movement, the church that was not the Anglican movement, so we talk about independency or nonconformity, we mean the people who have left the Anglican church in their pursuit of the Puritan ideal of reform. So one last quote of commendation from Charles Bridges, this is really quite amazing, "Indeed upon the whole, for luminous exposition, powerful defense of scripture doctrine, determined enforcement of practical obligation," underline last night, "for skillful anatomy of the self-deceitfulness of the heart," that's where I love Owen most, along with Edwards, "and for a detailed and wise treatment of the diversified exercises of the Christian heart, he stands probably unrivaled," that's Charles Bridges on Owen. So I would just commend to you that you get a hero who's dead, I mean that because live heroes can let you down and they're not tested long enough yet, so get yourself one or two good dead heroes and obey Hebrews 13-7. Remember those who led you and who spoke the word of God to you and consider the result and the outcome and imitate their faith. So it's right to have heroes, it's dangerous to have live heroes, it's good and safe to have proven, God-centered, Bible-saturated, dead heroes who, though they are dead, still speak. Let's do a little overview of Owen's life. The striking thing about Owen is how little we know because of how little was preserved of his detailed life, but enough to get the outline of it. Not one of his diaries has been preserved, none of his letters have been preserved. He remains hidden to and says, but not quite hidden because we have his books and you can read between the lines in many ways and then we have the basic facts. Born 1616, that's the year Shakespeare died and four years before the Puritans arrived in this land, isn't it amazing to think that we're reading the documents of a man who was meeting God, dealing with God before this vast America existed? And it just seems so recent. This is a baby country. I mean, if it went out of existence tomorrow, it would be a footnote in a thousand years. And it could! We're a baby land. It's still an experiment in the wilderness. God has been good to us, way better than we deserve. And we should tremble and be grateful and use, oh, work while it is day. Work while it is day. So born 1616, died 1683, right in the middle of the Puritan century. Usually measure the Puritans from about 1560s to 1660s. So I mean, he died right as it was closing. Did most of his work right in the middle of it. We don't know anything about his siblings except that he had three brothers and a sister. That's all we know. He never mentions his mother in any of his writings. He said one thing about his father, and this is it, I was bred up from my infancy under the care of my father who was a non-conformist all his days and a painful laborer in the vineyard of the Lord. When he was 10 years old, he was sent off to grammar school. At 12, he entered Queen's College Oxford, took his bachelor's degree at 16, got his MA at 19, entered upon the BD Theological Studies and quit because of the dominant Arminianism of the Church of England at that particular time, and he got a job as a chaplain to some wealthy families near London. He was very sympathetic with Parliament as Parliament and the King began to divide, and there were these civil wars, and he was on the more popular side rather than the King's side, the side of the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians and the non-conformity, the independence. Five events, let's get it summed up, in five events in London shaped his whole life. Number one, his conversion, everybody would have thought John Owen was converted. He was a Calvinist unconverted. There are such people, and they do a lot of damage, and I hope that you aren't one of them. But he was a Calvinist and unconverted, and God used, as he did with Charles Spurgeon, a commoner, an ordinary lay preacher to convert him. You know the story is Spurgeon, January 6, 1850, in the snow, driven out of his way into a little Wesleyan chapel, and a lay preacher picks up Isaiah 45, 22, and a little teeny group of people that had made it in the snow and says, "Look to me and be saved all the ends of the earth," and Spurgeon did and was saved. It was an amazing story. One thing happened with John Owen. He's 26 years old, he's in London, he visits his cousin who wants to take him to hear the famous Presbyterian preacher Edmund Calamy at St. Mary's Church. I said, "London, it's Aldermanbury, wherever that is." I don't even know if I pronounce it right. Well, he wasn't there. The preacher wasn't there. His cousin wanted to leave. Have you ever done that? Go to hear a famous preacher. You find out he's not preaching. You want to go away? Don't do that. You might get saved. So they stay, a simple preacher filling in on the spur of the moment, takes his text from Matthew 8, 26, "Why are you fearful, O you of little faith?" And it was the appointed word that penetrated Owen and removed all his doubts and fears and worries he felt as if he had been born anew or at least had been given profoundly unshakable assurance of his salvation, which I just can't help but pause and make an application here because of one of the things you said you drew out last night about the background of this movement with a basketball player for a leader, a drunken drug deal. You may not feel I'm a John Owen. I mean, I hope you do not feel you're an Owen. There's no Owens in this room, I can promise you. And therefore, I won't have an impact. But is it not amazing that God used the simple uneducated preacher to save the Owen? I mean, who's going to get the reward here? So how many stories there are like that? There's the Spurgeon story, the Owen story, the Billy Graham story. That's a good one from North Carolina. Somebody sitting in your little 30-person church whose ripple effect of life you cannot begin to calculate. When Jesus asks you tonight in your room, "Do you love me?" And you say, "Lord, you know that I love you." And he says, "Feed that flock. Know me or love me by feeding my flock. Know that he will receive that and multiply that." I mean, I am reading through the Bible with my discipleship journal reading plan. And this morning, therefore, read Jesus dealing with these hard-hearted disciples who are talking about bread again. And he says, "Don't you understand when we fed the 5,000, how many loaves were left over?" 12. When we fed the 4,000, how many loaves were left over? 7. Do you not understand? I think that's the point. The point is, "You'll be taken care of if you feed my flock." 12, 7, how much do you need? What do I need to do to help you stop talking about bread and start talking about souls? Would you stop worrying about your living? Would you stop worrying about your money? He's saying, "I have tried to show you, rest. I'll take care of you. Feed my sheep, simple or educated. Feed my sheep. I'll take care of you. The ripple effect will be beyond anything you ever dreamed." Second event that happened, that was first, his conversion. Second, his marriage. Why do I mention it since we know almost nothing about it? Her name was Mary Rook, R-O-O-K-E. He never mentions her in any writing. 31 years they were married. He died, I believe eight years before he died. What is so amazing in the story of the marriage is that they had 11 children and all of them died. And Mary died before Owen died. They have 31 years and a child dying roughly every three years, I mean it's an average. We don't know whether there were any twins even in the group or whether they died early or late. All it says is early childhood except for one who lived to be a young adult and she died. So I'm watching this man do what we're going to see him do in the midst of virtually constant loss. And some of us want to throw in the towel on God after one loss. And therefore I stand back, I take a deep breath and I say, "Oh God, make me like this." So that if my wife isn't there when I get home, my little girl's not there or my sons have terrible accidents. I keep feeding my flock and go deeper than I've ever gone and don't see anything but he gives and takes away, he gives and takes away, my heart will find a way to say, "Blessed be the name of the Lord." The marriage was hard. We don't know much, just death, death, death. Number three, he wrote his first book. I don't think I'll go into that except to say that it set the stage in two ways. One, it was a book on Armenianism and it was a powerfully politically affecting book. Here's the title, a display of Armenianism being a discovery that means an exposure of the old Pelagian idol free will with the new goddess contingency, advancing themselves into the throne of God in heaven to the prejudice of his grace, providence and supreme dominion over the children of men. Very typical Puritan title, actually they didn't have tables of contents so they just packed it in and that launched him into a remarkable career of endless controversy. Fourth, becoming a pastor, he became a pastor in London, he was a pastor all his life with some brief interludes with Cromwell in politics which I'll mention and that set the stage. He did all of his writing out of a pastoral ministry, sometimes a fugitive pastor. Number five, he addressed Parliament and that catapulted him into national prominence. They had these fast days where they invited a pastor to come address the Parliament and he did and the message got a hold of Cromwell's attention and Cromwell is said to have said, "Sir, you are a person I must be acquainted with," to which Owen replied, "That will be much more to my advantage than yours," to which I wrote, "I'm not sure that that's true. I don't think so. I think it was to Cromwell's great advantage to know Owen and maybe a diversion for Owen to know Cromwell." He was made the chaplain of Cromwell's armies. The armies were sent to Ireland and Scotland where they massacred whole groups of people and he was sent along to preach to the troops, assess the religious situation and give theological justification for the war which may or may not have been justifiable. He became the dean under Cromwell's leadership of Christ Church College in Oxford and served for nine years as the dean vice chancellor there and had a very fruitful ministry pastoring as well as academically leading the school at that time. Things like appointment of chaplains was his duty, choice of students, provision of tutorial facilities, administration of discipline, oversight of the property, collection of rents and ties, care of the almsman of the church hospital and on and on all the while trying to establish, this is his words, to establish the whole life of the college on the word of God. And then he ended that and he was glad to be done with it and wrote this or said this to the students in his concluding chapel message. Labors have been numberless besides submitting to enormous expense often when brought to the brink of death on your account. I have hated these limbs, his body and this feeble body which was ready to desert my mind. The reproaches of the vulgar have been disregarded. The envy of others has been overcome. In these circumstances I wish you all prosperity and bid you farewell. And in spite of all that pressure in those nine years with a child dying every third year, he wrote 22 books. Staying up too late and getting too little sleep, which he did regret in his latter days of suffering that he had treated his body so poorly. But you know, when I hear men of this caliber and this quantity of output and this depth of output begrudge the labor because of its later effects, I take it with a grain of salt because I frankly am deeply, deeply thankful that in spite of losing children the pressures of a deanship and a preacher I frankly am very thankful that he stayed up late for me and for you. He wrote things in those years that would boggle your mind. He wrote a book called The Saints Perseverance, 1654. Why did he write a book on perseverance? This book has 666 pages defending the doctrine of perseverance and he did it because a man emerged named John Goodwin spreading error about this doctrine infecting his students and the people in his church and he cared for them like a shepherd cares for a sheep and wants to protect them from wolves. You can find it in volume 11 of his collected works. And so he stayed up late to protect the sheep from a horrible doctrine that denied the precious doctrine of perseverance. Well, he was fired because Charles 2nd came back to the throne. Now Catholicism is starting to move or the high church Anglicanism 1662, two years later the Act of Uniformity 2000 Puritans put out of their churches. He's one of them and so now for the rest of his life 23 years he's a fugitive pastor in London. He has so many high connections that his plate is not as serious as some but it was tenuous and he had to move around and couldn't serve his church in the church all the time. He was a great defender of tolerance therefore. It would be a good to read his book in our day of tolerance to read his book on tolerance would be very educational. It's called Indulgence and Toleration Considered. He wrote this, "It seems that we are some of the first who ever anywhere in the world from the foundation of it thought of ruining and destroying persons of the same religion with ourselves merely upon the choice of some peculiar ways of worship in that religion." Nothing new under the sun is there. Agree on massive, glorious truths for which people have died but if you sing like that you are so defective. It's as though you were a heretic. William Penn, Pennsylvania, William Penn, was a Quaker and he studied with Owen. Then he came over and preached tolerance and Owen wrote to the governor of Massachusetts pleading for tolerance for the Baptists in his day though he was not himself a Baptist. So Owen was a remarkable combination of doctrinal defense and tolerance of form and I give thanks to God for him. Feed My Sheep was what he wanted to do. He knew John Bunyan. You know who Bunyan was? He wrote Pilgrim's Progress and they were contemporaries and they knew each other quite well and it always struck me as odd that Owen was known as the Atlas of Independence, the Calvin of England. Bunyan was an absolute nobody. He hadn't done anything to distinguish himself except get himself in prison and Owen who could have been in prison for the same reason but had strings he could pull tried to pull the same strings over and over for Bunyan. He was trying to get Bunyan out of jail because he loved him and his preaching. One time Charles II asked Owen why do you bother to go here that uneducated tinker and he said this could I possess the tinker's abilities for preaching? Please your majesty I would gladly relinquish all my learning. Now here's the lesson I learned from my life and it's very precious to me right now. You try and you try and you try to do what you know is right and make something happen that ought to happen. Get Bunyan out of jail. It's a good thing to do and you fail. You fail. You do your best and 12 years later he comes out of jail with a book in his hand called the Pilgrim's Progress that has influenced the world a hundred times more than John Owen. Was that a failure? You have to learn to talk in paradoxes if you're going to believe in the providence of God. Yes and no. It was right to try to get him out of jail. Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you and it was good and right that he failed under God's wise providence. I think I was hearing some of that tonight in what was being said during the worship time. So I learned that from my life. I'm thankful that God can do that with some of the things I'm failing right now to accomplish. He died in 1683. He was buried in Bunheal fields. I've been there and what makes the visit there so precious is that five years later Bunyan died and they're buried in the same graveyard. The great atlas of independency who functioned at the level of kings and the tinker who spent most of his productive years in jail writing the most important book in the world after the Bible probably. Well, what can we learn here? Just step back and do some lessons. That's the life. What makes this life tick? And I think it is his passion for communion with Christ in the gospel, in the pursuit of universal holiness of life. That's so I think the way he'd say it. Communion with Christ, the glory of Christ in the gospel, in the pursuit of a universal holiness of behavior. Let me read this in his book of the mortification of sin and believers. I hope that I may own insincerity that my heart's desire unto God and the chief design of my life are that mortification that means putting to death the deeds of the body Romans 8, 13. 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. Something he did was for the sake of his own and other people's holiness. What an amazing challenge to us in our day of letters like this. The article that I read in the Star this morning from Cody Pinkney asked the question, "Why did they do it? Why did they lean on other people's work?" He said, "Well, because they're depressed." He said, "And out of gas." He said, "But all they would have to do is tell their elders, 'I'm out of gas. May I have some time or would you mind if I preached some old Spurgeon sermons while I'm hurting?' But they wouldn't go to their elders and they wouldn't get permission. Why?" And his answer was pride. Pride. Depression can look like humility and cloak pride because you won't seek the help you need. My own word to you in regard to plagiarism and using other people's sermons is, "Don't do it, period, not even with permission." Because I think not preaching your own messages is a signal that Christ has ceased to be beautiful and glorious and wonderful. And if that's true, you've got no business in the pulpit. You need some time to see him again. We all go through those periods of time where it's hard to do the ministry. Everything around you seems to be painful and lost and discouraging. You can preach in those times because the Word of God is the Word of God whether you feel it or not. And I've known that and I've done it. But if you find yourself emotionally incapable, I don't think you ought to do it with other people's sermons. That's just my own personal opinion. I think these websites and these books and these ministries that offer you ready-made sermons are not to state it too strongly, demonic. Let your people see your heart. Find Christ here and tell them what you see. This is a very rich book. I have a hard time empathizing with those who can't find anything to preach here. A really hard time. Because I have a hard time keeping sermons short. There is so much to say about everything on every page. I know I'm being hard-hearted towards the depressed. If you're depressed, ask for a leave while you meet Jesus again. He really had a burden for missions and was torn up about what happened in Ireland and Scotland. When he spoke to the Parliament, he pled for holiness. Holiness of life that would yield a different attitude towards our adversaries. Here's a picture I'm saying this now that just slaughtered thousands of Irish people. How is it that Jesus Christ is in Ireland only as a lion standing all his-staining all his garments with the blood of his enemies and none to hold him out as a lamb sprinkled with his own blood to his friends? Is this to deal fairly with the Lord Jesus? Call him out to do battle and then keep away his crown. God hath been faithful in doing great things for you. Be faithful in this one. Do your utmost for the preaching of the gospel in Ireland. I think he had a guilty conscience about being a part of simply political force in the name of Jesus without any gospel force in the name of Jesus. When his funeral was preached by David Clarkson, he said, "A great light is fallen, one of eminency for holiness, learning, parts, abilities, pastor, scholar, divine of the first magnitude. Holiness gave a divine luster to his other accomplishments. It shined in his whole course and was diffused through his whole conversation." In other words, he succeeded as far as Clarkson was concerned in the pursuit of holiness in his life. Why should we listen to him, therefore? What are the reasons why you should go ahead and buy one or two volumes and read them? Not everything, just something. What are the reasons? Here's a few reasons why I think we should listen to Owen today. There is a holiness without which we will not see the Lord, Hebrews 12, 14, which means holiness of life is of paramount importance if you would go to heaven. Holiness confirms the authenticity of your faith which unites you to Christ who is your righteousness. It is not peripheral. It is not negligible. It is an essential part of the confirmation of your knowledge of Christ. Therefore, a man like Owen will be a great help to you in a book like The Mortification of Sins. It's only 80 pages long. Read that one. And then in dwelling sin, and then Psalm 130, Expositions of Psalm 130, and then communion with Christ. And then the glories of Christ. Those would be the places where I would start. Second reason why I encourage you to listen to Owen. There is such a shortage today of ecclesiastical and political leaders who believe personal holiness matters for public leadership. Our former president didn't. I hope the present one does. Pastor after pastor is shown to think it doesn't matter. That his public life is separated from his private life. We need models where that is unified. Third reason, he wasn't a hermit. We think, okay, you're going to pursue holiness? Be a monk. Don't get married, abstain from foods, be very rigorously disciplined, ascetic. Owen was a very public figure. Politically involved, ecclesiastically involved, involved in every controversy down to the vowel points of Hebrew. And yet his prime goal in all of his public life was personal holiness. Communion with Christ, yielding a life of love to people and purity of life and integrity. Owen would not have been able to conceive of any conception of ministry that allowed for pornographic galling on the internet with preaching on Sunday. It would have been incomprehensible. It ought to be incomprehensible to you if your eye causes you to sin. Pluck it out and throw it away for it is better for you to go into heaven maimed than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. I think he would have said that to many, many pastors today. So read him for that. He wasn't a hermit. He really lived in the world where it's hard to be pure and holy. Oh, how much criticism he took. I think I'll skip over a lot of the examples I have here. But it was a terrible thing from his enemies and from his friends. There was this constant barrage. He even got a letter one time from John Elliot, the missionary to the Indians in New England in the 1630s and following excoriating him for something he had been reported to have said to the prejudice of holiness. And it broke his heart. He loved the ministry of John Elliot and with no email, no telephone, you got months in between communications, you find out that you've been so understood or misunderstood that you are being considered to be an enemy of holiness and not a friend. And then picture this, listen to him because of the hardships he endured just because it was pre-modern. No electricity, no central heating, no central air, no 911, 11 children living and dying, your own health problems and nobody understanding in 1665, 70,000 people died in one year in London from the plague. London's population at that time was identical to Washington, D.C. today. So picture, 35, 9/11s in one year and you're the pastor of the local church. And he kept writing and writing and writing and preaching and preaching. Oh, what circumstances he endured and therefore we ought to listen to this man. There's things to learn here about life and endurance. How did you do it? Let's give you a few examples. One, he humbled himself under the mighty hand of God. I cherish that pursuit of sovereign grace ministries. It's dangerous to say you're succeeding. But I love your pursuit. I want more of it for myself. It's one of the reasons it's good to hang out here to drink a little bit of the pursuit, a passionate pursuit not to make much of ourselves, but I'm sure C.J. like this language to delight in making much of the evidences of grace in one another. Owen labored to humble himself. I am leaving the ship of the church in a storm. But while the great pilot is in it, the loss of a poor underrower will be inconsiderable. He fought. Now get this. You got to get this right in sovereign grace because very few are getting this right today. We heard one kind of church that is way off on the melancholy side. Others are way off on the rah rah side. You got to get this right because you're poised to be a witness, to get it right. He labored to stay conscious and broken for inbred sinfulness. Now there's so many people who would think that is the, I mean this is a Christian hedonist talking, right? How can a Christian hedonist say it is commendable to labor in the gospel to stay conscious of the pain of indwelling sin in your own life? How can that not crush you and remove all joy? Let me read one quote. To keep our souls in a constant state of mourning and self abasement is the most necessary part of our wisdom. And it is so far from having any inconsistency with those consolations and joys which the gospel tenders unto us in believing as that it is the only way to let them into the soul in due manner. You see why it's hard to read, I'll paraphrase. Labor to keep yourself in a constant state of mourning and self abasement not thinking that is inconsistent with the consolations and joys of the gospel but rather is the only proper means of admitting them into your life. Now that's strange. Very few pastors are preaching that or explaining or helping their people. The people don't have categories for that. The natural man cannot receive the things of the spirit like 2 Corinthians 6, 10. Sorrowful yet always rejoicing. That's the banner that flies over my life. How can you be a pastor and not be sorrowful when the Bible commands weep with those who weep not to mention what you see in the mirror? And therefore weeping and sorrow and brokenness and loneliness and a kind of melancholy stream should be there. But it's precisely that loneliness, that brokenness that gives you the capacity to taste things at the cross that no one else can taste and they are the sweetest of all things and they make you leap for joy as the tears run down your face. There is a paradox to the Christian life of joy and sorrow melancholy and happiness. And I want you to get it right. I want to get it right. And I think Owen will help us a lot here. Second, after humility, how did he do it by obeying what he knew already as he pursued more knowledge? Here's a great quote. This is so dangerous. You've got a leader in CJ who not just reads mediocre books five times but reads really good books one time and probably more. I would dare to ask like how often you've read Calvin's Institute. Don't answer. The point is this is remarkable how much CJ reads. I've heard, whoa, tell me where you read. That's really interesting. So the danger is that we read more than we do. Which is what I think you were saying last night if I was getting it. Now how do you not read more than you do? And what happens if you read or try to learn more than you live? Listen to this quote. "The true notion of holy evangelical truths will not live, at least not flourish, where they are divided from a holy life." Meaning you can't understand what you don't obey. You'll have a surface, marginal, academic, probably controversially embattled understanding because you're not devoting yourself first to doing what you just read rather than arguing about what you just read. As we learn all to practice, so we learn much by practice. Oh, that's profound. Let me read that again. I'll read it again. Anything you say. As we learn all to practice, so we learn much by practice. So learning is a means to obeying and obeying is a means to learning. Keep reading in the same quote. And here in alone, we come unto the assurance that what we know and learn is indeed the truth. Are you having trouble with assurance of any truths that you're wrestling with? Try living them as the pathway to assurance, he would say. And thereby will they be led continually into the farther degrees of knowledge for the mind of man is capable of receiving continual supplies in the increase of light and knowledge if they are improved unto their proper end in obedience unto God. But without this, the mind will be quickly stuffed with notions so that no streams can descend into it from the fountain of truth. Simple. Where's my wrapper? Where's my wrapper? Say that. If you don't do this, you won't be able to learn anything more. You'll cut it off. The stream will clog. It's meant to go. It's meant to go to people. It's meant to bless people. It's meant to bless the poor. It's meant to bless the unreached. It's meant to change you into a godly, broken, humble, loving person. And then the stream flows and the reading. The reading becomes life-giving and the sight of glory as you read and study the gospel becomes greater and greater but not if you become a dead sea of intellectual accumulation. Third, how did he do it? Passionate communion with Jesus Christ in the gospel. He loved Christ and he communed with Christ. He lived near God. He stayed on God. He was coming to the end of his life and he was communing with him and writing a book about his glories. He wrote a letter, "Christ is our best friend and heirlong will be our only friend. I pray God with all my heart that I may be weary of everything else but converse and communion with him." And then he wrote, "Friendship with Christ is most maintained and kept up by visits and these the more free and less occasion by urgent business." And when he came to make the visit with Jesus, he had a very set goal to see the glory of Christ. The revelation of Christ deserves the severest of our thoughts, the best of our meditations, our utmost diligence in them. What better preparation can there be for our future enjoyment of the glory of Christ than in a constant previous contemplation of that glory in the revelation that is made of it in the gospel? Here's what I'm 59 years old. That means I'm in my 60th year. That feels like a brink to me. Therefore, I find myself frequently these days laying my head down since almost all my heroes were dead by my age, laying my head down on the pillow. It's especially when my wife's not home because the house is empty except for my dog who's very faithful but he's not the same. I'm alone in the house and I put my head down knowing that it is wholly possible. It has always been possible. It just feels very real now that at three o'clock this morning, I might wake up in the presence of Jesus and not in the presence of my wife. Have you ever thought about that as you go to sleep that if your heart stops while you're asleep, you wake up in the presence of Jesus and you probably would say, excuse me, am I dreaming? Because you knew you were asleep and now you're watching Jesus, I suspect you'll know. But what it does is it helps me deal with him very personally. If you think that the likelihood is increasing with each day that this could happen, that you will meet him face to face and behold his glory, as Owen said, in a manner that I had never seen before, then you talk to him now and you deal with him now and you look for him now in the gospel in a way that you wouldn't otherwise look because he's just just on the other side. Just on the other side. I ask myself this question sometimes these days. Am I praying to him or in his name in a way that if in five minutes I were talking to him, I'd feel good about the way I was praying that it was authentic, that it was full of faith, that it was personal, that it was real, that it was Christ exalting, that it was loving to people. And it brings back into my life of prayer, of vitality and an authenticity that I think Owen was after in his life. I'm going to close with just this last this last point. He was authentic in commending in public what he experienced in private. He was authentic in commending, defending in public what he experienced and only what he experienced. I've got a bunch of quotes on that but I'm only going to read one of them. Make sure I get the right one. There it is. "When the heart," now Sovereign Grace Ministries, has a calling from many things. Since you're both reformed and moderately charismatic, you have a calling to make biblical defense of these things. Not in a contentious way, but in a robust way, like the Bible says, content for the faith once we're all delivered to the saints. That is defend, given reason for the faith that is in you. Now this last paragraph I'm going to read and close with is I think a word Owen would like to deliver to you concerning how you and I do that. I feel that's one of my roles as well. I want to argue for some things in our day that are neglected and I want to do it in a way that magnifies Christ, honors the truth, helps the church. This paragraph made a huge impact on me back in '94 when I first read it. "When the heart is cast indeed," I think this is at the top of your website, isn't it Justin? At least I went there and I think portion of this is right there, John Owen.org. "When the heart is cast indeed into the mold of the doctrine that the mind embraces." That's worth thinking about and it's just the wind clause. "When the heart is cast indeed into the mold of the doctrine that the mind embraces, for the goal of embracing the deity of Christ, or the substitutionary atonement, or the inerrancy of the Bible, or the imputation of the righteousness of Christ, or the bodily resurrection of Jesus, or the virgin birth, that the point of the mind getting itself around those is that the heart comes into a form. The heart is formed by it." Continuing. "When the evidence and necessity of the truth abides in us, when not the sense of the words only is in our heads, but the sense of the thing abides in our hearts, when we have communion with God in the doctrine we contend for, then shall we be garrisoned by the grace of God against all the assaults of men." For that last phrase. "Having communion with God in the doctrine we contend for." That means that if you're an Athanasius against the world and you are arguing for the deity of Christ against Arianism who said Christ like the Jehovah's Witnesses is a created being, then as you make your case for the deity of Christ in and through the very argument you should at that moment be communing with the divine Christ, enjoying Christ, leaning on Christ, living on Christ, so that this reality is not over there. While you do battle over here, hoping that you can both go over there, it's here being enjoyed, which means, maybe this would be the best way to say it in closing, we must, we who love doctrine and are charismatic wired, we who love doctrine and believe that it breaks you and fills you with joy should in our contending out rejoice our adversaries. We should out rejoice our adversaries. Reformed people have not been good at that. You have a calling on you to reverse that and to out rejoice our minions and to out rejoice people who simply are in the fog and don't understand doctrine and think that doctrine makes people ball ring. We need to out rejoice them not because we're confused about the nature of God. There's so many people today in certain branches of the church that think that the best thing you can do for a church on Sunday morning is to create fog because precision and accuracy and definition bores. Frankly, I think that notion is one of the most blasphemous notions imaginable because if God bores to the degree that he has clearly seen, get another religion. Rather, let us say that the more clearly we see Christ in all the contours of his work and the more clearly we see God and all the contours of his character, the more we will rejoice over this Christ. Yes, be broken, but rejoice over here. Father in heaven, words, words, words, unless you come and do a mighty work. So I believe you have come earlier and you have been coming and now I ask that as we go our ways find ourselves reading, meditating, pondering. Would you come? Would you do a great work? Let Owens life and my fragmentary storytelling become a means of seeing and savoring the glory of Christ in the gospel to the end of universal holiness in sovereign grace movement through Christ, I pray. Amen. Thank you for listening to this message by John Piper, pastor for preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Feel free to make copies of this message to give to others, but please do not charge for those copies or alter the content in any way without permission. We invite you to visit Desiring God online at www.desiringgod.org. There you'll find hundreds of sermons, articles, radio broadcasts and much more all available to you at no charge. Our online store carries all of Pastor John's books, audio and video resources. You can also stay up to date on what's new at Desiring God. Again, our website is www.desiringgod.org or call us toll free at 1-888-346-4700. Our mailing address is Desiring God 20601 East Franklin Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55406. Desiring God exists to help you make God your treasure because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. [BLANK_AUDIO]
John Piper | John Owen is worthy to be studied in his works and imitated in his life and faith.