John Owen

I’ve watched more than one pastor work himself to exhaustion tending to one congregational need after another, while giving little time to study and delivering mediocre teaching from the pulpit. Not to be too hard on the pastor, that seemed to be what the congregation wanted—demanded, even. Is that the way it should be? Should the teaching ministry play second fiddle to other pastoral duties? John Owen didn’t think so.

   Under normal circumstances Owen believed and taught that “The first and principal duty of a pastor is to feed the flock by diligent preaching of the word.” he pointed to Jeremiah 3:15 and to the purpose of God to “give to his church pastors according to his own heart, who should feed them with knowledge and understanding.” He showed that the care of preaching the gospel was committed to Peter, and in him all true pastors of the Church under the name of “feeding” (John 21:15–17). He cited Acts 6 and the apostles’ decision to free themselves from all encumbrances that they may give themselves wholly to the Word and prayer. He referred to 1 Timothy 5:17—it is the pastor’s duty to “labor in the word and doctrine,” and to Acts 20:28 where the overseers of the flock are to feed them with the Word. Then he says,

Nor is it required only that he preach now and then at his leisure; but that he lay aside all other employments, though lawful, all others duties in the church, as unto such a constant attendance on them as would divert him from his work, that he give himself unto it. . . . Without this, no man will be able to give a comfortable account of his pastoral office at the last day.

—John Piper, Contending for Our All, 94-95

John Piper on the humility of John Owen:

Owen Humbled Himself Under the Mighty Hand of God

Though he was one of the most influential and well-known men of his day, his own view of his place on God’s economy was somber and humble. Two days before he died he wrote in a letter to Charles Fleetwood, “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.”
   Packer says that “Owen, [though] a proud man by nature, had been brought low in and by his conversion, and thereafter he kept himself low by recurring contemplation of his inbred sinfulness.” Owen illustrates this:

To keep our soul 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 a due manner.

   With regard to his immense learning and the tremendous insight he had into the things of God he seems to have a humbler attitude toward his achievement because he had climbed high enough to see over the first ridge of revolution into the endless mysteries of God.

I make no pretence of searching into the bottom or depth of any part of this “great mystery of godliness, God manifest in the flesh.” They are altogether unreachable, unto the [limit] of the most enlightened minds, in this life, what we shall farther comprehend of them in the other world, God only knows.

This humility opened Owens’s soul to the greatest visions of Christ in the Scriptures. And he believed with all his heart the truth of 2 Corinthians 3:18, that by contemplating the glory of Christ “we may be gradually transformed into the same glory.” And that is nothing other than holiness.

—John Piper, Contending for Our All, 103-104

It is relatively easy to learn facts. It is more difficult to apply them personally. It often takes considerable time for lessons to become embedded in our minds and be consistently reflected in our lives. John Owen was a man who excelled in personal application.

Commending in Public Only What He Experienced in Private

One great hindrance to holiness in the ministry of the Word is that we are prone to preach and write without pressing into the things we say and making them real to our own souls. Over the years words begin to come easy, and we find we can speak of mysteries without standing in awe; we can speak of purity without feeling pure; we can speak of zeal without spiritual passion; we can speak of God’s holiness without trembling; we can speak of sin without sorrow; we can speak of heaven without eagerness. And the result is an increasing hardening of the spiritual life.
   Words came easy for Owen, but he set himself against this terrible disease of inauthenticity and secured his growth in holiness. He began with the premise: “Our happiness consisteth not in the knowing the things of the gospel, but in the doing of them.” Doing, not just knowing, was the goal of all his studies.
   As a means to this authentic doing he labored to experience every truth he preached. He said,

I hold myself bound in conscience and in honor, not even to imagine that I have attained a proper knowledge of any one article of truth, mush less to publish it, unless through the Holy Spirit I have had such a taste of it, in its spiritual sense, that I may be able, from the heart, to say with the psalmist, “I have believed, and therefore I have spoken.”

So, for example, his Exposition of Psalm 130 (320 pages on eight verses) is the laying open not only of the Psalm but of his own heart. Andrew Thomason says,

When Owen . . . laid open the book of God, he laid open at the same time the book of his own heart and of his own history, and produced a book which . . . is rich in golden thoughts, and distinct with the living experience of “one who spake what he knew, and testified what he had seen.”

The same biographer said of Owen’s On The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded (1681) that he “first preached [it] to his own heart, and then to private congregation; and which reveals to us the almost untouched and untrodden eminences on which Own walked in the last years of his pilgrimage.”

—John Piper, Contending for Our All, 109-111

Having completed John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine, and Doxology, the next church history book in my queue is Worldly Saints by Leland Ryken.

You’ve no doubt heard the terms “puritan” and “puritanical” used pejoratively; but those who use those words in that way know nothing of the faith and character of the Puritans. In truth, most of us probably know little about them; so when I discovered Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were by Leland Ryken, I knew I had to get it and put it near the of my to-read stack.

The Puritans, as you likely know, were Calvinists. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that truth was extremely important to them. Ryken writes:

   The Puritans placed a high premium on religious truth. The intellectual content of a person’s faith was not an indifferent matter for them. Thomas Hooker claimed that “all truth, though the least that God reveals , is it not better than all the world?” John Owen urged Christians to “look on truth as a pearl, as that which is better than all the world, bought with any price.”

—Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were (Academie Books, 1986), 17.

It should not be believed, however, that bare dogma was the sum of the Puritans’ religion. The possibility that religious belief could be intellectual without touching the heart was very real to them. They were diligent in self-examination (perhaps sometimes too much so) as a defense against that deplorable condition.

   The idea of cold or coldness and the synonyms for dull and dullness, were major spiritual aversions for the Puritans. Richard Rogers recoiled from “the coldness and half-service . . . Which is in the world.” wile Cotton Mather warned, “beware of . . . A strong head and a cold heart.” Samuel Ward recorded in his diary the self-accusation “How on the 15 and 16 of February thou was very dull in God’s service.” as a counterpart to these rejections of coldness, zeal and zealous were recurrent positive value-terms in Puritan vocabulary.
   Spiritual complacency and mediocrity were the greatest of all Puritan aversions. Richard Baxter wrote,

As mere idleness and forgetting God will keep a soul as certainly from heaven as a profane, licentious, fleshly life, so also will the usual company of such idle, forgetful, negligent persons as surly keep our hearts from heaven, as the company of men more dissolute and profane. [The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (Fleming H. Revell, 1962), 125.]

Samuel Willard lamented that in New England “forwardness and zeal for God is almost out of date” while “lukewarm-confession is much in credit.”

—Ibid.