John Owen Quotes

You've got to walk and talk with God to go to heaven... I have the devil in me! If I didn't have, I'd be Christian!

Brethren, it is easier to declaim against a thousand sins of others, than to mortify one sin in ourselves.

My 12th was my most Christian and most boring year of my life. Try as I did, day after day, to cling to righteousness, I was washed down in suds of sinful surroundings.

My life is such a contradiction. My soul yearns for holiness and then runs from the mortification necessary to attain it.

Pastoral ministry is about an ongoing confrontation with the god of this world, with blindness, hardness of heart, remaining sin.

The mystery of the Christian life is that Christ expects us to flee sin and the devil, but does not expect us to rid ourselves of either on this side of glory. Repentance is a way of life, and so is the pursuit of godliness. I wish every Christian could be reminded of these two things.

The vigor and power and comfort of our spiritual life depends on our mortification of deeds of the flesh.

It was about 5 years after I was baptized before the pull of sin finally stopped.

Christian morality prefers remorse to precede lust, and then lust not to follow.

That's one of the problems as a Christian, is that we have to deal with our failures and the shame of it all.

Even though God loves us, we still have a problem: sin. It's important for us to learn how to confront sin and overcome it, because while God loves sinners, He hates sin. And He hates it because of what it does to us and how it keeps us from the abundant life Jesus died to give us.

I want to be a good person. I don't want to fail. I want to learn from my mistakes, rid myself of distractions, and run into the arms of Jesus. Most of the time, however, I feel like I am running away from Jesus into the arms of my own clutteredness.

Men are not born saints with special gifts and privileges. They fight against the world, the flesh and the devil, and as they conquer, the spirit of Jesus begins to shine through with more clarity.

Sin will be always acting, if we be not always mortifying, we are lost creatures.

He who finds not opposition from sin, and who sets not himself in every particular to its mortification, is at peace with it, not dying to it.

Lay siege to your sins, and starve them out by keeping away the food and fuel which is their maintenance and life.

Indwelling sin always abides whilst we are in this world; therefore it is always to be mortified.

Prayer will consume sin, or sin will choke prayer.

God will never tell us to do something that gratifies the flesh.

Drinking beer is easy. Trashing your hotel room is easy. But being a Christian, that's a tough call. That's rebellion.

And if we are in this state, if we had an eternity of probation, what reason have we to suppose that we should profit by it - if we had ever so long a time to chose for ourselves we should pursue our own will, to gratify our carnal I desires.

Affliction is a school of virtue; it corrects levity, and interrupts the confidence of sinning.

To abstain from sin when one can no longer sin is to be forsaken by sin, not to forsake it.

All other ways of mortification are vain, all helps leave us helpless, it must be done by the Spirit.

I don't enjoy. I suffer from enjoying. It's very Christian.