John Owen Quotes

My principal anguish, and the wellspring of all my joys and sorrows, has been the incessant merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.

Ten commandments yet seven deadly sins: conflict?

A sinful heart makes feeble hand.

The choicest believers, who are assuredly freed from the condemning power of sin, ought yet to make it their business all their days to mortify the indwelling power of sin.

So now the devil's in my soul.

A sin is anything you do which goes against yourself

Knowing that something is wrong and doing it anyway happens very often in life, and I doubt I will ever know why.

In the heart of man, there is a constant conflict between the flesh and the spirit.

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

The wages of sin are an expensive infection.

To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged.

Prayer will consume sin, or sin will choke prayer.

At the moment I sin, I desire the sin more than I desire to please God.

Saw so much of the wickedness of my heart that I longed to get away from myself...I felt almost pressed to death with my own vileness. Oh what a body of death is there in me...Oh the closest walk with God is the sweetest heaven that can be enjoyed on earth!

Guilt is present in the very hesitation, even though the deed be not committed.

Be killing sin or it will be killing you.

I feel my griefs too, and there scarce is ground Upon my flesh t'inflict another wound. Yet dare I not complain, or wish for death With holy Paul; lest it be thought the breath Of discontent; or that these prayers be For weariness of life, not love of thee.

He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood.

When we would think of God, how many things we find which turn us away from Him, and tempt us to think otherwise. All this is evil, yet it is innate.

People are backsliders on their knees long before they backslide openly in the eyes of the world.

As always at these times when he felt really in need of God the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer.

It seems to me that the darkness that has troubled you ... comes from one very serious source. Without wanting to be in conflict with the truth and with the will of God, we are actually going against God's will and His teaching.

Wondering if God loves us when we're cheating? Oh, but why he lets us feel things, if it's wrong.

Never in her life – she could swear it from the bottom of her soul – had she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgments had come. Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?

Passion persuades me one way, reason another. I see the better and approve it, but I follow the worse.