My Year with Owen #25

I will be sharing some John Owen quotes this year. The second book I'll be reading is Of Temptation: The Nature and Power of It.

• The word of Christ is the word of the gospel; the word by him revealed from the bosom of the Father; the word of the Word; the word spoken in time of the eternal Word. ~ John Owen
• Now this word is called “the word of Christ’s patience,” or tolerance and forbearance, upon the account of that patience and longsuffering which, in the dispensation of it, the Lord Christ exercises toward the whole, and to all persons in it; and that both actively and passively, in his bearing with men and enduring from them. He is patient toward his saints— he bears with them, suffers from them. He is “patient toward us” (2 Pet. 3: 9)— that is, that believe. The gospel is the word of Christ’s patience even to believers.  ~ John Owen
• He that knows not the word of Christ’s patience as a sanctifying, cleansing word, in the power of it upon his own soul, neither knows it nor keeps it. The empty profession of our days knows not one step toward this duty; and thence it is that the most are so overborne under the power of temptations. Men full of self, of the world, of fury, ambition, and almost all unclean lusts, do yet talk of keeping the word of Christ! (See 1 Peter 1: 2; 2 Timothy 2: 19.) ~ John Owen
• We have arrived, then, to the sum of this safeguarding duty, of this condition of freedom from the power of temptation: He that, having a due acquaintance with the gospel in its excellencies, as to him a word of mercy, holiness, liberty, and consolation, values it, in all its concerns, as his choicest and only treasure— makes it his business and the work of his life to give himself up unto it in universal obedience, then especially when opposition and apostasy put the patience of Christ to the utmost— he shall be preserved from the hour of temptation. ~ John Owen
• He that keeps close to Christ is crucified with him and is dead to all the desires of the flesh and the world (as more fully: Gal. 6: 14). Here the match is broken, and all love, entangling love, dissolved. The heart is crucified to the world and all things in it. ~ John Owen
• If liking and love of the things proposed, insinuated, commended in the temptation be living and active in us, we shall not be able to resist and stand. ~ John Owen
• He that makes it his business to eat daily of the tree of life will have no appetite unto other fruit, though the tree that bear them seem to stand in the midst of paradise. ~ John Owen
• “Let a soul exercise itself to a communion with Christ in the good things of the gospel— pardon of sin, fruits of holiness, hope of glory, peace with God, joy in the Holy Ghost, dominion over sin— and he shall have a mighty preservative against all temptations.” ~ John Owen
• Consider that you are always under the eye of Christ, the great captain of our salvation, who has enjoined us to watch thus, and pray that we enter not into temptation. What do you think are the thoughts and the heart of Christ when he sees a temptation hastening toward us, a storm rising about us, and we are fast asleep? Does it not grieve him to see us expose ourselves so to danger, after he has given us warning upon warning? ~ John Owen

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible