Thursday, November 11, 2010

How's Your Posture?

Among the stances and strategies the disciple must take against sin in the soul is this posture described by John Owen in a little work called On the Dominion of Sin and Grace (Works, vol. 7, 532):
No frame of mind is a better antidote against the poisin of sin. . . . God hath a continual regard unto mourners, those that are of a 'broken heart and a contrite spirit.' It is the soil where all grace will thrive and flourish. A constant due sense of sin as sin, of our interest therein by nature and in the course of our lives, with a continual afflictive rememberance of some such instances of it as have had peculiar aggravations, issuing in a gracious self-abasement, is the soul's best posture in watching against all the deceits and incursions of sin. And this is a duty which we ought with all diligence to attend unto.
Does this sound like morbid introspection to you?  Well, in a tomorrow's post I'll give Owen's take on the charge that this produces morbid introspection.

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