In the last post, I suggested that it is the Christian’s right self image, that is, understanding who they are in Christ which is to fuel and motivate them as they put sin to death. Theology provides rich fodder for doing this. Here are three suggestions:
In examining Owen and Chalmers we have seen them answer the question of how one dies to sin and lives to righteousness by concentrating on either hating sin or supplanting it with satisfaction in Christ. However, they both overlook the verse Anthony Hoekema sees as the vital weapon in mortification […]
Thomas Chalmers lived slightly later than John Owen but he was a Puritan as well. The purpose of Thomas Chalmers’ The Expulsive Power of a New Affection is to show that “the rescue and recovery of the heart from the wrong affection that domineers over it” is best accomplished by […]
John Owen was a 17th century Puritan. He wrote a whole treatise on The Mortification of Sin in Believers. He identified deceitfulness as the chief characteristic of sin such that you can think you have so understood grace that you tolerate and even love sin. Thus in order to mortify […]
Last time we saw the commands in the Bible to die to/rid yourself of sin and live to righteousness/clothe yourself with godliness. So that sounds like those things are our job to do. Yet, the Bible also uses the passive to talk about this, the idea of us ‘being renewed’ […]
For my theology paper this semester, I wrote on the ideas of ‘dying to sin and living to righteousness’, or, in theological speak, ‘mortification and vivification’. It’s all very well to know the theory of being made new in Christ, but ‘dying to sin’ sounds like an abstract concept: what […]
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