Contending for Our All: Defending Truth and Treasuring Christ in the Lives of Athanasius, John Owen, and J. Gresham Machen by John Piper

Author:John Piper
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Religion
ISBN: 9781581346763
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2006-01-19T22:00:00+00:00

and the enabling of us to discover their madness and

answer their objections, of indispensable necessity.67

His aim in all he did was to grasp the mind of Christ and

reflect it in his behavior. This means that the quest for holiness was always bound up with a quest for true knowledge of God. That’s why prayer and study and meditation always went together.

I suppose . . . this may be fixed on as a common principle

of Christianity; namely, that constant and fervent prayer

for the divine assistance of the Holy Spirit, is such an indispensable means for . . . attaining the knowledge of the

mind of God in the Scripture, as that without it all others

will not [avail].68

67 Owen, Works XII:50.

68 Owen, Works, IV:203.

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Communing with God in the Things for Which We Contend

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Owen gives us a glimpse into the struggle that we all have in this regard lest anyone think he was above the battle. He wrote to John Eliot in New England,

I do acknowledge unto you that I have a dry and barren

spirit, and I do heartily beg your prayers that the Holy One would, notwithstanding all my sinful provocations, water

me from above.69

In other words, the prayers of others, not just his own, were essential for his holiness.

The source of all that Owen preached and wrote was this

“assiduous meditation” on Scripture and prayer. Which leads us to the fourth way that Owen achieved such holiness in his

immensely busy and productive life.

Commending in Public Only What He Experienced

in Private

One great hindrance to holiness in the ministry of the Word is that we are prone to preach and write without pressing into the things we say and making them real to our own souls. Over the years words begin to come easy, and we find we can speak of mysteries without standing in awe; we can speak of purity without feeling pure; we can speak of zeal without spiritual passion; we can speak of God’s holiness without trembling; we can speak of sin without sorrow; we can speak of heaven without eagerness. And the result is an increasing hardening of the spiritual life.

Words came easy for Owen, but he set himself against this

69 Toon, ed., The Correspondence of John Owen, p. 154.

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C O N T E N D I N G F O R O U R A L L

terrible disease of inauthenticity and secured his growth in holiness. He began with the premise: “Our happiness consisteth not in the knowing the things of the gospel, but in the doing of them.”70 Doing, not just knowing, was the goal of all his studies.

As a means to this authentic doing he labored to experience

every truth he preached. He said,

I hold myself bound in conscience and in honor, not even

to imagine that I have attained a proper knowledge of

any one article of truth, much less to publish it, unless

through the Holy Spirit I have had such a taste of it, in its spiritual sense, that I

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