Let me ask you a blunt question: what sin are you putting to death?

I don’t mean to be rude, and I certainly don’t mean to pry. I’m not your pastor and I’m certainly not accountable for you.

But I do know that the Scriptures teach that the mark of a Spirit-filled believer is someone who is killing off sin. ‘For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live’ (Rom. 8:13).

So central is this to the Christian life that the Apostle Paul makes this a mark of living, vital Christianity. Not wrestling with sin, notice. Nor simply battling with it. But actually putting it to death. The old-timers who went before called this discipline the mortification of sin, using the words of the Romans verse found in the King James Version.

However, it’s become something of an old-fashioned idea also. It’s not language you hear in many evangelical prayers. It’s not an application you hear in many evangelical sermons or Bible studies. It’s not that we’re silent about sin. Nor is it that we don’t think sin is serious. For the most part Bible-believing Christians get these things right. But we do seem to fail to take things to their natural, biblical, conclusion and so fight sin to the

In his 1656 book The Mortification of Sin, John Owen, pastor, preacher and sometime politician, sets out a biblical pattern for making such a practice a reality in the believer’s life. Interestingly, he does so not because people are ignoring the discipline altogether, but because they are going about it the wrong way: making it into a human effort which ultimately ends in despair rather than relying on the Spirit’s power.

Owen wants to show a better way. There’s not space to outline his whole approach here, but one thing struck me afresh these past few weeks. I was reminded of it in a conference where the speaker (addressing godliness in leaders, as it happens), referred to this particular component of Owen’s approach.

Owen argues that a key element of this process must be understanding that ‘sin always aims at the utmost’. What he means by this is simple: sin, if left unchecked will always tend towards its ultimate fulfilment. ‘Every time it rises up to tempt or entice, might it have its own course, it would go out to the utmost sin in that kind.

‘Every unclean thought or glance would be adultery if it could; every covetous desire would be oppression, every thought of unbelief would be atheism, might it grow its head … it is like the grave, it is never satisfied.’

Is this too bleak a view of the human nature, do you suppose? I don’t believe so – and it is precisely perhaps because we have failed to see where our sin might ultimately lead that we neglect to make the spiritual discipline of mortification a key element of our walk with Christ through reliance on His Spirit.

Two questions thus present themselves. First, what sin are you putting to death? And second, have you – on your knees – trembled with fear at where this unchecked sin might lead if you don’t?