A challenging but life-changing volume on the principles of wrestling with sin. Oh, how 21st century pop-Christianity has fallen from Owen's vision for practical discipleship. Oh that we would rediscover this timeless wisdom again. Now one of the 'books of my life'. ( )

Quotes:

(37) Even when we think that a lust is dead because it is quiet, we must labour to give it new wounds and new blows every day.

(43) Mortification is not the present duty of unregenerate men. God calls them to conversion first.

(50) To seek mortification only because a sin troubles us proceeds from self-love.

(57) ...to satisfy your conscience when your heart is convicted of sin is a desperate device of the heart that is in love with sin.

(67) But consider in your mind that the guilt of sinning against grace is more serious than if you did not have any grace at all.

(87) We need to be exercised with such meditations as will fill us at all times with self-abasement and thoughts of our own vileness.

(103) If men are wounded by sin, disturbed and perplexed, and realize that there is no remedy for them except in the mercy of God and through the blood of Christ; and if such look to Him and His covenant promises, and upon this basis quiet their hearts, believing that it will indeed be well with them, and that God will be gracious to them -- and yet they do not detest with utter hatred the sin in question -- this is to heal themselves and not to be healed by God. ( )

Owen's Mortification was the first Puritan book I ever read, through which I fell in love with an author and with a genre. Owen isn't as easy to read as, say, Jonathan Edwards, but he is supremely worth it. He speaks on the sinfulness of the heart with such power and profundity, convincing you of the profanity and wretchedness of it and making it unthinkable. This may be the most impactful humanly authored book I've ever read. ( )