Suspicion, as you may know, is highly contagious.

Its prevalence in our times has been caught more than taught. Sinful humans don’t need textbooks and grad courses to undermine trust and spiral into suspicion. We know the corruption at work in our own hearts, however much we try to suppress it, and we’re easily won over to suspecting the worst in others.

With just a few comments here and there, we’re quick to absorb the mood of suspicion. A suggestive question is raised. We catch the suspicious drift. Imitation is easy. Suspicion spreads quickly, especially against those perceived to be in positions of authority and privilege. That is, especially against those perceived to be “leaders” of whatever sort.

Suspicious Church

Pastors today are not the first spiritual leaders to encounter moods of suspicion. This is an old, old tale, with roots in Eden and branches in the Old and New Testaments. For one, the apostle Paul encountered acute suspicion in the church in his storied relationship with Corinth.

At one juncture, he realized his planned visit at that moment would likely result in more pain, not healing. A kind of cooling-off period would be wise, he thought, so he chose to write first, and visit later. For some in Corinth, already suspicious of Paul, this became a fresh occasion to voice criticisms, perhaps with the characteristic suggestive questions. Is he shooting us straight, or hiding his real plans from us? Is he vacillating not only in his travel but in his heart? Or is he simply making plans in his own flesh, saying “Yes” and “No” to us at the same time?

Into this chorus of suspicions (2 Corinthians 1:17), Paul writes 2 Corinthians to defend his “abundant love” for them (2 Corinthians 2:4), however critical some have become of him.

Joy in Their Joy

In this letter in particular, Paul seeks to communicate his love for them through an emphasis on joy — both his joy and theirs — that is, his joy in their joy. The reason Paul delayed his visit to Corinth, and wrote instead, he says, was “to spare you” (2 Corinthians 1:23). Lest that be misunderstood, he explains in verse 24:

Not that we lord it over your faith, but we work with you for your joy, for you stand firm in your faith.

Here we find, in one brief but penetrating statement, an enduring vision for Christian pastors and leaders. We work (that is, expend effort, not enjoy ease) and do so together (as a team, not solo) aiming at the everlasting (not short-term) joy in Christ of those to whom we minister. But also — and this can be easy to overlook — we work with them.
What, then, might be some of the implications today for pastors owning such a “with them” mentality in our calling? If we are coworkers not only with a team of pastors but also with the church for its joy, how will that shape the tenor, aims, and pressure points of our calling? Consider three effects, among others.

1. We remember our people want to be happy.

Spiritual leaders do well to regularly recall that our people want to be happy. They want to rejoice — first as humans (“All men seek happiness,” writes Blaise Pascal), and now in Christ in increasing holiness by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.

The way Paul seeks to communicate his “abundant love” to a suspicious church in 2 Corinthians is striking. Some of us call this Christian Hedonistic. The pursuit of joy drives Paul in ministry. For one, he speaks explicitly of his own pursuit of joy. He himself wants to be glad (2 Corinthians 2:2) and to rejoice (verse 3) — explicitly, consciously, even shamelessly so. The reason this is abundant love, rather than selfishness, is because Paul pursues his joy in their joy. Here we find the assumption that the Corinthians, like him, want to be happy. They long to have real joy, deep and enduring — the real joy found only in God himself, through Christ.

So we pastors also find piercing clarity into the heart of Christian ministry in acknowledging that our people want to be happy — and that in God. Our people are seeking their joy. They want to be satisfied, and they know, at least in theory, that the only true and lasting source of soul satisfaction is Jesus Christ. Yet life in the present age is fraught. We pastors ourselves struggle to find and keep real joy in Christ. And we work to help our people in their struggle to find and keep real joy.

2. We dignify our people as partners, not just recipients.

Pastors are teachers (Hebrews 13:7; Ephesians 4:11), and so we do think of our churches as recipients of our efforts to faithfully teach God’s word. However, our teaching is not the real “work of ministry.” Instead, our teaching equips the saints for the work. “[Christ] gave . . . the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:11–12). A “with them” ministry acknowledges that our people have an essential part to play in their own joy. It’s good for them to have “skin in the game.” It’s fitting to have expectations of them, and require effort from them — that we not take up the mentality of “doing it all” for them.

“Good pastors are more like husbands than fathers.”

Good pastors don’t assume their people, professing Christians in good standing, are lazy or idiots or secretly unbelievers. We don’t assume the worst of our people. Nor do we “lord it over” them, as Jesus so clearly warned (Mark 10:42), and as both Paul and Peter (1 Peter 5:3) disavowed. In this way, good pastors are more like husbands than fathers. As Jonathan Leeman observes, parents have the rod (Proverbs 22:15; 23:13), the state has the sword (Romans 13:3–4), the church has the keys (for excommunication, Matthew 16:19; 18:17; 1 Corinthians 5:4–5), but pastors, on their own, have no enforcement mechanism. What we do have is our words. So, we seek to persuade our people. We seek to win them to truth and biblical wisdom.

Added to this is the reality that Christians are “God-taught” by the Holy Spirit. As Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4:9, “You yourselves have been taught by God to love one another.” It is vital that we remember that, in the church, the Holy Spirit has gone to work on and in our people. In fulfilling the new-covenant prophecy of Jeremiah 31, he teaches them. And we, as teachers, are God’s gift, human instruments, of the Spirit for his teaching.

In our work, we are means of the Spirit doing his work. And his work is decisive. What a difference it makes when we recognize and rehearse that our work is God-appointed and yet it doesn’t all hinge on us.

3. We embrace labor that is harder, not easier.

Finally, convincing our people, rather than coercing them, takes more work and effort, not less. Forcing people is quick work. Winning them from the heart takes sweat, and patience. So we work with words. Acknowledging “their part” (as the church), we do “our part” (as pastors) to be understandable and accessible. We’re not afraid of abstract truths, and we work to make them concrete. A “with them” vision of pastoral ministry owns that we work indeed — that it is typically more work, more energy-intensive and patience-trying, to work with others, not just do it all for them.

“Christian leaders don’t want mere external conformity; they want glad consent.”

Other than Christ himself, if any human could just speak and require obedience in the church, it would be Paul as an apostle. Yet, what an appeal he makes for their joy. And he does the same in Philemon: “Though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do what is required, yet for love’s sake I prefer to appeal to you” (Philemon 8–9). Christian leaders don’t want mere external conformity; they want glad consent. “I preferred to do nothing without your consent in order that your goodness might not be by compulsion but of your own accord” (Philemon 14). We want our people to give from the heart, “not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7). We aim at willingness, not compliance. We want eager hearts, not begrudging hands.

And so we work to win them — to secure willing spirits, not just actions. And so we teach, we reason, we seek to persuade. Domineering and dictating can be quick and easy. Working to win the heart is hard work. But this is our calling, however suspicious our times.

Glad Work of God

God means for his willing servants to labor for the willingness of our people. And all this flowing from the willing God himself. The foundational gladness, the deepest willingness, the bottom of our joy is God’s own willingness.

Our pursuit of joy in him, through finding joy in our people’s, rests on the bedrock of God’s own pursuit of joy. Our God is not reluctant. He does not act by compulsion, whether in creating the world or saving his people. Rather, he is the happy, glad, rejoicing, willing and eager God who makes much of himself by putting the joy of willingness in his leaders and, through them, his people.

John Owen (1616–1683) agreed with the ancient idea that happiness is a good and worthy goal, although what he had in mind is far different from what we tend to assume about happiness. We often link happiness to entertainment or comedy, and thus to distraction from the frustrations of everyday life. The ancients, in contrast, equated happiness with virtue and being as fully human as possible. Aristotle, for example, encouraged his readers to instill good habits in their children, to give them a depth of character that would equip them for life and for contributing to the polis (their society). Owen, working within his distinctly Christian tradition, naturally envisioned happiness against a much more God-oriented background.

Like Aristotle, Owen derived his understanding of happiness from his view of the world and our place in it, but, of course, his starting point was very different from Aristotle’s. Owen knew that God himself is the source and goal of our happiness. As Owen puts it, “It was from eternity that [God] laid in his own bosom a design for our happiness” (Works of John Owen, 2:33), which is nothing less than communion with God. Communion, for Owen, constituted true, deep, and life-giving happiness.

The triune God of life and love made us to enjoy fellowship with him, to love our neighbors, and to live in harmony with the earth. Communion, as interpersonal activity, is our mode of engaging God and the world as we were designed to do. We will need to understand this construct of happiness if we are going to rightly understand why Owen, in perhaps his most recognized book, would emphasize an exercise that sounds so negative — mortification! Sin is that which disorders, disrupts, and destroys our communion, so learning to deal with this threat is a necessary component of happiness.

Mortification and Communion

Owen’s little book On the Mortification of Sin grew out of a series of sermons he preached while serving as Dean of Christ Church and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. His preface mentions that he was also working on his volume Communion with God, but because that was unfinished, he hoped this smaller contribution would satisfy readers in the meantime. I point this out because readers too often detach Owen’s writing on “putting sin to death” from the larger theme of communion with God, and that produces all kinds of problems, like reading the book as an exercise in moralism — not at all Owen’s intention!

The theme of mortification animated Owen’s pastoral heart because killing sin is a necessary tool in our pursuit of communion with God. Owen’s approach does not imply any sort of legalism or negative self-concept, although some have read him that way. On the contrary, he knew that, while God’s love for us, his people, is never contingent upon our faithfulness, our experience of communion with God can be helped or hindered by how we deal with our sins.

Ignoring or downplaying our sins tends to harden our hearts and deaden our awareness of God’s presence, activity, and comforts. We must, therefore, constantly remind ourselves that mortification matters, not to keep an abstract law, but to pursue our very life in God and with our neighbors.

Start with the Spirit

“To mortify” means “to put to death,” which is what we must do with sin. Even here, however, a careful reading of Owen shows that he begins not with a principle of death, but of life — what John Calvin and others called “vivification,” making alive. Although this particular book of Owen’s concentrates on the problem of sin, it constantly presupposes and points back to the presence and power of the Holy Spirit, who makes us alive. Only through the Spirit can “the deeds of the body” be mortified (Romans 8:13; Works, 6:5).

Consider the difference between Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and John Owen’s volume Mortification. Franklin wanted to cultivate virtue, show self-control, and live in an upright manner. He even created a list of virtues and decided to take one at a time: his plan was to concentrate on one virtue, master it, and then acquire the next. In this simplistic vision, he expected to end up truly virtuous, having conquered the weaknesses in his character. It’s no surprise that Franklin found this plan far more difficult than he originally anticipated.

Like Franklin, Owen was concerned with cultivating virtues and self-control, but the Puritan’s vision is fundamentally different: instead of merely relying on willpower, Owen looks to the presence and power of God’s Spirit. Owen doesn’t disregard human agency — as we will see, he takes our actions fully seriously — but he knows we need God’s activity in giving us eyes to see, ears to hear, wills to stir, and energy to move forward. Owen rejects false dichotomies between divine and human agency: by definition, communion is mutual, with God working and us responding. This experience of communion differs from his view of union (which God alone establishes and which doesn’t waver), but that is a discussion for a different time.

How the Spirit Works

How does the Spirit work in us? Positively, he fills our hearts with life, light, and love. Only by God’s power can Christians kill sin and grow in obedience. Without these gifts, our efforts quickly devolve into self-righteousness or legalism or mere failure. Negatively, the Spirit attacks our sin, like a fire that burns the roots of a tree and kills it utterly.

The Spirit convicts us of sin, not because he hates us, but because he loves us: he wants to free us from sin’s destructive entanglements that would enslave or suffocate us and destroy our communion with God, our neighbors, and the earth. In this way, the Spirit of creation is also active in this work of re-creation. Further, the Spirit constantly points us away from our own sin and back to Christ, thus fostering communion with our crucified and risen Lord (Works, 6:19).

When the only book people read by John Owen is his little volume on Mortification, they can easily miss this larger background. But he wrote far more on the glory of Christ and on the person and work of the Spirit than he did on sin. If we forget this, we will miss Owen’s deeper themes, which provide the basis for us to fight sin with all our strength and passion. He was not interested in promoting obsessive levels of meticulous self-criticism, but a burgeoning communion with God.

Renewed, Deeper Humanity

Owen’s teaching about the work of the Spirit and of Christ does not undermine our agency, but rather establishes it. In Owen’s words, the Spirit “works in us and with us, not against us or without us” (Works, 6:20; emphasis original). Our actions have consequences, not because they make God love us more or less, but because they either promote or hinder the liveliness of our communion with the living Lord.

Nor does being spiritual mean we stop being human — on the contrary, as Owen shows, the Spirit renews and deepens our humanity by redirecting us to its source, God himself (see his Discourses on the Holy Spirit). Thus the Spirit works in and through our wills, our affections, our minds, and even our bodies. When we respond to and participate in what God’s Spirit is doing with us, we mortify sin and deepen the quality of our humanity. Divine sovereignty and human agency are not at odds.

Our era avidly pursues shortcuts, efficiency, and instantaneous growth. That, however, is not how most of the world works. Growth happens slowly, and the formation of human character takes effort, patience, and perspective. Those who read Owen on mortification often feel exhausted by it because, this side of glory, the threat and attack of sin never stops. Thus we must never stop. He famously provides believers with an either-or admonition: “Be killing sin or it will be killing you” (Works, 6:9). There is no other option. Left alone, sin will grow like mold, and the damage quickly becomes very difficult to repair. You are no longer cleaning surfaces, but having to rip out walls — far more painful than if you had noticed and dealt with it earlier.

Or, to use an analogy from Owen, sin is like weeds growing in a garden — unattended, they will take over and choke out the beautiful flowers and fruits. A good gardener always pulls out the weeds even while cultivating the good fruit. The Spirit plants and produces fruit in our hearts, and he also gives us the power to pull out the invasive weeds attacking the garden of our hearts and lives. We are invited to participate in this work of the Spirit.

Exposed and Healed

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once made a distinction between the “psychologist” and the “Christian.” While I would never want this quote to be taken as grounds for belittling the field of psychology (we all owe a great debt to scholars in this discipline), Bonhoeffer’s comment illustrates why we need Owen’s book on mortification. He writes,

The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot comprehend this one thing: what sin is. [Secular] psychological wisdom knows what need and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the ungodliness of the human being. . . . In the presence of a psychologist I am only sick; in the presence of another Christian I can be a sinner. (Life Together, 94–95)

Owen is a trained Christian physician of the soul. When we sit on the couch in his presence, he will tell us the truth about our condition. If you are like me, you may find you are more manipulative than you realized, more arrogant than you wanted to admit, more greedy and self-absorbed than you would ever want anyone to know. But Owen exposes these sins in us, not that we might wallow in our guilt, but to show us forgiveness, to show us our liberation in Christ to a happier way of life — a life of freedom before God as we confess our sins, resist them in the power of the Spirit, and rest secure in the Father’s love.

Owen’s exposition of mortification, read carefully, will not ultimately make you sad, but profoundly and durably happy. It gives us tools for honest, energized, and relationally oriented Christian living. It fosters communion. So I recommend this book to you, dear reader, in the hope that you will learn from this Puritan master — not because the process will be easy, but because it can be healing in all the best ways.

What is Look at the Book?

You look at a Bible text on the screen. You listen to John Piper. You watch his pen “draw out” meaning. You see for yourself whether the meaning is really there. And (we pray!) all that God is for you in Christ explodes with faith, and joy, and love.