Category Archives: John Owen
The Goal of Doctrine Is Worship
What is it that true theology aims at? To gain understanding and wisdom in Gospel mysteries by experience of personal knowledge of God in Christ, to gain an insight into the marvels of God’s plans and covenants through the ages, and to experience and partake of spiritual worship and obedient faith.
Accepted by God
We can begin each day with the deeply encouraging realization, I’m accepted by God, not on the basis of my personal performance, but on the basis of the infinitely perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ.
The Moral Duty of Every Believer
It was Cain, the slayer of his own brother, who denied before God Himself being his brother’s keeper, but that was a saying fit for Satan in the first instance, and for a murderer, and those of the like nature in the next…. All of those who believe that faith in Jesus Christ for salvation is an absolute law and necessity for the human race, springing from our situation as inherited from our first parents, will also believe that the spreading of the Gospel is nothing less than the moral duty of all believers.
Worship Is the Gift of God’s Grace
It is God’s wonderful kindness to the fallen race of humanity that He has willed that all of the knowledge needful for an awareness of Him, and for correct worship of Him, should be provided by Him and proceed from Himself, lest we be left to stumble on in our own blindness.
John Owen, Biblical Theology, p. 16
God Alone Defines Worship
God has, in no way and at no time, from the foundation of the world, allowed human judgment to give His worship its limits or measure.
John Owen, Biblical Theology, p. 434
Wisdom and Fear
Wisdom… consists in the active fear of God and the practice of holiness.
John Owen, Biblical Theology, p. 647
Absolutes in a World of Relativity
Without ‘absolutes’ revealed from without by God Himself, we are left rudderless in a sea of conflicting ideas about manners, justice, and right and wrong, issuing from a multitude of self-opinionated thinkers. We could never know who God is, how He is to be worshipped, or wherein true happiness lies. If virtue is sought … as a road to temporal happiness, the striving and the progress starts and ends in self — but selfishness is itself a vice! No attitude of mind which does not acknowledge dependence upon Almighty God and seek to glorify Him has any element of good or virtue in it.
John Owen, Biblical Theology, p. xl
What Is a Pastor?
A minister may fill his pews, his communion roll, the mouths of the publick, but what that minister is on his knees in secret before God almighty, that he is and no more.
Life Is Worship 