Mortification - by J. I. Packer

Can you believe July will be over in 2 weeks? Wow.
Oh, back to the post...
My mom recently showed me a post on John Piper's blog. It has really blessed me and so I wanted to share it with you. Please tell me what you think.

Oh, and if your internet is as slow as mine you'll be glad I wrote out all that he said, if not you'll enjoy the video.

J. I. Packer: "Personal prayer begins before the Throne of God with my acknowledgement that He is great, glorious, all-powerful, and ready to help me and I am weak, unstable, with no strength of my own to get things right in spiritual terms. And thus I need His help and need it urgently at all points of obedience but certainly at the point in which I am called to mortify sin.

Sin, I understand in that phrase, is sin in the sense of ungodly and anti-God inclinations in the heart. They are positive inclinations to act in disobedience and they are also negative, that is, they are inclinations not to bother about moral and spiritual issues. That kind of inclination used to be called 'sloth', spiritual laziness. And as far as I'm concerned sloth is still the best word for it. But if I want to mortify sin what I must do is first of all ask God to enable me to see the it sin as He sees, that is as spiritual equivalent as dirt in places where cleanliness ought to be, as something very ugly as well as something very guilty. In prayer also I ask, yes I must ask the Lord to direct the Holy Spirit within me, to drain the life out of sin and in prayer I must seek it seems to me both to see and to fellowship with the Lord Jesus whose disciple I am, whose servant I am and Who most certainly echos the Father's directive that I mortify sin. By the way that directive is expressed by two Greek words. One of them comes in Romans 8:13, I think, and it means put to death. and the other comes in Colossians 3:4, if I remember rightly, it's a different word but it also means put to death, and put to death is the basic idea.

If the Father and the Son in mercy show me Their love to me and draw out of me grateful love to Them, if at the same time the Spirit makes me aware that my sinful habits are what they are and that each single one of them is anathema to God. God wants to see the last of it. And through the power of the Holy Spirit He can actually bring that to pass. Well then I pray, continue to pray, I cherish grateful love to the Father and the Son in my heart, I thank the Lord Jesus for the new life that I already have in Him, risen as indeed I am in Christ, in dwelt by the Holy Spirit, called to holiness and promised all the enabling I need to achieve holiness. I expect to find as I pray along theses lines day by day and - well it depends on the sin that is bothering me at the moment, it may be hour by hour. But as I pray regularly along these lines so I look to find and by the grace of God -again and again I do find- that the sinful desire that was grabbing my heart is getting weaker, and love and loyalty to the Lord and a spirit of praise, adoration and thanksgiving is getting stronger and stronger. And I experience at that point what Thomas Chalmers called "the expulsive power of a new affection".

Love to the Father and the Son simply drains the life out of love for sin and for the particular happiness in which sin expresses itself. I never get to the end of mortifying sin because sin in my heart is still marauding, even though it is not dominant. Sin is constantly expressing itself in new disorderly desires, as bindweed is constantly expressing itself in fresh shoots and fresh blooms. Once bindweed has established itself in your garden or hedge it is very difficult to get out because it is always extending itself under the surface of the soil. And sin in the heart is rather like that. But as blooms of sin break surface and I recognize them, I am called to — indeed deep down in my heart I want to — go into action with this prayer procedure for draining the life out of them. And I think this is a discipline every Christian has to wake up to right at the beginning of the Christian life and continue with as long as we are in this world.

So I picked up what I know about mortification very soon after my conversion which was more than 65 years ago. And mortification is still necessary. There are sinful desires associated with old age, same as there are sinful desires associated with youth. I'm older now but sinful desires, like the bloom of the bindweed, do from time to time grow up. And from time to time I have to go back to the beginning and labour in the practice of mortification as described."

Have you ever heard of J.I. Packer? What did you think of all he said?

Have a great week, all.