Podcast: John Owen’s Advice for Killing Your Sin (Kelly Kapic)

January 27, 2025 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

“Be Killing Sin, or It Will Be Killing You”

In this episode, Kelly Kapic discusses the works of John Owen and how his insight into the corruption of the human heart and the gospel’s power to change us from the inside out, though written hundreds of years ago, are still truly profound and helpful for us today.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:08 - Who Was John Owen, and Why Does He Know My Soul So Well?

Matt Tully
Kelly, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Kelly Kapic
Oh, I’m happy to be with you, Matt. Thanks.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about John Owen and some of the helpful insights that he can offer to us today when it comes to fighting against sin as Christians. If people have heard of John Owen, they’ve probably heard a quote that directly relates to this topic, and the quote is, “Be killing sin, or it will be killing you.” I wonder if you could just reflect a little bit back to when you first heard that quote. Do you remember when you first encountered that line and even what you thought about that?

Kelly Kapic
I probably can’t tell you exactly when I first heard it or read it, but I can tell you I’ve had a little bit of a mixed relationship with the quote. The idea of “be killing sin, or it will be killing you”—how that sounds depends on your personality and how you’re feeling any given day. If you’re really passionate, you would be like, “Yeah! Be killing sin, or it will be killing you.” But honestly, sometimes it just sounds exhausting. And so I have wrestled with Owen and said, “You mean you never get to stop?” There is a sense in which he is just right in the sense of there is no indifference to the power of sin and temptation. It’s very interesting: Owen hinted at this, but more and more New Testament scholars talk about this in Romans, where sin is not just like this thing; it’s a personal entity. It is a force, and it is coming after you. There is something about that. But Owen didn’t mean you can’t laugh, you can’t rest, you can't do any of that. But he did mean this stuff is real, and things that you think, Ah, it’s not a big deal, the next thing you know, you’re dealing with pretty significant problems.

Matt Tully
And there are just so many examples of that as we look around. Maybe we ourselves have felt this happen to us, where you look in the rear view mirror and you realize, How did I get here? How did my sin get so big, so in control of me? And it really is this neglect of the daily fighting against that sin and not giving up. But I do think, and I want to get into this in a little bit, there is this tension of the persistent fight against sin that Owen’s calling us to in that line, and then maybe on the other hand, we often talk, though, of resting in the gospel, resting in Christ’s righteousness for us, not our own. So I think I want to explore some of those dynamics that we can sometimes get tripped up in. But maybe before we get there, give us a refresher. Who was John Owen, and why was he important in the broader scope of church history?

Kelly Kapic
That’s a great question. Owen was born in 1616, the year, if I remember right, that Shakespeare died, and he died in 1683. So he actually lived during a pretty wild seventeenth century, where you have the English Civil War and you have all kinds of things going on. He’s actually important in British history, partly because he represents some of these tensions. He preached the day after the beheading of the king. He was a chaplain for Oliver Cromwell, so he was right in the mix. But then eventually, when Cromwell was no longer there and it was his son, he opposed Richard Cromwell. And there’s some debate exactly how this looked, but Owen thought Richard really wanted to take more power than he should, and Owen was against it. So Owen got kicked out and lost power. So there are all kinds of different things. He was vice chancellor of Oxford university. So he was a significant ecclesial, educational, political figure. But most people today are reading him because of his really important theological contributions and also because of how those relate to pastoral issues.

Matt Tully
If you had to boil down his theological contributions, what would be maybe one or two of the most important insights or topics that he was really focused on in his life?

Kelly Kapic
That’s a great question. That’s super hard. For me, probably the most important book he ever wrote, in my opinion, and the number one book that’s influenced my entire life is called Communion with God or Communion with the Father, with the Son, and with the Holy Spirit. It’s actually a much longer seventeenth century title, but that’s the idea.

Matt Tully
They did love their long titles.

Kelly Kapic
Oh man, yeah. They were paragraphs sometimes, which is hilarious. But that is an example. Christians are Trinitarian, but Owen really explored how Trinitarian theology relates to all of life and that we have communion with the one God, but the communion with the one God is always with the Father, with the Son, or with the Spirit. There’s no communion apart from the persons. And so he really unpacks the love of God, the grace of Christ, and the fellowship of the Spirit, which relates to what we’re talking about today in terms of sin and temptation. Because if you don’t have a robust Trinitarian theology and of the goodness and grace and activity of God, then when you start talking about sin and temptation, you really reduce it to willpower in a self-help program. And so part of what makes Owen, in my opinion—and particularly the works we’re talking about—so important is I really think Owen was doing early modern psychology. He was very good at exploring the depth of God and the depth of the human person, and then trying to bring those together. And even though his writing is very difficult to read, I think that is why maybe even in spite of how difficult he is to read, people still read him because they think, How does he know my soul so well?

Matt Tully
Wow. He was a student not just of theology, not just of the Bible, but of human nature and human tendencies. So how did you first get into reading Owen? Again, he is difficult to read. He’s this hundreds-year-old figure. What was your first introduction to reading his works?

Kelly Kapic
I read some in college I think, and I think maybe even a little before that. I was in seminary, I knew I wanted to do my PhD, and I wanted to do it in theology. I had done some German. I had done Spanish in high school, but I just cheated, so that doesn’t count at all, right? So I had done some German in college, I had done Greek and Hebrew and some Latin. But the reality is, I’m not great at languages. I’m too old to really tell, but it’s probably pretty clear I have dyslexia, even though I read a lot.

Matt Tully
Wow.

Kelly Kapic
So I tell you all that to say—and Herman Bavink; this is before this whole Bavink renaissance. There was a little of his work translated, and I thought, *Oh, I really want to do his anthropology because of things I read, but I just realistically thought I should not do my PhD in the Netherlands, working in Dutch primary sources. And I started working under a guy named Roger Nicole, who was an expert in the Puritans, in the 90s, and he really turned me on to Owen. And what I found in Owen was someone who really talked about the affections in ways I found very appealing. Working in the Reformed tradition, I thought that if I talked about the affections, ain’t nobody gonna care. But if I say Owen says this, then people have to listen. So that is what took me there. And even better than I knew, his anthropology—his view of what it means to be human—was incredibly rich for me to spend years studying.

Matt Tully
And he’s writing in English, presumably?

Kelly Kapic
Yeah. He also wrote some in Latin. Most of it’s in English, but Packer memorably said his English is like Latin—the way his sentences are structured and when you’re waiting for the verb to show up and all this kind of stuff. But yes, primarily, he’s writing in English. Although, in this Crossway series, there are some translated works or works that weren’t translated very well, that are going to be in English that have not been.

08:41 - Put Sin to Death, and Be Made Alive by the Spirit

Matt Tully
Retranslated from the original Latin. So maybe now let’s speak a little bit to this specific work that we’re going to talk about today: The Mortification of Sin. This is just one of his works that relates to sin and temptation that you guys have collected in this new volume in Crossway’s massive John Owen series. I think it’s going to be forty volumes when it’s done. Is that right?

Kelly Kapic
Yeah. Just forty small, 700-page volumes or whatever it is.

Matt Tully
He was just truly a prolific author. It was just amazing what he was able to accomplish even just on the writing side, let alone all the other things he was involved with. But give us a little bit more of the backstory of The Mortification of Sin.

Kelly Kapic
The brief version for Owen himself is that when he was at Oxford, this book, which is relatively brief, on mortification was originally given as homilies to college students or even younger in that day.

Matt Tully
So just little talks.

Kelly Kapic
Little talks that ended up turning into this. And I think that’s partly why they’re more concrete than abstract. And I think that’s part of their continuing abiding appeal. Just to give us a text to base this in, in Colossians 3:9–10, this is what it says: “Do not lie to one another, seeing you have put off the old self.” Before I read more, that’s what they mean by mortification: to put off the old self. “Seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and put on the new self”—that’s what they call vivification, and I’ll mention that in a minute—“which is being renewed in the knowledge after the image of its creator.” So I mention that to say, and the tradition actually goes into the early church and Calvin talked a lot about this, but the idea that Owen is working with here is the idea of mortification, and it is to mortify, to put to death, or that Pauline text that says to “put off the old self,” “to die to sin”—those kinds of things. And so what Owen is trying to do in this work is look for ways that sin is alive in us or attacking us or seducing us and to try and attack it, and that is about putting it to death. But the reason I read that text from Paul is there are two sides, and Calvin and Owen both understood this. Ultimately, the Christian life is not just about putting sin to death, but being made alive in the power of the Spirit. And I guess I want to mention that here because it’s very easy for us to end up, especially in some of our circles, only talking about dealing with the problem of sin. And that is a truncated view. Can I give you an example? Because it sounds a little abstract. So take, for example, someone that’s really struggling with slander or lust. I work with college students. You take something like lust, and you often have these examples where maybe someone is in a small group. It’s a guy, and he says, “Man, there’s someone in my office that I find myself occasionally having inappropriate thoughts about.” Well, those need to be mortified. Those need to be put to death. But the problem is that in a lot of our Christian circles, that becomes the whole thing. And this is where bad pastoral advice comes in, where it becomes like, “Well, what you need to do is if she eats at 12:00, you need to eat at 11:30. And when she walks on one side of the office, you need to walk on the other.” And sometimes there’s something to those things, but the problem is that if you pay attention, the goal then becomes to pretend she doesn’t exist. Now, it is true that if you can move from having inappropriate thoughts to just no thoughts, that’s better than inappropriate thoughts. But that’s actually not the Christian vision. The Christian vision is to put to death the inappropriate thoughts—mortification—but also in the power to be made alive. So the Christian vision in that kind of circumstance is not just that you stop having inappropriate thoughts, but that you start affirming and seeing the dignity of this other human being, and you seek her good. You become her advocate in wholly appropriate ways. It’s like slander. Is it better that you stop saying bad things about someone and just say nothing than slandering? Yes. But the goal of sanctification is to put the slander to death and be made alive in the Spirit to actually bring contributions of affirmation, love, seeking the person’s good. And so I do want to mention that other side because it just doesn’t get mentioned enough. We want to put sin to death, but we are Spirit-led, resurrection people, and our goal is shalom. Our goal is actually life, not just denying. Does that make sense?

Matt Tully
Yeah, totally. And I think that’s one of the assumptions someone could have, and even just seeing the title of that book, The Mortification of Sin, it can sound like Owen’s real only focus is going to be on, “Don’t do this. Stop doing this bad thing.”

Kelly Kapic
And in that book, a lot of that is his focus. So part of what I’m trying to do is give a larger context to what Owen is saying. Because if you don’t have the larger context, it really can just become that.

Matt Tully
And it does seem like that is just a perennial challenge for us as Christians. We can read verses and passages in the Bible that talk about fleeing temptation and then think that’s all there is to this fight against sin. And that’s certainly part of it. But as you’re saying, and as Owen would say, there’s a lot more towards pursuing greater joy, greater fulfillment in God and finding that to be the motivation.

Kelly Kapic
And part of what Owen talks about, especially elsewhere in several of his just beautiful works on Christ and the glory of Christ, is, and you find this even in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, repentance is turning away from your sin, but it’s not merely that. It’s turning from your sin and basically beholding the goodness and the beauty of Christ. And so we want that full turn. That’s how you start to really appreciate the goodness of grace. You’re not doing it to achieve grace, but when you’re looking at your sin and you’re engaging in your sin, you’re actually not understanding the depth and the beauty and the freedom of your grace. And by turning from your sin Christ, you can start to live a graceful life.

14:48 - Examine the Symptoms of Sin

Matt Tully
You write in the introduction to this book, “Although Owen does not use current labels, he’s dealing with very contemporary issues such as depression, addiction, apathy, and lust.” Can you share some of the more concrete insights or advice that he might offer on some of those very modern-sounding issues that we all feel like we struggle with at different points?

Kelly Kapic
I just mentioned an example of lust. I jotted down a top ten, if you want to hear.

Matt Tully
Yeah, that would be great.

Kelly Kapic
It’s a top ten reflections on Owen, because in some ways, this is an abbreviated version of what he does in the work. Let’s at least explore some of these. Maybe this will help people. When Owen’s talking about mortification and giving advice, one of the very first things is that he says, “Examine the symptoms of sin.” And the reason he’s saying that is you need to know what the actual problem is so you can address it. A lot of people today can experience the problem of going to the doctor, and before they get out four sentences, the doctor’s already writing a prescription. They see a rash on your arm and they’re like, “Okay, I’ve got a solution,” and you want to tell them there are other things going on in your body that matter, but they don’t want to listen. And that’s part of what Owen is saying. You have to be very careful that you don’t just immediately deal with a surface issue when there’s something deeper. In fact, I’ll give you an example here, since you asked about lust. Pornography is a massive, massive challenge in our day. Again, I work in an undergraduate institution, so you can imagine some of the complexities here. But it is interesting that I’ve now learned occasionally, when I’m working with a student, I remember one time asking questions—and this is a real challenge, and I’m not trying to make light of it at all—but as I asked more questions, I ended up saying—and you guys, I guess, don’t know me, but I promise I’m pretty loving—but I actually ended up saying, “I think you’re slothful.” And what was interesting is if I’m like, “Man, you are struggling with lust, you’re struggling with pornography,” it’s like, “Oh yeah. Totally.” But when I call someone slothful or lazy, now they’re ticked at me.

Matt Tully
That hits home in a different way.

Kelly Kapic
Well, and it’s very interesting, and here’s the reason why I say that. Yes, obviously the last thing is a problem, but it became, in this case, and I’m not saying this is true in every case, part of it is you know what’s really hard? Feeling overwhelmed by all the work you have to do, and trying to make little bits of progress, it’s much easier to go into a dark place and to escape. You know what’s really hard? The courage to ask someone on a date. What’s much easier is this other thing. And so I’m not trying to belittle it. I’m not trying to say these are not addictive things, and we’ve got to be aware of physiological realities. I’m aware of all of that, but it’s interesting that sometimes saying, “Hey, there might be something even deeper. And if we’re just worrying about your internet filters, we’re not going to get to this. But by starting to address and understand the deeper issues beyond these symptoms, then we can start to address it.” So that’s one example. Maybe I shouldn’t do a top ten because we’d be here all day. Examining the symptoms of sin is an example and start to dig and make sure you’re dealing with the root of the problem, because for all of us, it may be different. And we just have to be careful that we’re not like the physician who doesn’t listen but immediately starts to try and put a balm on something that may require physical activity or something. Spiritually, the answer may be that you don’t need to memorize another Bible verse; you need to get more sleep every night.

Matt Tully
I was going to say that feels like there are even insights from the broader secular psychology and counseling world that would align with that. And that’s one of the things you highlight in the book is that Owen had a very robust whole-person theology where he understood that body, soul, and spirit were all involved in our lives as Christians, our pursuit of holiness, and our stumbling in sin. And so we have to think holistically when it comes to some of these things.

Kelly Kapic
Yeah. Just in terms of his holistic view, which he really tries to take the mind, the will, the affections, and even our physical bodies seriously. And I think that holistic view is very important, because different traditions pick one of those and highlight it. The Reformed tradition tends to be more like, “Let’s focus on the mind and the transforming of the mind.” Even how we read Paul on that tends to be purely rational. In other traditions, it’s all about the affections and let’s stir the emotions and move some of that. With others, it’s the will and engaging the will. And everybody has Bible verses to support them. So the reality is that part of what Owen at his best is doing is, “Hey, we need to engage the whole person, and this is a good thing.” And so we need to stir the mind, provoke the affections, renew the will, and all of this in and through the power of Spirit. Experience matters for Owen because pneumatology, or the work of the Spirit, matters, if that makes sense.

19:53 - Resisting Despair

Matt Tully
Maybe one other quick question about maybe insights he might have. Speak a little bit to what counsel or advice he might give related to depression and anxiety. These are two modern topics that are just obviously so prevalent and seem to be on the rise in our culture today. What might he say in response to learning about that if he were here today?

Kelly Kapic
Well, it seems, from what we can tell, that this was an issue for Owen himself. Even from his conversion story, it seems that he was struggling with depression. But then when he was even older, he had eleven children, and ten of them died quite young. His first wife died with those kids. The eleventh daughter had a marriage that didn’t work. She ended up moving in with him and then dying of consumption. Sometimes we think only this age is an age filled with anxiety. He’s dealing with the civil war and some of those things. So part of what Owen, at his best when he’s dealing with these things, does is he’s comfortable being honest about how hard things are, but he really wants to draw your focus to the beauty of Christ. And I think partly it’s because there is a lot of devastation in this world. And the way to get out of depression is not to convince yourself that your circumstances are better, because maybe they just suck. Maybe, honestly, they’re not good. You still find this a lot in Christian circles, especially evangelical circles, where it’s kind of like cheap, plastic Christianity—“Upwards and onwards! Everything’s good! Praise God all the time!” Everything may not be good. So the reason you don’t have to be stuck in despair is not because your circumstances are changing; it’s because you have a very kind God. And so for Owen, it is focusing on the glory of Christ and his solidarity with us in our suffering, taking on the depths of temptation but never giving in, and rising. So the death, the resurrection, and for Owen, the ongoing heavenly intercession of Christ, these are what give us hope and help us resist despair.

21:57 - The Holy Spirit’s Role in Fighting Sin

Matt Tully
One other important thing to note that came out as I was reading your work here and, obviously, interacting with the broader series as a whole is the important role of the Holy Spirit in Owen’s theology. How would you summarize his view of the Holy Spirit’s role as we pursue holiness and fight against our own indwelling sin?

Kelly Kapic
It’s fascinating. There was a scholar who once argued, and these are overgeneralizations, but maybe there’s something to them that helps people, but he argued you can learn a lot about a particular theologian and a tradition by which person of the Trinity they focus most on. And this scholar argued: Augustine, something about the Father; Luther, it’s really about the Son crucified; and for the Puritans, he said it’s the Holy Spirit. And the idea was just that the Puritans were so interested in God’s present, ongoing work in believers' lives. And so in that way, they really took human experience seriously—sometimes too seriously. That’s where the challenge became where all of a sudden you can become overly introspective, and all of a sudden issues like the assurance of salvation became more of an issue sometimes, even though they had the theology to make it less of an issue. So with an increased awareness of the Spirit, you’re not just affirming something about the past, but you’re affirming that God is present in us working. So that’s pretty exciting and pretty hopeful and raises all kinds of interesting questions. And part of Owen’s works, and these are also published in that Crossway series (some have and more will be), is Owen is responding to extremes here. On the one hand, he’s worried about the rationalist of his day, who basically denied the Spirit is a person of the Trinity. And so they undermine it and they say, “No, no, no. The Spirit is like the breath of God. It’s the wind of God. It’s an attribute of God. The Spirit is not a person.” And Owen’s going to reject that. On the other hand, Owen rejects what, in his day, were called the enthusiasts, who talked about the Spirit in such a way that all of a sudden Scripture seemed undermined. Sometimes, at least in Owen’s estimation, they talked about the Spirit in a way that undermined the significance and centrality of Jesus. So rather than becoming rationalist and denying the Spirit, or becoming what he would call an enthusiast who reduces everything pertaining to the Spirit in a way that undermines the Father and the Son, we want to emphasize the Spirit who’s present and working, always drawing us to the Son that we might rest in the love of the Father. So it’s always Trinitarian. But I think Owen has a lot to say, especially to those of us in the Reformed tradition that, for various reasons, have been very nervous about the Spirit. And we shouldn’t be. And it shouldn’t just be like, “The Spirit back then did something in the authors of Scripture” or “The Spirit saved us, but then basically is not involved anymore.” We’ve got to have a more comfortable relationship with the ongoing work of the Spirit in our lives.

24:55 - Advice on Reading Owen

Matt Tully
And that’s something, going back to what you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, just the robustly present Trinitarian role that he has in the way he views God in our lives today as Christians is so fresh, so refreshing, so relevant even for us today, as we do tend to pick and choose the person that we’re most focused on. Maybe a couple final questions. Speak to the person right now who would say, “I would love to try reading this book. I’ve heard that Owen’s a little tricky to read, but you’re saying that this Mortification of Sin was written for young people originally and is not that long.” What would be some advice you’d offer about a reading plan or a schedule or an approach that might be a helpful way for the person who’s new to Owen to actually get started?

Kelly Kapic
With the volume we’re talking about, if they buy it, don’t be intimidated that it’s big, but within it there are four different books, and I would just try the first one on mortification of sin. And what I would do, and a lot of people have found this quite helpful, is to read it in little bits. And I mean like try three pages a day, or the days that you read. And then if you’re in a small group, talk about what you read. But part of the reason to read, especially this work on mortification of sin, slowly is it is like meeting with a counselor. And you can’t read fifty pages and let it sink into you and do some of the honest reflection, and just even reflecting on God, in that way. So the goal here is not quantity. This is good for your soul, so be patient with yourself. Just read three or four pages or two to three pages. And if you lose the idea that you need to read a lot, I do think you’ll find it’s amazing. I’ve done a PhD on Owen and I’ve written a lot. When I read some of his work, I’ll read like two pages and I just have to walk around afterwards. I’m like, “Wow. Is that true what he’s saying? How does that relate to me? How does that influence how I’m seeing some of these other situations?” Maybe it’s not even my own sin on something, but it’s helped me see another dynamic. So it’s really good, but stop trying to treat it like you can pound through it like a novel.

Matt Tully
Yeah, absolutely. I was reading, I think it was in the introduction to one of these books, and you shared the story of a time when maybe you were working on your PhD at the time, and you were talking with your wife about what John Owen said yesterday. You were referring to him as if he was still alive and chatting with you over coffee. Are you still engaging with him on a regular basis? Do you still find that there’s a spiritual benefit for you to be reading him regularly?

Kelly Kapic
Owen remains a significant voice in my life. I’m doing a lot of other things. But even right now, another Crossway book that myself and another younger Owen scholar, Ty Kieser, are doing for Crossway is called Owen Among the Theologians. And so in each chapter, it’s Owen and Augustine on a particular topic, or Owen and Didymus the Blind, an early church father. So that’s really fun because Owen has really fresh, interesting things to say. It doesn’t mean we always agree, but it’s just interesting. And there’s so much relevance for church history, but also for our lives. So yeah, he remains one of the key voices in my life, for sure.

Matt Tully
Kelly, thanks so much for introducing us to this incredible little book and this incredible theologian who is, as you said, so relevant for us today, even living in the twenty-first century. We appreciate it.

Kelly Kapic
You got it. Thanks for having me.

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