Mortification
Over the last several weeks as we have been tracking through the Sermon on the Mount, we have been confronted with the numerous ways in which our sin and rebellion plague us. Anger, lust, deception, revenge all finds ways to grow within our hearts and creep into our lives. So how do we go forward? How do we make progress against hearts that would betray us?
I want to mention two things. First, we need to anchor ourselves to the righteousness that is greater than the scribes and the pharisees, that is, the righteousness that Christ earned through his life, death and resurrection and which we receive by faith. Throughout our days we need to remember Christ (the Biblical term of remembering being that of an action directed toward someone, rather than a mental recall of a subject), being in awe of the love of Christ whose depth can't be plumbed or whose height cannot be scaled. We need to believe that we are watched over and cared for by our Heavenly Father.
Then secondly, being grounded in this love, we need to get to work putting to death the tendrils of sin. Or as generations past referred to it, to begin the work of mortification. John Owen asks it poignantly: "Do you mortify? Do you make it your daily work? Be always at it whilst you live; cease not a day from this work; be killing sin or it will be killing you". Mortification has strong Biblical roots. We find it in places like Romans 8:13, Galatians 5:24, and Colossians 3:5. In each of these passages, we are to give sin no ground in which to grow, no space to get up the speed necessary to derail our happiness in Christ. Mortification is not easy work, but as Owen puts it, it is necessary work: "be killing sin or it will be killing you". For the believer it is also joyful work, for in the work of mortification we truly experience the nearness of Christ.