Theological Term of the Week: Mortification

mortification
The believer’s lifelong fight to put to death self and sin by the power of the Spirit. 

• From scripture:

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. (Colossians 3:3-10 ESV)

• From The Second Helvetic Confession: 

Chapter XIV 

Of Repentance and the Conversion of Man

… We also disapprove of those who think that by their own satisfactions they make amends for sins committed. For we teach that Christ alone by his death or passion is the satisfaction, propitiation or expiation of all sins (Isa., ch.53; I Cor. 1:30). Yet as we have already said, we do not cease to urge the mortification of the flesh. We add, however, that this mortification is not to be proudly obtruded upon God as a satisfaction for sins, but is to be performed humble, in keeping with the nature of the children of God, as a new obedience out of gratitude for the deliverance and full satisfaction obtained by the death and satisfaction of the Son of God.

• From 18 Words by J. I. Packer:

This is our aim; so to drain the life out of sin that it never moves again. We are not promised that we shall reach our goal in this life, but we are commanded to advance towards it by assaulting those inclinations and habits in which sin’s presence is recognized. We are not merely to resist its attacks. We are to take the initiative against it. We must seek, in Owen’s phrase, ‘not a mere disappointment of sin, that it be not brought forth … but a victory over it, and pursuit of it to a complete conquest’; not merely the counteraction, but the eradication of it. Killing, so far as we can compass that, is the end in view.

• From A Discourse of Mortification by Stephen Charnock:

Let us labour to mortify sin. If we will not be the death of sin, sin will be the death of our souls. Though the allurements of sin may be pleasant, the propositions seemingly fair, yet the end of all is death, Rom. v. 21. Death was threatened by God and executed upon Adam; death must be executed upon our sins, in order to the restoration of the eternal life of our souls. Love to everlasting life should provoke us, fear of everlasting death should excite us to this, the two most solemn and fundamental passions that put us upon action. ‘Why will you die?’ was God’s expostulation, Ezek. xxxiii. 11; Why should thou, O my soul, for a short vanishing pleasure, venture an eternal death? should be our expostulation with ourselves. This would be a curing our disease, bringing our soul into that order in part which was broken by the fall; by this the power of that tyrant that first headed and maintained the faction against God would be removed, and the soul recover that liberty and life it lost by disobeying of God. This would conduce to our peace. We have then a sprouting assurance when we are most victorious over our lusts: after every victory, God gives us a taste of the hidden manna, Rev. ii. 17. Unmortified lusts do only raise storms and tempests in the soul; less pains are required to the mortification of them than to the satisfaction of them. Sin is a hard taskmaster; there must be a pleasure in destroying so cruel an inmate. Gratitude engages us; God’s holiness and justice bruised Christ for us, and shall not we kill sin for him? An infinite love parted with a dear Son, and shall not our shallow finite love part with destroying lusts? We cannot love our sins so much as God loved his Son: he loved him infinitely. If God parted with him for us, shall not we part with our sins for him? He would have us kill it because it hurts us; the very command discovers affection as well as sovereignty, and minds us of it as our privilege as well as our duty. And to engage us to it, he hath sent as great a person to help us as to redeem us, viz, his Spirit; he sent one to merit it, and the other to assist us in it and work it in us, who is to bring back the creature to God by conquering that in it which hath so long detained it captive.

Learn more:

1. Erik Raymond: A Primer on Mortification of Sin
2. Derek Thomas: Putting Sin to Death
3. Sinclair Ferguson: How to Mortify Sin
4. Dane Ortland: You Need to Put Your Sin to Death
5. Kelly M. Kapic: The Mortification of Sin
6. Barry York: Mortification and Vivification
7. John Owen: The Mortification of Sin in Believers

Related terms:

• glorification
• regeneration
• repentance
• sanctification

 Filed under Salvation and Reformed Theology

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By Faith Abraham and Sarah

Abraham Journeying into the Land of Canaan by Gustave Doré

When I was five, my family moved from Idaho to Illinois in the dead of winter. We towed all our belongings behind us in a small utility trailer as we climbed over snowy mountain passes on the way to the home my parents arranged for us. It was a fun adventure for me, but I know it was harder for my parents, who left family and a steady income so my father could finish his schooling. Later, when I was a young mother, my husband and I packed up the back of an old pickup truck, strapped the baby in a car seat between us, and headed from Minnesota to Whitehorse, up the Alaska highway to a new job and new apartment. These were both big moves, but at least we knew where we were going and we had a place to live when we got there.

When God told Abraham, the fourth person listed in the Hebrews hall of faith, to leave his relatives and his home in Harran and set out for a place God would show him, Abraham didn’t know his destination (Hebrew 11:8). The Lord promised to bless him and make him into a great nation, and commanded him to go, so Abraham packed up his wife Sarah, his nephew Lot, his herdsmen and servants, and off they went in obedience to the Lord (Genesis 12:1-5). 

Their move from Haran was much riskier and more difficult than any of the moves I’ve experienced. Not only did they not know where they were headed, but Abraham lived in a patriarchal society, and people relied on their extended family for everything. All their social ties were within a kindred group, which had its own distinct culture, traditions, and religion. What’s more, large extended families defended each other from the pirate kings who roamed around the land, plundering and enslaving those weaker than they were. (Remember when Abraham rescued Lot from a ransacking alliance of kings in Genesis 14?  As Lot’s relative, he was fulfilling his duty to protect him.) So when Abraham and his family left Harran, they left everything familiar and headed into a dangerous unknown without the safety and security their relatives had provided for them. 

The author of Hebrew calls Abraham’s obedience to God’s command an act of faith. Abraham believed God had something better for him, so he left everything he knew and all his earthly protection because God commanded him to go (Hebrews 11:8-10). He took God at his word, so he obeyed him.

And it was by faith that Abraham’s wife Sarah eventually gave birth to a son (Hebrews 11:11). Sarah had been barren her whole life, and she was already sixty-five years old when God promised to give offspring to Abraham (Genesis 15:5). Biologically speaking, what God promised was impossible from the start, and then twenty-five years passed before God fulfilled this promise.  As each year went by, the promise must have seemed more and more impossible to believe. 

But God had promised the couple a son, and according to the author of Hebrews, Sarah trusted him to fulfill his promise. When Sarah was 90 years old and Abraham was 100, God kept word, and Sarah had her son Isaac. Eventually, through the almighty power of the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not” (Romans 4:17), descendants “as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore” came from one “as good as dead” husband and his old barren wife (Hebrews 11:12). 

The Old Testament accounts of the lives of Able, Enoch, and Noah, the first three people in the Hebrews hall of faith, give us little reason to doubt the quality of their faith. But we know more about the lives of Abraham and Sarah, and we can see from their actions that they sometimes forgot or doubted God’s promise to bless them. Where was Abraham’s trust in God’s promises when he twice endangered Sarah in a foolish scheme to keep himself safe by telling everyone she was just his sister (Genesis 12:10-20; Genesis 20:1-18)?  God intervened both times to save Sarah and Abraham from harm despite Abraham’s weak faith. God was faithful when Abraham wasn’t.

And at one point, rather than trusting God to give her a family, Sarah blamed him for her lack children, and came up with her own twisted plan to build herself a family with Abraham—a plan that only brought her sorrow (Genesis 16). Later, when the Lord told Abraham that Sarah would indeed have a son in about a year, she scoffed at the idea. She laughed, and then lied to the Lord about laughing (Genesis 18:10-15). Despite the Lord’s sure promise, she struggled over the years to believe she could ever become pregnant.

Yet here they are, both Abraham and Sarah, listed as examples of faith in Hebrews. They remind us that a life of true faith may contain periods of strong faith and also periods of doubt, and that the Lord remains faithful throughout. He rescued them when Abraham’s lack of faith got them into trouble, and when Sarah’s doubt caused her to lose hope, he reassured them by reminding them that nothing is too hard for him (Genesis 18:14). In the end, even scoffing Sarah “considered him faithful who had made the promise” (Hebrews 11:11). By her imperfect faith she received her son Isaac, because the power of faith is not in its strength or perfection, but in its object—our faithful God who can do the impossible.  

Despite their doubts, Abraham and Sarah ultimately trusted God to do what he said he would do, so they were included in the hall of faith to encourage the original audience of the letter to the Hebrews. Their faith was imperfect, too. Some of them were struggling to keep on believing as life got harder. The stories of Abraham and Sarah reminded them that the fulfillment of God’s promises is certain, but it may come only after a long wait—or even, as we shall see later in Hebrews 11, not in this life at all. The Christian life required patience. Eventually, even if their trust sometimes wavered, they would receive all God’s promised blessings through the perfect saving work of Jesus. 

And the stories of Abraham and Sarah should encourage us, too. All God’s promises are “yes” in Jesus, and by faith in him, we will eventually inherit all the eternal blessings of salvation. Not because our faith is strong, but because it looks to Jesus, who is faithful and mighty to save. 

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Previous posts in this series:

• By Faith the Ancients
• By Faith Abel
• By Faith Enoch
• By Faith Noah

Sunday Hymn: Jesus, I My Cross Have Taken

Jesus, I my cross have taken,
All to leave, and follow thee;
Destitute, despised, forsaken,
Thou from hence my all shalt be:
Perish ev’ry fond ambition,
All I’ve sought, or hoped, or known;
Yet how rich is my condition,
God and heav’n are still my own.

Man may trouble and distress me,
‘Twill but drive me to thy breast;
Life with trials hard may press me,
Heav’n will bring me sweeter rest:
O ‘tis not in grief to harm me
While thy love is left to me;
O ‘twere not in joy to charm me,
Were that joy unmixed with thee.

Take, my soul, thy full salvation,
Rise o’er sin and fear and care;
Joy to find in ev’ry station
Something still to do or bear;
Think what spirit dwells within thee,
What a Father’s smile is thine,
What a Saviour died to win thee:
Child of heav’n, shouldst thou repine?

Haste then on from grace to glory,
Armed by faith, and winged by prayer;
Heav’n’s eternal day’s before thee,
God’s own hand shall guide thee there.
Soon shall close thy earthly mission;
Swift shall pass thy pilgrim days;
Hope soon change to glad fruition,
Faith to sight, and prayer to praise.

—Henry F. Lyte