Owen himself battled for assurance of salvation throughout various seasons of his life. It was on account of this that he wrote his magnificent discourse on Psalm 130. Toward the end of that work, Owen wrote:
“Notwithstanding all your sins, all the evil that your own hearts know you to be guilty of, and that hidden mass or evil treasure of sin which is in you, which you are not able to look into; notwithstanding that charge that lies upon you from your own consciences, and that dreadful sentence and curse of the law which you are obnoxious unto; notwithstanding all the just grounds that you have to apprehend that God is your enemy, and will be so unto eternity; yet there are terms of peace and reconciliation provided and proposed between Him and your souls… There is a way whereby sinners may come to be accepted with God; for ‘there is forgiveness with Him, that He may be feared.’”1
When our hearts are weighed down with a sense of the guilt of our sin, we must necessarily turn the eyes of our hearts to Christ crucified. Owen illustratively painted the grounds of forgiveness when he wrote, “Pardon flows from the heart of the Father through the blood of the Son.” The Apostle John emphasized this truth when he wrote, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness… If anyone sins we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous–and he himself is the propitiation for our sin” (1 John 1:8-2:1). Believers must be confident in the fact that “there is a fountain opened…to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness” (Zech. 13:1). David was confident in the promise of God to forgive and cleanse through the blood of Christ, when he cried out, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow” (Ps. 51:7). Jesus holds forth the cup in the Supper to assure the hearts of his people that his blood “was shed for the remission of sin.”
The more we are convinced of the truth that the Father has already provided legal forgiveness through the shedding of the blood of the Son, the more readily we will go to him for the paternal forgiveness of our particular sins. The Apostle Peter explained that when growth in grace and holiness is lacking it someone’s life it is because he has “forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins” (2 Peter 1:9). When we return to God in brokenness and in confidence that He has already provided forgiveness in the blood of Christ, we will make it our renewed aim to be well-pleasing to Him. And, we will repeat this processes again and again, all the days of our life, until we are “saved to sin no more.”
1. John Owen, The works of John Owen. (W. H. Goold, Ed.) (Vol. 6, p. 516). Edinburgh: T&T Clark.
This article originally appeared here.
