The Sin of Trying to Sanctify Yourself — John Owen on Communion
⏱ 12 min read
You have been trying to be a better Christian for a long time now. You have been reading the right books and praying the right prayers and confessing the right sins, and every few months you sit down with the journal and write the new resolutions in a slightly different hand. The list is the same list. More disciplined. More prayerful. More patient. Less reactive. Less anxious. Less of the small ugly self that keeps showing up in the same places. The resolutions hold for a week, sometimes two, and then the old self walks back in through the unlocked side door and sits down at the table as if it had never left.
The question underneath that quiet exhaustion is the one you are not sure you are allowed to ask aloud — can I sanctify myself? If the answer is yes, you are doing something wrong, because the years of trying have not produced what the trying was supposed to produce. If the answer is no, then what exactly have you been doing with the resolutions, the discipline, the careful self-management, the slow tightening of every spiritual screw you can find?
This is a slow reading of John Owen on that question. Not the doctrinal summary version; the contemplative one. Owen, the seventeenth-century Puritan who wrote a treatise called Of Communion with God that runs to several hundred pages because he could not stop unfolding the same simple thing, has a quiet answer to the question of self-sanctification. The answer is that you have been trying to do — by effort, by will, by careful resolution — the one thing the soul is changed only by being near. If you want the practical home for the slow practice this essay walks, the Bible Study Workbook for Women is the 140-day form, built so the near-sitting has a page-shape rather than asking you to invent one each evening.
The error Owen names is not the wanting to be holy. The wanting is good. The error is in the engine — the assumption that holiness is generated by the trier rather than received by the one who beholds. Half of Christian formation has been quietly broken by that assumption. This essay is the unbreaking.
The error you have been making for a long time without naming it
The self-sanctification posture looks, from the outside, like virtue. You are taking your faith seriously. You are doing the work. You are not lazy about your formation; you are not letting yourself off the hook. The friends who know you would call you disciplined, perhaps even severe with yourself.
Inside, though, the posture has a quiet noise to it. The noise is the running audit. Am I doing better than last month? Is the anger less? Is the prayer life more consistent? Have I read the chapters? Have I confessed the same sin enough times for it to count this time? The audit runs in the back of every quiet moment. It is the reason the silence in your prayer chair is not actually silent.
The audit is the giveaway. Sanctification by effort produces an auditor, because effort needs to be measured to know if it is working. Sanctification by communion does not produce an auditor, because the soul that has been near the Father is not asking itself how it is doing. It is simply near.
Owen sees this exactly. The treatise Of Communion with God is not a manual for how to try harder. It is a slow argument that the saints, for most of Christian history, have misunderstood what kind of God they are with — and that the misunderstanding is what keeps them at arm’s length and exhausted. Here is the line that turns the whole treatise:
“They that know thee will put their trust in thee.” Men cannot abide with God in spiritual meditations. He loseth soul’s company by their want of this insight into his love. They fix their thoughts only on his terrible majesty, severity, and greatness; and so their spirits are not endeared. Would a soul continually eye his everlasting tenderness and compassion, his thoughts of kindness that have been from of old, his present gracious acceptance, it could not bear an hour’s absence from him; whereas now, perhaps, it cannot watch with him one hour. Let, then, this be the saints’ first notion of the Father, — as one full of eternal, free love towards them.
— John Owen, Communion with God
He loseth soul’s company by their want of this insight into his love. Read that sentence twice. The reason your soul has not been keeping company with God — the reason the chair time has felt like a duty rather than a rest, the reason the years of trying have produced an auditor instead of a saint — is not laziness, or insufficient discipline, or some moral defect you have not yet diagnosed. It is that your notion of the Father has been mostly the severe one. The majesty. The judgment. The standards you are not meeting. The slight disappointment you assume is the divine default expression when you walk into the room.
The soul cannot keep company with a Father it imagines is mostly disappointed in it. So the soul tries to fix itself first, and then approach. That ordering is the engine of self-sanctification. It is also the engine of its failure. The soul that approaches after the fixing is supposed to be in approaches a Father it has had to invent in order to be allowed near at all — a Father whose love is contingent, whose acceptance is performance-based, whose patience runs out. That Father is not the Father of scripture. He is a projection of the auditor.
Owen’s argument turns the order. Approach first. Be near, with the Father as He actually is — one full of eternal, free love towards them — and the sanctification grows out of the nearness. Not the other way around.
The somatic moment, in the middle of the reading
Stop for one breath. Set the screen down for a moment, or look up from the page. Notice where your jaw is. Notice where the shoulders are sitting. If you have been reading carefully, the audit-engine has been quietly running in the body too — a small tightening across the upper chest, a slight clench in the hands, the readiness to take notes on what you have to fix next. Let the jaw lower by a fraction. Let one slow exhale go out. The line you just read — one full of eternal, free love towards them — is not a thing to memorise. It is a thing to be lowered into. The body is part of how the lowering happens. Take the breath. Then come back.
What Owen calls communion, and why it is not what you have been doing
Owen’s word for the alternative is communion. He does not mean the sacrament, though the sacrament is one of its forms. He means the actual practice of being with the Father in a way that does not run the audit. Here is the second line worth keeping near the page:
To give a poor sinful soul a comfortable persuasion, affecting it throughout, in all its faculties and affections, that God in Jesus Christ loves him, delights in him, is well pleased with him, hath thoughts of tenderness and kindness towards him; to give, I say, a soul an overflowing sense hereof, is an inexpressible mercy.
— John Owen, Communion with God
Read what he is actually saying. A comfortable persuasion, affecting it throughout, in all its faculties and affections, that God in Jesus Christ loves him, delights in him, is well pleased with him. Owen is naming a state of soul. It is not a doctrinal proposition you assent to with the mind. It is a persuasion that affects the whole person — the thinking, the feeling, the willing, the imagining — that you are loved, delighted in, pleased with, treated with tenderness and kindness by God.
That is not what most of your Christian life has been operating from. Most of your Christian life has been operating from a tentative probably-loved-if-I-keep-it-together. The persuasion has been conditional. The faculties and affections have been kept slightly held back, because the soul does not throw itself fully into the arms of a Father it half-suspects is disappointed in it.
Owen names this conditional posture as the quiet sickness underneath most Christian effort. Not unbelief, exactly. A thin belief. A belief that has not yet sunk into the affections. A belief that the mind has signed off on but the heart has never been allowed to feel.
The slow practice of communion is the unbecoming of that thinness. It is the daily, repeated sitting near — not to perform devotion, not to produce a holier version of yourself by next Tuesday, but to let the persuasion do its slow soaking work. The faculties and affections take years to be persuaded. Owen knew this. He wrote hundreds of pages because the persuasion does not happen in a paragraph; it happens in a life slowly steeped in the same small set of true sentences about who God is, until the auditor in the back of the prayer chair finally puts down the clipboard and goes home.
This is also why the Bible Study Workbook for Women is built the way it is. Each day is one short page of scripture and one slow prompt — a hundred and forty days of the soul being repeatedly near the same true sentences, not asked to produce anything, only to be lowered toward the Father Owen is describing. The book is not a curriculum to complete. It is a small daily room to keep returning to. The persuasion grows by repetition, not by intensity.
The third line — what changes when the soul actually sees
Here is the third passage, the one that names what the slow nearness eventually produces:
When the soul sees God, in his dispensation of love, to be love, to be infinitely lovely and loving, rests upon and delights in him as such, then hath it communion with him in love.
— John Owen, Communion with God
Notice the verbs. Sees. Rests upon. Delights in. Owen does not write strives. Achieves. Improves. The soul that has come into communion does three things, and none of them are the things the self-sanctifier has been doing. It sees — that is, it has had the persuasion soak through the affections far enough that the seeing is now real. It rests upon — that is, it has stopped trying to hold itself up. It delights in — that is, the felt response to God has become enjoyment rather than audit.
The sanctification, in Owen’s reading, is what comes out the other side of those three verbs. You become like the One you behold; that is the whole logic. The auditor’s logic is try harder to be like Him. The communing soul’s logic is be near Him, and the becoming happens through the nearness. These are different engines. Only one of them works.
This is also why so many years of trying have produced so little change. You were not lazy. You were not insincere. You were running the wrong engine. The effort engine produces tiredness and a thinner version of the same self. The beholding engine produces a slow, quiet conformity to what is being beheld. Owen’s name for the second engine is communion in love. The Puritan name. The same thing the desert fathers called theosis in their dialect, and the same thing the modern contemplatives mean when they say abiding.
(If the language of abiding is closer to where you naturally rest, letting go and letting God — what the phrase actually means walks the same posture through Andrew Murray’s hand. And if surrender is the verb your soul reaches for when self-sanctification finally falls quiet, what does absolute surrender mean — Andrew Murray’s plain reading is the sister essay on the verb underneath this whole posture.)
So — can I sanctify myself?
The honest answer Owen would give you, slowly, with no triumph in his voice: no, and also, the question is the wrong one. You cannot sanctify yourself. The years of trying have already told you that. The sanctification you are looking for is not in your reach by effort. And — and this is where the comfort lives — the sanctification is not refused to you. It is being offered, daily, in the form of the nearness. You are being invited to put down the clipboard and to sit with the Father whose first notion of you, Owen insists, is eternal, free love.
The verb shifts. From try harder to come closer. The result the trying was meant to produce — the slow becoming-like-Him — is produced reliably by the coming closer, and not at all by the trying. This is the practice the saints meant when they said abide. This is what the contemplatives meant by the practice of the presence. This is what Owen named, in his hundred Puritan ways, communion with God.
If the soul is not yet able to sit in that nearness for an hour, do not punish it. Owen himself names that exact problem — it cannot watch with him one hour — and does not scold the soul for it. He simply prescribes the slow soaking. Let, then, this be the saints’ first notion of the Father, — as one full of eternal, free love towards them. That is the medicine. Not a fix. A re-rooting. A slow re-acquaintance with the Father you have been trying to please without ever quite trusting.
The trying does not stop overnight. The auditor does not move out the day you read the sentence. The clipboard is heavy and the habit is old. But the engine has been named, and the alternative has been offered, and the years ahead can quietly run on the other engine if you are willing to let the running happen in five-minute pieces. (If the dry stretch in which the seeing has gone quiet is the part you cannot move through, when you feel spiritually dry — the practice for the year God goes quiet walks the seventh year of beholding in a way Owen would recognise.)
Five minutes a day, in the chair, with the persuasion He loves me; He delights in me; He is well pleased with me in Christ Jesus. Not to make the persuasion true — it is already true — but to let it soak in. That is the whole Puritan practice. It is also, if you are willing, the next stretch of your life.
A note on the somatic shift, before we close
Watch what happens in the body across the next two weeks, if you put down the auditor and pick up the nearness. The chest will lower by a small amount. The jaw will release. The Sunday-night dread before the Monday-morning effort will quiet. The sermon that used to feel like a performance review will start to feel like a meal. None of this is dramatic; all of it is reliable. The body knows when it has stopped being audited and started being loved. The shift will show in the body before it shows in any visible change in behaviour. Let the body be the early indicator. The behaviour follows the soul; the soul follows the beholding. (For the bridge between this kind of slow Puritan reading and a practice you can actually start, a beginner study bible for women — and how to use it without being embarrassed is a quiet on-ramp, and bible study tools for women — the five you actually need keeps the kit short. If you want the slow method Owen would have approved of, inductive bible study for beginners — a 4-step method is the structured cousin, and SOAP bible study method — free printable worksheet is the one-page form for the days you cannot manage more.)
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