John Owen's Mortification of Sin is a short book. You can read it in an afternoon. I have been rereading it for three years.
The basic argument is this: sin does not age out. It does not fade because you are busy or because your life is going well or because you have identified it and named it and made peace with it being there. It is either being killed or it is gaining ground. There is no maintenance mode.
Owens writes as a pastor who has watched men manage sin for decades and then be destroyed by it. He is not interested in comfort. He is interested in clarity.
What this looks like on a Tuesday
I work in software. The patterns of my work reinforce certain things: the sense that problems can be deferred, that a backlog is a legitimate state, that identifying something is progress toward resolving it.
None of these are true of sin.
Identifying a pattern of compromise and putting it in a mental backlog is not progress. It is the form that sophisticated avoidance takes in people who think clearly about other things. Owen would recognize it immediately. He would not be impressed.
The practical question, the one he returns to, is: what are you actually doing about it today? Not in principle. Today.
"Be killing sin, or it will be killing you." — John Owen, The Mortification of Sin, Ch. 2