Daily Inspiration Quote by John Owen

Owen writes like a man watching the soul’s thermostat: turn down the body’s appetites, and the spirit warms. The triad "vigor and power and comfort" is doing more than piling on synonyms. It sketches a full-spectrum religious life - stamina to endure, force to act, relief to rest - and then pins all remembering, all momentum, all peace on a single practice: mortification. Not moderation, not self-care, not "balance", but an active, almost surgical killing-off of what Paul calls "the flesh."

The intent is pastoral and polemical at once. Owen is trying to make holiness feel mechanically reliable: spiritual vitality is not a mood bestowed by heaven; it is the predictable consequence of disciplined self-denial. That rhetorical move matters in a 17th-century Puritan world anxious about assurance, always scanning for evidence that grace is real. Mortification becomes an audit trail. If you can name the desire, resist it, and let it wither, you can also believe you’re alive to God.

The subtext is stern but oddly consoling: suffering can be translated into meaning. "Comfort" is the tell. Owen isn’t romanticizing misery for its own sake; he’s selling a kind of inner stability purchased through restraint. There’s also a quiet warning embedded in "depends": fail here, and the entire spiritual economy goes soft. In an age of civil upheaval and moral suspicion, the private war against the flesh doubles as social argument - the godly self, governed from within, is fit to help govern the world.