John Owen is one of my heroes, and I read and copiously underlined Mortification of Sin years ago when I was attending a quasi-cultish church where the elders were practically infallible and what was preached was the "whole counsel of God" minus any Gospel encouragement. The ministry was all about personal holiness and every man Jack of us in the church had an enormous Puritan library (I had the 16 vol set of JO for starters). The weakness of all this, however, is that, speaking from the sad experience of one who strove with all my power to mortify my besetting sin (addiction to porn, primarily), we were each trying to do this on our own, in private, as though we were in church together, but each isolated in his own cocoon. But Christ gave us the church, our brothers, each other, to bear each other's burdens, to help one another through our struggles, in the spirit of James 5:16, to wit "Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed." I now know men who are successfully mortifying such sin, but they're not doing it alone. They attend men's groups regularly, and have accountability partners. If I could have had one such meeting, and one such partner, 25 years ago when I was striving on my own for holiness, reading Owen and Whitfield and Flavel and Watson, I would have gladly traded all my hundreds of Puritan and Reformed volumes for the privilege.
This is in no way a criticism of the great John Owen, though, and it doesn't have to be either or. To any brother struggling with indwelling, especially besetting sin today, I would say, study Owen (if you have the mind; as one said above, he's not for the faint of heart), and study that other giant of Christian literature of a slightly later day, John Bunyon. But find a group of brothers with whom you can share your burden, and unburden your soul and heart to them, and find one or two brothers to be accountable to.
"Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor. For if either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion. But woe to the one who falls when there is not another to lift him up." Eccl 4:9, 10.
This is in no way a criticism of the great John Owen, though, and it doesn't have to be either or. To any brother struggling with indwelling, especially besetting sin today, I would say, study Owen (if you have the mind; as one said above, he's not for the faint of heart), and study that other giant of Christian literature of a slightly later day, John Bunyon. But find a group of brothers with whom you can share your burden, and unburden your soul and heart to them, and find one or two brothers to be accountable to.
"Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor. For if either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion. But woe to the one who falls when there is not another to lift him up." Eccl 4:9, 10.