Category: D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Can you say quite honestly that you have a deeper affection for, and a deeper understanding of, you fellow Christians that you have for your natural relatives who are not Christians?  That is a very good test of our position as Christian people.  It is a proof of your regeneration, and it is also a proof that you have paid heed to this exhortation and are putting it into practice.  A Christian should feel a closer bond with another Christian than he feels with a relative who is not a Christian.  This is true of necessity.  The new nature is in us.  We are all children of God and belong to the family of God.  And this is a relationship that will not only last while we are in this world of time, but will last throughout eternity.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 12, p. 352

One of the greatest dangers, it always seems to me, is to interpret the Scriptures in the light of our experience, instead of testing our experience by the teaching of Scripture.  So often this happens at the present time.  People lay down as the norm what they have and what they are familiar with, and test everything by that.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 12, p. 227

The unity that the apostle speaks of is a unity that can never be produced by human beings – never!  ‘So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members of one another.’  This, again, is something that follows of necessity from the illustration of the body.  As we have seen, the human body starts with one cell, which becomes impregnated and grows and develops.  The proliferations come out and form neck and arms and feet and trunk and so on.  And it is exactly the same with the church.  This is something supernatural; it is miraculous; it is the divine ‘something’.  And so the illustration proves to us that men and women can never produce this unity, and, of course, the Bible never exhorts us to.  What Paul does exhort us to do, is to maintain the unity – which is entirely different.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 12, pp. 188-189

The Christian gospel is unique.  It tells us: Be what you are; realize what you are; and proceed to show that you are what you are.  Nowhere else in the world do we find such a message.  And as we have seen, that is why we must always realize that no one can live the Christian life without being regenerate.  Indeed, to tell anybody who is not a Christian to life the Christian life in any part or form is to teach heresy.  It is the Pelagian heresy.  Pelagius thought that you simply had to teach people the principles of Christian living for them to carry them out.  That is false teaching which has been condemned, and always should be condemned by the Christian church.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 12, p. 113

In other words, in Christianity it is always the inward state that matters, the spirit of the mind, this transformation, this shining forth of the inner being.  The conduct of Christian men and women is not something that they add on to their lives, it is not like putting on a suit.  As we have seen it is the outward expression of something that is within.  This can be illustrated by something which we see at Christmastime.  Before Christmas, people buy their Christmas trees and on the branches they often hang silver and gold apples and pears.  They tie this artificial fruit on to the tree with thin pieces of string or wire.  The artificial is that which is put on the tree.  When you go into an orchard you also see apples and pears, but they are real, and have grown from the inner life of the tree – now that is Christianity.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 12, pp. 109-110

The doctrine of sanctification has nothing to say to those who are not Christians, but it is vital for those who are.  It means the kind of life we are to live because we are Chrsitians.  D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 12, p. 99

People who give the impression that theology is as dry as dust show either that they do not know their theology or that they are very bad teachers.  There is no such thing as dry-as-dust theology.  True theology always moves the heart…  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 12, p. 31

Once I was travelling to the West Country to preach.  We arrived at the train at Reading and a young man came into my compartment holding in his right hand a Bible and a copy of The Times and I know immediately what he was going to do that day.  He was going to give an address on prophecy and I turned out to be right.  There was nothing clever about my deduction.  It was the fact that the man had a bible and The Times together and I happened to know the mentality which did that!  The detailed news and information in The Times all foretold in the Bible, in the prophecy of the Bible.  And so people expect to find these details and so on, and thus they have identified Napoleon with the man of sin, and then Hitler and perhaps Stalin after that.  It is a wrong approach to prophecy altogether because prophecy does not give us those details.  The Scriptures themselves say so.  We are not to be concerned about the times and the seasons.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 11, p. 229

I want to quote a sentence to you from a man who was about as far removed from being an Evangelical Christian as anyone could be, but he was a great thinker and an acute observer – the late Dean Inge.  He has produced a little book on Protestantism; it was one of a series.  I will never forget the first sentence in that book, it was so true.  He put it all in one phrase; he said: ‘Every institution tends to produce its opposite’.  Now that is a very profound remark.  It is a very perfect summary of the very thing I am trying to say here.  He was writing on Protestantism, and what he was able to show so cleverly, and which I want to repeat is this: that by today Protestantism has become almost the exact opposite of what it was at its beginning in the sixteenth century.

Why does such a thing happen?  It occurs as a result of the struggle between the spirit and the form.  I do not think there is a greater struggle than this.  The spirit must always have a form and that is why you have such a thing as the Christian church.  An idea must always take form if it is to be of any value.  But there is always a tension between these two.  Certain dangers arise, and the biggest danger of all is that the form tends to cripple the spirit.  I do not think you can begin to understand church history, you cannot understand the Bible, unless you have got clear in your mind this struggle and tension between form and spirit.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 11, p. 150

[M]an’s only need ultimately is to be reconciled to God.  Nothing else.  You see if you start with man and man’s needs you find that there are a large number of people who are not interested in your evangelism.  They say, ‘But I never do that, I have not been guilty of that sin’.  Highly moral, intellectual people, living a good life and trying to help others, sitting in their self-contained homes – they do not see any need of coming to Christ.  There is only one way to show that everybody needs Christ, and that is to hold them face to face with God.  …You see it affects, of necessity, our whole approach to the unbeliever, the whole matter of evangelism.  And so you get wrong appeals.  You actually get evangelists sometimes saying, ‘Come! God needs you’.  Have you not heard that?  It is quite common.  Or it is put in the form of the benefits of salvation.  “How foolish you are. Come!  If you only came this is what you would get’ – and so the things are put before them.  And of course when you get to the point of pressure being brought being brought to bear upon people to make an immediate decision, it is still further wrong.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 11, p. 129