Category: Heroes

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

Martyn Lloyd-Jones was one of the most influential preachers of the century.  A few weeks before he died, someone asked him how, after decades of fruitful ministry and extraordinary activity, he was coping now he was suffering such serious weakness it took much of his energy to move from his bed to his armchair and back.  He replied in the words of Luke 10:20: ‘Do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.’  In other words, do not tie your joy, your sense of wellbeing, to power in ministry.  Your ministry can be taken from you.  Tie your joy to the fact that you are known and loved by God; tie it to your salvation; tie it to the sublime truth that your name is written in heaven.  That can never be taken from you.   Lloyd-Jones added: ‘I am perfectly content.’  – From A Call to Spiritual Reformation by D.A. Carson

The problem of life, my friends, is not individual sins but Sin itself, the whole background – the thing itself, the desire process which is the cause of all these local and minor manifestations and eruptions.  And that is our problem.  We are not here to teach and lecture men and women about individual sins you may control and conquer.  You are still an sinner, your nature is still evil and will remains so, until by the death of Christ and the resurrection you are born again and receive a new nature.  Our trouble is that our nature is evil; it really does not matter how it may manifest itself.

What is our duty then?  Well, it is this.  Before we talk to anyone we must find out first whether he believes in Christ or not.  Is he a new man?  If he is not, then he is still struggling with flesh and blood.  Are we to lecture him on his sins and to preach morality to him?  No, we are to preach Christ to him and do all we can to convert him, for what he needs is a new nature, a new outlook, a new mind.  It is no use our expecting to find figs on a thorn bush, however much we may treat and care for it.  The trouble is the root.  We are wasting our time and neglecting our duty by preaching morality to a lost world.  For what the world needs is life, new life, and it can be found in Christ alone.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, From D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years by Iain Murray, pp. 159-160

There is nothing that so controls the height of joy as the depth of the realization of our sinfulness, our utter hopelessness as we are by nature.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 10, p. 351

Now here the Apostle at ounce gives us a general test.  Whatever else the gospel is, it is ‘glad tidings’!  Here is the comparison – ‘How beautiful are the feet of them that bring glad tidings of great joy!”  Sometimes people think that I have suddenly gone mad if I announce Christmas hymns at some other time of the year.  But I have not!  I do it deliberately in order to introduce this very theme – and why should we not sing these hymns all year round?  Why should we leave them only to that particular time of the year?  The gospel in its fullness should be constantly in our minds.  It is glad tidings, good news!  – D. Martyn loyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 10, p. 299

Now, in parenthesis, let me say here that when you come across a subsection such as this, or even a verse which seems to you on the surface to be difficult, and you say to yourself, ‘Why does he say that here?  What is the connection?’  Then a very good principle to follow is not to spend too much time with the immediate connection.  Go further back!  Look at the larger context, and very often that will give you the key to the solution of your immediate problem.

Let me use an illustration here.  In athletics, if you come up against a particularly high hurdle that you have to jump, you take a longer run!  If you want to vault over it, you go further back.  You do not try to lift yourself up over this very high hurdle from where you are on the ground.  The further back you go, the longer your run, and the momentum will carry you over.  That is a very valuable principle in the exposition of Scripture and in the elucidation of some of these problems with which it presents us.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 10, p. 253

So you do not become a Christian in cold blood, unmoved, undisturbed.  You do not sit down in a detached manner and say, ‘Well, I have agreed with that doctrine, and therefore I am a Chrsitian.’  Not at al!  You have been through these stages – conviction, repentance, fear, desire for deliverance, recognition of Him, casting yourself upon Him, thankfulness and praise, glorying in Him, greeting His truth, desiring to know more and more about it!  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 10, p. 174

[I]n the vast majority of instances, the word heart in Scripture means the centre, the very innermost citadel, of the personality.  Or, if you like, it means the whole personality.  So when the Scripture says that with heart we believe that God has raised Him from the dead, it means that with the whole of our being we believe that.  ‘With the heart man believeth unto righteousness’: with the whole of his personality, not merely his feelings, not merely his intellect, but the totality of everything that he is.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 10, p. 14