Category: Heroes

We must not give up because the subject matter is difficult.  You will then find happening to you what is the almost universal experience of all raw students.  When students first begin to listen to lectures on a subject they often feel on the first few occasions not only that they know nothing at all of what is being said, but that they will probably never be able to understand.  There is only one thing to do at that point, and that is to go on listening.  If you go on listening then you will begin to find that more than you had ever realized is sinking and seeping in, and you will wake up one day and say, “Ah, I now see what it is about, I am beginning to understand’.  Do not be impatient with yourself when you are studying a difficult passage in Scripture; keep on, hold on, reading or listening; and suddenly you will find not only do you know much more than you thought you knew, but you will be able to follow and understand.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Volume 6, p. 189

Concerning Romans 7:9:

[T]here is no more complete misunderstanding of the Law, and of ethics and morality, than to think that ‘obligation implies ability’.  That is a very familiar argument.  Most people today who think at all, and who reject the gospel of salvation, do so for this fundamental reason, that in their view obligation implies ability.  They believe that God would never command us to do anything unless we were able to do it.  So, they argue, the fact that God has given us the Ten Commandments and the Moral Law implies that we are able to carry them out and observe their dictates.  And they further believe that they can obey them and that they are actually doing so.  The final answer to such persons and claims is that the very Law that ‘came’ to Paul and said ‘Thou shalt not covet’, the very Law that reminded him of his obligation was the very thing that proved to him that he could not perform it!  ‘Sin revived and I died’ when ‘the commandment came’.  Far from the obligation implying ability in this realm, the exact opposite is true.  The whole function of the law is not to enable a man to justify himself, but to show him that he cannot do so; it is to bring out ‘the exceeding sinfulness of sin’, as the apostle will tell us later.  But that misunderstanding of the law is the popular view today.  The moral man says,  ‘Ah yes, here are the ethical demands of the gospel.  They address me; very well, I rise up and do them.  The fact that they come to me means that I can carry them out.’  But the whole function of the Law was the exact opposite of that; it was to ‘kill’ you, to show you that you cannot do it, to take pride and self-confidence out of you, to take the ‘life’ out of you, to make you feel that you are weak and helpless and hopeless.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Volume 6, pp. 143-144

On Romans 7:4

It is even worse to feel condemned by the Law.  I desire to emphasize this.  A Christian who continues to feel the condemnation of the Law is like a wife who still feels afraid of her first husband from whom she has been separated by death.  You must never go back ‘under the law’.  You must really learn to say, ‘There is therefore no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus’.  ‘But’, you say, ‘I feel that I am such a failure, I feel that I am such a sinner, I feel I am so unworthy.’  That may be well true – I often feel the same, but I will never allow myself to go back under condemnation.  I may be unworthy of my new husband, but that does not mean I am going back to be married to the old husband.  That is nonsense, that is confusion, that is impossible.  Whatever you may feel about yourself, and whatever you may know to be true about yourself, ‘there is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus’.  None!  You must not think of yourself and your life in that way; you should now think of it as your lack of faithfulness to the new husband.  You must think of it in terms of Christ, and never again in terms of the Law, otherwise you are contradicting what you believe.   – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 6, p. 50

‘Christianity is Christ.’  He is central, He is vital, He is all in all.  It does not matter how good a life may be, how moral it may appear to be, if it is not entirely dependent upon the Lord Jesus Christ and what He has done, it is not Christianity.  It may be morality, it may be some other religion, but it is not Christianity.  You can have religion without Christianity; you may have morality without Christianity; but the thing that makes Christianity Christian is the centrality, is the cruciality of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Hence, any claim that is made, if it does not directly relate everything to Him, and give the glory to Him, proves at once that it is not Christian at all. … If your position is not entirely dependent upon this blessed Person it is not Christianity at all; it is a sham, it is counterfeit.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 6, p. 35

On Romans 6:22

The Christian is meant to glory in the ‘But now’.  He asserts it.  That is why I maintain, and maintain stoutly, that a man who understands this truth cannot merely lecture on it.  A man who can lecture on this does not really appreciate what it means.  If you know anything about this you are bound to preach!  A man who can say ‘By now” coldly, and merely regard them as two words, just a part of the construction of a sentence, a part of the syntax, has never seen their real meaning.  No, the Christian cannot look at these words without being moved to the depth of his being.  He worships, he praises God, he must shout ‘But now’.  This is in many ways the best test of our profession of the Christian faith.  If these words do not thrill us and move us, then I think we has better re-examine our whole position.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 5, p. 286

I end with this question.  What kind of food can we take?  Are we still only capable of taking milk, or are we beginning to develop a taste for meat?  Are illustrations and analogies still essential, or do we know that our minds are expanding under the illumination of the Spirit and rejoicing in the deep things of God?  ‘The Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.’  I must confess that there is nothing which ever happens in my experience which depresses me more than the following. Sometimes when I am preaching away from him, and have preaches what I would have thought were the mere elements and beginnings of the Christian faith, people come to me and say, ‘You were making rather heavy demands upon us this evening’.  They add, ‘We are not accustomed to these deep things’.  Deep things! and I thought I was being elementary!  That occurs among Christians, and evangelical people.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Volume 5, p. 253

What I desire to emphasize at the moment is the greatness of this change.  It is not enough for us merely to know that we have been changed, or that a Christian is a man who must undergo a change; we must have some inadequate conception of the greatness of the change which is undergone.  We see the greatness in this way, that it is a change which affects the whole of a man’s personality.  Look at it again.  ‘Ye have obeyed’ – there is you will.  ‘From the heart’ – there is you emotion.  What have you obeyed from the heart?  ‘The form of doctrine delivered you’.  How do you apprehend doctrine?  You do so with you mind.  So the change a man undergoes to become a Christian is a change that affects him in his mind, in his heart, and in his will; the entire personality is involved.  – D. Martyn Lloyd Jones, Romans Volume 5, p. 207

Because of what the Lord Jesus Christ has done, and because of what has happened to Him, and because of our union with Him, it is true to say of us that our whole relationship to sin and all it can do has been fundamentally changed.  We are no longer in the position in which we were when we were born as the children of Adam.  We were under the dominion, under the reign, and the rule of sin.  That is no longer the position, we have been ‘translated’ out of that ‘into the Kingdom of God’s dear Son’ (Colossians 1:13).  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 5, pp. 124-125

As we come to this detailed outworking of his argument by the Apostle it is essential that we should hold clearly in our minds what he is setting out to do.  He is refuting the charge brought against his teaching stated in the first verse, ‘Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?’  He is not giving an exposition of the way of holiness and of sanctification, as is commonly suggested; he is simply refuting the charge that is brought against the doctrine of justification by faith, and against the finality and certainty of our salvation in Christ.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 5, p. 42

The true preaching of the gospel of salvation by grace alone always leads to the possibility of this charge [antinomianism] being brought against it. There is no better test as to whether a man is really preaching the New Testament gospel of salvation than this, that some people might misunderstand it and misinterpret it to mean that it really amounts to this, that because you are saved by grace alone it does not matter at all what you do; you can go on sinning as much as you like because it will redound all the more to the glory of grace. If my preaching and presentation of the gospel of salvation does not expose it to that misunderstanding, then it is not the gospel.  – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans Vol. 5, p. 8