Gifted Welsh medical doctor, minister and evangelical leader. Coming
from the Reformed tradition, Lloyd-Jones was Pastor of Westminster Chapel in
London from 1943 – 1968. During his ministry, the Church seceded from the
Congregational Union and aligned itself with the Federation of Independent
Evangelical Churches. A warm-hearted, passionate man, Lloyd-Jones was conscious
of the need of the Holy Spirit’s empowering for ministry, and his expository
sermons, both in the pulpit and on the page in the many volumes he published
were hugely influential within the evangelical community. He was also involved
in the creation of the Banner of Truth Trust which has re-printed many Reformed
publications and issued new titles, including many of Lloyd-Jones’ sermons. He stood
firmly against liberalism, and advocated evangelical Christians ‘coming out’ of
churches where more liberal theologies were tolerated.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ impact on me, through his published works, was
incalculable. Since my childhood, his name had been up there in the pantheon of
evangelicalism, but the first time I recall holding a book of his in my hands
was one September evening in the mid-1970s just inside the door of the Church
of Scotland in Strathpeffer. I’d been attending one of the services at the
annual Northern Convention with my parents, and before we went out into the
darkness to walk back to our hotel we were scanning the bookstall in the foyer,
run by the quaintly-titled Scottish Colportage Society. For some reason I was attracted to a blue-jacketed
volume of sermons on a sections of St Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians by Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones, which he had
preached during his time at London’s Westminster Chapel in the 1950s and ‘60s.
‘What are you buying?’ my mother asked. ‘It’s called Life in the Spirit in Marriage, Home and Work,’ I replied, before
adding quickly and nervously ‘Not that I’m thinking of getting married.’
I don’t particularly recall reading that book, but I found the
succeeding volume, Christian warfare
unforgettable. The sermons it contains deal in great detail with part of
chapter 6 of Ephesians, discussing both the reality of a personal devil who attempts
to bring chaos where God has created life and joy, and the reality of the
victory over this persistent opponent in which Christians participate by virtue
of Christ’s ultimate victory. I read chapter after chapter of this book with an
increasing sense of joy and a liberating lightness of spirit. As my eyes were opened to the source of the smog
of doubt which I felt was hemming me in at that point, it was dispelled by the
breath of the Spirit and I saw more clearly than ever before the sun shining
brightly. I recall experiencing a similar sense of freedom a decade later when
I read Michael Green’s book on the same subject I believe in Satan’s downfall.
Having finished Christian warfare,
I turned next to its sequel, The
Christian Soldier which dealt with the later verses in Ephesians chapter 6
(but which left me relatively unmoved,) before launching into Lloyd-Jones’s many volumes
of sermons on St Paul’s Epistle to the
Romans (again originally preached at Westminster Chapel). I formed the
habit of reading one of these sermons in bed each evening, just before going to
sleep, and evening by evening expanded my education in the Reformed, Calvinist
school of theology. I understood for the first time what it meant to be
‘justified’ – I was accepted by God not
because of my own merits, and despite my own demerits, by virtue of the death
of Christ on my behalf.
The reason Lloyd-Jones preached so many sermons in the process of
unpacking St Paul’s writing was his desire to explore every nuance of the work
in the light of the Bible’s overarching theme and to allow type to illuminate
anti-type. Hence his exposition ranged
over the biblical text as a whole, and as I read on I gained an overview of the
entire Bible, and discerned God’s continuing strategy to reconcile with its
Creator an alienated cosmos. And often as I read I was conscious of being
somehow released, conscious of a welling up of praise and thanksgiving. This is
where I was blessed – not sitting in church aware of my body pressing into the
hard seat, unable to reach beyond the material because I was distracted by the
crowds around me and by the noise of hymn-singing, and the thought of the
journey home, but here lying in bed able to let go of my surroundings and lose
myself in the Doctor’s exposition.
Another Martyn Lloyd-Jones title which I found most helpful was his Spiritual Depression – a collection of
sermon addressed to those suffering from spiritual, as opposed to clinical
depression, although the two are closely related. I was particularly struck by
the chapter entitled Men as trees walking,
which describes Jesus’ unique healing of a blind man, unique in that the
healing took place in two stages. First, the man was given a blurred, imprecise
vision so that people looked to him like walking trees, and then, after a
further intervention from Jesus, he was able to see perfectly. I was helped by
this when I read it, probably back in the 1970s as it enabled me to synthesise
both the fact that I had been conscious of divine intervention in my life, and
yet at the same time was aware of so much dross, so much work-in-progress, so
much I wanted to be but was not yet. Now, in 2013, I suppose I would
re-interpret this, seeing the partial vision and the clarity both as aspects of
everyday Christian experience (don’t I speak about my ‘clearer-seeing days’?) and as a symbol of the contrast between the ‘now’,
and the ‘yet-to-be’. I can just imagine
the Doctor harrumphing!
Having read
all Lloyd-Jones’ volumes on Romans which
had been published by that point, I turned in the 1980s to the earlier
collections of sermons in the parallel series on Ephesians. I found these less satisfying. I was no longer able to sit at Martyn
Lloyd-Jones feet as an uncritical listener, since I was aware of my many growing
questions about the Bible and its contents and was unable simply to accept
Lloyd-Jones assurances that it was an infallible book. But this in no way reduces my debt to the man
– I learned many, many true things from him even if I would now question some
aspects of the theological framework through which those true things reached
and touched and changed me.
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