Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Thanks, Dane!

A 1970 interview with the doctor.

The Essense of the Christian Faith

"The determining factor in our relationship with God is not our past or present, but Christ's past and present.

'How then does it work?' It works like this. God accepts this righteousness of Christ, this perfect righteousness face to face with the Law, which He honored in every respect. He has kept it and given obedience to it [through his perfect life], and he has borne its penalty [through his death]. The Law is fully satisfied. God's way of salvation, says Paul, is that. He gives to us the righteousness of Christ. If we have seen our need and go to God and confess it, God will give us his own Son's righteousness. He imputes Christ's righteousness to us, who believe in Him, and regards us as righteous, and declares and pronounces us to be righteous in Him. That is the way of salvation, the Christian way of salvation...

To make it quite practical let me say that there is a very simple way of testing yourself to know whether you believe that... [After] I have explained the way of justification...to them, then I say: 'Well, then, you are now ready to say that you are a Christian?' And they hesitate. And I know they have not understood. Then I say: 'What is the matter, why are you hesitating?' And they say: 'I do not feel that I am good enough.' At once I know that in a sense I have been wasting my breath. They are still thinking in terms of themselves; their idea still is that they have to make themselves good enough to be a Christian, good enough to be accepted with Christ. They have to do it! 'I am not good enough.' It sounds very modest, but it is the lie of the devil, it is a denial of the faith... The essence of the Christian faith is to say that He is good enough and that I am in Him!

As long as you go on thinking about yourself and saying: 'Ah, yes, I would like to, but I am not good enough; I am a sinner, a great sinner,' you are denying God and you will never be happy. You will continue to be cast down and disquieted. You will think you are better at times and then again you will find that you are not as good as you thought you were... How can I put this plainly? It does not matter if you have almost entered into the depths of hell, if you are guilty of murder as well as every other vile sin, it does not matter from the standpoint of being justified before God. You are no more hopeless than the most respectable...person in the world. Do you believe that?"  

D.M. Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression

Martin Lloyd-Jones on Preaching and the Gospel

A few lessons Tim Keller has learned from Martin Lloyd-Jones.

"The lesson I eventually learned from him was—don't preach to your congregation for spiritual growth thinking everyone there is a Christian—and don't preach the gospel evangelistically thinking that Christians cannot grow from it. In other words—evangelize as you edify, and edify as you evangelize. These are two different by intimately related ideas, and we will tackle one in each of the next two posts."

You can read the rest of the article here.

The Promises Of God Are Our Foundation

"Our relationship with God should not be defined by our feelings about ourselves at any one moment, but by the eternal promises of God that we know throughout every moment."

-Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

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I often fall into a deceiving and foundationless mindset when I awake in the morning. I am burdened by the "daily doing" that lies ahead of me. My attitude and mood can be entirely dependent on my moral successes and failures of the previous day. I can be filled with so much unrest. I lose sight of where I truly stand with God, and seem to forget the joy of my salvation in the gospel.

But, I am brought back to peace when the scripture is spoken to me. God's word empowers me to believe in someone outside of myself, Christ Jesus. When you look at the person of Jesus, his life, death and resurrection, you begin to see He is the only answer to yourself. His life is the only explicable and powerful being that can deal with me. May we stay reminded that the Bible's truths are personal. They are corporate. They are defining. They are applicable. They are unchanging, and they are transcendent through all of time. If we embrace each and every moment in light of the truth of the Bible, I believe we will see more and more how they prove to be true!

A Quiet Heart

Trail of thoughts from Martyn Lloyd-Jones' book Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled.

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"The greatest need of men and women in this world is the need of what is called a quiet heart."

"The claim of the gospel is not only that it can give us a quiet heart, but also that nothing else can do it."

"If we are depending for happiness and joy and a quiet heart, in a final sense, upon any individual human being, upon our family, our home, our profession, our money, our health and strength, we are doomed to experience disappointment."

"Do you want a quiet heart? Here is the way to have one - to believe that God has come to us in the person of his Son. We are not left on the human level; We are not left to grope vainly in the dark. God has done something, and this is what he has done: he has 'sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law' (Galatians 4: 4-5), that he might give us a quiet heart."

Finding Rest in Jesus

The following excerpt comes from the book titled Living Water by the Welsh minister Martyn Lloyd Jones (1899-1981). This book is an in depth examination of the story in John 4 about Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. As it looks at each verse in detail, it consistently points to Jesus as the eternal answer to our overwhelming thirst for true life in Him. In short, this book is pure honey in gospel content and in Lloyd Jones' easy to read writing style. That was actually what I was told by the Crossway books salesman who got me interested, and it indeed is true.

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"On what are we actually living? By what are we living? On what do we really depend?

I wonder, are we kept going by our own activities, by the various things that we have to do? This a question that every one of us should face.

Now this applies, I repeat, to all of us. The very routine of life sustains many people; they go on because they have to. Certain things must be done, and if they are not done, everything will end in chaos. So they are kept going by the demands, the needs, the necessities of life. And very often when, for various reasons such as illness or accident, they have to stop, they suddenly find that they have nothing to rest upon. Others are kept going by things that happen to them, by events and by circumstances, and so, centrally they have nothing on which they can depend and on which they live, nothing that ultimately sustains them.

Or, to put this question in a slightly different form, do you have a central rest in your life, a place of quiet, a place into which you can always retreat? Amid all the multifarious activities of life and of business, is there a place at the center where you can always go, where you know that you will have peace and quiet, where you delight to go because it gives you ultimate rest for your soul?

Or to put it still more directly, what does the Lord Jesus Christ himself really mean to us? This is ultimately the only question that matters...We shall never know him truly, and we shall never know this experience that he himself here describes to the woman of Samaria, until we realize our deepest need, which is this ultimate rest of our soul, the final peace and quiet and confidence and assurance, the ability to stand in the midst of life with all that is happening and all that may happen and know exactly where we are because of our relationship to him."

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Simply, in order to know our need for Jesus, we must realize our deepest need...an ultimate rest for our souls. Through the ups and downs of life...through the daily battle of trying not to fall into a cancerous self-justifying lifestyle...through the constant, idolatrous temptation of success and advancing in the earthly realm of whatever...through the warfare the human race has waged against its creator, we need peace. Rest is not easy to find within ourselves; more so, I believe it is impossible to find apart from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Jesus stabilizes the roller coaster of life by his steadfast promises we have in Him and His Word...Jesus sufficiently justified those in Him through faith on the cross 2000 years ago...and Jesus acts as the mediator between us and His father, to bring us back to Him. May we have rest in these truths for eternity.