The Christ-Centered Preaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899–1981) was one of the greatest preachers of the twentieth century and one of the leading evangelicals in that God-given major renaissance of evangelical life and witness that has been continuing worldwide since his death. He was also keen on the works of the Puritans and was instrumental in the renewed interest in their works after 1945, an enthusiasm that has continued to the present day.

But while Dr. Lloyd-Jones was someone who loved history and enthused friends and family alike with his abiding interest in it, this is not essentially a historical tome or retrospect. Some years ago a book of his collected sermons was published so that those who enjoyed his preaching could have their favorites in a nutshell volume. The purpose of this book, however, is very different.

THE THEME OF THIS BOOK

Dr. Lloyd-Jones (“the Doctor” as he was usually known, and how we shall frequently refer to him here) believed strongly that God’s Word is relevant for all time and in all places. His view of the centrality of Scripture in preaching has guided this book. When we met to decide which sermons would be included here, we soon realized that one could not possibly say that any sermon was worthier of a Best of Martyn Lloyd-Jones than any other.

But what was true of all of them was that they remain relevant, even though they were preached across his decades-long ministerial life, from 1927 when he began as a young preacher in Aberavon in South Wales to his last sermon, preached for a friend’s gathering in 1980, when he was already suffering from the cancer that took him the following year.

So what we have in this book is selected sermons from that fifty-three-year period chosen:

• Mainly chronologically, in the order in which they were preached.
• But also thematically, illustrating his preaching style and the eternal relevance of his expositions.
• To prove the point that we are making that if you preach in an expository way you always speak to your congregation, and that if you are biblical you are always relevant, so that a sermon on events thousands of years ago speaks as much to the twenty-first century as it did in its own time.

If the new excitement for Reformed theology and for expository preaching—for which we can all thank God—is to continue, it must have a secure base. Otherwise it is but a passing fad whose ending will be of great loss to the evangelical church in the century ahead of us.

The Doctor himself always stressed that his interest in history was not a mere antiquarian fancy but one with a purpose: to build up God’s people in biblical doctrine from generation to generation.

So this is a book to introduce both the Doctor and the truths for which he stood to the twenty-first-century generation. They have, like him, become evangelicals, discovered Reformed theology and expository preaching, and wonder how they can bring those same truths to their own generation as he did to his.

One brief comment is needed about our selection before we enter the biographical part of this introduction.

We have concentrated on sermons. No one could have been more enthusiastic about church history than the Doctor, but we have decided that it would be better not to include any of his historical lectures here and emphasize his preaching instead. The same also applies to his deeply held views of church government and ecclesiology, which he firmly believed were Scripture based but are perhaps, for the same reason, not appropriate here.

And we also want this book to be irenic. This is very much the case with several core groups in the United States at the moment. For instance, Together for the Gospel is united in its enthusiastic encouragement for the reintroduction of Bible-based, Scripture-centered Reformed theology as the basis for an evangelical renaissance in America today.

HIS LIFE AND THE BACKGROUND TO THE SELECTIONS

So these are sermons with a purpose! We can see how they unfold against the chronology of the Doctor’s life because, being the believer in Reformed theology as he was, he knew that all that happened to him unfolded in the providence of God. And as millions worldwide have been influenced by his ministry, the events of his life have changed all of ours as well.

He was not born to wealth or privilege. His father, Henry Lloyd-Jones, was a village shopkeeper, later moving to London when his business went bankrupt. His mother, Magdalen Evans, was a farmer’s daughter. Llwyncadfor, the family farm in South Wales, was to remain a focal point for the Doctor the rest of his life as he stayed in touch with the cousins who eventually inherited both the farm and also the successful horse-breeding business based there. One could say that he had his father’s considerable intellect—in another age Henry Lloyd-Jones would have gone on to a university and a stellar career—and the dynamism of his Evans forebears.

Significantly though, when he died in 1981 he was buried with his wife’s family, the Phillipses. Martyn’s elder brother, Harold, a gifted poet, survived the horrors of the western front in World War I, only to die in 1918 in the huge influenza epidemic that killed millions worldwide. His younger brother became a distinguished High Court judge—Sir Vincent Lloyd-Jones—and a well-known figure in literary and political circles in Wales. Henry Lloyd-Jones, his beloved father, died in 1922. Decades after his father’s death, Martyn came close to tears when American theologian Carl Henry asked him if his father had been a Christian, because he simply did not know how to respond.

The Doctor always said that he was never a teenager in the meaning that we understand that today. He nearly died in a fire in his childhood home in Wales, and his father’s bankruptcy gave him a sense of responsibility for his family that weighed heavily on him. The Doctor never made jokes from the pulpit, which caused some people to think that he was a somber person. In fact, his sense of humor was infectious and lifelong, never more so than with his family or a close circle of friends with whom he could relax. When he and his brother Vincent launched into their favorite puns, no one could stay glum!

Except for the humor, which was private, and the very profound love and affection he had for his family and close friends, one could say that the public man and the personal were one and the same. His love for debate, for example, and of verbal repartee was no different in a meeting of ministers than around the intimacy of the family table at mealtimes. He was a man who practiced what he preached in whatever context he found himself.

Despite a lack of money for private schooling, the increasingly gifted Martyn was admitted to one of London’s best schools, St. Marylebone Grammar (the Old Philologian), located in Westminster, where he would one day become famous.

He became a medical student at a much younger age than usual at St Bartholemew’s Hospital in London, one of the top medical training schools in the country, and one of the very oldest. It was joked that “you could always tell a Bart’s man, and you could not tell him much.” Here he shone, becoming one of their best and brightest students, and at an unusually young age a full doctor of medicine and also chief clinical assistant to Lord Horder, the royal physician to King George V and the top diagnostic physician of the day.

At Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s memorial service in 1981 an amicable dispute broke out between two of the speakers on what had influenced their late friend’s preaching the most. One of them, Dr. Gaius Davies, a leading London psychiatrist, was surely right to say that the Doctor’s medical training was used by God to make Martyn Lloyd-Jones into the kind of preacher that he later became. Sin was diagnosed as the disease, and Christ was the only remedy. When one thinks of his great definition of preaching, “Logic on fire, theology coming through a man who is on fire,” one can see this clearly—the diagnostic method that he learned as a medical student at Bart’s led him to the logic with which he would dissect sin in his evangelistic message or expound the doctrines so clearly laid out in Scripture. His way of preaching both logically and with great passionate conviction was what made his preaching so unique and persuasive. One can easily see why God sent him to medical school first before he contemplated the ministry.

Being in London changed his life in other ways, too. The Lloyd-Jones family began attending a Welsh chapel in the famous Charing Cross Road, where they met the Phillips family. Thomas Phillips was an eminent eye surgeon with a consulting room in Harley Street. He and his wife, Margaret, and their three children—Ieuan, Bethan, and Tomos John—lived in a big house in Harrow. Ieuan would become a preacher in South Wales; Bethan was a medical student at Bart’s great rival, University College Hospital in London; and Tomos John would later follow his father and become an eye surgeon. Ieuan and Martyn became lifelong friends, but it was Ieuan’s sister, Bethan, whom Martyn noticed! Beautiful and much admired, Bethan was eighteen months older than Martyn, and for many years his feelings for her were unreciprocated. But over the course of time things changed, and in January 1927 they married and, as the famous saying goes, “lived happily ever after!”

Significantly the Phillips family had played a role in the great revivals in Wales...