PRAYING FOR REVIVAL

D.M. Lloyd-Jones:

When did you last hear anyone praying for revival, praying that God might open the windows of heaven and pour out His Spirit? When did you last pray for that yourself? I suggest seriously that we are neglecting this almost entirely. We are guilty of forgetting the authority of the Holy Spirit. We are so interested in ourselves and in our own activities that we have forgotten the one thing that can make us effective. By all means let us continue to pray for the particular efforts, for the minister, and his preaching every Sunday, for all essential organizations and for evangelistic campaigns, if we feel led to have them. But before it all, and after it all, let us pray and plead for revival. When God sends revival He can do more in a single day than in fifty years of all our organization. That is the verdict of sheer history which emerges clearly from the long story of the Church. (Authority, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1984 p. 93)

DISCIPLINE AND THE TRUE CHURCH

Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

There is no purpose in having a basis or a confession of faith unless it is applied. So we must assert the element of discipline as being essential to the true life of the church. And what calls itself a church which does not believe in discipline, and does not use it and apply it, is therefore not a true church. (What is an Evangelical? p. 83)

FAITH

Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

Faith is this extraordinary principle which links man to God; faith is this thing that keeps a man from hell and puts him in heaven; it is the connection between this world and the world to come; faith is this mystic astounding thing that can take a man dead in trespasses and sins and make him live as a new being, a new man in Christ Jesus. (Spiritual Depression – Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 227)

UNION WITH CHRIST

Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

“Ultimately it comes down to this, that the real cause of our trouble is failure to realize our union with Christ. Many Seem to think that Christianity means that we are delivered in that sense that our sins are forgiven. But that is only the beginning, but one aspect of it. Essentially salvation means union with Christ, being one with Christ. We have been crucified with Christ – ‘I am crucified with Christ’, says Paul. ‘All that has happened to Him has happened to me. I am one with Him.’ Read the fifth and sixth chapters of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. The teaching is that we have died with Christ, have been buried with Christ, have risen with Christ, and are seated in the heavenly places in Christ and with Christ. That is the teaching of the Scriptures. ‘Ye are dead and your life is hid with Christ in God’ (Colossians 3. 3). The old man has been crucified and all that belonged to Christ, you are risen with Christ. ‘Reckon ye yourselves then to be dead unto sin but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord’ (Romans 6. 11).” (Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure, 74-75)

SPIRITUAL DEPRESSION

Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

The Scriptures do grant clearly by their teaching that it is possible for a Christian to be depressed. Not that they justify this, but they do recognize the fact. (Spiritual Depression – Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 107)

DO YOU CALL YOURSELF A CHRISTIAN?

Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

There is something essentially wrong with a man who calls himself a Christian and who can listen to a truly evangelistic sermon without coming under conviction again, without feeling something of his own unworthiness, and rejoicing when he hears the Gospel remedy being presented. (Preachers and Preaching, Zondervan, 1971, p. 150)

MAKE YOUR REQUESTS KNOWN TO GOD

Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

“You pray and make your requests made known unto God, and God will do something.’ It is not your prayer that is going to do it, it is not you who is going to do it, but God. ‘The peace of God that passeth all understanding’—He, through it all, ‘will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus’.” (Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure, 270)

ALWAYS PRAY

Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

“Always respond to every impulse to pray. The impulse to pray may come when you are reading or when you are battling with a text. I would make an absolute law of this – always obey such an impulse. Where does it come from? It is the work of the Holy Spirit (Phil 2:12-13). This often leads to some of the most remarkable experiences in the life of the minister. So never resist, never postpone it, never push it aside because you are busy. Give yourself to it, yield to it; and you will find not only that you have not been wasting time with respect to the matter with which you are dealing but that actually it has helped you greatly in that respect. You will experience an ease and a facility in understanding what you were reading, in thinking, in ordering matter for a sermon, in writing, in everything which is quite astonishing. Such a call to prayer must never be regarded as a distraction; always respond to it immediately, and thank God if it happens to you frequently.” (Preaching & Preachers, 170-171)

THE GREAT CAMPAIGN

Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

The main trouble with the Christian Church today is that she is too much like a clinic, too much like a hospital; that is why the great world is going to hell outside! Look at the great campaign, look at it objectively, look at it from God’s standpoint. Forget yourself and your temporary troubles and ills for the moment; fight in the army. It is not a clinic you need; you must realize that we are in a barracks, and that we are involved in a mighty campaign.

The Altar Call and Eleven Choruses of “Just as I Am”

Quoting D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

1. It is wrong to put direct pressure on the will. The will should always be approached primarily through the mind, the intellect, and then through the affections. The action of the will should be determined by those influences.

2. In the end it may produce a condition in which what has determined the response of the man who ‘comes forward’ is not so much the Truth itself as, perhaps, the personality of the evangelist, or some vague general fear, or some other kind of influence.

3. The preaching of the Word and the call for decision should not be separated in our thinking.

4. This method surely carries in it the implication that sinners have an inherent power of decision and of self-conversion.

The Church

Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones by Ron Adair

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

If you go back through the long history of the Church, you will find that it has often counted most, and has been most used by God, when there have been just a handful of people who were agreed in spirit and in doctrine. God took hold of them and used them and did mighty things through them. But when there was only one Church in the whole of western Europe, what did she lead to? The Dark Ages. And yet it seems to me that this great lesson of history is being entirely forgotten and ignored at this present time. I say these things not because I am animated by any controversial spirit, but because I have a zeal for the truth as I find it in the Scriptures, and regard it as tragic to note the way in which Scripture is being twisted and perverted in the interests of a unity which is not a unity. (Great Doctrines of the Bible – The Church)

Praise the Name of God

I will praise the name of God with a song; I will magnify him with thanksgiving. (Psalm 69:30 ESV)

Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

“We tend to take all the gifts and pleasures and happiness and the joy without saying much to God. We take our health and strength, our food and clothing and our loved ones, all for granted; but the moment anything goes wrong we start grumbling and complaining and we say ‘Why should God do this to me, why should this happen to me?’ How slow we are to thank and swift to grumble.”

The Nature of Love

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

Now this is the very nature of love. It must express itself; it is always active; and if our love does not do that, I say it is not true love. You see, the real trouble with the person who is seated there in the study reading beautiful poems or books about love and who feels that he is controlled by it and that he is a fine Christian is this: What is really happening to that person is that he is simply in love with himself, because he appreciates these elevating thoughts. He is loving himself because he thinks he is in love. He has turned in upon himself, and that is the very antithesis to love; love does not look at itself – it is absorbed in the object of its love.

Facing Suffering in a New Way

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

We must think of suffering in a new way, we must face everything in a new way. And the way in which we face it all is by reminding ourselves that the Holy Spirit is in us. There is the future, there is the high calling, there is the persecution, there is the opposition, there is the enemy. I see it all. I must admit also that I am weak, that I lack the necessary powers and propensities. But instead of stopping there . . . I say, ‘But the Spirit of God is in me. God has given me his Holy Spirit.’ . . . What matters . . . is not what is true of us but what is true of Him. (I highly recommend – Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Cure)

Martyn Lloyd Jones: Salt and Light

Martyn Lloyd-Jones‘ sermon on Matthew 5:14:

The first thing our Lord said of us was, ‘Ye are the salt of the earth’; and it is only after this that He says, ‘Ye are the light of the world’. Why does He put it in that order instead of the reverse? . . . Scripture, in dealing with the Christian, always emphasizes first what he is, before it begins to speak of what he does. . . . Far too often we Christians tend to reverse the order. We have spoken in a very enlightened manner, but we have not always lived as the salt of the earth. Whether we like it or not, our lives should always be the first thing to speak; and if our lips speak more than our lives it will avail very little. So often the tragedy has been that people proclaim the gospel in words, but their whole life and demeanor has been a denial of it. The world does not pay much attention to them. Let us never forget this order deliberately chosen by our Lord: ‘the salt of the earth’ before ‘the light of the world’. We >are< something before we begin to >act< as something. The two things should always go together, but the order and sequence should be the one that He sets down here. (Studies in the Sermon on the Mount Volume 1 [Eerdmans, 1959-60], p. 164-65)