Birthday of a Phenomenon

Martyn Lloyd-Jones (December 19, 1899-March 1, 1981)

Martyn Lloyd-Jones was born this day in Cardiff 110 years ago, the year Dwight L. Moody died. In my opinion he was the greatest expository preacher in English in the 20th Century. He was one of three sons born to Henry Lloyd-Jones a Welsh dairyman who moved his family to London during Martyn's childhood. His story is remarkable because of what he walked away from and the brilliant effectiveness he sustained as an auto-didact. As for ministry preparation he was entirely self-taught with no formal theological training.
He qualified in medicine and a brilliant career loomed. One of the Medical Professors at St. Bartholomew's Hospital where he trained was Lord Thomas Horder the most famous doctor in Britain. Lord Horder was the physician to Prime Ministers and the glitterati of London society. He was also Physician-in-Waiting to the King. His fame rested largely on the fact that as King Edward VII lay dying, in 1910, he called for Lord Horder. During his training M L-J disputed a diagnosis of the great man. L-J was able to make his diagnosis by a manual external probing of the patient’s spleen, something Horder was not able to do. Time proved the student right and the teacher wrong. Though Horder was not a Christian, he responded with magnanimity and invited L-J to join his prestigious Harley Street practice upon graduation. At about the same time (1926) L-J married Bethan Phillips, the only child of a Welsh doctor and a physician in her own right. As women physicians were rare in those days one can only guess at how over-qualified she must truly have been.
Sometime in his student days Martyn Lloyd-Jones came to know Christ personally. A sense of a call to ministry began to grow. One hundred per-cent of his counselors urged him to stay in medicine, though some suggested medical missions. His own pastor at Charing Cross Welsh Chapel assured him that if he had his life to live over he would have been a physician! It was during the Christmas season that the crisis came. Some honeymooning friends from Wales visited the recently married Lloyd-Jones' in London. The two couples decided to attend the Theatre. Exiting the performance a Salvation Army band approached ringing their bells and beating their drums. Some would be understandably embarrassed as the shabbily dressed gospelers drew close to the fashionable West End theatre crowd in their furs and finery. At that moment Martyn Lloyd-Jones realized he KNEW. The juxtaposition of the two competing fellowships was overpowering. Later he compared the experience to the scene in Wagner's Tannhäuser when there is a call from the Pilgrims competing against the pull of the world. Looking upon the down market evangelists M L-Jones said that he realized "These are my people" Looking upon his fellow theatre goers he realized, "These are not my people."
Immediately he resigned his Medical Practice and left London for a struggling Mission Church in a poor Welsh mining town called Aberavon. The decision must have been excruciating because his wife gave up her career as well. It was all the more surprising because they realized later that she wasn't a Christian at the time.
He stayed in Wales for 12 years before becoming G. Campbell-Morgan's co-Pastor at Westminster Chapel in London (near Buckingham Palace) in 1939. He became Senior Minister in 1943. He never had a formal welcome to the church because the weekend he began England declared war on Germany. He never had a formal goodbye because he resigned quickly in 1968 due to impending heart surgery. His ministry was remarkable for many reasons including:
1) He preached the Bible, verse by verse through books, a rare thing in those days. Even Spurgeon hadn't done that.
2) He resurrected and relished the powerfully theologized pulpit emphases of the Reformers and the Puritans whose doctrines he loved and whose holiness he imitated.
3) He was an activist who catalyzed movements. He helped Inter-Varsity in their critical early days. He helped bring the Evangelical Library to London and established the Westminster Conference, an annual lecture series on Puritan history and theology. He encouraged the launch of the Banner of Truth Trust in 1957, the foremost publisher of Puritan and Reformed literature in the world.
4) Although he published little while in active pastoral ministry after his retirement a steady stream of books began to flow.
He was not perfect. He could be hard to get along with. And he could be narrow. One of the first things he did at Westminster Chapel was to abolish the choir. His book Joy Unspeakable (published posthumously without his oversight) shows that even a great mind and arduous study cannot always compensate entirely for a lack of theological training.
But he was a giant and a great man.
He should always be studied.
My own favorites are his expositions of Roman 5 and volume two of Romans 8.
Real experts on his writings usually list ‘Spiritual Depression’ and ‘Studies in the Sermon on the Mount’ in the first rank.
He should always be honored.
It would be hard to imagine 20th Century evangelicalism without him. We would have been much the poorer; of that there can be no doubt.
May God be praised for giving him to the Church.
And may God raise up more like him before it's too late.