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.

Christmas as an Evangelistic Opportunity

Christmas is one of the easiest times to talk about the Lord Jesus. He is, after all, the whole point, though it's easy for the point to be lost in the froth of the inconsequential. If the percentage of Christians who share their faith on a regular basis is a trustworthy gauge, then apparently talking about Jesus is not easy. It's not as if we need a special reason to bring up the Creator of the Universe from time to time with those who owe Him every breath and heartbeat. If we have specific commands from God, do we need special concessions from sinners? I think not. It is not as if the Lord said, “Go out into all the world and wait for the right moment.”
We will do well, though, to consider how best to begin. Many Christians feel the need to engage the unbeliever on neutral ground at first and then hope for a segue which doesn't jar or alienate. May all who opt for indirect approaches be fruitful in evangelistic labor. But a direct approach attracts me most.
"Have you ever heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?" is a question blessed in my generation."If you were to die tonight do you know for certain that you would go to heaven?" is the first of two diagnostic questions made popular by D. James Kennedy. The second question is "What would you say to God if He asked you why He should let you into His heaven?"As an unbeliever Dr. Kennedy heard those words spoken on the radio by a Philadelphia Pastor named Donald Grey Barnhouse. It seems likely that Barnhouse learned the approach from CH Spurgeon who asked the questions to his cab driver in 19th century London. The cabs were pulled by horses in those days. People get along in cabs much faster now. But they still get to heaven or hell at pretty much the same pace and by the same familiar routes. Our apathy or activism may play a role in hastening progress in one direction or another.
"Have you ever thought about becoming a follower of Jesus of Nazareth?" is my own favorite opening. No hidden agenda there. No wasted time. That way the Holy Spirit can bring honor to the Name of Jesus from the outset.
Whether the answer is ‘yes’ or ‘no’ we follow with "Would you allow me to tell you how I began to follow and why I've never regretted that step?"
If we don't speak of the Lord at Christmas when will we speak of the Lord?
If not now when?
If not ourselves, who then?
How will they believe unless they hear?
Because the Lord has come we go.
I relish all the down-time at Christmas.
But Christ did not come to make us passive.

The Incarnation

;...and the Word became flesh." John 1:14


Less than two weeks until Christmas.
When we were children it pained us that Christmas came so slow. Now that we are adults, it surprises us that it comes so fast.
The Incarnation is a permanent thing.
God Became Man.
When Jesus was born on earth He never ceased to be God. When He ascended into heaven He never ceased to be Man.
It is a Man (God too, of course) who intercedes for us at the Father's right hand.

"For there is one God and one Mediator between God and man, the MAN, Christ Jesus..." (I Timothy 2:5).

Strong comfort that. He was touched by our infirmities. He KNOWS. Not by some remote intellectual knowing but by the knowledge of shared experience. He is Immanuel, God with us. He knows what it is like to live in a fallen place (with 'mosquitoes, tapeworms and rabies' in the words of Vern Poythress' apt summary). He knows us not as an astronomer knows a planet by peering through a telescope. He knows us as a Son knows a family by being conceived in a human womb and sleeping in a crowded room.

He came to set His people free ---far as the curse is found. And the curse is found everywhere.

There is no patch under the sun uncontaminated by the curse of sin. He provides the antidote by swallowing the poison Himself. He tasted death for every man. He was born with us that He might die for us.
And so He did.
O come let us adore Him.
Born the King of Angels.

The Way Jesus Launched

A few years ago I was talking with someone who knows a lot more about Christian ministry than I. Such folk are not hard to find, but this mentor is especially sagacious, and I relish his insights. We were lamenting the tendency of one celebrated and wildly successful (if numbers, popularity and resources count as success) Christian group to focus almost exclusively on the fashionable and the well heeled. My friend noted that Jesus practiced the exact opposite. For proof he cited that incident in the region of Gadara on the far side of the lake. You will remember that the case involved madmen, demons and pigs. Decorous it was not.
I thought back to that conversation as I spent a little time in Matthew 8 and 9 yesterday.
The Sermon on the Mount stretches across the whole of Matthew 5-7, preceded by the Temptation in Chapter 4 and the Baptism in Chapter 3. Working our way back to Chapter 2 we are already at the Birth Narrative. So effectively the beginning of Jesus’ ministry proper, at least after that stunning inaugural sermon, commences at Matthew 8.
How then does He begin?
What emphases does He foreshadow?
Is there an intentional (could Jesus ever be unintentional?) pattern here meant as a model for us?
Those initial signals constitute a kind of gauntlet thrown down. He begins by cleansing a leper. Then He heals a Centurion’s servant from a distance after offering to enter the man’s home. While that Centurion had gained some favor with the Jews he was still a Gentile and an occupier. Jesus extols the Gentile’s faith noting that it was especially praiseworthy compared to the faith of Israel. This from the Jewish Messiah! Impolitic that. Not at all what was expected. At the beginning of Chapter 9 Jesus calls the author of the First Gospel, Matthew himself, to become a member of the Twelve. He thus renders permanent His association with the despised for the balance of His biological Life. His was not a perfunctory ministry to the outcast. He actually invited a tax-collector to live with Him and become His permanent envoy.
Can we see a pattern yet?
He appears to actually favor the Low and the Loathed.
Do you think these memoirs were contrived?
Impossible!!!
If these accounts were spun from fancy they would have been crafted in a far different way.
The agenda of Jesus of Nazareth did not originate in the First Century.
The language of Jesus of Nazareth was not originally spoken on this planet.
And that was just the way He started out.
Outreach to fallen women, Samaritans and the Zaccheus-like wretches of the earth follow in their turn.
Chesterton said we ought to sing “Glory to God in the Lowest” when we hail the coming of this Christ.
He seemed always to specialize in the unfashionable and the counterintuitive.
In Chapter 8 we learn that Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law. Mark informs us that about the same time the paralytic was lowered from a roof rudely peeled off someone’s home. That house was likely Peter’s. Would it be amiss to imagine that Simon Peter may have been among that vast number of the married and the male who secretly prefer a healthy roof to a healthy mother-in-law? The very presence of Jesus seemed always to precipitate the unexpected. And often the uninvited. That’s one reason we’re sure the Gospel accounts were not made up. Men don’t make up that which they cannot imagine. The life and teaching of Jesus would have settled no First Century controversy in a hoped for direction. He vindicated no cherished position. He enfranchised no school of thought.
The message He brought, the model He showed pleased neither the Scribes nor the Pharisees. Not the Herodian or the Sadduccee, neither the Essene nor the Zealot would have been attracted to His teaching. Their prior convictions and commitments ruled out such a possibility. Only an Anna here or a Simeon there would have been pleased, and those two rare and worthy ones were in heaven well before He approached young manhood.
No, the thing cannot have been contrived.
“Cui bono?” the ancients sometimes asked. For whose good? Who would have profited from the doctrine and actions of this Jesus?
Nobody.
No one but the hopeless sinner.
None but the Sovereign God.

The Capital of Darkness

Last week Jane and I traveled to Krakow, the beautiful “Little Prague”, on the Vistula, Poland’s former capital and home to John-Paul II. While there I spent an afternoon at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp.
Auschwitz is one of those places many want to visit once and nobody wants to visit twice. I was amazed at the size of the crowds so late in the season.
Samuel Johnson said that we are more concerned about a pain in our little fingers than the suffering of thousands we do not know. In the main I suspect he was right. The exception may be Auschwitz. It marks us. It inspires a kind of ultimate sobriety and changes the way we look at the world. We’ve grown accustomed to endless analyses of the Holocaust and its lessons. Still the lessons should not be ignored. We may uncover new lessons if we refuse to forget.
1) Anti-Semitism in any form is a thing to be opposed. This species of iniquity is particularly malignant and has a tendency to metastasize quickly. And anti-Semitism is still alive and well in Eastern Europe. A European poll conducted a few years back showed that a plurality of Europeans believe that Israel is the chief cause of terrorism. One of Hungary’s two major parties, appealing at one level because it champions more conservative and religious causes, still fosters a dark tolerance of anti-Semitism. This alone is sufficient ground for the Christian to withhold support.
2) Of course Hitler did not reserve his malice exclusively for the Jews. Thousands of Slavs and Gypsies were murdered at Auschwitz and other camps. Secular saviors tend to become advocates of liquidation sooner or later. It is likely that his racial obsessions cost him the War. The Ukrainians initially welcomed the Germans as liberators. That soon changed when the Nazis treated them as sub humans because they were Slavs. The Germans lost a valuable ally who could have turned the tide against Russia. Had Jewish genius been enlisted on the side of Germany it is hard to imagine Germany losing. But if the Nazis had honored the Jews they wouldn’t have been Nazis
3) The capacity for human evil is apparently unlimited. You know you are beginning to think theologically when you hear the phrase “The Fall” and think of Genesis 3 instead of Autumn. We are fallen. The sin nature asserts itself. If that nature proceeds unrelieved by regeneration and the restraining power of the Holy Spirit the consequences can be dire. Cicero remarked that in war all law is suspended, but there’s no doubt that the Nazis would have continued their extermination program after the war. Dachau was built before the war began. Our potential for wickedness is staggering. Chesterton wrote that it is surprising that the doctrine of human depravity is so universally rejected because it is the one Christian doctrine which can be proved empirically.

4) To sin against spiritual light and privilege invites woeful results. The Germans as a nation were the first to embrace the Bible through the Reformation. It may be claimed that they were also the first to reject biblical authority through Liberal Theology and the Higher Criticism. It’s only fair for a fiercely Protestant observer like myself to note that the Nazis appropriated many of Martin Luther’s anti-Jewish rants for their own purposes. I have no inclination to defend Luther on this score except to quote his biographer Roland Bainton who pointed out that most of those abysmal utterances came in the last two years of Luther’s life when he had, in Bainton’s words, “lost his emotional poise.”
5) We may thank God for the noble few who stood up. We remember the Dutch family who sheltered Ann Frank. Corrie ten Boom and her sister stand out. At Munich University there were those intrepid students called The White Rose, who along with Professor Kurt Huber, were decapitated for their courage. Let us note that 40,000 Germans were executed for opposing the regime including the heroic Dietrich Bonhoeffer who could have saved himself at the end by playing along with Himmler’s plan to make a separate peace with the Allies. He refused and was hung for his principles.

Religion itself is no cure for the world’s murderous tendencies. It is a false religion which convulses the world as I write. It was a professedly religious people who insisted that the Savior be crucified. Pilate, the representative of the secular power was quite satisfied to beat Jesus and let Him go. And let us be honest. Untold savagery has been prosecuted in the name of Christ in the history of the world.
But those who use the name of Christ as a pretense for slaughter do not employ the doctrine of Christ Who laid down His life for the nations.
The Lord gives us no promise that there will not be another Holocaust, perhaps next time directed against Christians. We are only assured of wars and rumors of wars. No vague religious sentiment or specific religious enterprise will help. It is that personal relationship entered into by faith in Christ’s promises which we need. The specific trust in Jesus that leads to actual Christ-likeness is the only hope for us as individuals.
Corporately the only hope is the actual return of Jesus Himself.
It can’t come too soon for me.

The Mustering of the Host

“The Lord of Hosts is mustering a host for battle.” Isaiah 13:4

One day I may write a book called “Errors of the Quiet Time.” It would be mainly autobiographical. My qualifications as author include an habitual underachievement in the devotional realm. It is something I wish to mend.

One error is coming to prayer keen to involve God in my plan. Most will know Bill Bright’s Four Spiritual Laws, the most effective evangelistic tool of my generation. As a new Christian it was one of the first things I was taught. As an older Christian it may be the last thing I learn. The first law reads, “God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life.” I fear I often imperfectly incorporate that truth into my approach to God.

Too often I treat God as a prospect for my current enthusiasms. It is as if I say: “Dear God, I know you love me, therefore I’m sure you’ll want to bless my plan.” Thus Law One is turned upon its head.

How can we forget that God has a plan?

In January I wrote of God The Amazing Star-Breather (Louie Giglio’s term). Louie masterfully expounded the theme of God the Creator--the God who fills the vastness of the inter-stellar reaches and fashions the stars in their magnitude. Let us also remember that God manages the microcosm, including that microcosm called me. He manages the microcosm of my days and nights. The God who has a plan for eternity has a plan for the hours. Let us then celebrate The God who Numbers Hairs on Heads, The Knower of Sparrows, The Tailor to Lilies. As we get to know this God, we will discover His plan for us.

When I began the Christian life it felt like enrolling in a class. As I go on it feels more like preparing for a war. Years ago I heard a professor lecture about the run-up to the Trojan War. He told of the enlistment phase. There was reluctance on the part of the Greek champions to risk their safety for an unfortunate husband in pursuit of a faithless wife. Odysseus, the most resourceful, feigned madness, while Achilles, the manliest among them, disguised himself as a woman! After being unmasked by Agamemnon, both Odysseus and Achilles took their places in the expedition to Troy. Classical scholars have a name for that enlistment phase. They call it The Mustering of the Host.

The Great Apostle compares the Christian life to the life of a soldier (2 Timothy 2:4). With those who rise early to march and to fight, we share a kindred calling. In its current and cosmic phase Christian experience takes on the shape of battle. As I read the reports of the G-20 Summit and the speeches before the U.N. General Assembly, I thought of Psalm 2. The heathen rage and the peoples imagine a vain thing. The rulers still take counsel against the Lord and against His anointed. What are the toxic rants of Gadhafi and Achmedenejad but a raging? There are those who submit to God’s rule. Most do not. We are a minority against the armed and the powerful. God’s plan for us may necessarily include collisions. Our part is not to take the life of another. We are advanced beyond Old Testament warfare. We are New Testament believers. Our weapons are of a different kind (2 Corinthians 10:4-5). We take up our life to lay it down.

A few step forward boldly. Others must be wooed. Some shrink back.
So it is in the world. So it is in the Church.
May we enlist among the eager.
When we do God will reveal His plan and assign our role.

We go with those sensitive to God’s honor and jealous for God’s glory.
May our sense of privilege be obvious.
We start at break of day.
That’s when the muster begins.

Five Things About September 1rst

‘He maketh peace in thy borders…’ Psalm 147:14

It’s a beautiful September morning in the old Hungarian capital. We hope to visit Krakow this month, perhaps next week. A missionary who was in our wedding lives there and we’ve never been.
Seventy years ago today Adolph Hitler fulfilled his own wish to visit Poland. Before daylight that morning he sent 40 divisions over the frontier and the Second World War was on .It was less than 21 years after the Armistice which ended the previous war.

What have we learned?
1) There will always be war. Jesus said there would be wars and rumors of wars. Jesus also declared the poor would always be with us. At the beginning of the 20th Century many of the most celebrated thinkers in the English-speaking world (men like HG Wells and Bernard Shaw) believed that the end of war and poverty was not only possible but near. The great hope was socialism. The founding of the Soviet state appeared to those people to make that dream even more plausible. How did a Galilean Carpenter born in the First Century know more about the 20th Century than the leading intellectual lights who entered the 20th Century as adults?
My guess is that it is because long before He made anything in that Nazareth shop He made the world and everything in it.
2) Pacifism is an admirable ideal. It is seldom a practical possibility. A very high percentage of European Christians are pacifists. Our greatest living preacher (my opinion) is a pacifist, a unilateralist and was a conscientious objector in WW II. His name is John Stott. Nearly all Eastern European and Russian Christians are against capital punishment. There are good historical reasons for that. But should our fathers and grandfathers have allowed Hitler to kill ALL the Jews, ALL the Gypsies, and All the courageous people in Germany who stood up? Should Hitler have been allowed to enslave all the Slavs? Would it have been better if we had not even tried to rescue Ann Frank and Dietrich Bonhoeffer before they perished? Is that what God wanted? I don’t think so. It would be possible to make a nearly airtight New Testament case for pacifism were it not for one verse: “… he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.” It’s a position we don’t normally associate with Jesus but there it is in Luke 22:36. While we are in Krakow we will make the obligatory visit to Auschwitz. The place holds a lesson which begs to be mastered.
3) Some forms of evil are intransigent. Perhaps I should say that evil by its very nature is intransigent. Hitler could not be TALKED out of Austria, the Sudetenland, Prague or the Danzig corridor. He had to be evicted by force.
4) Moral clarity is elusive in war. Both sides accumulate considerable guilt. Stalin helped Germany carve up Poland as Hitler’s admiring accomplice. At the end of the War Poland was still enslaved, not by the Germans but by the Soviet Union.
5) The answer individually is regeneration. The answer globally is the Coming of the Son of Man. It is a tired objection that some of the worst wars have been religious wars. Jesus did not exempt religious wars from His prophecy. It was religious people who killed Him. When professing Christians are guilty of aggressive warfare or wanton slaughter they are not being faithful to the New Testament. Indulge my prejudice please but I don’t think either Communist ideology or the Koran can be said to offer comparable safeguards against all which leads to war.
May peace come soon to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Sudan, and to all the earth’s habitable spaces.
And a September full of peaceful and pleasant things to you all.
Even so come quickly Lord Jesus.
Selah.