- 18 June 1944—in the midst of WWII.
- Martyn Lloyd-Jones is 44 years old and the pastor of the Westminster Chapel in London.
- Germany has been bombing London when suddenly all the members of the congregation hear the familiar whistle of another bomb falling towards the city.
- ML-J is at this moment leading the church in prayer.
- He continues to pray until the whistle is too loud for anyone to hear his words.
- Suddenly, the bomb hits the church and damages the building at 11:20 am.
- Plaster falls and hits ML-J’s head.
- As soon as the noise is gone, he picked up with his prayer right where he had left off.
- He only paused for a few seconds.
- This is the life of a man so drawn to God, that nothing else mattered on earth.
- Many godly men like this are kept hidden in relative obscurity, but here is a man that God specially brought to popularity–a man full of God.
- When J. I. Packer heard him preach he said, “I have never heard another preacher with so much of God about him. … The thrust of Lloyd-Jones’ sermons is always to show man small and God great.” 317
Thesis
- Revival most commonly comes among those who are God-centered like Martyn Lloyd Jones.
The life of Martyn Lloyd-Jones
- 1899 – December 20, Born to Henry and Magdalen Lloyd-Jones in Wales.
- 1910 – January 20 – The Lloyd-Jones home burns to the ground with the family barely escaping. Martyn is saved by being thrown from an upstairs window into a blanket below.
- 1911 – – Martyn attends a boarding school in Tregaron Wales for the next three years. He disliked his time at the school and would forever be a vocal antagonist to this British custom. He would later say of his boarding school experience, “I believe that I shall never totally recover from this until I reach that country where we shall never part anymore.” (219)
- 1913 – Martyn decides to become a doctor.
- 1914— The family business fails and Henry claims bankruptcy.
- 1914— Martyn considers dropping out of school to become a bank clerk, but his family sends him to school which sets him up for his medical career.
- 1916 – At 16, Martyn is accepted at the very prestigious St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.
- 1921– Martyn begins working for Sir Thomas Horder, a doctor to the royal family.
- 1922 – His father Henry dies. His brother had died a few years earlier.
- 1923 – He receives his MD degree for his research in subacute bacterial endocarditis. His research is later published.
- 1924 – Martyn Lloyd-Jones is converted.
- 1925– Martyn begins to yield to God’s call to preach.
- 1926 – October 10, – Martyn preaches his first sermon
- 1926— November 28, – Martyn candidates and is accepted at Aberavon, Wales.
- 1927 – January 8, – Martyn marries Bethan Phillips. Wedding gifts: Books by John Owen and Richard Baxter.
- 1927— October 26 – His daughter Elizabeth is born.
- 1929 – Martyn discovers the writings of Jonathan Edwards in a second hand book store as he waits for a train in Cardiff Wales. He would later say “They helped me more than anything else.” (125) Lloyd-Jones would come to evaluate Edwards as the greatest theological mind of all times. (MLJ, The Puritans: Their Origins and Successors, p. 355)
- 1929— Reads Luke Tyerman’s The Life and Times of George Whitefield. “When I read of Whitefield I feel that I have never really preached in my life.”
- 1931 – Harry Wood, a recent convert, expressed his desire to go straight home to Heaven after praying. He later dies at church after opening the church’s prayer meeting. Revival begins with 128 converts that year.
- 1932 – He discovers the writings of B.B. Warfield. This influences him more towards doctrinal and Pauline preaching. He would later confess (1949) that he became too academic because of Warfield’s influence.
- 1935 – He preaches on the radio and later to 7,000 people in Wales.
- 1935— December, – G. Campbell Morgan hears Lloyd-Jones preach for the first time.
- 1936 – April, – Lloyd-Jones preaches at Spurgeon’s Tabernacle and is contacted about becoming their Pastor.
- 1938—After 10 years of pastoring at Aberavon, he seeks another church feeling that his work was done there.
- 1938–September, –Martyn Lloyd-Jones accepts G. Campbell Morgan’s proposal to preach for six months at Westminster Chapel
- 1939 – April 23, – Martyn Lloyd-Jones accepts the call of Westminster Chapel to share pastoral duties with G. Campbell Morgan
- 1939— Sept 3, WWII begins the day before he becomes the Co-pastor at Westminster.
- 1939— His first book of sermons is published, Why does God allow War? Eventually, 95 different books will be published, all his sermons.
- 1940 – Attendance drops significantly due to widespread evacuations. His salary becomes very small.
- 1941— Begins a ministers’ Fraternal at Westminster Chapel.
- 1941— Establishes a church prayer meeting at Westminster Chapel
- 1943 – Lloyd-Jones officially becomes the pastor of Westminster.
- 1943— October3, – Lloyd-Jones establishes the pattern of preaching a sermon of edification for believers in the morning and an evangelistic sermon in the evening.
- 1943–On this Sunday he began his very first expositional series on the book of 1 Peter.
- 1944 – June 18, 1944 – Lloyd-Jones Prays though a V1 attack that damages Westminster chapel. Plaster falls from the ceiling on his head but he continues his pastoral prayer.
- 1945 – January 15, – Lloyd-Jones opens the Evangelical library.
- 1945— October, – Becomes a council member of the China Inland Mission.
- 1946— September – December, – Revival with many conversions.
- 1949 – Summer, – Lloyd-Jones suffers from a serious bout of depression.
- 1949— December, – Lloyd- Jones begins the Puritan Conference with the aid of J.I. Packer.
- 1953 – March – Attacked in the British Weekly for his ICF address “Maintaining the evangelical faith today”.
- 1954– Begins his series of sermons on Spiritual Depression. This would become “the doctor’s” most popular topical messages.
- 1954— March, – Lloyd-Jones is the only well-known minister who does not support the Billy Graham crusade in London.
- 1957 – The Banner of Truth Trust is founded.
- 1958–August – Preaches extensively in South Africa
- 1959 – January 11, – Begins a series of 26 messages on revival to commemorate the revival of 1859.
- 1965– Gets his first home.
- 1966 –October 18, 1966 – Gives his “Evangelical Unity” appeal at the Evangelical Alliance. He calls for separation from compromised denominations. John Stott follows with a rebuttal.
- 1968 – February 25, – Preaches his last Sunday sermon as Pastor.
- 1968–April 14, – Begins his historic addresses on “Preaching and Preachers” at Westminster Seminary.
- 1970 – May- ends the Puritan Conference due to the position of Packer and others on issues of doctrine and separation.
- 1970— R.T. Kendall becomes the Pastor at Westminster Chapel
- 1981 – February – Lloyd-Jones scribbles a note to his family, “Don’t pray for healing. Don’t try to hold me back from the glory.”
- 1981— March 1, – Dr. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones dies on Sunday.
Lessons from his life
- We must constantly preach the bad news before we can do any spiritual good.
- From early on in his ministry he preached to edify believers on Sunday morning and to evangelize on Sunday evenings.
- When asked when he was going to have a crusade, he said, “I have one every week.”
- “The great difference between the Christian and the non-Christian is that the former speaks with humility and meekness.” 96
- “The first work of the Holy Spirit is to convict of sin and to humble men in the presence of God.” 129
- “It is made perfectly clear in the pages of the NT that no man can be saved until, at some time or other, he has felt desperate about himself.” 130
- “The staple of Paul’s preaching was God and judgment.” 316
- His sermons commonly emphasized sin and humility.
- Men felt small when they heard him preach, but they weren’t bothered because they also felt that God was very big.
- Absolutely everything in the Bible is true.
- Because the Bible is inerrant, we must study it thoroughly.
- He loved true doctrine and held firmly to Reformed theology.
- Sometimes in his preaching he would make distinctions based on the whether a word was singular or plural.
- He wanted to separate from those in the churches who tried to diminish parts of the Scripture.
- Because he believed in inerrancy, his sermons were logical, rational, and tightly reasoned.
- When I heard one of his last sermons, his medical training came through several times, as he looked for “the cause before the cure.”
- For example: “Evolution is the biggest hoax in the world in the past 100 years.” 338
- God is most honored and His people are most helped by expositional preaching.
- He preached constantly. Often in the week, he would be speaking on Tuesday through Friday at different churches. In his first year of being a pastor—and for almost all of the next 50—he preached in 54 different churches. 116
- Later in life, he would preach verse by verse through books of the Bible.
- 2 ½ years on Sermon on the Mount
- 8 years on Ephesians
- 13 years on Romans
- He placed very little emphasis on programs in the church, preferring all the children above 3 years old to sit in the service.
- When he found a stage at his first church for practicing acting during the week, he said, “You can heat the church with it.” 88
- Once he was asked to preach on television, and he was told to stop when the light came on. But he refused to obey since he didn’t want to quench the Spirit.
- At 80 years old he was still preaching to large crowds.
- He said preaching is “logic on fire.”
- He believed that preaching must address the mind first.
- But the preacher must not be satisfied until the hearer has truly experienced awe and reverence before God.
- Prayer is as vital to the Christian as blood is to the body.
- The Sunday morning prayers were about 10 minutes long.
- He took time to prepare himself for the prayer and said that there was “nothing more important than to learn how to get oneself into that frame and condition in which one can pray.” Preaching and Preachers, 170.
- “When a man is speaking to God, he is at his very acme. It is the highest activity of the human soul, and therefore it is at the same time the ultimate test of a man’s true spiritual condition. There is nothing that tells the truth about us as Christian people so much as our prayer life. Everything we do in the Christian life is easier than prayer.” Sermon on the Mount, vol. 2, 46.
- He warned that it is far easier to preach than to pray well.
- On one Sunday morning when he was in London a man wanted to kill himself by jumping into the Thames. He suddenly went to the Chapel where he was converted hearing ML-J’s pulpit prayer. 305
- In both pastorates, he sought to devote the congregation to prayer during the week for at least an hour.
- Once in May 1931, they began praying at 7:15 as usual and prayed until ML-J closed the meeting at 10 pm.
- At his first church when the congregation was about 80, they had 40 people coming to pray.
- Harry Wood prayed to death in 1931. 134
- We need to set our hopes on God for revival.
- He longed for revival and saw amazing movements of God’s Spirit several times in his ministry.
- In 1930, he and some other pastors gathered “to consider means for promoting a Revival of Religion.” 124
- Toward this end they pledged:
- To abstain from any sin which would hinder revival.
- To pray daily for 30 minutes that God would send revival.
- To call constantly for true conversion in their churches.
- “Pray for revival? Yes, go on, but do not try to create it, do not attempt to produce it, it is only given by Christ himself. The last church to be visited by a revival is the church trying to make it.” 128
- However, he did not disparage the average means of grace whereby men and women would come to Christ slowly.
- But he wanted nothing to do with fake “revivals.” One newspaper wrote about him: “He had no use for the type of man who was always trying to produce a revival; there were men in the churches today who seemed to regard a revival as a hobby…” 84
- After about 6 months as pastor, his wife was one of the first converts in his ministry. “She had always feared God; her life was upright, and yet she knew that she had no personal consciousness of the forgiveness of sins, no sense of inward joyful communion with Christ.” 110
- Shortly after that other church officers became converted. One “rushed to speak” to ML-J before he left the pulpit. 109
- On one evening 40 people were baptized in his first church.
- Seriousness is a Christian virtue because of the great realities with which they alone deal.
- His biography has 13 photos of ML-J between 15 and 70 where he is not smiling in one of them.
- There are no jokes in his sermons.
- The people would arrive and wait in silence until the worship began.
- There was no band or even choir.
- “If there were celebrities in the congregation he neither knew nor cared.” 302
- “It is not our service; the people do not come there to see us or please us… They, and we, are there to worship God, and to meet with God.” Preaching and Preachers, 263
- He prayed a lengthy Sunday morning pastoral prayer.
- In preaching “the first thing you had to do was to demonstrate to the people that what you were going to do was very relevant and urgently important.”
- The greatest Christian blessing is to know Christ.
- “My request is this: That we all be honest with one another in our conversation and discussions and never profess to believe more than is actually true to our experience.” 89
- For many years, he placed great emphasis on experiential Christianity. He wanted no part of a dead but orthodox church.
- To this end, he started a Wednesday night fellowship meeting where believers would testify about their salvation. (He did not preach at these meetings.)
- Often workers would come straight from work, still in their dirty clothes, in order to pray and hear the testimonies. 140
- “If you honestly believe (and remember it is your responsibility) that you derive greater benefit by spending your day in the country than you do by attending a place of worship, well then, go to the country. Don’t come here if you honestly feel that you do better elsewhere. … All I ask of you is, be consistent. When someone dies in your family, do not come to ask the church in which you do not believe to come to bury him. Go to the seaside for consolation.” 91
- He knew that the churches were helping to produce false converts so he rejected the altar call and things like it.
- Truth is more valuable than friendship, recognition, or opportunity.
- As liberalism grew, the Christians in the major churches decided to talk with the unbelievers who were calling themselves Christians.
- However, this dialogue proceeded on the assumption that these men were true believers.
- By so doing, the true Christians were accepted, but so were the false.
- ML-J would have none of this ecumenism.
- He lost friends and influence because he would not endorse Billy Graham or others like him.
- Yet 50 years late, his fears have come true: the Christians who tried to gain more influence have actually lost their witness.
- ML-J loved the gospel more than influence, fame, or reputation.
Sources
Murray, Iain. The Life of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, single volume.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Preaching and Preachers.
Catherwood, Christopher. Martyn Lloyd-Jones.
Sargent, Tony. The Sacred Anointing.