The Christ-Centered Preaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones E-Book

Martyn Lloyd-Jones

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 581

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Throughout history, there have been certain figures who have stood the test of time and had an enduring impact on the church at large. One such person was the famed Welsh preacher Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. In this carefully curated collection of sermons, contemporary readers are introduced to one of the most influential pastors of the 20th century. Each sermon in this volume is preceded by a unique introduction detailing when it was preached, what Lloyd-Jones was doing at the time, why the historical context gave rise to the sermon, and how its message relates to the modern world. Compiled and expertly edited by his daughter and grandson, this powerful anthology will help Christians learn from Lloyd-Jones's prophetic preaching—even today.

Leseprobe

THE CHRIST-CENTERED PREACHING OF

MARTYN LLOYD-JONES

Classic Sermons For The Church Today

MARTYN LLOYD-JONES

edited by

ELIZABETH CATHERWOOD and CHRISTOPHER CATHERWOOD

The Christ-Centered Preaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Catherwood and Ann Beatt

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

See page 275 for a list of the original sources and permission statements for the contents of this volume.

Cover design: Dual Identity, inc.

Cover image: Richard Solomon Artists, Mark Summers

First printing 2014

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-4102-5 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-4105-6 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-4103-2 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-4104-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lloyd-Jones, David Martyn

[Sermon Selections]

   The Christ-centered preaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones : classic sermons for the church today / Martyn Lloyd Jones ; edited by Elizabeth Catherwood and Christopher Catherwood.

        1 online resource. — (Theologians on the Christian life)

   1 online resource.

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

   ISBN 978-1-4335-4103-2 (pdf) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4104-9 (mobi) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4105-6 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4102-5 (print)

   1. Sermons, English--20th century. I. Catherwood, Elizabeth, editor of compilation. II. Title.

BV4253

252'.058–dc23

2014008638

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

CONTENTS

Introduction 1  No Substitute From Preaching and Preachers 2  The Narrowness of the Gospel (Matthew 7:13–14) From Evangelistic Sermons at Aberavon 3  The Final Answer to All Our Questions (Romans 8:28) From Why Does God Allow War? 4  Is the Gospel Still Relevant? From Truth Unchanged, Unchanging 5  Practicing the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:28–29) From Studies in the Sermon on the Mount 6  Mind, Heart, and Will (Romans 6:17) From Spiritual Depression 7  My Purpose and Method (Deuteronomy 29:29) From Great Doctrines of the Bible 8  The Christian Message to the World (Ephesians 2:4) From God’s Way of Reconciliation 9  The Purpose of Revival (Joshua 4:21–24) From Revival10 The Spirit Himself Bears Witness (Romans 8:16) From Romans: Exposition of Chapter 8:5–1711 The Only Hope (1 Corinthians 6:9–11) From The Kingdom of God12 He Is Our Peace (Galatians 6:14) From The Cross13 Where Art Thou? (Genesis 3:9) From The Gospel in Genesis14 Seeking the Face of God (Psalm 27) From Seeking the Face of God15 Why Christ Had to Suffer (Acts 8:30) From Acts: Chapters 1–816 With Him in the Glory (John 17:24) From The Assurance of Our Salvation17 More Than Conquerors (John 4:28–30) From Living WaterSourcesNotes

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 both in 1859 and in 1904—indeed Bethan and her older brother had witnessed much of the latter revival personally as their father had sent them there to see and experience it for themselves. Revival was to be a major preoccupation of the Doctor’s life. In 1959, one hundred years after the Great Awakenings both in the United States and in Wales, he was to preach one of his most famous sermon series on the subject of revival itself and how the Bible saw it. He longed to see revival himself, and though he witnessed it on a small scale in parts of his ministry in Wales and believed that Christians should pray for it unceasingly, he was never to experience it on the scale of those great outpourings about which he loved to preach.

Martyn would look back to his early days in medicine and say that he was not then a Christian, but the hound of heaven was after him, convicting him of sin, but also working on his conscience in a manner that showed him how man’s cures were not God’s cures. Many of the Bart’s patients were from the top echelons of British society and led lives that were not attractive to behold.

In due time the Holy Spirit worked in him in two different ways. First, he was converted to his own true faith in Jesus Christ. But second, he realized that while he was mixing with educated and privileged people in London, the poor Welsh folk from whom he had come were living in spiritual darkness.

So at the age of twenty-six the Doctor decided to give up what would have been an immensely prominent medical career in London, the capital not just of Britain but of the British Empire at the time, and return to Wales. He would go, not as a doctor, but as a physician of souls, as a pastor for the Welsh Forward Movement, part of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist group of his childhood.

This move, coupled with his wedding, was so astonishing that it actually made the national press! The newlyweds went to Sandfields in Aberavon, a rundown part of South Wales that after the Great Depression hit was to become poorer still, with many of the local workers—from the steel works and the docks—out of work. Alcoholism was rife among them.

But these were the people in need of the gospel and to whom he had been called. From 1927 to 1938 he had a ministry there that is still spoken of and remembered because of the impact that it made.

Their first child was a daughter, Elizabeth, whose childhood years in such circumstances were to make an impression upon her that has never left her. With the birth of Ann over nine years later, the Lloyd-Jones quartet was completed, giving him the family and emotional security needed as the human base for his God-given ministry, first in Wales and then in London and the world beyond.

What is significant for us now as it was then is that he treated the congregation with the same intellectual courtesy and respect that he would have given his socially eminent patients in London. He knew, as he would often boast, that the ordinary working man (though often unemployed) could, if taught, properly understand God’s truth and biblical theology every bit as well as a university professor. He never, throughout his life, condescended or dumbed down the gospel message—something that both students from Third World countries and also children appreciated in later years as he treated all of them as intellectual equals, fully capable of grasping the most complex truths.

If one reflects upon this it is wholly biblical—only Luke and Paul were educated among the writers of the New Testament, and most of the disciples were simple fishermen. Yet it was just such a group of people that turned the world upside down, transformed the Roman Empire, and spread Christianity across the globe.

Note that the sermon we have chosen for this period of time is evangelistic, and then think of the educational background of those listening.

As his wife demonstrates in her small book Memories of Sandfields, extraordinary things happened in their time in Wales, with the unlikeliest people becoming gloriously saved. This was no seeker-sensitive church—in fact some of the first things he did was to scrap the choir and abolish the anti drink Temperance League—alcoholics did indeed go on to give up their drunken ways but through being converted and not via well-meaning middle-class good works.

This being a brief summary of his life, we can now say that his fame spread, even across the Atlantic. He came to love the United States, spending as many summers there as possible, preaching in many places. During his recovery from cancer in 1969, he delivered his master lectures on preaching to the students of Westminster Theological Seminary near Philadelphia, one of which appears first in this book.

In 1938 the then eminent preacher J. Campbell Morgan asked him to become his joint minister at Westminster Chapel, one of the biggest Free Churches in Britain and a place with a global reputation. Largely forgotten today, Morgan was one of the pulpit giants of his time. This would be a major change for the Doctor, leaving his successful ministry in Wales.

He decided to accept, and when Morgan retired in 1943 the Doctor became sole minister, remaining there until cancer forced his retirement a quarter of a century later in 1968. It is for his ministry at Westminster Chapel that he is most famous, and most of the sermons in this book were preached there. It was certainly one of the biggest platforms that a non-Anglican could have. But such was the power of his preaching that he soon became renowned for it not just in Britain but also in the United States and in the world beyond. The Chapel might have been his base, but in reality his ministry was soon global, especially after the war.

After 1945 he was in effect able to build up his own congregation, with folk coming increasingly from all over the southeast of England, some from many miles away, to attend Westminster Chapel. So much so in fact that people had to stay all day, arriving in time for the eleven o’clock morning service and not leaving until coffee after the evening service, which lasted until around eight thirty or later. Temporary wartime lunch facilities became permanent, and hundreds of people both lunched there and had tea after the afternoon Bible classes (the British equivalent of an all-age Sunday school in the United States). The Chapel, while geographically disparate, was a community.

It was of course his preaching that drew people in numbers unique for London—only the ministry of John Stott a few miles away at All Souls Langham Place came anywhere near the congregational size that Westminster Chapel witnessed in these years. Indeed some of those listening to the Doctor on Sundays were young curates from All Souls, including a profoundly impressed young Anglican theologian named James Packer. This period, Packer was later to recall, was Martyn Lloyd-Jones at his peak of unmatched excellence.

The Sunday morning sermons were preached to Christians, and the evenings were essentially evangelistic, though as much Scripture-based and expository as those in the mornings. The Doctor would refuse to let his own sermons be regarded as authoritative. Everything had to be proved from the words of Scripture itself.

However, some of the great sermons he gave during this period were on apologetics and on the great doctrines of Scripture. If one is Bible based, there is no clash between apologetics and exposition, since apologetics flows naturally from the truth of God as seen in Scripture as well as from the world that God has made and that we see around us. It is significant that the sermon we have chosen from this time, from Truth Unchanged, Unchanging, was one preached in the United States, for he was becoming as well known there as he was back home.

Around this time he also became the first chairman of the executive committee of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES), of which he later became the president. IFES was truly global and indeed is more so today than ever, since areas of the world where the gospel was forbidden or unknown are now some of the strongest evangelical regions of the twenty-first century. Studies that concentrate on him as a British figure sadly omit this vital part of his international life and ministry, which was so central to his life for well over a quarter of a century.

The fact that IFES began as a strongly evangelical movement after World War II was very much due to his influence and Bible-centered thinking. While this book concentrates on him as a preacher, one cannot get an overall perspective on the Doctor and leave so crucial a ministry out of the record.

In 1950 he began what in some circles still remains his best-known sermon series, that on the Sermon on the Mount. This was the period during which he was gaining fame as an expositor both at home and overseas. His preaching was intelligent, reasoned, Scripture based, timeless, and also delivered with passion and total conviction. This was in such contrast to many popular pulpit fillers of his own generation in London, most of whom now lie forgotten, their works dated and their theologies, if they had any, long since discredited.

At the same time, he found that many of his congregation knew the basics—they knew they were saved through Jesus Christ on the cross—but they knew very little actual Christian doctrine as such. Faith without depth is bound to be shallow and is what the apostle Paul described as milk for infants—not the real meat that adults need. So keeping his Sundays clear for straight exposition of particular books of the Bible, he used the Friday night sermons to begin a Scripture-based expository series called Great Doctrines of the Bible.

Sadly, one can argue that we now live in an era in which the serious study of biblical doctrine, or indeed the very thought of doctrine itself, causes so-called evangelicals to shudder. But the need for the study of sound theology is a running theme throughout the New Testament, alongside warnings against ravenous wolves who would devour untaught and theologically shaky believers. In that sense we need Scripture-centered exposition on both what we believe and why we do so more than ever. So his sermons have even greater relevance more than six decades after they were first delivered to a congregation prepared to often travel many miles into central London on a working day in order to hear someone speak to them on weighty matters for over an hour.

The biblical office is that of pastor-teacher. The Doctor was a doctor in more senses than one—both medical and spiritual—and in the case of his congregation and that of the Westminster Fellowship of Ministers (originally Anglican and Free Church and just Free Church later on) he was both. With his acute medical knowledge—which he kept up all his life, reading medical journals for enjoyment to the end of his days—and with his pastoral insights, he could see how a member of the Chapel congregation or a struggling preacher might be run down and depressed physically and mentally and therefore more open to spiritual attack. He was also aware that while sin sometimes causes spiritual dryness or isolation, it could be that, as with Job, Satan was attacking a faithful and innocent child of God. Maybe God was testing one of his own children for his or her particular good.

All these were possibilities and as a medically trained physician with a deep understanding of human psychology, as well as being a pastor charged by God with the spiritual care of souls, the Doctor knew that the permutations were many and various.

The chapter “Mind, Heart, and Will” shows the Doctor both as an outstanding biblical expositor but also as someone who used the medical training that God had put him through in the 1920s. True preaching appeals, if scripturally understood, to the heart (emotions), to the mind (intellect), and to the will (application). This unique combination is at the heart of his preaching altogether and not just on this subject. Logic on fire and its application with the employment of our will was all tied in together, so unlike the preaching of his own time, which appealed usually to either heart or head but seldom to both, and which never appealed to the human will to implement what was learned in everyday life.

How true that is today as well! Cerebral sermons, emotionally excessive and manipulative, with no application of what kind of life should be lived on Monday morning, are quite common. The importance of the Doctor’s very different combination cannot be emphasized enough since this particular combination—heart, mind, will—is as important, in many ways, as his actual words and makes the six decades or more between the original sermon and us as readers of it today immaterial.

As the Doctor began, so he continued.

He is best known in the evangelical world for his epic expository sermons, in particular those on Ephesians, which he preached on Sundays, and those on Romans, which he delivered on Friday nights.

While his exposition was biblical, it was also profoundly practical! One of his series was on life as a Christian in marriage, at home, and at work. That volume has been a wedding present for new couples now for decades. The principles outlined by Paul in Scripture do not alter. Human nature does not change, and so marriage and its joys and requirements are the same too—as indeed are the biblical principles upon which we base every waking minute of every day.

But all this has a deep spiritual underpinning—God’s work of reconciliation on the cross—without which we would be nowhere. So we have chosen a foundational chapter as the one to be represented in this book.

Remember when you read any of these chapters, it is unction, the gift of God, at work, enabling the Doctor to preach with the conviction and power provided solely by the Holy Spirit. There is a world of difference between, say, a history lecture and an unction-filled sermon. A history lecturer, or a speaker on modern physics, may proclaim with passion but with human endeavor, whereas a preacher equipped by God to preach to the saints does so with a conviction that comes from God alone.

This is vital to recall since no formula will enable one to preach like Martyn Lloyd-Jones.

1

NO SUBSTITUTE

(1969)From Preaching and Preachers

This is a book about Christ-centered preaching. For that reason the great majority of chapters in our volume will be the sermons of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, as outlined in this book’s introduction.

However, we do need to know what Dr. Lloyd-Jones actually meant when he employed that term. Thankfully, he has given us a detailed answer in Preaching and Preachers, a book still in print well over five decades after the original lectures were given.

As he goes into some depth in “No Substitute,” there is not as much need for as full an introduction here as will be the case with subsequent chapters. For him, preaching and giving a lecture were two totally different things—one a God-ordained way of proclamation, the other a human institution. This is why he had the very high notion of what he did Sunday by Sunday and on Friday evenings at Westminster Chapel. He was proclaiming God’s Word, not just giving a stream of good ideas that had by chance come to him during the week or while reading the news.

Pastor-teacher is one of the spiritual gifts of the New Testament, and thankfully it is one of those whose continual validity is never contested. It is as vitally necessary in our time as it was in the time of the apostle Paul! Being a preacher was not a human vocation but a calling from God himself. It was God’s means of communication, and that being the case there was no possible substitute for it.

Today there is a renaissance in the centrality of preaching, for which we can be thankful to God! But simultaneously there are those who announce that we must find new ways of “doing church” because twenty-first-century people can no longer cope with the supposedly old and outdated methods of the past. A biblically based, Christ-centered defense of preaching has therefore never been more important.

No one can speak more eloquently on this than the Doctor himself. Let the words that now follow transform you as they did those who heard them spoken in 1969 and the many who have been changed by them since.

In our first lecture I laid down a proposition that preaching is the primary task of the church and therefore of the minster of the church, that everything else is subsidiary to this and can be represented as the outworking or the carrying out of this in daily practice. What I am doing is to justify this proposition, and I am doing so, particularly, in view of the tendency today to depreciate preaching at the expense of various other forms of activity. Having laid down the proposition, I have tried to substantiate it by evidence from the New Testament and also from the history of the church.

I now want to go a step further and to suggest that this evidence from the New Testament itself, supported and exemplified by the history of the church, leads us to the conclusion that the ultimate justification for asserting the primacy of preaching is theological. In other words, I argue that the whole message of the Bible asserts this and drives us to this conclusion. What do I mean by that? Essentially I mean that the moment you consider man’s real need, and also the nature of the salvation announced and proclaimed in the Scriptures, you are driven to the conclusion that the primary task of the church is to preach and to proclaim this, to show man’s real need, and to show the only remedy, the only cure for it.

Let me elaborate that a little. This is the very essence of my argument. I am suggesting that it is because there are currently false views with regard to these matters that people no longer see the importance of preaching. Take the question of the need, man’s need.

NOT A MERE SICKNESS

What is it? Well, negatively, it is not a mere sickness. There is a tendency to regard man’s essential trouble as being a sickness. I do not mean physical sickness only. That comes in, but I mean a kind of mental and moral and spiritual sickness. It is not that; that is not man’s real need, not his real trouble! I would say the same about his misery and his unhappiness, and also about his being a victim of circumstances.

These are the things that are given prominence today. There are so many people trying to diagnose the human situation; and they come to the conclusion that man is sick, man is unhappy, man is the victim of circumstances. They believe therefore that his primary need is to have these things dealt with, that he must be delivered from them. But I suggest that is too superficial a diagnosis of the condition of man and that man’s real trouble is that he is a rebel against God and consequently is under the wrath of God.

Now this is the biblical statement concerning him; this is the biblical view of man as he is by nature. He is “dead in trespasses and sins”; that means spiritually dead. He is dead to the life of God, to the spiritual realm, and to all the beneficent influences of that realm upon him. We are also told that he is “blind.” “If our gospel be hid,” says Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:3– 4, “it is hid to them that are lost: In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not.” Or as Paul puts it again in Ephesians 4:17ff., man’s trouble is that his understanding is darkened because he is alienated from the life of God through the sin that is in him. Another very common biblical term to describe this condition of man is the term “darkness.” You have it in John 3:19: “This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, but men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” And in 1 John 2:8 you find the same idea worked out. Writing to Christians he says that “the darkness is past, and the true light now shineth.” The apostle Paul uses the same idea exactly in Ephesians 5:8. He says, “Ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord.” These are the terms that express the biblical diagnosis of man’s essential trouble. In other words we can sum it up in one word by saying that it is ignorance. All the terms such as “blindness” and “darkness” are indicative of ignorance. And according to this biblical view of man all these other things, such as unhappiness and misery, even physical illness, and all the other things that torment and trouble us so much are the results and the consequences of original sin and the fall of Adam. They are not the main problem; they are consequences or symptoms if you like, manifestations of this primary, this ultimate disease.

THE KNOWLEDGE THAT SAVES

That being the picture of man’s need, it is not surprising that when you turn to the biblical account of salvation you find that it is put in terms that correspond to this expression of the need. The apostle describes salvation in these words: it means “to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4). It is the will of God that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. Salvation is a knowledge of the truth. In 2 Corinthians 5:19–20 he says that the message that has been committed to the preacher, who is an “ambassador for Christ,” is to say to men, “be ye reconciled to God.” You find it again in the practice of the apostle. We read in Acts 17:23 of him preaching in Athens and saying, “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.” They were ignorant though they were philosophers, and he is the one who can teach them and give them light in this matter.

I am simply showing that the biblical teaching concerning salvation is that it is the result of bringing men to this “knowledge” that they lack, it is dealing with this ignorance. Paul talks about preaching “all the counsel of God,” and Peter had the same idea when he says that Christians are people who have been called “out of darkness into [God’s] marvellous light.” Now these are the biblical terms, and they all, it seems to me, indicate that preaching always comes first and is given priority. If this is the greatest need of man, if his ultimate need is something that arises out of this ignorance of his, which in turn is the result of rebellion against God, then what he needs first and foremost is to be told about this, to be told the truth about himself, and to be told of the only way in which this can be dealt with. So I assert that it is the peculiar task of the church, and of the preacher, to make all this known.

I would emphasize the word peculiar—you can use the word exceptional if you like or special. The preacher alone is the one who can do this. He is the only one who is in a position to deal with the greatest need of the world. Paul says of himself in 1 Corinthians 9:17 that “a dispensation of the gospel is committed unto me.” That is what he was called for—this “dispensation of the gospel,” this message, had been given to him. And you have the same thing expressed in a very glorious statement in the third chapter of the epistle to the Ephesians, verse 8: “Unto me,” he says, “who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ.” This is his calling, this is his task. He has said before that all this “in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit” (Eph. 3:5). This is the message: “And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ: to the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God” (Eph. 3:9–10).

My whole contention is that it is the church alone that can do this, and it is the preacher therefore who alone can make it known. He is set apart by the church, as I am going to show, to serve this particular function, to perform this particular task. This is the thing that is given primacy and is emphasized, and it must surely of necessity be the case. The moment we realize man’s true need and see the only answer, it becomes clear that only those who are in possession of this understanding can impart this message to those who lack it.

THE BUSINESS OF THE CHURCH

Let me work this out a little. There are other agencies in the world that can deal with many of the problems of mankind. I mean by that things like medicine, the state, other religions and cults, psychology and various other teachings, and political agencies. These are all designed to help and to relieve, somewhat, the human condition, to ease the pain and the problem of life and to enable men to live more harmoniously and to enjoy life in a greater measure. They set out to do that, and it is not part of our case to say that they are of no value. We must observe the facts and grant that they can do good, and do much good. They are capable in a measure of dealing with these things. But none of them can deal with this fundamental, this primary trouble at which we have been looking.

Not only that, when they have done their all, or when even the church coming down to that level and operating on that level alone, has done her all, the primary trouble still remains. So I would lay it down as a basic proposition that the primary task of the church is not to educate man, it is not to heal him physically or psychologically, it is not to make him happy. I will go further: it is not even to make him good. These are things that accompany salvation, and when the church performs her true task she does incidentally educate men and give them knowledge and information, she does bring them happiness, she does make them good and better than they were. But my point is that those are not her primary objectives. Her primary purpose is not any of these; it is rather to put man into the right relationship with God, to reconcile man to God. This really does need to be emphasized at the present time because this, it seems to me, is the essence of the modern fallacy. It has come into the church, and it is influencing the thinking of many in the church––this notion that the business of the church is to make people happy, or to integrate their lives, or to relieve their circumstances and improve their conditions. My whole case is that to do that is just to palliate the symptoms, to give temporary ease, and that it does not get beyond that.

I am not saying that it is a bad thing to palliate symptoms; it is not, and it is obviously right and good to do so. But I am constrained to say that though to palliate symptoms or to relieve them is not bad in and of itself, it can be bad, it can have a bad influence and a bad effect from the standpoint of the biblical understanding of man and his needs. It can become harmful in this way: by palliating the symptoms you can conceal the real disease. Here is something that we have to bear in mind at the present time because, unless I am greatly mistaken, this is a vital part of our problem today.

Let me use a medical illustration. Take a man who is lying on a bed and writhing in agony with abdominal pain. Now a doctor may come along who happens to be a very nice and a very sympathetic man. He does not like to see people suffering; he does not like to see people in pain, so he feels that the one thing to do is to relieve this man of his pain. He is able to do so. He can give him an injection of morphine or various other drugs that would give the man almost immediate relief. “Well,” you say, “surely there is nothing wrong in doing that. It is a kind action; it is a good action. The patient is made more comfortable; he is made happier and is no longer suffering.” The answer to that is that it is well-nigh a criminal act on the part of this doctor. It is criminal because merely to remove a symptom without discovering the cause of the symptom is to do a disservice to the patient. A symptom after all is a manifestation of a disease, and symptoms are very valuable. It is through tracking the symptoms and following the lead that they give that you should arrive at the disease that has given rise to the symptoms. So if you just remove the symptoms before you have discovered the cause of the symptoms, you are actually doing your patient real harm because you are giving him temporary ease that makes him think that all is well. But all is not well; it is only a temporary relief, and the disease is there, is still continuing. If this happened to have been an acute appendix or something like that, the sooner it is taken out the better, and if you have merely given the patient ease and relief without dealing with it, you are asking for an abscess or something even worse.

That, surely, gives us a picture of a great deal that is happening at the present time. This is one of the problems confronting the Christian church today. This affluent society in which we are living is drugging people and making them feel that all is well with them. They have better wages, better houses, better cars, every gadget desirable in the home. Life is satisfactory and all seems to be well, and because of that people have ceased to think and to face the real problems. They are content with this superficial ease and satisfaction, and that militates against a true and a radical understanding of their actual condition. And, of course, this is aggravated at the present time by many other agencies. There is the pleasure mania and television and radio bringing their influence right into the home. All these things persuade man that all is well; they give him temporary feelings of happiness, so he assumes that all is well and stops thinking. The result is that he does not realize his true position and then face it.

Then you have to add to that the giving of tranquilizing drugs and the taking of so-called pep pills and hypnotics. People live on these, and all this, very often, not only has the effect of concealing the physical problem but also, and still more serious, the spiritual problem. As man is content with this temporary relief, he tends to go on assuming that all is well and eventually ends in a crash. The form that the crash is taking so often today is drug addiction and so on, and there are many who cannot continue to do their work without this alternation of pep pills and hypnotics, tranquilizers and stimulants. I suggest that many of these agencies to which the church seems to be turning today, instead of carrying out her primary task of preaching, are ultimately having that same kind of effect. While they are not bad in and of themselves, they can become bad, and truly harmful, by concealing the real need.

The business of the church and the business of preaching—and she alone can do this—is to isolate the radical problems and to deal with them in a radical manner. This is specialist work; it is the peculiar task of the church. The church is not one of a number of agencies, she is not in competition with the cults, she is not in competition with other religions, she is not in competition with psychologists or any other agency, political or social or whatever it may chance to be. The church is a special and a specialist institution, and this is a work that she alone can perform.

THE INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL GOSPEL

I want to support this contention by certain other statements. Here, for instance, is one that to me has an almost amusing aspect to it. These proposals that we should preach less and do various other things more are of course not new at all. People seem to think that all this is quite new and that it is the hallmark of modernity to decry or to depreciate preaching and to put your emphasis on these other things. The simple answer to that is that there is nothing new about it. The actual form may be new, but the principle is certainly not a new one at all; indeed it has been the particular emphasis of this present [twentieth] century.

Take all this new interest in the social application of the gospel and the idea of going to live among the people and to talk politics and to enter into their social affairs and so on. The simple answer to that is that until the First World War that was the real vogue in most western countries. It was then called “the social gospel,” but it was precisely the same thing. The argument was that the old evangelical preaching of the gospel was too personal, too simple, that it did not deal with the social problems and conditions. This was a part, of course, of the liberal, modernist, higher-critical view of the Scriptures and of our Lord. He was just a perfect man and a great teacher, a political agitator and reformer, and the great exemplar. He had come to do good, and the Sermon on the Mount was something that you could put into acts of Parliament and turn into legislation. So you were going to make a perfect world. That was the old liberalism of the pre-1914 period. The very thing that is regarded as so new today, and what is regarded as the primary task of the church, is something that has already been tried, and tried with great thoroughness, in the early part of the twentieth century.

The same is true of various other agencies that are coming into the life and activity of the church. What is advocated today as a new approach was practiced by what was then called the institutional church; and this, once more, was done with considerable thoroughness. There were all sorts of cultural clubs in the churches, and the church became the center of social life. There were organized games and clubs of various descriptions. All this was given a most thorough trial in the pre-1914 period.

But we are entitled to ask, surely, whether they worked, how effective they were, and what they led to. The answer is that they proved to be failures. I am not so aware in a detailed way of the position in the United States, which I know is somewhat different from that in Great Britain, but I have no hesitation in asserting that what was largely responsible for emptying the churches in Great Britain was “social gospel” preaching and the institutional church. It was more responsible for doing so than anything else. The people rightly argued in this way: if the business of the church was really just to preach a form of political and social reform and pacifism, then the church was not really necessary, for all that could be done through the political agencies. So they left the churches and went and did it, or tried to do it, through their political parties. That was perfectly logical, but its effect upon the churches was most harmful.

That can be illustrated and shown equally well at the present time. There are two preachers in London who are great advocates of this political-social interest of the church in the man of the world and who contend that this is the way to win him and to help him and to make him a Christian. It is most interesting to notice that these two men who are most given to this teaching in Britain have small congregations on Sundays in their churches in the very heart and most accessible part of London. These are facts that can be verified, and that this should be the case is not at all surprising. People say to themselves that there is no need to go to church to hear that kind of thing. You can get it daily in the newspapers and in the political and social institutions that are designed to do this very thing. One of these two men who gets great publicity because of this interest of his has recently even ceased to have a Sunday evening service at all in his own building. He has had to join his evening service with that of another church on the same street.

Now this is more interesting and most important. When you depart from the primary task of the church and do something else, though your motive may be pure and excellent, that is the result. I am not disputing or criticizing the motives, I am simply showing that actually this theory in practice has the reverse effect from that which it sets out to achieve. I argue that in many ways it is the departure of the church from preaching that is responsible in a large measure for the state of modern society. The church has been trying to preach morality and ethics without the gospel as a basis; it has been preaching morality without godliness, and that simply does not work. It never has, and it never will. And the result is that the church, having abandoned her real task, has left humanity more or less to its own devices.

FADS AND FASHIONS

Another argument that I would adduce at this point is that the moment you begin to turn from preaching to these other expedients you will find yourself undergoing a constant series of changes. One of the advantages of being old is that you have experience, so when something new comes up, and you see people getting very excited about it, you happen to be in the position of being able to remember a similar excitement perhaps forty years ago. We have seen fashions and vogues and stunts coming one after another into the church. Each one creates great excitement and enthusiasm and is loudly advertised as the thing that is going to fill the churches, the thing that is going to solve the problem. They have said that about every single one of them. But in a few years they have forgotten all about it, and another stunt comes along, or another new idea; somebody has hit upon the one thing needful or he has a psychological understanding of modern man. Here is the thing, and everybody rushes after it; but soon it wanes and disappears, and something else takes its place.

This is, surely, a very sad and regrettable state for the Christian church to be in, that like the world she should exhibit these constant changes of fashion. In that state she lacks the stability and the solidity and the continuing message that has ever been the glory of the Christian church.

But my objection to the substitution of a sociopolitical interest for the preaching of the gospel can be stated more positively. This concern about social and political conditions and about the happiness of the individual and so on has always been dealt with most effectively when you have had reformation and revival and true preaching in the Christian church. I would go further and suggest that it is the Christian church that has made the greatest contribution throughout the centuries to the solution of these very problems. The modern man is very ignorant of history; he does not know that the hospitals originally came through the church. It was Christian people who first, out of a sense of compassion for suffering and illness, began to do something about even physical diseases and illnesses. The first hospitals were founded by Christian people. The same thing is true of education; it was the church that first saw this need and proceeded to do something about it. The same is true of poor law relief and the mitigation of the sufferings of people who were enduring poverty. I argue that it is the church that really has done this. Your trade unions and other such movements, you will find, if you go back to their beginnings, have almost invariably had Christian origins.

My argument is that when the church performs her primary task these other things invariably result from it. The Protestant Reformation, for instance, gave a stimulus to the whole of man’s outlook on and activity in life. It can be demonstrated quite satisfactorily that the Protestant Reformation gave the greatest possible stimulus to science and scientific inquiry and study, and it certainly did the same to literature and many other activities of man. In other words, when man truly becomes what he is meant to be under God, he then begins to realize what faculties and propensities he has, and he begins to use them. And so you will find that the greatest periods and epochs in the history of countries have always been those eras that have followed in the wake of great religious reformations and revivals. The other people talk a great deal about the political and social conditions but do very little about them. It is this activity of the church that really deals with the situation and produces enduring and permanent results. So I argue that even from the pragmatic standpoint it can be demonstrated that you must keep preaching in the primary and central position.

PREACHING IS PERSONAL WORK

We turn now to the realm of personal problems. This is a familiar argument today as I have already indicated. People say that the preachers stand in their pulpits and preach their sermons, but that there before them are individuals with their individual problems and sufferings. So the argument runs, you ought to preach less and spend more time in doing personal work and counseling and interviewing. My reply to this argument is to suggest, once more, that the answer is to put preaching into the primary position. Why? For the reason that true preaching does deal with personal problems, so much so that true preaching saves a great deal of time for the pastor. I am speaking out of forty years of experience. What do I mean? Let me explain. The Puritans are justly famous for their pastoral preaching. They would take up what they called “cases of conscience” and deal with them in their sermons, and as they dealt with these problems they were solving the personal, individual problems of those who were listening to them. That has constantly been my experience. The preaching of the gospel from the pulpit, applied by the Holy Spirit to the individuals who are listening, has been the means of dealing with personal problems of which I as the preacher knew nothing until people came to me at the end of the service saying, “I want to thank you for that sermon because if you had known I was there and the exact nature of my problem, you could not have answered my various questions more perfectly. I have often thought of bringing them to you, but you have now answered them without my doing so.” The preaching had already dealt with the personal problems. Do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that the preacher should never do any personal work, far from it. But I do contend that preaching must always come first and that it must not be replaced by anything else.

I have often told a story of a remarkable case that illustrates this point. Many years ago I was asked to see, with a doctor and a pastor, a young lady who was said to have been paralyzed in both legs for eight years. I went to see her with them, and I found to my amazement that she was capable of making most extraordinary movements with her legs. This led me at once to diagnose her as a case of hysteria, and so it turned out to be. This supposed paralysis, this functional condition, had come on as the result of a disappointment in her emotional life. She lay there on the bed, and I was not able to help her because she just would not keep sufficiently quiet for the doctor or myself to examine her properly. However, this is what happened afterward. She had two sisters, and her older sister, as the result of this visit of mine, began to attend our church and after a number of months was converted and became a very fine Christian. After a while the second sister began to attend our services, and she in turn became a Christian. Then eventually one Sunday night I saw the so-called paralytic being half-carried into the church by her two sisters. She continued to attend, and in due course she became a Christian. Now the point I want to emphasize is this: I never had another conversation with her about her so-called paralysis; it was never mentioned, it was never discussed, but it completely disappeared. Why? How? As the result of the preaching of the gospel. As she became a Christian this matter was dealt with by the application of the truth by the Holy Spirit without any personal counseling or psychological analysis or treatment.

Now I am not arguing that this will happen every time. My contention is that if the gospel is truly preached, in a most astonishing manner it can be so applied by the Spirit to these individual cases and problems that they are dealt with without the preacher knowing it at all. I could tell you numerous stories to illustrate this very thing and how sometimes even a mere aside by the preacher has been the means of dealing with some person’s problem.