Engaging Faith: The Legacy of Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones

"Shortly after I started coming to Westminster Chaple with my parents and my sisters in 1948, my father took it into his head to ask doct and Mrs Lloyd James for a holiday in the west of Ireland and I remember lecturing him as Sons do and saying 2,000 people come to this church and thousands more come to hear him preach elsewhere why do they why do you think he would they would want to accept your invitation and thus do 23y old Sons know better than their parents I couldn't imagine the great doctor of this Pulpit on the golf links or playing tennis or fishing or any of the things we did but I was wrong they came and they played golf not admittedly with but with enormous enthusiasm and for the first time I saw the other side of the most powerful Christian preacher and teacher it was his teaching that had drawn our family here first in 1947 we began to come first of all to the Friday night discussions that filled the Institute Hall to hear him make the audience work out the Christian attitude to the questions that they themselves had raised he knew how to teach not only so that you didn't forget but so that in future you knew how to begin on any problem that came up in your own experience and it was always scripturally based you think that Paul may have said something about it Paul wrote a number of letters which one was it in and so you had to think very hard about that and finally you might drop on the right one Ephesians very well then there were four chapters in Ephesians Which chapter was it and you may have got the third chapter and then he said and there are so many verses in the third chapter and which verse was it until finally you put your finger on the exact quotation and then it was put in its context and then it was compared with other parts of the Bible on the same subject until finally we were all clear to begin with what the Bible was saying not because he had told us but because he had made it made us work it through for ourselves and then we had to apply it and here he would try to make us separate our well-worn prejudices from the balance of Biblical teaching yes indeed I understand that point of view Mr cathwood and Hing that as you do you would also logically H the following would you not and you would cautiously Ascent um and that being so and as he took you down another step on your road of error you would begin to see where you were going and would hesitate come come Mr cath do you not agree that that is the logic of your position you do do you not and having seen at last where your logic took you you would be forced back to the beginning and having recanted in full public view of your error you would never make that mistake again he once apologized for pressing me so hard he said you can take it but there are others who hold the views you're putting who could not take it and really I'm teaching them through you I felt better about it after that and as I learned myself later on taking a discussion here in Westminster discussions are not actually easy to lead in a talk or in a sermon you map out your own logical route and you don't have to prepare for all the objections and diversions because you're on the platform and they're down there and not asking you any questions they may think about it but they haven't an opportunity of putting them but in leading a discussion anything may arise and if you've not got the whole framework within which your doctrinal theme sits then you're lost if the the line of thought is irrelevant then you have to persuade the contributor very gently that it really is another subject of course sometimes it was so irrelevant that the doctor simply used to say yes Mr Smith very very interesting now has anyone else got any point on that and you would know that Mr Smith was not really on the ball um and you have to know where and how it fits if it is relevant so that the contributor can be led with the class to the connection and that that facet of the truth can be fitted in where it belongs and properly illuminated but of course that requires a wide knowledge of the subject that you're discussing and all the arguments that have been put theologically on that subject and that needs not only a well stocked mind but of course the ability to assess arguments as they come up against the framework of Doctrine what you know and what you've read and also the spiritual sensitivity to detect in those arguments however well put a tendency to truth or a tendency to error and the doctor's vast reading not only gave him a knowledge of the arguments but his Supreme medical skill as a diagnostician gave him a superbly analytical and logical mind you could see him as the discussion went on separating out the strands of the argument dividing the false from the true showing why certain strands were really dangerous and would not hold which strands were true and could be relied on and were they needed strengthening with others before they could be put to the test and he showed Our Generation clearly that the strand of pietistic evangelicalism the muscular Christianity of the vast and public school camps which was all the Vogue then the devotional py of the brethren in which I was brought up the emotional dedication of the great conventions the revivalism of the big interdenominational mission none of these were enough he almost alone stopped the retreat in the face of liberal humanism which the church had not dared to meet headon he led the Evangelical wing of the church back into the center of theological argument not by conceding a thing but by going back to its foundations in the reformation and he almost alone to begin with wo in again the strong central strand of reformed theology to Evangelical teaching a strand which had almost been snapped off in the late 19th century when Spurgeon seemed to lose to the rising tide of liberalism in the downgrade controversy the reformed theology which illuminated the immense logical sweep of the Christian Gospel seemed to me to be like the great mutually supporting archers of a majestic Cathedral and it came as a revelation to those of us brought up on a diet of blessed thoughts and texts for the day and having read through Calvin and the westmin confessions through Harge and burkhoff having seen that the reformed doctrine of the sovereignty of God the Creator transformed the Natural Sciences and indeed the whole of society having seen Evolution as no more than speculative metaphysics and Rel liberalism and higher criticism for oldfashioned heresies we then being so struck with all of this tended to forget that the Majestic vaed roof of Christian doctrine was to cover and to protect the Human Relationships of a living church but Dr lloy James did not forget that all the doctrine was dead without the strand of love a passionate love for for God which as he kept on saying from this Pulpit God would return flooding us with an overwhelming sense of his presence and a love for each other by which all men would know that we were God's children and as he set out these two strands both Calvinists and charismatics claimed him for themselves alone but that was totally to misunderstand his teaching that both strands were absolutely essential parts of Christian belief that the one called for the other and that in the Christian Life they had to be woven strongly together in the same person strength and warmth warmth and strength never one without the other of course in Pulpit appearance he looked the calvinist rather than the charismatic in his U aere Geneva gown his lack of any personal reference in his feeling that the awe of the gospel for bad jokes that the power of the message itself produced emotion enough in his hatred of uh artificial bonomi or breeziness and in the sheer weight of the authority with which he preached he was about as far from ecstasy or dance drama as you can get and yet and yet he was the most human of men I remember uh one late Autumn Sunday evening in the early 50s sitting up at the back of the gallery there through an hour's thundering sermon from this Pulpit quaking at the thought that at the end I was to go to see him to ask for his Elder daughter's hand in marriage I had rehearsed my lines most carefully but when At Last I crossed the threshold of the vest his welcome was so warm that as far as I remember I never had a chance to say a thing and for the next 28 years until he died that warmth and that affection never diminished not only in the family where he was deeply devoted to each and every one but in the wider family of church and ministers he was the most warmhearted of men I have a constant picture of him sitting in his red armed chair engaged in Long telephone conversations with ministers or others with problems uh we would get a w a wave and a smile as uh we came grandchildren would rush in in pajamas to get a kiss on their way to bed and the call would uh go on as he quietly and gently untangled the mental knots into which someone at the other end had tied themselves or sympathy aized with someone in distress or encouraged some Minister faced with opposition and I know how it felt because he did the same with us and when he talked to you about your problems he was thinking of you entirely never remotely about himself you not only had his undivided attention but his total commitment until the problem had been sorted out to his satisfaction and to yours uh there were of course exceptions his oldest grandson aged eight at a quiet Tate arate lunch where both were quietly reading uh looked at him suddenly and said what do you think about sex and history does not relate the answer to that particular query from that 8-year-old grandson and he had in dealing with personal problems both a vast range of knowledge secular and spiritual and also an inspired Common Sense there was a nurse in bed at her parents house being looked after with a fellow nurse she had a soaring temperature which came down to normal every time every evening by the time the GP GP called around and no one could make any sense of the symptoms uh so drct L James was called in and he uh looked at the nurse and heard about everything everything and then he got everyone out of the sick room and he asked the nurse why did the hospital dismiss you and um she hadn't dared tell her parents and had come home with a feigned illness and the other partner in trouble to report the high temperature when the doctor wasn't there and of course it always came down just before he arrived and they maintained her desperate cover and he had simply looked at the patient and not at the temperature chart and he knew with a doctor's eye that she wasn't ill my recollection is that he prescribed to her in private a speedy recovery followed by a dose of moral courage and of course he was very much in demand for problems on the frontiers of medson and the Christian faith a friend of mine was a depressive and his whole life was completely transformed when doctor was able to show him the sure Foundation of faith on which he could build and from which he could fight the depressive doubts by which he had been continuously attacked he was a new man from then on he was not only generous with his time to people who had trouble and who came to him he was generous with his money of course like all cardiganshire Welsh he was very careful with his money but um he hardly ever used it for himself however small his ministerial salary he always gave regularly and generously and whenever he found that he had more than he needed whether from an inheritance or laterally from book royalties he at once started to ask who needed it or who in the family needed it who somewhere else needed it I thought actually I married a poor Minister's daughter without expectations but that was where we got our first loan to buy our first house um though uh the thought that he might spend any money on himself it just never seemed to occur to him and he was just as generous with his grandchildren and while of course I've always regarded uh his views as our generation did with the greatest respect not so his grandchildren to them he was only Dei which is the Welsh for Grandad and whatever views he held were there to be disputed uh together with the views of the rest of their Elders he was simply one of the elders and he was there to be argued with and when this went on and it went on pretty vigorously um he was really like an old lion with young cubs which darted in and out where no one else would dare to go and occasionally a great poor would descend upon them um and he tolerated from them what he wouldn't have tolerated no doubt from anyone else and um within the family debate where he didn't have to worry about misrepresentation he would set them off with the most outrageous statements and they came spluttering back with you can't possibly say that and then he would defend this absurd position with all his forensic skill we used to have tremendous discussions in the family about politics and although he had throughout his public life attacked the idea of a social gospel the idea that there is some salvation through politics and as a kind of overrun from that tended to the view that there was no Christian attitude to politics he was nevertheless fascinated by the whole political process he us used to watch political debate on television with enormous zest and report to us on the programs that we had missed he always wanted to know about the politicians we had met and he met quite a number himself he and Mrs Lloyd Jones had a wedding present from Lloyd George whom doctor used to admire greatly and who indeed came to hear him speak at least once in Westminster Chapel he had spoken here I think also on a platform with Stafford cryp at a an outside meeting Ernest mares once gave him a very right-wing political book which he passed on to me and of course um he knew many of the Welsh politicians particularly well clinn Hughes um George Thomas the present Speaker of the House of Commons who had a great admiration for him and almost certainly it was George Thomas who recommended him for a high public honor which as a Christian minister he felt bound to refuse and not only in Wales I met uh Lord mecky the Lord advocate of Scotland 10 days ago and he said that he'd seen we were to have this meeting here tonight so there was a wide interest in political circles and what he did and he had a wide interest in political circles I think what interested him in politics really was The Clash of Personality for him politics was people he didn't believe that there was a particularly Christian view of politics it was more to him a matter of the capacity to make the right judgment Lloyd George's private life didn't override his capacity to make better political judgments than others who didn't have his political genius and uh what he did object to was the hypocrisy of politicians disregarding their marriage vows and then taking a high moral tone about the sanctity of contracts it was his capacity to be interested in everything uh that was going on that gave him such a breadth of mind he read the newspapers right till the end of his long illness then one Thursday he told Pam Harris to cancel the times after Saturday and he died on Sunday and uh he kept up his medical reading too and his capacity for diagnosis as we well learned in our family was as sharp as ever something the Specialists would Overlook he would be on to but perhaps his greatest attribute was his Visionary prophetic capacity he saw for instance very early on the potential of student work and all through the war he was president and the inspiration of the inas fellowship working in a superb partnership with Dr Douglas Johnson together they steered that movement away from muscular Christianity the high hearty and shallow evangelicalism of the day and they based it firmly on the rock of Christian truth and Christian doctrine doulas Johnson's successor Dr Oliver Barkley attended Westminster in the 50s and uh Dr Robin Wells the present General Secretary was a member when he lived in London in the 60s so he kept that connection with the movement in um Britain with a student movement in Britain and immediately after the war he was one of the founders of the International Fellowship of Evangelical students and um Stacy Woods uh was also who was the founder General Secretary of that was also founder General Secretary of the American movement ifes now has member movements from that beginning in 1946 in 75 countries and is a very flourishing and rapidly expanding movement so that his vision of what could be done through student movements in the world's universities getting to the leaders in those countries the leaders politically the leaders in thought so that they evangelized their own country um his inspiration there has now come to pass and he kept in touch with the ifes as well as the British movement the last quadral General Committee of the ifs he attended was in Austria in 1971 where he gave a most magnificent address which is uh one of the most memorable that he ever gave he was there with another co-founder of ifes John Bolton a German born American who had given us the old castle at mitel for student conferences which we still have and John Bolton was uh the sort of uh character that the doctor liked and got on with he was the first treasurer of if he was a tremendous character he'd been a first uh World War officer in the Bavarian Army and after the war felt with other Bavarian officers that the Army had been let down by Communists and socialists at home that the Versa treaty had to be revised and they felt they needed a popular politician uh to put this because they were army officers and didn't know how to put it over to the public so they went out and found a good Rabel rousing politician calling himself Adolf Hitler it wasn't long before they wanted to drop him and uh then they discovered he was not the sort of person who took to being dropped and uh John B after discovering his family on one of the first of Hitler's hitlists immigrated to America he became a Christian uh a fine Christian and incidentally made a fortune and uh Martin Lloyd Jones John Bolton Stacy Woods the Australian Rene PES the Swiss all of these were tremendous characters with others they were lifelong friends who respected trusted encouraged criticized each other a group of pioneers who sep separately and together did great things for God through the international student movement um and though less well known than his work in Britain I'm not so sure that this International work May well be far more reaching in the end than anything he's actually done here when he retired he had 13 busy years in writing in preaching and after much urging television he'd been very dismissive of Television I used to do a lot of television at the time and he never thought much of it he was arguing that it was in one year and out the other and that the real media of communication was still preaching and writing but eventually he succumbed he was persuaded first in Wales I think it was because it was in Wales he was persuaded and uh then occasionally on nationally networked programs he did one um series on Whitfield taking his TV camera team around the country with him and he took to it just like a professional and he had no fear of famous TV interviewers Joan bwell known as the intelligent man's pinup um was enormously impressed by his complete indifference to trendy thinking uh to which most clerics that She interviewed seemed to want to Bow she said he was the first person to tell her frankly that she wasn't a Christian she knew L well she wasn't a Christian she kept on telling them she wasn't a Christian but all these TV clergymen had insisted to her Fury that she was really but uh what she said was that she couldn't understand how in this day and age he got anyone to listen to such old-fashioned ideas much though she respected him for holding them tell me replied the doctor of any politician who in this day and age can still fill the free trade Hall in Manchester and to that there was no answer he could and they couldn't if there is any one quality by which I remember him it is his gentleness he was a strong character he had strong views and he could put them most powerfully he had a formidable personality and the capacity if he wished it to crush opponents yet to All In need who all who wanted him certainly to All in the Family Circle he was the gentlest of people always helpful most anxious not to be in in the way or to put anyone out sitting peacefully in the armchair of our old house in cambrid correcting manuscripts reading a book while TV was on while everyone flew in and out talking their heads off and nothing Disturbed him then last thing at night he would uh have prayers we would have prayers someone would fetch his Bible everyone would stop what they were doing they would come in they would start chanting this would go on uh for maybe a full half hour or more and he would join in while the Bible lay on his lap and then he would read a passage and then he would pray to the heavenly father he knew so well he trusted so completely and he loved so dearly and that is how I today like to remember it we do hope that you've been helped by the preaching of Dr Martin lyd Jones all of the sermons contained within the mlj trust audio library are now available for free download you may share the sermons or broadcast them however because of international copyright please be advised that we are asking first that these sermons never be offered for sale by a third party and second that these sermons will not be edited in any way for length or to use as audio clips you can find our contact information on our website at mlj trust.org that's mlj t.org" [00:00:12]