Introduction

For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. 1 CORINTHIANS 2:2

In the late 1920s a young London physician, already marked out as one of the ablest men of his generation, gave up medicine to become the minister of a small mission church among the dockers and steelworkers of South Wales. His colleagues thought he had thrown his life away. He spent the next fifty years explaining, in one way or another, why he had not. A physician, he came to believe, can relieve a man’s symptoms and send him home. He cannot touch the thing that is really wrong with him. And the thing that is really wrong with every one of us is not in the body at all.

That man was David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, known for the rest of his life simply as the Doctor. For thirty years he preached at Westminster Chapel in London, a short walk from Buckingham Palace, working his way through books of the Bible verse by verse, sometimes for years at a time. His sermons, gathered after his death into dozens of volumes, are still read on every continent. He did more than any other single figure to recover expository preaching and the theology of the Reformers and the Puritans for the English-speaking evangelical world of the twentieth century.

The one thread

He preached on a great many subjects, but beneath them all ran a single conviction, and it came from the consulting room. The first duty of a physician is diagnosis. Until you know what is wrong, you cannot help; and the commonest failure in medicine, as he had learned at the side of one of the great diagnosticians of the age, is to treat the symptom and miss the disease. Lloyd-Jones carried that conviction into the pulpit and never laid it down. The modern world, he believed, was forever treating symptoms. It thought man’s trouble was ignorance, and offered education. It thought the trouble was poverty, and offered prosperity. It thought the trouble was war, and offered conferences. The church, too often, followed suit, offering entertainment to the bored, therapy to the anxious and activity to the aimless.

The Bible, he insisted, gives a different diagnosis. Man is a sinner, in rebellion against God, under His righteous wrath and unable to save himself. Only when that diagnosis has been accepted does the remedy become good news: that God, who is rich in mercy, has done in Christ what we could never do. That is the thread of this book. The doctor’s diagnosis, and the one cure — it runs through his treatment of the plight of man and the sovereignty of God, through justification and union with Christ, through the Sermon on the Mount and the care of depressed Christians, through his view of preaching and his longing for revival.

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on his life, seventeen short chapters take up his key teachings in a rough order. The first group concerns the gospel itself: the diagnosis, the plight of man, the sovereignty of God, the authority of Scripture, justification, the cross and union with Christ. The second concerns the Christian life: the character drawn in the Beatitudes, the Christian as salt and light, the Christian and the world, spiritual depression and its cure, and the working out of salvation. The third concerns the Spirit and the church: the baptism with the Spirit and assurance, revival, preaching, and the church and evangelical unity.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. That is not a decoration. Lloyd-Jones held that preaching which leaves a man merely informed has failed; truth is meant to be applied to the conscience and obeyed. A chapter of this book that is read with interest and changes nothing has missed its purpose. Read slowly. Stop at the questions. Pray.

A word about his words

Lloyd-Jones died in 1981, and his books are not in the public domain. This volume therefore quotes none of his words. Everything said here about his teaching is Ochorus’s own summary, and his books are named throughout so that the reader may go to them. A number of his sermons can be read on Ochorus, and they are the best place to hear his own voice; but the reader who wants the man himself must go to his published works, and should. Nothing here is a substitute. It is, at most, a door.

Reading him with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and he would have disliked one. There are places where he must be read with care, and they will be set out plainly as they arise.

He was a controversial figure in his own lifetime, and the sharpest controversy was his public call in 1966 for evangelicals to leave doctrinally mixed denominations and come together. Many who loved him believed it was a mistake, and it opened a lasting breach with John Stott and a great many Anglican evangelicals. That story is told in chapter nineteen as fairly as we can tell it.

His teaching on the baptism with the Holy Spirit — that it is an experience of assurance and power distinct from conversion, which a believer may lack — was disputed by some of his closest Reformed friends, and is still disputed. It is treated in chapter sixteen, with the objections.

His sermon series were long, and his manner could be severe. He could seem to his critics to despise every method but his own, and his distrust of evangelistic technique and of much in modern church life was at times sweeping. Readers will not always agree with him on what he opposed. They will find it hard to disagree with what he preached.

The counsel of this book is therefore the counsel of Scripture: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Weigh every chapter against the Word of God, which is what he asked of his own hearers every Sunday.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

Why listen now

There is a reason his influence has outlived him. He did not chase the questions of his decade. He dealt, as a good physician does, with what does not change: the human heart, its guilt, its fears, its self-deceptions, and its need of God. Fashions in church life have come and gone many times since he stopped preaching. The heart he diagnosed has not changed at all. That is why the patient still needs the Doctor, and why the Doctor would insist, every time, that the patient needs Another far more.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask yourself honestly what you think is the deepest trouble in your own life. Is your answer a symptom or the disease?

2. Consider whether your church life has drifted towards treating symptoms — offering comfort, activity or entertainment where the gospel is needed.

3. Choose a time each week to read one chapter of this book slowly, with a Bible open beside it.

4. Before you begin, name one area where you expect to disagree with Lloyd-Jones, and resolve to test it by Scripture rather than by preference.

5. Read one of his sermons in the Ochorus library this week, and notice how he moves from diagnosis to remedy.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You know what is really wrong with me better than I do. I have been content to treat the symptoms of my life and to leave the disease untouched.

Give me an honest heart as I read. Search me, show me my true condition, and do not let me look away.

And when You have shown me my need, show me Christ, who is the only cure, and make me glad to go to Him. Amen.