The Doctor Changes Patients

But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. PHILIPPIANS 3:7

A Welsh boyhood. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones was born in Cardiff on the twentieth of December, 1899, the second of three sons of Henry Lloyd-Jones, a grocer, and his wife Magdalene. When he was six the family moved to Llangeitho, a village in rural Cardiganshire, where his father kept the shop. It was deep Welsh-speaking country, and it was holy ground in the memory of Welsh Christianity: Llangeitho was where Daniel Rowland had ministered, one of the great preachers of the eighteenth-century awakening, when crowds came from all over Wales to hear him. The boy grew up in the Calvinistic Methodist chapel, which by then was respectable, orderly and, as he later judged it, largely without life. He was clever, argumentative and ambitious. He went on to the county school at Tregaron.

A dairy in Westminster. His father’s business did not prosper, and in 1914 the family left Wales for London, where they ran a dairy business in Westminster. The move put the teenage Martyn within reach of the best education in the country. From Marylebone Grammar School he went, remarkably young, to St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School — Bart’s, one of the great teaching hospitals of Britain. On Sundays the family worshipped at the Welsh Presbyterian chapel at Charing Cross. There he came to know Bethan Phillips, whose family came from Newcastle Emlyn in west Wales, and who became a medical student herself, whom he would afterwards marry. Her grandfather, Evan Phillips, had been a preacher of the Welsh revivals.

The chief’s assistant. At Bart’s he was brilliant. He qualified with distinction, took his doctorate in medicine for research on heart disease, and became a Member of the Royal College of Physicians while still in his twenties. Above all, he became chief clinical assistant to Sir Thomas Horder, later Lord Horder, physician to the King and one of the most celebrated diagnosticians of his day. From Horder he learned a method he never forgot: take the history carefully, ask the right questions, refuse to be satisfied by the presenting complaint, reason from the evidence to the cause. A distinguished career lay open before him. He was widely expected to inherit his master’s mantle.

The diagnosis turns. It was during those years that the diagnostician found himself diagnosed. There was no single dramatic moment. Over a period of some two years in the mid-1920s he came under deep conviction of sin, and to a settled faith in Christ as Saviour. With the faith came a disturbing observation. The patients who came to Horder’s rooms, many of them wealthy and distinguished, were very often not ill in body at all, or not only so. Their deepest trouble was guilt, fear, emptiness, the misuse of their lives. He could treat their symptoms and send them away. He could not touch the disease. He became convinced that the most urgent need of men and women was not medical but spiritual, and that he was called to preach.

Sandfields. The decision astonished London. In January 1927 he married Bethan, and that year the two young doctors went to Aberavon, near Port Talbot, where he became minister of the Bethlehem Forward Movement Mission Church at Sandfields, a home-mission work of the Presbyterian Church of Wales among the industrial working class. He had no theological college training. He was ordained, and stayed eleven years. He abolished much that he thought mere machinery, preached the gospel plainly and searchingly, and waited on God. Men and women whom respectable religion had given up on were converted and their lives visibly changed — drinkers, dockers, the hard and the hopeless. Bethan Lloyd-Jones later wrote her own account of those years, Memories of Sandfields. The work gave him an unshakeable confidence that the gospel reaches what nothing else can reach. Their two daughters, Elizabeth and Ann, were born to them.

Westminster Chapel. In 1938 he was called to Westminster Chapel in London, at first to share the pulpit with the veteran expositor G. Campbell Morgan. On Morgan’s retirement in 1943 he became sole minister, and he remained there until 1968. Those were not easy years to begin a London ministry. The war scattered the congregation, and a flying bomb fell nearby in 1944. But he did one essentially unfashionable thing, week after week, for thirty years: he preached consecutively through books of the Bible. The great series became landmarks — the Sermon on the Mount; the Friday-evening exposition of Romans, which ran for some thirteen years; the Sunday-morning series on Ephesians; the sermons on spiritual depression; and many more. Congregations of well over a thousand gathered to hear a man speak, without anecdotes or humour or visual aids, for the better part of an hour.

A wider influence. His work reached far beyond his own pulpit. He was a leading figure among students through the Inter-Varsity Fellowship and served as the first chairman of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. With J. I. Packer he began the Puritan Conference in 1950, which did much to bring the Puritans back into evangelical reading. He encouraged the young Banner of Truth Trust, which reprinted older Reformed works. He led a monthly fellowship of ministers for many years, and gave himself freely to pastors and individuals who brought him their troubles. Many came to him in private with problems of every kind, and he would listen and question as he had once done in a consulting room.

A costly disagreement. In October 1966, at the National Assembly of Evangelicals in London, he made a public appeal for evangelicals to come together and to consider leaving denominations that tolerated the denial of the gospel. John Stott, who was in the chair, publicly disagreed. The breach that followed divided British evangelicalism for a generation. It is one of the sorrows of the story, and it is told more fully in chapter nineteen.

The last years. In 1968 he underwent major surgery for cancer, and decided that the time had come to leave Westminster Chapel. His retirement was not idle. He edited his sermons for publication, preached widely, and in 1969 gave the lectures at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia that became Preaching and Preachers. The flow of books that began then has not stopped since. He preached for the last time in 1980, and his health declined as the cancer returned. He asked his family not to pray for his recovery. He died in his sleep at his home in Ealing on the first of March, 1981 — St David’s Day, the feast of the patron saint of Wales — and was buried at Newcastle Emlyn, in the west Wales country from which his wife’s family had come.

The Doctor. He is remembered by the name everyone gave him, long after he had ceased to practise medicine. It told the truth about him. He had never stopped being a physician. He had only changed his patients, and the disease he treated, and the remedy he prescribed.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Lloyd-Jones gave up a brilliant career because he had seen what was really wrong with people. What have you counted gain that Christ may be asking you to count loss?

2. Consider the patients in Horder’s rooms who were sick in soul rather than body. Is there any symptom in your own life that you have been treating while ignoring its cause?

3. The Sandfields years were built on plain preaching and waiting on God. What machinery in your own service might you lay down in order to trust God more?

4. Pray this week for your own minister, that the Word he preaches may reach the disease and not merely the symptoms.

5. Read a sermon by Lloyd-Jones in the Ochorus library, and notice how often he asks questions of his hearers.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, Great Physician, You saw what was wrong with a young doctor and called him to spend his life on what matters most.

Show me what I am holding on to that You would have me count as loss. Give me courage to lay it down.

Thank You for faithful ministers who preach Your Word plainly. Bless them, keep them, and use them in my life.

And when my own last days come, let me go to You without fear, because my trust is in You alone. Amen.