What Is Really Wrong

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? JEREMIAH 17:9

If you want to understand Martyn Lloyd-Jones, begin in a consulting room. A patient comes in complaining of a pain. An inexperienced doctor treats the pain. He prescribes something to dull it, the patient feels better, and both go away satisfied. A great physician does something else. He takes the history. He asks question after question. He examines. He reasons from the symptom to its cause, and he will not prescribe until he knows what is really wrong. Sometimes the pain the patient complains of is the least important thing about him. Sometimes the thing that will kill him is something he has not mentioned at all.

Lloyd-Jones learned that method at the side of Sir Thomas Horder, and he brought it, entire, into the pulpit. It shaped the way he read the Bible, the way he preached, and the way he counselled the troubled men and women who came to his vestry. More than any doctrine, it is the key to his whole ministry.

Symptoms and disease

His great complaint against the modern world, and against much of the modern church, was that it treated symptoms. He preached through the middle decades of a century that had expected to be the most enlightened in history and had instead produced two world wars, the concentration camps and the threat of nuclear annihilation. In sermon after sermon — the sermon on the salt of the earth hosted on Ochorus is a good example — he pointed to the confident optimism of the thinkers of the late nineteenth century, and to what had become of it. Education had spread; knowledge had multiplied; wealth had grown. And men were not better. The disease had not been touched.

The reason, he argued, is that the world misdiagnoses man. It assumes that his trouble is ignorance, or environment, or poverty, or maladjustment, and it treats him accordingly. The Bible says that his trouble is sin — and that sin is not first of all a matter of things done but a condition of heart.

For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders. MARK 7:21

That is the diagnosis, and every remedy that ignores it is a palliative. It may make the patient more comfortable for a time. It will not cure him.

Sin as a disposition

In his exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, when he came to our Lord’s teaching on prayer, Lloyd-Jones made a point that goes to the root of his understanding. We tend, he said in effect, to think of sin in its grossest forms — the drunkard in the gutter, the criminal in the dock — and to congratulate ourselves that we are not like that. But if you want to see sin in its essence, look at a devout man on his knees. Even there, in the very presence of God, self intrudes. The temptation follows him into the holiest place of all, and he finds himself thinking about himself, admiring himself, worshipping himself when he meant to worship God. Sin, in other words, is at bottom self-worship; it is a disposition, a state of heart, before it is ever an act.

For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing. ROMANS 7:18

This is why moral reform cannot save a man. You can change a man’s behaviour and leave his heart exactly where it was. You can make him respectable and leave him proud. The diagnosis goes deeper than conduct, and so must the cure.

Taking the history

The method had a practical side that shaped his pastoral work. When someone brought him a spiritual problem, he did not begin with advice. He asked questions. What exactly is the trouble? When did it begin? What do you believe about it? What have you tried? He was listening for the real complaint beneath the presenting one. A man who says he cannot pray may really be a man who does not believe God hears. A woman who says she has lost her joy may be a woman who has never understood justification. A minister who complains of fruitlessness may be a man who has been relying on his own gifts.

He applied the same method to Scripture. Before asking what a text says to us, he asked what it says, and why, and to whom. He would take a phrase apart word by word, ask what problem the apostle was addressing, and reason carefully to the conclusion. His hearers often found it slow. But it meant that when he came to application, it rested on something solid.

Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. 2 CORINTHIANS 13:5

The diagnosis is itself a mercy

It would be easy to hear all this as bleak. Lloyd-Jones did not intend it so, and he was clear about why. A doctor who tells a patient the truth about his condition is not being cruel. He is being kind. The cruel doctor is the one who flatters the patient with a comforting falsehood and lets him die. In the same way, the preacher who hides the diagnosis of sin in order to be pleasant is doing his hearers no kindness at all.

They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace. JEREMIAH 6:14

And here is the heart of it. The diagnosis matters because there is a cure. A physician does not dwell on an incurable disease; he dwells on a curable one, because once it is identified it can be treated. The gospel’s diagnosis of man is severe precisely because the gospel’s remedy is sure. Christ did not come to improve the healthy.

They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. MATTHEW 9:12

Lloyd-Jones would say again and again that a man cannot be helped until he knows he is sick. The whole purpose of the searching, probing, uncomfortable preaching for which he was known was to bring the hearer to that knowledge — and then to Christ.

Where care is needed

The method has its dangers, and it is fair to name them. A preacher who is always diagnosing can become a preacher who is always suspicious, forever probing for the hidden fault, slow to encourage. Some of Lloyd-Jones’s hearers found him more searching than consoling, and some sensitive consciences were more wounded than healed. The physician’s method must be held together with the physician’s compassion, which was in fact strong in him but did not always show in the pulpit. We should also remember that not every trouble is spiritual in origin. Lloyd-Jones himself insisted, as we shall see in the chapters on depression, that the body and the temperament matter, and that a Christian may need a doctor as well as a preacher. The diagnostic habit is a servant, not a master. Its one purpose is to bring the sick to the Physician who can heal them.

Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases. PSALM 103:3

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Name one recurring trouble in your life. Now ask, as a physician would: what is the cause beneath it?

2. Read Mark 7:20–23 slowly. Resist the instinct to think of other people. Ask where your own heart fits the description.

3. The next time you pray, notice any moment when your thoughts turn to yourself — to how well you are praying, or how you appear. Confess it simply.

4. If you are helping someone in trouble this week, ask questions before you give advice. Listen for the real complaint.

5. Thank God specifically that the diagnosis of Scripture comes with a cure, and name that cure aloud: Christ.

A PRAYER

Searcher of hearts, I have been content to think of sin as something other people do. Show me my own heart as You see it.

Do not heal my hurt slightly. Do not let me settle for comfort when I need a cure.

Bring me to the end of myself, and then bring me to Christ, the Physician of souls, who came not for the healthy but for the sick.

And make me gentle with others, as You have been gentle with me. Amen.