David Martyn Lloyd-Jones
(1899-1981)
His
Life
David MartynLloyd-Jones was born on 20th December 1899 in Cardiff, Wales, the middle
son of Henry and Magdalene Lloyd-Jones, Harold and Vincent being the other
siblings. His father was a small but reasonably
successful businessman in Llangeitho, Cardiganshire.
Wales had known the
outpouring of God’s Spirit in earlier times under the ministries of men like
Daniel Rowland, Howell Harris, William Williams, Christmas Evans, Evan Roberts,
and not least John Jones of Talsarn. At
the close of the nineteenth century and after great visitations of God, Wales
was a dark spiritual wilderness, despite the many churches and chapels that lay
scattered around the country. The
Lloyd-Jones family belonged to the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church in
Llangeitho. This denomination had grown
cold during Martyn’s boyhood and adolescence, and much of the life of the
revivals of 1904/5 had become a faint memory.
The Calvinistic
Methodist Church which the Lloyd-Jones family was connected to can trace its
beginnings to the mid-1700s, a time when the Christian churches in Britain were
divided into two main groupings – the Arminians under John Wesley (17??-17??)
were the Methodists, and the Calvinists under George Whitefield were the
Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists.
Both these groups faced their own particular problems. The Methodists emphasised the free will of
men and ignored the need for depraved men to be sovereignly regenerated by the
effectual call of God. The Calvinists
were also facing challenges; while they emphasised the sovereignty of God in
salvation, they degenerated into hyper-Calvinism in which there was no longer
any Gospel for a lost mankind.
They denied the free
offer of salvation to all men through Christ the Saviour of the world, and with
that they sidelined the need for evangelism and missions.
The young Martyn had a fairly uneventful
boyhood up to January 1910. On a winter’s
night everything would change for the whole family, and not least for young
Martyn. In the early hours, a fire broke
out which nearly cost the lives of the three boys who were sleeping
upstairs. The family was spared, but
most of their possessions were lost, a loss from which Henry never fully
recovered.
The three boys
joined as members of the church at Llangeitho in 1914 at the encouragement of
their minister. However, while they
enjoyed the debate on religious matters, each was more committed to his career
than to his professed faith; this was a common thing in their day.
The family moved to
London in 1914 where his father set up a milk delivery business. Martyn shared in the rounds of the
business. With the family, they attached
themselves to the Charing Cross Chapel (now Orange Street Congregational Chapel)
and Martyn attended there throughout his young adulthood and student days in
the capital. He continued his education
and commenced his training to be a medical doctor at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in
London (known affectionately as Barts). By
the age of 26 he had gained his MD degree and the MRCP. From these facts, it is clear that, as a
young doctor, he was well up the Harley Street career ladder. He obviously has a lucrative career in
medicine before him.
The Charing Cross
Chapel where the Lloyd-Jones family attended was no different from the other
congregations in the connexion. But what
stood in its favour was the fact the Welsh Calvinistic Methodism sought to take
a mid-way between high Calvinism and Arminianism. They held tenaciously to the doctrines of
grace but unlike their English counterparts, they did not believe that being
Calvinistic meant ignoring the heart and emotions. For them, it was a “whole Gospel for a whole
man.” Holding to correct doctrines apart
from what Whitefield called a “felt Christ” was wrong and potentially
spiritually dangerous. They saw a need
for a return to Bible preaching rather than preaching of doctrinal statements,
catechisms and confessions. They also
emphasised the need for spiritual revival.
DML-J has begun to
feel the promptings of the Holy Spirit in his life and in the fullness of time
realised he was a lost sinner who needed Christ as his Saviour. While he enjoyed the religious debates he had
with other Sunday School scholars, Martyn had another debate going on which
only he knew about, a debate that was raging within his own heart. He was becoming concerned about his own
spiritual condition. He had thought all
along he was a Christian because he was a church member, but he knew he was
not. Only later did he come to see his
need of Christ and His salvation. He
knew that he needed to hear the Gospel being preached clearly, and he also knew
that this was not what he was receiving in his church. In fact, his minister preached on the
assumption that all were Christians, which was a common reality in many
Presbyterian churches of that era, and sadly also of today. But while reading for himself, the truth of
God’s love for the world dawned upon him, and he came to see that Christ died
for all men, and therefore for him, and he entrusted himself to the Saviour of
the world, whom he was later to preach with great effectiveness.
It was this Welsh
religious history that played a crucial role in the development of Martyn’s
life and ministry. He married Bethan
Philips in 1927, also a trainee medical doctor, and who became a Christian
under her husband’s faithful preaching in Sandfields. Afterwards the young newly-weds moved to Port
Talbot in South Wales, where Dr Lloyd-Jones was installed as minister of the
Forward Movement of the Presbyterian Church of Wales at Sandfields,
Aberavon.
His
Work
Although he had
preached a few times before realising that he was being called by God into the
Christian ministry, DML-J had ministered in Sandfields while working with Sir
Thomas Horder at Barts. After one of
these visits, the congregation decided that they wanted to call him as their
minister, which they did. He accepted
the call of the congregation as the call of God, and went back to his beloved
Wales in 1927 to commence what was to be an eleven year ministry of careful
biblical expository preaching. As well
as being aware of the call of God on his life, DML-J was so impressed with the
conditions of the poor in London among whom he had worked as a physician;
hence, Aberavon was a logical choice as his sphere of ministry. This town had a population of about 5,000
people who lived in sordid, squalid and overcrowded conditions; or as someone
put it, Aberavon was a place for the bookie, the prostitute and the
publican. Here his convictions about the
Gospel would be tested to the limit. On
being asked whether or not he knew if he could preach, he candidly admitted
that he did not know; but he did know what needed to be preached – the Gospel
of redeeming grace to a lost world.
In the church in
Sandfields, his approach was so different to that of other ministers who came
straight out of a liberal theological college with a corresponding liberal
theological education. DML-J knew what
he believed, and he declared that message uncompromisingly and with authority. His message can be distilled to this: he
preached Christ and Him crucified, determining with Paul not to know anything
among them but this. Some church members
did not like this message, and left. But
they were replaced gradually with those who were drawn by God’s Spirit and
gripped by the truth, and these were mainly the working class in South Wales. They were converted to Christ under the
Doctor’s authoritative biblical preaching.
He did not have emotionally charged appeals after his sermons, but
allowed the Lord to do His own saving work in their hearts. But God used this young man with the clear
message of God’s love for mankind and His justice and righteousness, and God
brought one hard case after another to the Cross and to saving faith in Christ
alone.
The stir this
preacher caused is difficult for those who do not sit under that kind of
ministry to understand. Given that he
had not been theologically trained in the recognised way, DML-J was a man who
got his message from the Bible. He saw as
his role to preach the Bible verse by verse and passage by passage. As his preaching ability became more widely
known, many demands were made for him to preach outside his own congregation
and in many different places.
On 28th
November 1935, he was invited to preach in the Royal Albert Hall in London to
an assembly of Christians. He dealt with
the problems he saw with many of the forms of evangelism that were being used
in the church, comparing and contrasting them with the Biblical model. In the congregation that evening was Dr G.
Campbell Morgan (then 72), minister of Westminster Chapel, London. Having heard of DML-J, and having listened to
him on that evening, he wanted, in 1938, to have him as his colleague and
successor in Westminster Chapel. But
this was not so easy because overtures had been made to him to become Principal
of Bala Theological College in North Wales.
The call to stay in Wales and also to head up the training of future
ministers of the Presbyterian Church in Wales was strong. Eventually, the call to London prevailed, and
the family transferred to London in April 1939 and he worked alongside Dr
Morgan from September 1938, thus providing him with the respite he needed at
that time. Dr Morgan died in 1945 and DML-J
was sole pastor of that great London congregation.
DML-J’s
work became critical to the resurgence of Reformed theology in the United
Kingdom (UK). His sermon series were
soon demanded in print, and his expository sermons on the Sermon of the Mount were published, and these expositions stand
today as classical sermons which set the pattern for what truly expository
preaching is.
After
the ravages of war, in 1947, the congregation grew quickly and the balconies
were opened. From 1948 until 1968 when
the Doctor retired as minister of Westminster Chapel, the congregation averaged
1,500 in the mornings and 2,000 at the evening services. He died and went to be with his Lord on 1st
March 1981, entirely appropriate for a Welshman since this was St David’s Day.
His Significance
Dr D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones has been rightly described as the most influential
preacher in twentieth century Britain, if not the world. His preaching gifts were unequalled,
therefore the influence he exerted on preachers across many denominations and
none, together with the legacy that he left in his printed and now digitally
re-mastered sermons is incalculable. His
books are listed in the Bibliography, and currently there are about 1,600
sermons available for download, covering his main sermon and lecturing series. His 53 years of ministry have left an
indelible mark on British and international evangelicalism.
Amongst
the extra-church involvements of DML-J can be accounted his setting up the
Banner of Truth Trust, the Evangelical Library, The Westminster Fellowship, Tyndale
House, The InterVarsity Fellowship, the International Fellowship of Evangelical
Students, etc.
While
DML-J, who was capable of thinking independently but without disparaging the
contribution of earlier generations of God’s servants, applied his mind to
understanding and preaching the Gospel, he was not swayed by everything he
read. Instead, his practice was to weigh
everything against the clear teaching of Scripture, on the hand, and by the
teaching of the Welsh Calvinistic Methodists, on the other. His practice was to use the Robert Murray
McCheyne Bible reading scheme where, if followed, one would read the entire
Bible once a year, and the New Testament and Psalms twice. His knowledge of Scripture was proverbial,
and this he used to assess everything he read.
But
as is usually the case when his theology is examined, he created as much
controversy after his life as he did while he was still ministering. Controversy was stirred because of his views
on ecclesiology, Pentecostalism, and his understanding of the
sealing/baptism/filling of the Spirit.
However,
his theology of one aspect of soteriology is now causing some controversy,
specifically his understanding of the universality of the Gospel. Since the Gospel is to be preached to every
creature, does that mean that what is offered in the Gospel is for all men
equally? Has God revealed His will to
save all men on condition of faith, or did He send Christ to save only His
elect? What DML-J actually preached, as
discovered in his published sermons, stands in clear contrast to what some
reformed theologians and preachers held to be the authentic Christian
message.
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