Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones as a Preacher1

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Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones as a Preacher1

by Graham Harrison


There could be no mistaking the opening. The distinctive Welsh accent. The voice, somewhat nasal in tone, that to begin with spoke so quietly that you had almost to strain to hear. 'I should like to call your attention to . . . .'And once again the great preacher had us in his grip.

Make no mistake about it, this man of many parts was above all else a preacher. 'This greatest of all tasks', as he called it, was the burden of his life. 'To me the work of preaching is the highest and the greatest and the most glorious calling to which anyone can ever be called.' Such was his conviction, and he acted on it by leaving medicine to preach the everlasting gospel.

Not that everybody agreed with his decision. I remember travelling home from Oxford to South Wales by train and sharing a compartment with two other men. It transpired that one was a middle-aged Brethren missionary home on furlough. The other was a retired (but not retiring) Welsh Congregational minister from London. When I produced a volume of The Sermon on the Mount (which had just been published) and began to read, he proceeded to pitch into me about the deficiencies of the author. What business had he to leave medicine and enter the ministry? Why hadn't he done an Albert Schweitzer and opened a dispensary in darkest Africa?

We had a theological dog-fight all the way from Didcot to Cardiff, with the incredulous Brother (to whom this was all quite new) occasionally interjecting a word on my behalf, as I tried to defend what the Doctor had done.

But he did not need defending! Who else in our day preached like him? What power of argument and logical progression as he unfolded his message in such a way that the simplest could follow him and the deepest could but marvel at his profundity. How great it was to hear him preach as he did not infrequently, 'with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven'.

It was a new dimension to me when first I heard him. Here was the spirit and the power of the old Methodist fathers all over again. He gave to those of us who were preachers at once a standard to aspire to and an encouragement to strive after it and seek it. He ministered in a day of small things, but he never let us settle for the inevitability of such a day. Always he pointed us to the glory of God, to the possibility of communion with him, to the increasingly urgent need for revival.

The God he preached was the God who could act and intervene in the affairs of men. His God was (and is) 'the living God' - I can hear him say it now - and no other God was worth having.

He never left you without a blessing. True, there were times when, judged by his own standards, he did not preach as he could. Yet even then you went away edified, humbled and blessed. But there were also times - and they were so many - when the almighty power of God was on him and he preached sermons the like of which I have never heard from anyone else. And there were occasions as well and how he longed for them! - when there was something even more. Heaven itself seemed open before you and you experienced something of the glory.

What he always sought to do was to confront you with the living God; it was not always a comforting or comfortable experience. One young woman very well known to me stopped going to Westminster Chapel because she said that he always made her feel uncomfortable, such a wretch and a sinner!

But what he did was to send you away with a renewed conviction of the greatness and the glory of the gospel, of the power of the living God, and of his love to us in sending his dear Son Christ Jesus to die for us sinners on Calvary's hill. So humbling! But so uplifting and exhilarating.

It was not that he was always the same. In fact you could say that he cultivated three distinct styles. There were the Friday evenings at Westminster as he worked his way through the riches of the mightiest of all the Epistles. As he used to say, that was 'more cerebral'. Sunday morning was a ministry largely with the saints in mind - heart-warming, encouraging, inciting to the knowledge and experience of God. Then on a Sunday evening he would blow the gospel trumpet with an authority and in a style that were unmatched.

The same variations could be seen as he made his weekly ventures through the length and breadth of the British Isles. The afternoon sermon - again to the saints - often dwelling on the need and condition of the church today, urging us to cry again to God to come and do for us what he had done so mightily for our forefathers. And yet, in a subtle and winsome way, it was evangelistic as well. Often in these meetings (certainly it was like this in Wales) he would attract a lot of chapel-going people, many of whom were religious and moral, but not Christians. Then come the evening with the chapel crammed to capacity, people in chairs down the aisles, sitting on the stairs, in the vestibules, sometimes even on the pulpit steps, he would preach the gospel. And how! I number some of the most thrilling moments of my life in such meetings. What a great gospel! What a glorious Saviour!

Indeed, it was as a preacher of the gospel that he excelled himself. He knew and believed it to be the only answer to man's trouble and predicament. In an age when even evangelical preachers were hastening down the by-roads of social and cultural involvement and political application of the message, he unhesitatingly called them back by precept and example. He knew his history well enough to know, as he often told us, that it had all been tried before - and that it had failed. The gospel, preached in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, was the answer - the only answer. Society could be changed only as the individuals who composed it were changed.

He gave you such confidence in the gospel and in its power. I remember hearing him preach on 1 Tim. 1:13 in a crowded little chapel up in Blaenavon. Quite early on in the sermon he began to deal with reasons that men gave for not believing in God and the message of the Bible. He instanced the so-called intellectual reasons that men advanced, based on the fact that many of the leading thinkers of the world were atheists or agnostics. He referred to Bertrand Russell - who was all the rage then in some circles - and quoted the title of his book Why I am not a Christian.

The Doctor then described how many people, who were not of the intellectual calibre of Bertrand Russell, would explain with a superior air that it was because they were thinkers that they were not Christians. You began to wonder where he preacher was going and how he would be able to deal with this.

'Very well then', he said, 'let's think of somebody else who isn't a Christian. What about Tom, Dick or Harry leaning on a lamp-post with a fag in his mouth. He isn't a Christian either! Is it because of the philosophical difficulties that attend the faith? Is it because he is a thinker? Of course not. It is because of the state of man's heart and the blindness of his mind. 'Men are rebels against God.'

In one devastating stroke of pulpit genius he had entirely exposed the pretentiousness of sin masquerading as intelligence. What is more, he had carried the congregation along with him in such a way that they could see in a moment the common failing that he had laid bare.

It was so typical of the way in which he reasoned with men as he preached. He would tell us that he was going to make us think. And he did so - arguing in big, bold, logical steps that were so compelling and lucid in their presentation of the truth. He even left you with the impression that it was all so obvious that you had worked it all out yourself!

What a sense of urgency and seriousness he brought to his congregations as he confronted them with the plight of the world. I was present on New Year's Day 1957 when he preached at Wood Street Congregational Church in Cardiff. It was a Civic Service and the chapel (now demolished to make way for a multi-storey office block) held 2500-3000 people. The sermon was on Isaiah 22:8-14: 'Sound an alarm'2. It was preached against the background of the Hungarian uprising and the Suez crisis. How he berated the frivolity of men who, when the world was on the verge of a third world war, were showing more interest in the sordid revelations of the sex life of a famous actress which were making headlines at the time.


Live broadcast

The sermon was broadcast live. The predictable happened and the Doctor exceeded the stated human time limit for the broadcast, for the Spirit was on him. But the unpredictable happened as well - has it ever happened thus for any other preacher? - the BBC did not fade him out; they simply broadcast him to the end. What a contrast between that and the same service a year or so before, when the preacher was a well-known London Methodist noted for his heterodoxy and his emphasis on the 'social gospel'. All I can remember from his sermon is one inanity - that it was his custom when preaching at a sea-side church in the summer to wear his bathing costume under his ecclesiastical robes, so that he could have a dip on the Lord's Day!

You could always rely on the Doctor to be both interesting and enjoyable to listen to. Indeed it was not unknown for him to reprove some of us for the lack of these qualities in our sermons. People came to hear him because they enjoyed it. Of course, in many cases there was something much more than that, but that element was always present. You could thus feel confident that, it you invited any man of the world along, the preacher would not fail you at this point. The man might be angered by what he heard. He might scoff. More likely he would be humbled and subdued. But one thing you could be certain of - he would not fall asleep and indicate by his attitude throughout the sermon that he would have been better off at home with his feet up in front of the television!

I well remember, on the occasion of one of his visits to my church, learning to my pleasure and, I must confess, to my surprise, that a Trade Union Convener at one of the local steelworks intended coming to the service. I happened to meet him in the street a couple of days before the Doctor's visit and, although he was not a Christian, he told me that he was coming and bringing four Shop Stewards with him. My face must have registered some surprise, for he went on to explain how he was getting them to come: '"Boys," I said to them "this bloke is the best speaker since Nye Bevan!"'

They came and heard a fine sermon on 1 Corinthians 2. The Convener's comparison was unfortunate, although perhaps pardonable. I had heard them both and, quite frankly, Bevan was not in the same oratorical league! Nevertheless, I was glad they all came - the more so when, 20 minutes before we were due to begin the service, all the lights fused. We had no need to panic, as all the Shop Stewards belonged to the E.T.U., and they had the power on for us again in about three minutes flat!

He possessed the most remarkable powers of analysis and diagnosis and he would use these to great advantage either in opening up a text or in assessing a situation and then relating it to the message of the Bible. It was not at all difficult to see that these same faculties exercised in the medical realm had made him such a brilliant physician. But now these powers were harnessed to expounding and applying the Word of God.

His method was expository and the more you heard him the greater became your appreciation of the way in which he handled Scripture. It was the truth of God that he was concerned to convey to you - and that in term of the message of the particular portion of the Word of God to which he was calling your attention. In fact - and this was a measure of his powers - he made you feel that the verse on which he was preaching was the most important verse in the whole Bible for you to be considering at that moment.

Then, as he went on in his inimitable way, he would widen it out and start quoting other scriptures to confirm‎ and illustrate the text. As he did this, he always left me with the impression that the message of the Bible was like an inverted pyramid, with the apex resting on and held up by this very verse that he was expounding.

What he did was to bring a message. He was a man sent from God and that was where his message came from. That is what made his preaching prophetic - and I do not hesitate to use the word. It was far removed from a sterile, doctrinaire, intellectual evangelicalism that is really but a form of religious humanism. Consequently there was nothing tentative about his ministry. He spoke with authority - and that is how it should be.

Along with this went that tremendous seriousness that characterized him and came across as he preached. You could see it in his manner, even in his dress, certainly in his demeanour in the pulpit. Frivolity and triviality would have been unthinkable to him, there most of all. His words were weighed, his decisions measured, for he was a steward of the mysteries of God who would one day give an account of his stewardship. He was in trust with the gospel.

In fact his sticking point was the gospel. Anything that either repudiated it or, by implication, undermined it was anathema to him and would be resisted with never the least suggestion of compromise. But there was a corollary to this. If the gospel was the great point of division which marked off evangelicals from others, it was also the great point of unity.


The cause of unity

No one laboured and preached so tirelessly and persistently for the cause of evangelical unity as the Doctor. It was a mark of his bigness. Although his views on most issues that you cared to mention were definite and decided, even distinctive, he would never allow lesser truths to overshadow the majesty of the gospel.

Hence the distinction between primary and secondary truths for which he often contended. How ardently he strove to prevent men, who were united in the primary truths, from falling apart over secondary issues like baptism, ecclesiology, prophetic interpretations, and even the doctrines of grace. Some have faulted him at this point and even suggested that it was a symptom of approaching senility (although, no doubt fearing a most unsenile reaction, they never said it to his face!). But his logic was entirely consistent and his reasoning eminently biblical. He 'saw life steadily, and saw it whole'. He acted with that sense of responsibility befitting the eminence to which God had called him. Let others set about building their little empires: he would not. Thus in a remarkable way he belonged to us all and made himself available to us all.

Herein lay the explanation of the stand he took, culminating in October 1966 in his famous call to evangelicals to leave their apostate denominations and come together, not in a new denomination, but in fellowship together in the gospel. The sad story of the succeeding doctrinal decline of those evangelical Anglicans and nonconformists who largely resisted that call is justification, if such be needed, of his rightness in making it. But that he made it at all can only be understood in the light of his heartfelt conviction that the only answer to the plight of man was the power of God. And it is the gospel that is the power of God to salvation.

You could not listen to him for long without noticing that strange power so frequently attending his preaching. He taught us to seek a 'baptism of fire', to sue God for the sealing of the Spirit and not to be content until we knew that mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost that he had undoubtedly experienced and that he assured us was available for us all.

He never claimed to have experienced revival, though some might want to describe what happened under his ministry in Aberavon as at least a touch of that blessing. The 'children of the Revival' from 1904 recognized in him a kindred spirit, and such longing after another visitation as still exists is largely attributable to his persistence in urging it on us as our only hope and our greatest need

Many ministers will ever praise God for the fact that it was under the Doctor's ministry that they were converted. Others, like myself, were left like little foundlings on his doorstep in our infancy, only for him to take us in and become a father and a mother to us. Now that he is gone we all feel bereft.

Truly he, the greatest preacher of the 20th century, was a prince in Israel. Yet he himself taught us to put our trust not in princes but in the living God. May we not ask that a double portion of his spirit will be on us? Then we shall go forth to smite the waters and to cry with faith 'Where is the Lord God of Elijah?'


Footnotes


1. This article first appeared in the Evangelical Times April 1981 Special Thanksgiving Feature for Lloyd-Jones soon after his death in March 1981.


2. This sermon is reprinted in Old Testament Evangelistic Sermons.