June 12

In The Holiness And Sincerity That Are From God

Now this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in our relations with you, in the holiness and sincerity that are from God. We have done so not according to worldly wisdom but according to God’s grace. For we do not write you anything you cannot read or understand. And I hope that, as you have understood us in part, you will come to understand fully that you can boast of us just as we will boast of you in the day of the Lord Jesus.

2 Corinthians 1:12-14 

In an effort to make the gospel appealing, many preachers and evangelists have sought to entertain and to water down the message. There is little market, it is often presumed, for serious, somber, uncompromising Bible teaching. This supposition was proven wrong by David Martyn Lloyd-]ones, one of the most acclaimed preachers of the twentieth century.

Lloyd-Jones was born in South Wales in 1900 and after graduating from medical school in 1921, he became an assistant to one of his former teachers. But he was not content in that profession, believing that God was calling him to preach the gospel. “By ‘gospel’ he meant the old-fashioned, Bible-based, life-transforming message of radical sin in every human heart and radical salvation through faith in Christ alone—a definite message quite distinct from the indefinite hints and euphoric vagueness that to his mind had usurped the gospel’s place in most British pulpits.”

In 1927, without seminary training, he became a lay pastor of a Presbyterian church in Wales, and from the first Sunday of his ministry had made it very clear to his parishioners what kind of a minister he would be. He preached “holiness and sincerity . . . not according to worldly wisdom.”

“Young men and women, my one great attempt here at Aberavon, as long as God gives me strength to do so, will be to try to prove to you not merely that Christianity is reasonable, but that ultimately, faced as we all are at some time or other with the stupendous fact of life and death, nothing else is reasonable . . .

“My request is this: that we all be honest with one another in our conversation and discussions . . .  Do let us be honest with one another and never profess to believe more than is actually true to our experience. Let us always, with the help of the Holy Spirit, testify to our belief, in full, but never a word more . . . If the church of Christ on earth could get rid of the parasites who only believe that they ought to believe in Christ, she would, I am certain, count once more in the world as she did in her early days . . . ”

In 1938, Lloyd-Jones became the pastor of London’s Congregational cathedral, Westminster Chapel, where he served for the next three decades. It was there that for the last twelve years of his ministry, he conducted Friday night lectures on Romans, drawing crowds upwards of two thousand. ¹²