Prayer is the highest activity of the human soul

"Prayer is the highest activity of the human soul, and therefore it is at the same time the ultimate test of a 

man´s true spiritual condition (there is nothing so much as prayer life that tells the truth about us as Christian people). Everything we do in the Christian life is easier than prayer."
~ Dr. Martin Lloyd Jones

He is your Father

"You need never be anxious, you must never be worried. God is with you in this state, you are not alone, and He is your Father." ~ Martyn Lloyd Jones

The Glory of the Gospel

“The glory of the gospel is that when the Church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it. It is then that the world is made to listen to her message, though it may hate it at first. That is how revival comes. That must also be true of us as individuals. It should not be our ambition to be as much like everybody else as we can, though we happen to be Christian, but rather to be as different from everybody who is not a Christian as we can possibly be. Our ambition should be to be like Christ; the more like Him the better. And the more like Him we become, the more we shall be unlike everybody who is not a Christian.”

~ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

The Life of God in the Soul of Man

[For Paul] everything always ends in Christ and with Christ. He is the final point, He is the explanation of Paul's living and his whole outlook upon life ... Christ is all-sufficient for every circumstance, for every eventuality and for every possibility ... he is introducing us to what in many ways we may describe as the cardinal New Testament doctrine. The Christian life ... is not just a philosophy, it is not just a point of view, it is not just a teaching that we take up and try to put into practice. It is all that, but it is something infinitely more. The very essence of the Christian life, according to the New Testament teaching everywhere, is that it is a mighty power that enters into us; it is a life, if you like, that is pulsating in us. It is an activity, and activity on the part of God ...

[Christians] are not just men who have taken up a certain theory and are trying to practise it; it is God doing something in them and through them ... our highest thoughts, our noblest aspirations, our every righteous inclination is from and of God, is something that is brought into being in us by God Himself. It is God's activity and not merely our activity (Philippians 3: 10) ... You find [Paul] saying exactly the same thing in other Epistles (Ephesians 1:19, 20; 2:10) ... You remember also the great statement at the end of the third chapter: 'He is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us'.

Now, that is typical and characteristic New Testament doctrine, and if we have not grasped it we are surely missing one of the most glorious things about the Christian life and position ... We come back again to what I am never tired of quoting, namely, John Wesley's favourite definition of a Christian. He found it in that book by Henry Scougal ... The life of God in the soul of man ... The Christian is not just a good, decent, moral man; the life of God has entered into him, there is an energy, a power, a life in him and it is that that makes him peculiarly and specifically Christian.

~Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression, pp. 291-2

We become weary ... ~ Martyn Lloyd-Jones

'Ah,' we say, 'the same old thing week after week.' That is our attitude towards our life, and ... we become weary ... If you regard the Christian life as a dreary task you are insulting God ... If you and I come to regard any aspect of this Christian life merely as a task and a duty, and if we have to goad ourselves and to set our teeth in order to get through with it, I say we are insulting God and we have forgotten the very essence of Christianity. The Christian life is not a task. The Christian life alone is worthy of the name life. This alone is righteous and holy and pure and good. It is the kind of life the Son of God Himself lived. It is to be like God Himself in His own holiness. That is why I should live it. I do not just decide to make a great effort to carry on somehow ... How have I got into this life — this life that I am grumbling and complaining about, and finding it hard and difficult? ... there is only one answer ... because the only begotten Son of God left heaven and came down to earth for our salvation; He divested Himself of all the insignia of His eternal glory and humbled Himself to be born as a babe and to be placed in a manger. He endured the life of this world for thirty-three years: He was spat upon and reviled. He had thorns thrust into his head and was nailed to a cross, to bear the punishment of my sin. That is how I have come to ... this.

... 'Be not weary in well-doing.' My friend, if you think of your Christian life ... with this sense of grudge, or as a wearisome task or duty, I tell you to go back to the beginning of your life, retrace your steps to the wicket gate through which you passed. Look at the world in its evil and sin, look at the hell to which it was leading you, and then look forward and realize that you are set in the midst of the most glorious campaign into which a man could ever enter, and that you are on the noblest road that the world has ever known.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones - Spiritual Depression, pp. 199-200

Faith is refusing to be...

Martyn Lloyd-Jones: Faith is refusing to be burdened because we have cast our burden upon the Lord. 

The Deification of man

 ‎"Man was never meant to be a god, but he is for
ever trying to deify himself." - Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Saying Farewell to the Past

Would you like to be rid of this spiritual depression?

The first thing you have to do is to say farewell now once and forever to your past.

Realize that it has been covered and blotted out in Christ.

Never look back at your sins again.

Say: ‘It is finished, it is covered by the Blood of Christ’.

That is your first step.

Take that and finish with yourself and all this talk about goodness, and look to the Lord Jesus Christ.

It is only then that true happiness and joy are possible for you.

What you need is not to make resolutions to live a better life, to start fasting and sweating and praying.

No! You just begin to say:

I rest my faith on Him alone
Who died for my transgressions to atone.

-D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression, p. 35:

Weariness on the Way

'Ah,' we say, 'the same old thing week after week.' That is our attitude towards our life, and ... we become weary ... If you regard the Christian life as a dreary task you are insulting God ... If you and I come to regard any aspect of this Christian life merely as a task and a duty, and if we have to goad ourselves and to set our teeth in order to get through with it, I say we are insulting God and we have forgotten the very essence of Christianity. The Christian life is not a task. The Christian life alone is worthy of the name life. This alone is righteous and holy and pure and good. It is the kind of life the Son of God Himself lived. It is to be like God Himself in His own holiness. That is why I should live it. I do not just decide to make a great effort to carry on somehow ... How have I got into this life — this life that I am grumbling and complaining about, and finding it hard and difficult? ... there is only one answer ... because the only begotten Son of God left heaven and came down to earth for our salvation; He divested Himself of all the insignia of His eternal glory and humbled Himself to be born as a babe and to be placed in a manger. He endured the life of this world for thirty-three years: He was spat upon and reviled. He had thorns thrust into his head and was nailed to a cross, to bear the punishment of my sin. That is how I have come to ... this.

... 'Be not weary in well-doing.' My friend, if you think of your Christian life ... with this sense of grudge, or as a wearisome task or duty, I tell you to go back to the beginning of your life, retrace your steps to the wicket gate through which you passed. Look at the world in its evil and sin, look at the hell to which it was leading you, and then look forward and realize that you are set in the midst of the most glorious campaign into which a man could ever enter, and that you are on the noblest road that the world has ever known.

-Martyn Lloyd-Jones - Spiritual Depression, pp. 199-200

Why believe the devil instead of believing God?

Why believe the devil instead of believing God? Rise up and realize the truth about yourself - that all the past has gone, and you are one with Christ, and all your sins have been blotted out once and for ever. O let us remember that it is sin to doubt God's Word. It is sin to allow the past, which God has dealt with, to rob us of our joy and our usefulness in the present and in the future.
Source: Spiritual Depression - Its Causes and its Cures, 1965,p.76 -Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Revival

Revival, above everything else, is a glorification of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It is the restoration of him to the center of the life of the Church. You find this warm devotion, personal devotion, to him.
~ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Revival (Crossway Books, 1987), 47.

Ambassadors for Christ

"You know, this is a matter of common honesty. The great apostle says elsewhere, 'I am an ambassador for Christ.' What is the business of an ambassador? Is it to voice his own opinions? Is it to say what he thinks? Well, if he does so, he is a very bad ambassador. The ambassador's job is to convey the thinking and the point of view of the country that has appointed him and which he is representing. He may disagree with it entirely, but it does not matter. The business of the ambassador is to deliver the message which has been given to him, to hand on this commission, whatever it is. And Paul says, I have no choice about this; that's what he told me to say. I'm not here to give you my theories and my ideas, he says. I am determined simply to preach what he gave me."
-Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Preaching

"Preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire"
-Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Not by deduction but by consciousness

“Did I not know the Lord to be mine, were I not certain his heart feels even more love for me than I am able to conceive, were not this evident to me, not by deduction and argument but by consciousness, by his own light shining in my soul as the sun doth upon my bodily eyes, into what deplorable situation should I have been now cast.”

~ Henry Venn, quoted in Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable

The Discipline of the Lord

"If you are a child of God then you are certainly going to be disciplined, because God is preparing you for holiness. He is not an indulgent father who hands out sweets indiscriminately and does not care what happens to us. God is holy, and He is preparing us for Himself and for glory; and because we are what we are, and because sin is in us, and because the world is what it is, we must needs be disciplined. So He sends us trials and tribulations in order to pull us up, and to conform us to 'the image of His Son'."
- Martyn Lloyd-Jones

GO WRONG IN DOCTRINE, GO WRONG IN LIFE

People say, ‘Do not be negative; let us be positive; let us just preach the simple gospel’. But the Bible is full of negatives, full of warnings, ever showing us these terrible possibilities. If you find in yourself a dislike of the warnings of the Scripture and of this negative teaching, it is obvious that you have been duped by the wiles of the devil. You have not realized the situation in which you are placed.

The movements to which I am referring can be best classified and considered along the following lines. We start with Heresies within the Church, which have been caused and produced by the devil and his powers. I am not concerned to go into the detail of heresies; I am simply concerned to emphasize the fact of heresies, the fact of movements within the life of the Church that have so often led to terrible trouble and produced a state of chaos.

A heresy is ‘a denial of or a doubt concerning any defined, established Christian doctrine’. There is a difference between heresy and apostasy. Apostasy means ‘a departure from the Christian truth’. It may be a total renunciation or denial of it, or it may be a misrepresentation of it to such an extent that it becomes a denial of the whole truth. But a heresy is more limited in its scope. To be guilty of heresy, and to be a heretic, means that in the main you hold to the doctrines of the Christian faith, but that you tend to go wrong on some particular doctrine or aspect of the faith. The New Testament itself shows us clearly that this tendency to heresy had already begun even in the days of the early Church.

One of the first things you are to learn in this Christian life and warfare is that, if you go wrong in your doctrine, you will go wrong in all aspects of your life. You will probably go wrong in your practice and behaviour; and you will certainly go wrong in your experience… We read about these things constantly in the newspapers. Some are rejoicing because Protestantism and Roman Catholicism are drawing nearer together. ‘What does the past matter?’ they say, ‘Let us have the right spirit, let us come together, all of us, and not be concerned about these particularities.’ I have but one comment to make about this matter, and I regret to have to make it. To me, all such talk is just a denial of the plain teaching of the New Testament, a denial of the Creeds and the Confessions and the Protestant Reformation! It is carnal thinking, in addition to being a denial of the truth.

According to the teaching of the Bible, one thing only matters, and that is the truth. The Holy Spirit will honor nothing but the truth, His own truth. But that, He will honor. To me the most marvelous thing of all is that, the moment you come to such a conclusion, you realize that in a sense nothing else matters. … Nothing matters in the spiritual realm except truth, the truth given by the Holy Spirit, the truth that can be honored by the Holy Spirit. Is there anything more glorious in the whole of the ld Testament than the way in which this great principle stands out? God often used individual men, or but two or three, against hordes and masses. Is there anything more exhilarating than the doctrine of the remnant? While the majority had gone wrong, the ones and the twos saw the truth.

Take a man like Jeremiah. All the false prophets were against him. There is a man who had to stand alone. Poor Jeremiah – how he hated it and disliked it! He did not like being unpopular, he did not like standing on his own, and being ridiculed and laughed at, and spat upon, as it were; but he had the truth of God, and so he endured it all. He decided at times to say nothing, but the word was like fire in his bones, and he had to go on speaking it. Obloquy and abuse were heaped upon him, but it did not matter; he was God’s spokesman and God’s representative. Similarly Moses had to stand alone when he came down from the Mount where he had met God. To stand in isolation from one’s fellows, but with God, is the great doctrine of the Old Testament in many ways. And it is emphasized in the New Testament also. (Online source)

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

The grace of God

“The ultimate test of our spirituality is the measure of our amazement at the grace of God.” —D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones