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January 20 Daily Devotional

A First Book of Daily Readings

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)

What are you making of yourself?

The case against this modern teaching [of self-expression] is not yet complete; ... it ignores recklessly the ultimate destiny of this self of ours; ... it does so from a merely earthly and human standpoint.... But there is a higher standpoint, and an infinitely more important one, which it also entirely ignores. Our Lord said, "It is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed rather than having two hands and two feet to be cast into everlasting fire." ... On the purely human plane ... this talk of self-expression is utterly degrading to the true self. But, over and above that, there is God's view of us, which is of infinitely greater consequence, as we are in His hands and He is the Judge eternal. That it is His view of self that matters is made abundantly clear in the Bible....

God gave man a nature and a being like His own. He created man in His own image. He breathed into man the breath of life and made of him a living soul. That soul is God's gift to us. It is the treasure which He has committed to our charge and keeping. It is the self He asks us to express and expects us to express. And at the end of life and of time He will test our performance.

The standard of judgement will be the moral law as given to Moses, the teachings of the prophets, the Sermon on the Mount, and, above all, our believing knowledge of Himself and our approximation to the life lived by our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. For true self-expression has been revealed perfectly once and for all in Him. The question we shall all have to face therefore is, What have you made of the self? How have you expressed it? The consequences are eternal—life or death, heaven or hell.

Truth Unchanged, Unchanging, pp. 28-30



“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”

Comments on D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, A First Book of Daily Readings

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