February 11 Daily Devotional

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

________________ February 11 Brother Ass [a cause of spiritual depression]—physical conditions. Is anyone surprised? Does someone hold the view that as long as you are a Christian it does not matter what the condition of your body is? Well, you will soon be disillusioned if you believe that. Physical conditions play their part in all this ... there are certain physical ailments which tend to promote depression. Thomas Carlyle, I suppose, is an outstanding illustration of this. Or take that great preacher who preached in London for nearly forty years in the last century—Charles Haddon Spurgeon—one of the truly great preachers of all time. That great man was subject to spiritual depression, and the main explanation in his case was undoubtedly the fact that he suffered from a gouty condition which finally killed him. ... And there are many, I find, who come to talk to me about these matters, in whose case it seems quite clear to me that the cause of the trouble is mainly physical ... tiredness, overstrain, illness. You cannot isolate the spiritual from the physical for we are body, mind and spirit. The greatest and the best Christians when they are physically weak are more prone to an attack of spiritual depression than at any other time and there are great illustrations of this in the Scriptures. Let us give a word of warning at this point. We must not forget the existence of the devil, nor allow him to trap us into regarding as spiritual that which is fundamentally physical. But we must be careful on all sides in drawing this distinction; because if you give way to your physical condition you become guilty in a spiritual sense. If you recognize, however, that the physical may be partly responsible for your spiritual condition and make allowances for that, you will be better able to deal with the spiritual. Spiritual Depression, pp. 18-19 February 12 You will find your marching orders here Why should we study [the Sermon on the Mount]? Why should we try to live it? ... The Lord Jesus Christ died to enable us to live the Sermon on the Mount ... He has made this possible for me. The second reason for studying it is that nothing shows me the absolute need of the new birth, and of the Holy Spirit and His work within, so much.... These Beatitudes crush me to the ground. They show me my utter helplessness. Were it not for the new birth, I am undone. Read and study it, face yourself in the light of it. It will drive you to see your ultimate need of the rebirth and the gracious operation of the Holy Spirit.... Another reason is this. The more we live and try to practice this Sermon on the Mount, the more shall we experience blessing. Look at the blessings that are promised to those who do practise it. The trouble with much holiness teaching is that it leaves out the Sermon on the Mount, and asks us to experience sanctification. That is not the biblical method. If you want to have power in your life and to be blessed, go straight to the Sermon on the Mount. Live and practise it and give yourself to it, and as you do so the promised blessings will come. "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled." If you want to be filled, don't seek some mystic blessing; don't rush to meetings hoping you will get it. Face the Sermon on the Mount and its implications and demands, see your utter need, and then you will get it. It is the direct road to blessing. Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, i, p. 18 February 13 He comes to us ... as of old by the lakeside . . . He speaks to us the same words, 'Follow Me," and sets us the task which He has to fulfil for our time and . . . [those who obey Him] shall learn in their own experience who He is Jesus is walking along one day and He sees a man called Matthew sitting at the receipt of custom. He does not hesitate to confront that man in the middle of transacting his business and say, 'Follow me And Matthew rose up, left everything and went after Jesus. He goes to the children of Zebedee and says the same thing. They too leave their boats, fishing nets, father and everything else. Here is One who does not hesitate to speak in a kind of totalitarian manner when He commands them, 'Follow me'. And they went and they followed Him. That is the gospel in action. That is evangelism. That is how the Church comes into being. That is the way in which the work of God is carried on. But He went even beyond that! He does not hesitate to claim that He has power to forgive sin. And He got into much trouble for claiming it. 'Who can forgive sins, but God alone?' said the people. But He does forgive sins. He asserts that He possesses the authority and power, and He is going to prove it. So He tells the man, 'Take up thy bed and walk', as a sign that He has power to forgive sins also.... So often when we ministers preach through the Gospels we take these things, and turn them into parables, accompanied by nice, soothing little messages. But we are really missing the point. We should be preaching the Lord Jesus Christ and asserting His authority.... Why are people expected to want to accept Christianity? Because ... it does this or that. It promises you happiness. It gives you peace and joy... this is false evangelism. Our one business is to preach the Lord Jesus Christ, the final Authority.... The cults can give you "results." Christian Science can tell you that if you do this and that you will sleep well at night, you will stop worrying, you will feel healthier.... We are not to do that. We are to declare Him, and to bring people face to face with Him. Authority, pp. 20-1 February 14 Right in our own eyes—or God's? Those who ignore God's word; who refuse to consider the gospel, with its light and its knowledge; who keep away from God's house and every form of instruction with respect to these matters; who argue that all that is necessary is that one should be sincere, that one should pay one's twenty shillings in the pound, give to charity, be friendly and affable—they are trusting to their own zeal, and to their own ideas and are refusing to be enlightened as to what God really demands. To them we must say what Paul said to his contemporaries, that having done all, they are simply establishing their own righteousness. We are not questioning their sincerity or their honesty.... But the vital question is, What is the value of it all? It is not God's way. It is not God's idea of righteousness, but simply their own. Surely the essence of wisdom is that before we begin to act at all, or to attempt to please God, we should discover what it is that God has to say about the matter. We must first learn His idea of righteousness, His demands. But the men and women of today, like the Jews of old, take their orders everywhere except from God's word. They rely upon the statements of certain modern writers, and live lives according to their own ideas rather than according to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God. But let them go on.... Let them establish their own righteousness and refuse the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the day will surely come when they will discover that "that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God" (Luke 16:15). The vital question to ask, therefore, is, Whom are we really pleasing? Is it ourselves or God? Have we yielded to His way? Can we say that we have submitted our wills and surrendered them to Him? Truth Unchanged, Unchanging, pp. 66-8 February 15 The Practice of the Presence of God ... we must realize that we are in the presence of God. What does that mean? It means realization of something of who God is and what God is. Before we begin to utter words we always ought to do this. We should say to ourselves: I am now entering into the audience chamber of that God, the almighty, the absolute, the eternal and great God with all His power and His might and majesty, that God who is a consuming fire, that God who is "light and in whom is no darkness at all", that utter, absolute Holy God. That is what I am doing."... But above all, our Lord insists that we should realize that, in addition to that, He is our Father.... O that we realized this! If only we realized that this almighty God is our Father through the Lord Jesus Christ. If only we realized that ... whenever we pray it is like a child going to its father! He knows all about us; He knows our every need before we tell Him….He desires to bless us very much more than we desire to be blessed. He has a view of us, He has a plan and a program for us, He has an ambition for us, I say it with reverence, which transcends our highest thought and imagination.... He cares for us. He has counted the very hairs of our head. He has said that nothing can happen to us apart from Him. Then we must remember what Paul puts so gloriously in Ephesians 3. He 'is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think'. That is the true notion of prayer, says Christ. You do not go and just turn a wheel. You do not just count the beads. You do not say: I must spend hours in prayer, I have decided to do it and I must do it."... We must get rid of this mathematical notion of prayer. What we have to do first of all is to realize who God is, what He is, and our relationship to Him. Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, ii, pp. 30-1 February 16 It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth The argument that the modern man refuses to be coerced into living the good life by the fear of God, but will respond to appeals, is entirely falsified by the facts ... as men have ceased to believe in the wrath of God, and have discarded the idea of law and righteousness, so their moral standards have gradually deteriorated and conduct has become lax and loose.... As men ceased to recognize God as the One to whom they are responsible, and under whose eye they live, so a sense of discipline and order gradually began to disappear from all the relationships of life. A man who does not live a life of obedience himself soon ceases to be concerned about the fact that his own children should obey him. The result is that discipline in the home has been sadly neglected, children no longer respect their parents as they should, and quite frequently these children have become the tyrants of the home. The fact is that those who were brought up under the stern and strict, and often hard discipline of former times, had actually a deeper regard as well as a greater respect for their parents….As man's sense of responsibility to God has declined, and as he has ceased to believe that God has ordained the whole of life, including the natural orders of society, so the ideas of the family and home, of marriage and parenthood, and, indeed, of law and order in general, have become looser and looser, and men have regarded themselves as being laws unto themselves. And what real hope can there be of international peace and concord unless nations are prepared to recognize and acknowledge a law above themselves and outside themselves—a law which has sanctions and power, a law the breaking of which will lead to suffering and punishment? The Plight of Man and the Power of God, pp. 65-6 February 17 ... none but His loved ones know For [unbelievers] Jesus Christ was only a man who was born and laid in a manger, lived, ate and drank like other men and worked as a carpenter. Then He was crucified in utter weakness upon a cross. 'There are the facts', they say, 'and am I asked to believe that that is the Son of God? It is impossible.'... They are thinking only on the rational level.... That is rational thinking. You talk to them about the doctrine of the rebirth, and they say, "Of course things like that don't happen, there is no such thing as a miracle ... once you talk about miracles you are violating the laws of nature." As Matthew Arnold said, 'Miracles cannot happen, therefore miracles have not happened.' That is rational thinking.... before a man can become a Christian he has to cease to think like that. He has to have a new type of thinking, he has to begin to think spiritually ... when we become Christian ... we find that we are thinking in a different way. We are on a different level... miracles are no longer a problem, the rebirth is no longer a problem, the doctrine of the atonement is no longer a problem. We have a new understanding, we are thinking spiritually. Our Lord was visited by Nicodemus, who ... said, "Master, I have watched your miracles; you must be a Teacher sent from God, for no man can do the things you do except God be with him." And he was clearly on the point of adding, 'Tell me how you do it...." But our Lord looked at him and .. . what He was saying to Nicodemus was really this, "Nicodemus, if you think that you can understand this thing before it has happened to you, you are making a real mistake. You will never become a Christian in that way ... you are trying to understand spiritual things with your natural understanding. But you cannot. Though you are a master of Israel you must be born again ... you have to realize the nature of this new type of thinking which is spiritual." Faith on Trial, pp. 35-6 February 18 We are not ignorant of his devices (2 Corinthians 2:11) In the last analysis . . . [there is only one] cause of spiritual depression— it is the devil, the adversary of our souls. He can use our temperaments and our physical condition. He so deals with us that we allow our temperament to control and govern us, instead of keeping temperament where it should be kept. There is no end to the ways in which the devil produces spiritual depression. We must always bear him in mind. The devil's one object is so to depress God's people that he can go to the man of the world and say, "There are God's people. Do you want to be like that?" Obviously the whole strategy of the adversary of our souls, and God's adversary, is to depress us and to make us look as this* man looked when he was passing through this period of unhappiness. Indeed I can put it, finally, like this; the ultimate cause of all spiritual depression is unbelief. For if it were not for unbelief even the devil could do nothing. It is because we listen to the devil instead of listening to God that we go down before him and fall before his attacks. This is why this psalmist keeps on saying to himself: 'Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise Him.... " He reminds himself of God. Why? Because he was depressed and had forgotten God, so that his faith and his belief in God and in God's power, and in his relationship to God, were not what they ought to be. We can indeed sum it up by saying that the final and ultimate cause is just sheer unbelief. Spiritual Depression, pp. 19-20 *(The Psalmist, as recorded in Psalm 42.) February 19 'I will believe in your Redeemer when I see the redeemed' (Nietzshe) A one-time Law Minister in the Indian Government was a great man called Dr Ambedkar, an out-caste himself and a leader of the out-castes in India. At the time of which I am speaking he was taking a great interest in the teachings of Buddhism, and attended a great Conference of twenty-seven countries in Ceylon which had met together to inaugurate a world fellowship of Buddhists….He said at the Conference, "I am here to find out to what extent there is dynamic in the Buddhist religion so far as the people of this country are concerned." There was the leader of the out-castes turning to Buddhism, and examining it. He said, "... Has it something to give to these masses of my fellow out-castes?" ... But the real tragedy about this able, learned man is that he had already spent much time in America and Great Britain studying Christianity. And it was because he had found it was not a live thing, because he had found an absence of dynamic in it, that he was now turning to Buddhism….That is the challenge that comes to you and to me. We know Buddhism is not the answer. We claim to believe that the Son of God has come into the world and has sent His own Holy Spirit into us, His own absolute power that will reside in men and make them live a quality of life like His own.... If only all of us were living the Sermon on the Mount, men would know that there is dynamic in the Christian gospel; they would know that this is a five thing; they would not go looking for anything else. They would say, "Here it is."... it has always been when men and women have taken this Sermon seriously and faced themselves in the light of it, that true revival has come. And when the world sees the truly Christian man, it not only feels condemned, it is drawn, it is attracted. Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, i, pp. 19-20