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November 3 Daily Devotional

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

The most impossible of all
Is, that I e’er from sin should cease;
Yet shall it be, I know it shall:
Jesus, look to Thy faithfulness!

It is very interesting to observe how people, when they have the gospel presented to them, generally have two main objections to it, and ... the two objections are so often found in the same people.... First of all, when they hear this announcement, ‘Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled’, when they are told that salvation is altogether of grace, that it is something that is given by God, which they cannot merit, which they can never deserve, and about which they can do nothing except receive it, they immediately begin to object and say, ‘But that is making the thing much too easy... surely salvation cannot be as easy as that’....

Then, when one points out to them that it must be like that because of the character of the righteousness about which the text speaks, they begin to object and to say that that is making it much too difficult, indeed so difficult as to make it impossible.... They go astray, you see, about this whole question of righteousness. Righteousness to them means just being decent and moral up to a certain level. But... righteousness ultimately means being like the Lord Jesus Christ.... That is what we have to attain unto. And, of course, the moment we realize that, then we see that it is something we ourselves cannot do, and realize that we must therefore receive it as helpless paupers, as those who have nothing in our hands at all, as those who take it entirely as a free gift ... to object to the gospel because it ‘makes things too easy’, or to object to it because it makes things too difficult, is just virtually to confess that we are not Christians at all. The Christian is one who admits that the statements and the demands of the gospel are impossible, but thanks God that the gospel does the impossible for us.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, i, pp. 84–6

 

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