D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: Servant Of The Word
By David L. Larsen
Although Charles Haddon Spurgeon was often called "The Last of the Puritans," the title probably better belongs to D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981), whose strategic ministry at the heart of London spoke to the nation and impacted the entire world (and still does through his tapes and printed sermons).
The "doctor" — as he was rightly called, for he was a medical doctor — came out of Wales and the Calvinistic Methodist Church (Presbyterian). Not at rest in his promising medical practice in London, Lloyd-Jones took his bride to serve the Bethlehem Forward Movement Hall in Sandfields (Aberavon) in Wales from 1927-38. The deeply moving story of this ministry is given to us most powerfully in the first volume of lain H. Murray's two volume (somewhat hagiographic study) The First Forty Years (Banner of Truth) and in his wife Bethan's beautiful Memories of Sandfields 1927-1938 (Banner of Truth). Then it was on to London.
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Joining G. Campbell Morgan as his associate during Morgan's second ministry at Westminster Chapel, Morgan and Lloyd-Jones alternated preaching morning and evening until Morgan's advancing age and weakness led to his retirement in 1943, when Lloyd-Jones took the succession. So very different in style and theology (Morgan was Arminian and Lloyd-Jones a five-point Calvinist), the team modeled Christian charity. Indeed Lloyd-Jones said at Morgan's funeral that they "had never quarrelled at all" (Westminster Record, 19:7, 63). Like his contemporary, John Stott at All Souls, Lloyd-Jones drew huge throngs to Westminster and had a remarkable hearing before students and internationals and soon a world-wide ministry. The heart of it all was his aggressive and strong preaching.
Getting at his strengths
Whether at the very popular Friday night "Fellowship and Discussion Meetings" which filled the Chapel — and in which the famous multi-year series on Romans was delivered — or in the services on the Lord's Day — when, for instance, the seven-year series on Ephesians was given — Lloyd-Jones used the Puritan sermon model with minimal exposure of the text and from that mini-text (several words or a clause) he would range over Scripture as a whole for analogies, parallels and further doctrinal confirmation of his relentlessly unitary sermon. This, in fact, is not exposition (in the Broadus/Robinson definition) but a textual-topical model.
The foundational premise in all of his preaching was an unflagging confidence in the integrity and authority of Holy Scripture. He never asked "is it true?" but always "what does it mean?" He drew every drop possible from a text. He obviously relished and delighted in what he was doing, as is witnessed in his masterful lectures at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia in 1969 (Preachers and Preaching, Zondervan).
Lloyd-Jones preached from within a keen sense of doctrinal construct; he loved doctrine and was always concerned about "sound doctrine" and the analogia fides, which Calvin defined as the consistency of the doctrine as taught in Scripture. We really have no choice here. No doctrine is bad doctrine. Still, Lloyd-Jones developed some rather idiosyncratic ideas, such as his curious interpretation of Romans 7 and his insistence that the "sealing of the Holy Spirit" distinctly follows conversion. This led some in the Pentecostal/Charismatic camp to claim him as their own.