Short pithy quotes from Martyn Lloyd-Jones


The Christian is not a good man. He is a vile wretch who has been saved by the grace of God!

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The tragedy of sin, is that it affects man in his highest faculties.
Sin causes us to become fools, and behave in an irrational manner.
Modern man, far from being ruled by reason, is ruled by lust and passion.

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The man who refuses to face the fact of his own death, is a fool!

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The more Christian a person is, the simpler will that person's life be.

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I'd rather hobble into Heaven, than walk into Hell!

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God is nowhere more hidden, than in most churches!

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Pride is probably the deadliest and the most subtle of all sins, and it can assume many forms!

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The Cross not only shows the love of God more gloriously than anything else-it also shows His righteousness, His justice, His holiness, and all the glory of His eternal attributes. They are all to be seen shining together there.

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The ultimate test of our spirituality, is the measure of our amazement at the grace of God.

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Grace is favor shown to people who do not deserve any favor at all. We deserve nothing but Hell! If you think you deserve Heaven-then you are not a Christian.

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Some tend to think that Christianity is a matter of being nice.
But niceness is purely biological. One dog is nicer than another dog!

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We must never parade ourselves!

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Do you think that you deserve forgiveness? If you do, you are not a Christian.

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When a man truly sees himself, he knows that nobody can say anything about him that is too bad.

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The trouble with man is not intellectual-but moral.

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If you claim to love Christ and yet are living an unholy life, there is only one thing to say about you: You are a bare-faced liar!

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To divorce forgiveness of sins from the actual living of the Christian life, is nothing but rank heresy!

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Christians are generally at their best, when they are in the furnace of affliction and being persecuted and tried.

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If you are not holy, you are not a Christian.
 
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There are no shortcuts in the Christian life-no simple remedies.

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The worst sin of all, is the false thinking about God of which the natural man is so terribly guilty.

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Nothing we do in the Christian life, is harder than prayer.

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The state of the world today, is nothing but an appalling monument to human failure.

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Intellectual pride is the last citadel of self.

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We have come to realize that a man can be educated and cultured, and still be a beast!

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The biggest hoax in the world for the last 150 years, has been the theory of evolution!

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The natural man is always looking at himself and admiring himself.

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I would rather make bricks without straw-than try to live the Sermon on the Mount in my own strength.

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No difficulty in believing the gospel is intellectual-it is always moral.

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The whole trouble in life, is ultimately a concern about self.

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A man is not a Christian unless he can say with Paul, "I am what I am by the grace of God!"

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Many who go to the psychiatrist are like the woman in the Gospels-they are nothing bettered, but rather grow worse!

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There is little difference between a ladies fashion parade, and a dog show!

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By definition, a Christian should be an enigma to every person who is not a Christian.

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The first sign of spiritual life, is to feel that you are dead!

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Avoid cleverness and smartness in the pulpit. The people will detect this, and they will get the impression that you are more interested in promoting yourself and your cleverness, than in the truth of God and their souls.

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Self is the greatest enemy of the preacher-and more so to him, than in the case of any other man in society. And the only way to deal with self is to be so taken up with, and so enraptured by, the glory of what you are doing-that you forget yourself altogether.

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You are always on duty in the Christian life. There is no such thing as a vacation in the spiritual realm.

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Does it grieve you that the name of God is being taken in vain and desecrated?

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If we only spent more of our time in looking at Him-we would soon forget our own petty trials.

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The glory of the gospel is that when the church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it.

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Prayer, in many ways, is the supreme expression of our faith in God.

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If you do not desire to be holy-then you have no right to think that you are a Christian.

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Our supreme need, our only need, is to know God, the living God!

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Man's chief business in life, is to serve and to glorify God.

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I am not afraid of being charged, as I frequently am, of trying to frighten you, for I am definitely trying to do so. If the wondrous love of God in Christ Jesus and the hope of glory is not sufficient to attract you, then, such is the value I attach to the worth of your soul, I will do my utmost to alarm you with a sight of the terrors of Hell.

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Most people are forever saying that "they simply cannot believe that God will punish the unrepentant sinner to all eternity." They cannot believe that God will do so-therefore, they draw the conclusion that God does not and will not. In other words, God does what they believe He ought to do or not do. They are always criticizing God, and pontificating about what God should or should not do, and asking, "Why does God allow this and that?"
What a false and blasphemous conception of God! How utterly untrue and unworthy! Such is the new paganism of today!

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The ultimate test of my understanding of the scriptural teaching, is the amount of time I spend in prayer. As theology is ultimately the knowledge of God-the more theology I know, the more it should drive me to seek to know God. Not to know "about" Him-but to know Him! The whole object of salvation is to bring me to knowledge of God. If all my knowledge does not lead me to prayer, then there is something wrong somewhere.

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The great doctrine of the second advent has in a sense fallen into disrepute because of the tendency on the part of some to be more interested in the how and the when of the second coming rather than in the fact of the second coming.

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In the last analysis, it is not the temptations that meet us on the streets that determine our conduct-it is the heart of the man who faces them. Two men may face the same conditions; one falls-and the other stands. The difference is not in the temptation, but in the heart of the man.

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We have somehow got hold of the idea that error is only that which is outrageously wrong; and we do not seem to understand that the most dangerous person of all is the one who does not emphasize the right things.

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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 that tells the truth about us, so much as our prayer life.

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An evangelical is one who is entirely subservient to the Bible. This is true of every evangelical. He is a man of one book. He starts with it; he submits himself to it; this is his sole authority.

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Man is at his greatest and highest, when upon his knees he comes face to face with God.

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What is preaching? Logic on fire! Preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire. A true understanding and experience of the truth must lead to this. I say again that a man who can speak about these things dispassionately, has no right whatever to be in a pulpit; and should never be allowed to enter one!

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A preacher must always convey the impression that he himself has been gripped by what he is saying. If he has not been gripped, then nobody else will be. So this is absolutely essential. He must impress the people by the fact that he is taken up and absorbed by what he is doing. He is full of matter, and he is anxious to impart this. He is so moved and thrilled by it himself, that he wants everybody else to share in this. He is concerned about them; that is why he is preaching to them. He is anxious about them; anxious to help them, anxious to tell them the truth of God. So he does it with energy, with zeal, and with this obvious concern for people.

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There are certain things which have to be said over and over again, of necessity-and yet this is the marvel and the wonder of the cross, that however many times a man may preach about it, he is never finished preaching about it. There is always something fresh to say, always something new. There is a great central message that is always there-but nothing is so wonderful as to see that one thing in different ways.

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We must be very careful to draw a distinction between essentials and non-essentials, lest we become guilty of schism and begin to rend the body of Christ.

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It is important that we not give other people the impression that to be a Christian means to be unhappy, to be sad, to be morbid, and that the Christian is one who scorns delights and lives laborious days.

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Redemption is a greater work than creation-and especially when we consider the way in which God has achieved it, even through the sending of His only Begotten Son into this world in all the marvel and the wonder and the miracle of the Incarnation; but above all in delivering Him up to the death upon the Cross to redeem His people from their sins.

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Our Lord does not promise to remove difficulties and trials and problems and tribulations. He does not say that He is going to cut out all the thorns and leave the roses with their wonderful perfume. No, He faces life realistically, and tells us that these are things to which the flesh is heir, and which are bound to come. But He assures us that we can so know Him that, whatever happens, we need never be frightened, we need never be alarmed.

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Whenever I realize something of what my blessed Lord has done for me at Calvary-I am ready to forgive anybody anything.

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SCHISM is when people who were agreed about the centralities of the faith, divide and separate from one another over matters that are not essential to salvation, not absolutely vital. This is always one of the dangers afflicting us as evangelicals. We can be so rigid, so over-strict, and so narrow that we become guilty of schism.

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Justification not only means that our sins are forgiven-but that we have been declared to be righteous by God Himself. It not merely means that we were righteous at the moment when we believed-but that we are permanently righteous. Justification also means that we are given by God the positive righteousness of His own Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

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The greatest of all the temptations that assail a preacher, is pride. Pride, because he is set up there almost on a pedestal. He is standing in a pulpit, he is above the people, all of whom are looking to him.

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There is nothing like preaching. It is the greatest work in the world, the most thrilling, the most exciting, the most rewarding, the most wonderful. I know of nothing comparable to the feeling one has as one walks up the steps of one's pulpit with a fresh sermon on a Sunday morning or a Sunday evening-especially when you feel that you have a message from God and are longing to give it to the people. This is something that one cannot describe.

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Repentance means that you realize that you are a guilty, vile sinner in the presence of God, that you deserve the wrath and punishment of God, that you are Hell-bound. You renounce the world whatever the cost, the world in its mind and outlook as well as its practice. You deny yourself, and take up the cross and go after Christ. Your nearest and dearest, and the whole world, may call you a fool, or say you have religious mania. You may have to suffer financially-but it makes no difference. That is repentance.

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You can have knowledge, and you can be meticulous in your sermon preparation; but without the unction of the Holy Spirit, you will have no power, and your preaching will not be effective.

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The man who is truly meek, never pities himself-he is never sorry for himself.