Weekly Dose Of Lloyd-Jones (On Preaching)

‘… on another occasion I stand in this pulpit labouring as it were left to myself, preaching badly and utterly weak, and the devil has come and said, ‘There will be nobody there at all next Sunday’, But thank God I have found on the following Sunday a larger congregation. That is God’s method of accountancy. You never know. I enter a pulpit in weakness and I end with power, I enter with self confidence and I am made to feel a fool. It is God’s accountancy. He knows us so much better than we know ourselves … His book-keeping is the most romantic thing I know of in the whole world,

Preaching should make such a difference to a man who is listening that he is never the same again. Preaching, in other words, is a transaction between the preacher and the listener. It does something for the soul of a man, for the whole of the person, the entire man; it deals with him in a vital and radical manner.

We wound in order to heal; we knock down in order to lift up.

The thing that has given me greatest pleasure, and greatest encouragement of all the things I have ever been told that people say about my ministry, is this. It was said by a lady, who remonstrated, and said, ‘This man preaches to us as if we were sinners!’

Preaching is designed to do something to people.

Let me say it once more: if the preaching of the gospel does not make you think, and think as you have never thought in your life before, it is very bad preaching.

Peter stood up and he preached. He did not spend hours in a study polishing his phrases, thinking of clever illustrations—oh, such a thing is so repugnant to the New Testament gospel. Here was a man, alive, and he wanted other people to be alive. Here was a man who felt the burden of souls and so he brought his whole great statement of the gospel to this focus, to this point of application. And that should be the aim of all preaching … Do you get tired of hearing me saying the same things, my friends? Well, I am just doing what the Apostle Peter did (2 Peter 1 verses 12–13). I am sure he was right and I am sure I am right! Our greatest trouble always is that we forget … And I think this is the call that comes more than ever before to ministers today. Christian people are forgetting things they have known, and that is why we are in the present muddle and confusion; and the business of preaching is to go on reminding them.

There is all the difference in the world between having your preaching controlled by theology, and preaching theology. Our preaching should always be controlled by theology, we must always be scriptural in our presentation of the truth, but that is a very different thing from preaching theology.

 *Sargent, T. (2007). Gems from Martyn Lloyd-Jones: An Anthology of Quotations from 'the Doctor' (232-235). Milton Keynes, England; Colorado Springs, CO; Hyderabad, AP: Paternoster.