Martyn Lloyd-Jones Quotes

If you can explain what is happening in a church, apart from the sovereign act of God, it is not revival.

We must cease to think of the church as a gathering of institutions and organizations, and we must get back to the notion that we are the people of God.

A man who imagines that because he has a head full of knowledge that he is sufficient for these things had better start learning again. 'Who is sufficient for these things?' What are you doing? You are not simply imparting information, you are dealing with souls, you are dealing with pilgrims on the way to eternity, you are dealing with matters not only of life and death in this world, but with eternal destiny.

The Gospel is open to all; the most respectable sinner has no more claim on it than the worst.

So let me put it thus: Hold on to your principles of morality and ethics, use your willpower to the limit, pay great heed to every noble, uplifting desire that is in you; but realize that these things alone are not enough, that they will never bring you to the desired place. We have to realize that all our best is totally inadequate, that a spiritual battle must be fought in a spiritual manner.

Faith always shows itself in the whole personality.

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 whatsoever to be in a pulpit; and should never be allowed to enter one.

Be still, and know that I am God. We must not interpret that 'Be still' in a sentimental manner. Some regard it as a kind of exhortation to us to be silent; but it is nothing of the sort. It means, 'Give up -or 'Give in' and admit I am God'. God is addressing people who are opposed to Him.

There is no happiness finally, there is no peace, there is no joy except we be right with God. The miserable Christian is wrong in his ideas as to how this rightness with God is to be obtained.

The very God whom we have offended has Himself provided the way whereby the offense has been dealt with. His anger, His wrath against sin and the sinner, has been satisfied, appeased and He therefore can now thus reconcile man unto Himself.

Grace is favor shown to people who do not deserve any favor at all.

A Christian is something before he does anything; and we have to be Christian before we can act as Christians.

The worst thing that can happen to a man is to succeed before he is ready.

Conviction is not repentance; conviction leads to repentance. But you can be convicted without repentance.

There is a very real danger of our putting our faith in our sermon rather than in the Spirit. Our faith should not be in the sermon, it should be in the Holy Spirit Himself.

Preaching the Word is the primary task of the Church, the primary task of the leaders of the Church, the people who are set in this position of authority; and we must not allow anything to deflect us from this, however good the cause, however great the need.

A revival means days of heaven upon earth.

The whole man is involved, the mind, the heart and the will, and a common cause of spiritual depression is the failure to realize that the Christian life is a whole life, a balanced life.

You pray and make your requests made known unto God, and God will do something.' It is not your prayer that is going to do it, it is not you who is going to do it, but God. 'The peace of God that passeth all understanding'-He, through it all, 'will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus'.

It is grace at the beginning, and grace at the end. So that when you and I come to lie upon our death beds, the one thing that should comfort and help and strengthen us there is the thing that helped us in the beginning. Not what we have been, not what we have done, but the Grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. The Christian life starts with grace, it must continue with grace, it ends with grace. Grace wondrous grace. By the grace of God I am what I am. Yet not I, but the Grace of God which was with me.

The devil is so subtle that he dominates man and persuades him at the same time that he is not being dominated.

People who think that once they are converted all will be happy, have forgotten Satan.

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

Human will-power alone is not enough. Will-power is excellent and we should always be using it; but it is not enough. A desire to live a good life is not enough. Obviously we should all have that desire, but it will not guarantee success.

The terrible, tragic fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man's troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but change his environment. That is a tragic fallacy. It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell.

Whenever you put happiness before righteousness, you will be doomed to misery. That is the great message of the Bible from beginning to end. They alone are truly happy who are seeking to be righteous.

There is nothing more foolish or self-defeating than for a Christian to say that he is not interested in doctrines.

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

The Christian is a man who can be certain about the ultimate even when he is most uncertain about the immediate.

The Christian faith is ultimately not only a matter of doctrine or understanding or of intellect, it is a condition of the heart.

The church is always to be under the Word; she must be; we must keep her there. You must not assume that because the church started correctly, she will continue so. She did not do so in the New Testament times; she has not done so since. Without being constantly reformed by the Word the church becomes something very different.

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

To be a Christian is not only to believe the teaching of Christ, and to practice it; it is not only to try to follow the pattern and example of Christ; it is to be so vitally related to Christ that His life and His power are working in us. It is to be "in Christ," it is for Christ to be in us.

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

If you look at your past and are depressed it means that you are listening to the devil.

The ultimate cause of 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.

The most vital question to ask about all who claim to be Christian is this: Have they a soul thirst for God? ... Is their life centered on Him? Do they press forward more and more that they might know Him.

There are powers that can counterfeit almost everything in the Christian life.

The Christian is not superficial in any sense, but is fundamentally serious and fundamentally happy. You see, the joy of the Christian is a holy joy; the happiness of the Christian is a serious happiness. ... it is a solemn joy, it is a holy joy, it is a serious happiness; so that, though he is grave and sober-minded and serious, he is never cold and prohibitive.

To love to preach is one thing; to love to whom you preach is quite another.

If you doubt your sins have been forgiven, that in itself is sin.

There is nothing which so certifies the genuineness of a man's faith as his patience and his patient endurance, his keeping on steadily in spite of everything.

All teaching and all truth and all doctrine must be tested in the light of the scriptures.

Though we claim to believe the whole of Scripture, in practice we frequently deny much of it by ignoring it.

Spiritual depression or unhappiness in the Christian life is very often due to our failure to realize the greatness of the gospel.

The gospel is not something partial or piecemeal: it takes in the whole life, the whole of history, the whole world. It tells us about creation and the final judgment and everything in between.

We must re-grasp the idea of church membership as being the membership of the body of Christ and as the biggest honour which can come man's way in this world.

There are ideas in our hearts, there are wishes, there are aspirations, there are groanings, there are sighings that the world knows nothing about; but God knows them. So words are not always necessary. When we cannot express our feelings except in wordless groanings, God knows exactly what is happening.