There Is 'Preaching'...And Then There Is Biblical Preaching

From the TeachingtheWord Bible Knowledgebase

Part one of a series.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones delivered a landmark series of lectures on preaching in the late 1960s that foretold the deplorable condition to which preaching would descend in much of the 21st-century Evangelical church - and gave the Biblical cure.

Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones was arguably the greatest preacher of the twentieth century. In 1969 he was invited to come over from Great Britain to deliver a series of lectures on preaching to the students of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.¹ Those lectures became the basis of the book, Preaching and Preachers (Zondervan, 1972).

Despite the passage of many decades and many changes in the church, what Martyn Lloyd-Jones had to say about preaching, preachers, and their congregations is just as relevant as when it first appeared - in fact even more so in light of subsequent developments in the church.

It Is As Though He Lived In Our Time

Although of course he called none of these later developments by name, Lloyd-Jones dealt presciently with such 21st-century phenomena as the multimedia church, the video church, the distributed church, as well as major movements such as the Purpose-Driven Church, the Emergent Church, and even the "woke" pseudo-theology that now plagues many churches. He pinpointed the central problem of all these things - their negative impact on preaching - and gave direct, Biblical advice on how to deal with it.

Lloyd-Jones was among the first to expose the postmodern danger of dumbing-down the message in the false hope of broadening its appeal. The answer, he said, is to hold up the Biblical message as it is, and to lift people up to it, relying upon the power of the Holy Spirit.

He said that preachers and congregations need to learn one of the greatest lessons of church history, and act accordingly: Apostasy is almost always preceded by the abandonment of expository preaching, and genuine revival is always accompanied by expository preaching.

Preaching, he said, is the most vital work in the entire world. The man who would be a preacher must have a clear calling from God, and commit himself to that calling with a seriousness and fervency that cannot be equaled in any other calling. He must, as Paul says in the original Greek of Colossians 1:29, be committed to labor to the point of exhaustion, and to struggle against intense spiritual opposition. Satan wants to defeat the work of the Biblical preacher more than anything else on earth, because it is the most important work on earth.

"Logic on Fire, Eloquent Reason"

Lloyd-Jones treated his subject with an intensity that is unequalled and is contagious. What he had to say is, to use Lloyd-Jones' own definition of genuine preaching, is "logic on fire, eloquent reason." At the same time, he freely confessed his own failings in some of the areas he most emphasizes as necessities to the ministry. But this genuineness, far from detracting from his advice on these topics, adds the weight of deep thought and personal struggle in spiritual battles.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones' voice is, above all, the voice of long experience. At the time he delivered the Westminster lectures he had been in the pulpit for forty-two years, and he would go on to minister for another eleven. Throughout the book, Lloyd-Jones takes the reader into the study and into the pulpit with him, clothing the skeleton of the theoretical with real-world flesh and blood.

Lloyd-Jones' Central Theme

The central theme and focus of Preaching and Preachers is 2 Timothy 3:16-4:5 -

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. I charge you therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge the living and the dead at His appearing and His kingdom: Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables. But you be watchful in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.

In this series of articles we shall highlight some of the most vital points of Martyn Lloyd-Jones' argument: the desperate need to restore the primacy of true preaching; the nature and absolute necessity of expository preaching; the congregation's proper relationship to the preacher and the preaching; the challenge of preaching in the postmodern church.

Next: The Primacy of Preaching

References:

The invitation to Lloyd-Jones was extended by seminary president Edmund P. Clowney. The late Arthur W. Kuschke, who was a member of the Westminster faculty at that time, acted as Dr. Lloyd-Jones' host during his 1969 visit. Kuschke once told me that while Lloyd-Jones' lectures were well-received by students, most of the faculty members remained aloof from their distinguished British guest.

There were, Kuschke said, two principal reasons for their sad disdain: Lloyd-Jones was a Congregationalist and not a Presbyterian; and, like Charles Haddon Spurgeon and George Campbell Morgan before him, the 20th century's greatest preacher never attended a day of Bible college or seminary in his life. (Lloyd-Jones was, by formal education, a medical doctor. He was, as he often put it, called by God out of the profession of healing men's bodies into the ministry of healing men's souls. Martyn Lloyd-Jones' public ministry extended from 1927 to 1980, and he went home to glory in 1981.)

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There Is 'Preaching'...And Then There Is Biblical Preaching

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