From the TeachingtheWord Bible Knowledgebase

Part four of a series. Read part three.

Preacher, do not follow the conventional wisdom about dumbing-down the message, says Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Lift people up to it.

Preaching Is Never Non-Theological

When Martyn Lloyd-Jones addressed the subject of preaching in relation to the congregation, he once again ran against the currents of postmodern Evangelicalism's conventional wisdom. Most of today's Evangelical preachers seem to avoid teaching doctrine, because they believe it will mean the death of the church. But Martyn Lloyd-Jones asserts that there can be no life in the church without it.

In chapter four of Preaching and Preachers,¹ titled "The Form of the Sermon", Lloyd-Jones begins by stating that "there is no type of preaching that should be non-theological." Evangelistic preaching that is not theological is not evangelistic preaching in any true sense; it has no Biblical foundation. The same is true, he says, of doctrinal or didactic preaching.

However, the sermon is not a theological lecture. It is theology applied to life. For that reason, he asserts, Biblical preaching must be firmly grounded in systematic theology. The preacher should not deal with any Bible text in isolation, but always as part of the greater whole of Scripture. The form of the sermon must reflect the fact that any sermon is the proclamation and application of a small but integral part of the larger fabric of the entirety of Biblical truth.

Do Not Dumb-Down the Message

In chapter seven, "The Congregation", Lloyd-Jones observes that we have entered an era in which it seems a sin - even in the Evangelical church - to embrace the idea that words have well-defined meanings, or that there can be such a thing as a single objective standard of Truth. (He wrote this forty years ago, but reliable surveys of today's Evangelical church show that many people in the congregation simply do not believe in objective truth.) We have entered an era in which, he says, "the pew is controlling the pulpit" - in other words, there is an ever-growing focus on trying to meet the psychological and social needs of people who aren't even regenerated believers, rather than on evangelizing the lost and cultivating the maturity of the saved.

The answer, he says, is not to dumb-down the message, but to hold it up before people and teach them so as to lift them up to it. This is how he answers those who say we must not preach doctrine from the pulpit:

The simple answer is that people have always found this language strange [the language and terminology of the Bible and Christianity]. The answer to the argument that people in this post-Christian age do not understand terms like Justification, Sanctification, and Glorification is simply to ask another question: When did people understand them? When did the unbeliever understand this language? The answer is: Never! These terms are peculiar and special to the Gospel. It is our business as preachers to show that our Gospel is essentially different and that we are not talking about ordinary matters. We must emphasize the fact that we are talking about something unique and special. We must lead people to expect this; and so we are to assert it. They do not decide and determine what is to be preached and how: it is we that have the Revelation, the Message, and we have to make this understood.

Do Not Balkanize the Congregation

Lloyd-Jones also spoke presciently against the postmodern tendency to "Balkanize" the congregation - to think that in order to be effective, the church must divide people up into categories of age, culture, professional status, marital status, personal interests, and so on, in order to reach them.

Lloyd-Jones' biographer and protege Ian Murray records that his mentor always approached preaching on the basis of an unshakeable belief: Only right doctrine can produce right living, not the other way around. This was a return to the New Testament model. Look at Jesus' teaching in the Gospels, he said, or Paul's epistles, or the epistle to the Hebrews. The Lord Himself and His inspired writers spent more than three fourths of their time laying the foundation of right doctrine, before they turned to the issues of practical application in right living. He emulated their method, and never varied from it through fifty-three years of pulpit ministry.

Lloyd-Jones employed the same approach, Murray said, whether he was speaking to a congregation of coal miners or an assembly of university professors. He believed there is no greater fallacy than to think that a man needs to preach a different gospel to different types of people. He made it a point never to preach above, or below, his hearers. Everyone went away from his sermons knowing exactly what he had meant. During a time of serious illness in later years, one of the most treasured get-well letters he received expressed the hope that he would soon be back in the pulpit, because "you are the only preacher I can understand." He especially prized this letter because the writer was an eleven-year-old girl.²

Martyn Lloyd-Jones ended his chapter on "The Congregation" with these powerful words, which again are so relevant for today:

My final comment is that the real trouble with this [post]modern outlook is that it forgets the Holy Spirit and His power. We have become such experts, as we think, in psychological understanding, and at dividing people up into groups - psychological, cultural, national, etc. - that we conclude as a result that what is all right for one is not right for another, and so eventually become guilty of denying the Gospel. "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free." This is the ONE Gospel - the ONLY Gospel. It is for the whole world, and the whole of humanity. Mankind is one. We have fallen into the grievous error of adopting modern psychological theories to such an extent that we evade the truth, sometimes to protect ourselves from the message, and certainly often to justify methods that are not consistent and consonant with the message which we are privileged to deliver.

Assess the Capacity of the Hearers

In chapter eight, "The Character of the Message", Lloyd-Jones asserted that it is vital for a preacher, especially a pastor who addresses the same congregation week after week, to assess the capacity of his hearers - where they are spiritually, where they are in their knowledge of the truth. He gives examples from 1 Corinthians 3 and Hebrews 5 to support this:

And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal, as to babes in Christ. I fed you with milk and not with solid food; for until now you were not able to receive it, and even now you are still not able; for you are still carnal... (1 Corinthians 3:1-3)

For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil. Therefore, leaving the discussion of the elementary principles of Christ, let us go on to perfection [maturity]... (Hebrews 5:12-6:1)

Do Not Assume Everyone Is a Christian

He especially cautions pastors against making the assumption that all of the people in the congregation - even long-time members who have at one time made a public profession of faith - are actually Christians. Always, the character of the message must be that it speaks of man's sin and of his need of salvation in Christ. There is no moving forward for the preacher or the congregation unless that point is present and foundational.

When Martyn Lloyd-Jones entered his first pastorate, the spiritual impact of his expository preaching manifested itself, first and always, in radically changed lives. One of the first people to experience such a change was one of the least expected - Martyn Lloyd-Jones' own wife.

Like her husband, Bethan Lloyd-Jones had grown up in the Evangelical church. And like him, she was also a qualified medical doctor. But she gave up her medical career to marry the man she knew would soon leave medicine for the ministry, and he took up his first pastorate right after their honeymoon. Bethan had heard her future husband preach for the first time only a few months before. He preached on the account of Zacchaeus in Luke chapter 19, and the point of his message was that all men in all circumstances are equally in need of salvation from sin. The message disturbed her greatly, even frightened her. She resented the idea that she was in the same category as someone who was not religious at all. Her state of unrest went on for many months. As she later wrote,

I was for two years under Martyn's ministry before I really understood what the Gospel was. I used to listen to him on Sunday morning and I used to feel, Well, if this is Christianity I really do not know anything about it. On Sunday night I used to pray that somebody would be converted; I thought you had to be a drunkard or a prostitute to be converted. I remember how I used to rejoice to see drunkards become Christians and envy them with all my heart, because here they were, full of joy, and free, and here I was in such a different condition.

During this time, she felt a growing conviction of sin, and wondered if her sin could be greater than the merit of the blood of Christ. Through the patient counsel of her husband, and his suggestion that she read an evangelistic book by John Angell James called The Anxious Enquirer Directed, she at last came to understand the Gospel - that Christ's atonement "was well able to clear my sins away." The pastor's own wife came to the place of personal repentance from sin, and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as her Savior from God's wrath.

Bethan Lloyd-Jones was one of many in Martyn Lloyd-Jones' first church who thought they were Christians, but under the preaching of the new pastor came to understand that they were not. Many of them subsequently trusted in Christ.

Understand The Source of the Power

In Preaching and Preachers, Martyn Lloyd-Jones also speaks of what he calls "the romance of preaching." In this he uses a definition of the word "romance" that is not often employed today, but is still in the dictionary. He refers by that term to the exciting and mysterious quality of preaching, the unpredictability of it. The preacher should never think he knows what is going to happen when he enters the pulpit, he says. He never knows how the act of preaching and the content of the message will affect the preacher himself, or affect his hearers. And, the preacher should never attempt to control things to the extent that preaching becomes a sterile and clinical exercise. The preacher never knows exactly who is listening, or how they are listening. He never knows how God may use even just one particular phrase out of an entire sermon to meet a particular heart's need.

During his decades of ministry, Martyn Lloyd-Jones typically met privately for counseling with a thousand or more individuals each year. But he said that he firmly believed that God the Holy Spirit could do more in the hearts and lives of his congregation through the preaching of the Word in one service, than he could in all of those counseling sessions in an entire year.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones concludes the book with a chapter titled "'Demonstration of the Spirit and of the Power". Here he calls attention once again to "the greatest essential in connection with preaching, and that is the unction and the anointing of the Holy Spirit."

He uses the illustration of Elijah at Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18). The right way to look at the unction of the Spirit, he says, "is to think of it as that which comes upon the preparation...We are told that Elijah built an altar, then cut wood and put it upon the altar, and that then he killed a bullock and cut it in pieces and put the pieces upon the wood. Then, having done all that, he prayed for the fire to descend; and the fire fell. That is the order."

He goes on: "We all tend to go to extremes; some rely only on their own preparation and look for nothing more; others, as I say, tend to despise preparation and trust to the unction, the anointing and the inspiration of the Spirit alone. But there must be no 'either/or' here; it is always 'both/and'. These two things must go together." He concludes with this exhortation to the preacher and the congregation:

What then are we to do about this? There is only one obvious conclusion. Seek Him! Seek Him! What can we do without Him?...But go beyond seeking Him; expect Him...Are you expecting [this week's preaching] to be the turning point in someone's life? Are you expecting anyone to have a climactic experience? That is what preaching is meant to do. That is what you find in the Bible and in the subsequent history of the church. Seek this power, expect this power, yearn for this power; and when the power comes, yield to Him. Do not resist. Forget all about your sermon if necessary. Let Him loose you, let Him manifest His power in you and through you...He is still able to do "exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or think."

References:

1. The material in this article is from Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1971), pages 64-80, 121-142, 143-164, and 304-325.
2. As reported in Ian H. Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years (Banner of Truth, 1982).
3. Murray, page 166.

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