Daily Devotional

January 23

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Reproduced from the OPC Website

Forgetting the things which are behind...
I press on toward the goal unto the prize
of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus

If you really do bemoan the fact that you have wasted so much time in the past, the thing to do is to make up for it in the present. Is not that common sense? Here is a man who comes in utterly dejected and saying: "If only;--the time I have wasted!"  What I say to him is this: "Are you making up for that lost time? Why are you wasting this energy in telling me about the past which you cannot undo? Why don't you put your energy into the present?" I speak with vehemence because this condition has to be dealt with sternly and the last thing to do with such people is to sympathize with them.


If you are suffering from this condition, take yourself in hand and examine yourself from an ordinary common sense point of view. You are behaving like a fool; you are irrational; you are wasting your time and your energy. You do not really believe what you are saying. If you bemoan a wasted past, make up for it in the present; give yourself entirely to living at this present moment.

That is what Paul did. He says: "And last of all He was seen of me also as of one born out of due time." He says in effect: I have wasted a lot of time; others have got ahead of me. But he is able to go on and to add: "I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me."

Spiritual Depression, pp. 83-4

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“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”