Daily Devotional

March 19

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

What none deserve, all may receive

If a knowledge of the truth were really dependent upon man's capacity, man's reason, man's sense-perception, man's intellectual intuition, and all that the scientific method postulates, then it follows that a knowledge of truth ... would be possible only to a very select number of V.I.P.s who can follow the arguments of the philosophers.... But what a few! The vast majority would never have any hope at all for any knowledge of truth ... for any solution to their pressing problems.

But when you come to the Christian method, there is hope for all. Why? Because all are inadequate, all are insufficient, all are failures. Here the position depends not upon man's capacity but upon his incapacity; ... it does not depend upon my capacity to understand or to discover but upon God's power to give. And He can give to all; therefore there is a chance and a hope for all....
When "the world by wisdom knew not God," when all the philosophers could get no further, then the unknown God sent His own Son into the world.
God came into the world in the Person of His Son, yes, from outside, wherever it may be, "up above," or "out there," or from the depths, for He is omnipresent.... Here is truth being revealed to us, coming to us [John 1:18; 14:9 and 6]....

The great story of the Christian Church is the story of thousands upon thousands of men and women, once hopeless in ignorance and sin, debauchery and iniquity, entirely renewed and transformed through the simple belief of this message, and becoming new creatures, knowing that God is their Father and that they are forgiven. They have a new life, a new orientation, new desires, new power, and are enabled to live in this world in a triumphant manner, to the astonishment of those who knew them as they once were.

That is the Christian method. It is the very antithesis of the scientific method; but it is God's method, and, thank God, it really does work.

The Approach to Truth: Scientific and Religious, pp. 25-7

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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.”