Daily Devotional

March 20

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

One thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.

... There are large numbers of people outside the Church, and outside Christ, at the present time solely because ... they seem to have determined not to allow the gospel to work on their lives until they understand the gospel itself.... They say that they do not desire to commit intellectual suicide and to submit themselves passively to what they do not understand.

The fear of passivity is a genuine and a good one.... The gospel places no premium on our ignorance.
Indeed, it teaches that we must use the mind and the powers with which God has endowed us. But ... [they] are guilty of a fallacy and are behaving in an unreasonable and irrational manner. Let me illustrate. It is clear, is it not, that we know much more about light and heat than we know about the sun itself? In other words, we understand a great deal about the functions and the working of the sun while the sun itself in its essential nature and constitution remains a mystery to us.

Or take electricity as an example. Here again, we know a great deal more about its use than we do about the nature of electricity itself. There is nothing unreasonable about availing ourselves of the benefit offered by electricity even though we do not understand the thing itself; ... there are many laws which have been discovered.... We may know a great deal about these laws without understanding the essential nature of electricity itself. We are saved, for instance, from the danger of putting our hand on a live current by this knowledge....

In the religious and the theological realm it is much the same. The mystery of godliness remains a mystery and will ever remain so.... But that is not the case with regard to the effects and the results and the working out of the gospel ... [which] is characterized above all else ... by this essential directness and simplicity; ... the gospel, on the one hand, has ever baffled, and is still baffling, the greatest philosophers the world has ever known and yet can save a little child.

Truth Unchanged, Unchanging, pp. 75-7

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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.”