Daily Devotional

April 07

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
"Now we can all live like this!"(Olive Schreiner)

... All Christians are to be like this. Read the Beatitudes, and there you have a description of what every Christian is meant to be. It is not merely the description of some exceptional Christians. Our Lord does not say here that He is going to paint a picture of what certain outstanding characters are going to be and can be in this world. It is His description of every single Christian....

[It is a] fatal tendency to divide Christians into two groups—the religious and the laity, exceptional Christians and ordinary Christians, the one who makes a vocation of the Christian life and the man who is engaged in secular affairs. That tendency is not only utterly and completely unscriptural; it is destructive ultimately of true piety and is in many ways a negation of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

There is no such distinction in the Bible. There are distinctions in offices—apostles, prophets, teachers, pastors, evangelists, and so on. But these Beatitudes are not a description of offices; they are a description of character. And from the standpoint of character, and of what we are meant to be, there is no difference between one Christian and another....

Read the introduction to almost any New Testament Epistle, and you will find all believers addressed as in the Epistle to the Church at Corinth, "called to be saints." All are "canonized," if you want to use the term, not some Christians only. The idea that this height of the Christian life is meant only for a chosen few and that the rest of us are meant to live on the dull plains is an entire denial of the Sermon on the Mount and of the Beatitudes in particular.... Therefore let us once and for ever get rid of that false notion. This is not merely a description of the Hudson Taylors or the George Miillers or the Whitefields or Wesleys of this world; it is a description of every Christian. We are all of us meant to conform to its pattern and to rise to its standard.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, i, pp. 33-4

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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.”