Daily Devotional

June 05

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

Beware of brief delight and lasting shame
It
 is no part of the gospel to denounce pleasure and enjoy­ment; in fact, the gospel offers a joy greater than anything else can give. But it is not content with testing by this one standard only. It desires to know the nature of the joys or the pleasures, whether it is good, whether it is true, and whether it is beautiful.... Men and women today do not like thought processes and discrimination. Like children, they desire to do what they like.... They therefore hate discipline and the facing of difficulty.

They object to the inconvenience of having to face the questions of truth, goodness, evil, and beauty. They do what they want to do, pleading the rightness of self-expression.
They have but one standard of value, that of pleasure.... They are content with the one test only—is it enjoyable? ... Is not this utterly suicidal, judged by the true standard of human nature? ... if you desire merely to satisfy the lust and the craving for pleasure, then go in for the modern cult. But if you desire the whole of yourself to be developed and expressed, regard this suggestion as the very suggestion of hell itself....

But ... let us apply the practical test. Read the Bible.... Was David the King of Israel at his best and highest, was he expressing his true self when he applied the single test of pleasure in the matter of Bathsheba, thereby becoming a thief and a murderer? Was St Augustine giving the truer expression to self when he was an immoral philosopher, or rather afterwards, when he became the disciplined saint.... Think of all the members of the noble army of saints and martyrs who have denied themselves ... and obeyed the teaching of the gospel! Compare and contrast them with the sensuous ... libertines of history.... The way to express self truly is the way of discipline and order, the way of reason and prayer.... You will have a self that will be worthy of expression, and which will grow from day to day.

Truth Unchanged, Unchanging, pp. 25-8

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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.”