Daily Devotional

July 10

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

The ‘one faith’: what is it?

... there is only one answer to the question. It is the great essential New Testament message concerning ‘justifying faith’.

That was the very nerve and centre of apostolic preaching.... ‘The just shall live by faith’ (Romans 1:16). This was the kernel of apostolic preaching—that it is by faith a man is justified, not by the deeds of the law, or any righteousness of his own.

We have a classic statement of it in Romans 3.... ‘Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus; whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, ... that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus ...’ (vv. 24–26).

That is the great central message of the gospel. It is through this faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and His work that we are justified. That is the meaning of this ‘one faith’.
It is, of course, the whole argument of the Epistle to the Galatians. ‘This is the gospel, and there is no other gospel’, says the apostle. And the gospel is that ‘God justifieth the ungodly who believe in Jesus’. This ‘one faith’ is something that is set over against every other teaching with regard to the way of salvation. It is this ‘one faith’ over against ... all notions that we can justify ourselves by works or actions, our own, or those of others. It is the teaching that it is Christ alone who saves, and that we become participants in this salvation through faith. So we have ‘one Lord, one faith’.

The Basis of Christian Unity, pp. 30–1

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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.”