Daily Devotional

August 02

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

Thou shall be turned into another man (1 Samuel 10:6)

What a miserable thing self is, what an ugly thing, what a foul thing. We are all guilty of this, every one of us, in some shape or form.... Self needs to be exposed for what it is. Sin in its ugliness and foulness needs to be unmasked.... It is the greatest enemy of the soul, and it leads to misery and un-happiness....

That brings me to the cure. What is the treatment? It is to understand the controlling principle of the Kingdom of God ... in the Kingdom of God everything is essentially different from everything in every other kingdom ... the Kingdom of God is not like that which you have always known, it is something quite new and different. The first thing we have to realize is that ‘if any man be in Christ he is a new creature, old things are passed away, behold all things are become new’. If only we realized as we should, that here we are in a realm in which everything is different! The whole foundation is different, it has nothing to do with the principle of the old life.... We must say to ourselves every day of our fives, ‘Now I am a Christian, and because I am a Christian I am in the Kingdom of God and all my thinking has got to be different. Everything here is different. I must not bring with me those old ideas, those old moods and concepts of thought.’ We tend to confine salvation to one thing, namely to forgiveness, but we have to apply the principle throughout the Christian life.

Spiritual Depression, pp. 128–9

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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.”