Daily Devotional

August 07

A First Book of Daily Readings

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

Christ shall give thee light

... there is but one treatment which can heal that diseased eye. We need waste none of our time in trying anything else. We need spend no further money on that which is not bread. We can cease to travel round to the various spiritual spas in our search for health and wholeness. The world has done its utmost to clear its own spiritual eye. Patent after patent has been brought out. Lenses and spectacles of all colours, shapes, and sizes have been offered to us, and have been loudly recommended by great and well-known leaders....

But still mankind cannot see, and continues in sin and in misery. The strain is too deep. The nebulae and the mists are not outside the eye but actually within the organ itself. All our own efforts and all our best remedies leave us precisely where we were. Indeed, we find ... that the experts themselves cannot see, and often end their lives, as did the German philosopher Goethe upon his deathbed, with the cry, ‘More light!’ ... Is there no cure? Are we all doomed therefore to perpetual blindness and darkness?


There is but one hope. There is but one answer. There is but one cure. According to the gospel, Jesus of Nazareth ... came down to earth because of the blindness of mankind.... He came and brought that treatment which alone can avail.... He has given new life and power to our diseased and paralysed spiritual optic nerves. He enables us to see God, to behold our Father’s face. And, looking at Him, the light of the eternal countenance irradiates our whole being

He said that He was ‘the light of the world’ (John 8:12) and that anyone who followed Him need no longer walk in darkness, but have the ‘light of life’ (John 8:12).... The message of the gospel therefore to this modern distracted world is that in simplicity it has but to offer this prayer:

Holy Spirit, truth divine, Dawn upon this soul of mine, Word of God and inward light, Wake my spirit, clear my sight.

Truth Unchanged, Unchanging, pp. 95–7