Aug 22, 2016

Daddy and "the Doctor"


Daddy's Lloyd-Jones book:
Romans, pp. 118-119,
content below
Daddy's favorite author was hands down, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones. "The Doctor" didn't talk about church growth strategy, proven methodology, interpersonal psychology or religious moralism. Daddy liked him because he went back to emphasizing the basics and, well, sometimes he'd be telling me about something he read in his book and get all excited and lose himself. That's how I started asking if I could borrow and read some of those books myself. And I began reading Martyn Lloyd-Jones. And I know what Daddy's talking about. And I get flustered now too, knowing I know in my head and heart what I mean but can't get it out in words...well, people like "the Doctor" (that was Lloyd-Jones' nickname) will just have to do it for us. Just look at how many times Daddy read this chapter! And since it speaks of the moment one goes to Glory, I guess it fits neatly--right here!


"Keep on dwelling upon these things until they all become real to you. How real to you is this other realm? How real is this 'blessed hope'? Make it real by reading, meditating, praying, asking the Lord to make it clear. The Spirit has been sent in order to do such a work. Keep on doing all these things until you are so 'conscious' of that other realm that it becomes the greatest thing in your lives.
 
  I read a remarkable statement this very week as I was preparing these matters. I was reading an extract from an autobiography of an old Welsh preacher whom I had the privilege of knowing. He died in 1929. He says that after his mother died he was looking through her papers and various belongings. In a very old book he came across a little sheet of paper on which he found that one of his sisters had written certain words. She was then quite young, I suppose somewhere between ten and twelve years old. Her father had died, and evidently, on the day of his death, the little girl had written these words on the piece of paper, and had put it in the old book. This is what she had written: 'Today Dada has left us. He has gone into the glorious liberty of the children of God.' A little girl of ten or twelve, in the 'sixties of the last century could write in that way. Why? Because those were the terms in which she thought, the climate in which her family lived.
 
How many of us think in that way? How many of us could write like that? Is that our view of our own ultimate departure? Do we think instinctively in that way when our loved ones who are Christians leave us and go to be with Christ? This is true Christianity. I ask again, what is the value of all our head knowledge if it does not bring us to this? This is triumphing. It transforms everything. Life, death, and everything else becomes different. 'If we hope for that we see not, then through patience do we with eager expectation wait for it.' What a poor generation of Christians we are! What has gone wrong, I wonder, during the last hundred years or so? The answer, I fear, is that we are all so subjective, always looking at ourselves and our happiness, instead of thinking and meditating on the truth of the Scriptures and setting our affection on things above. Look at Christ, consider Him and what He is preparing for us. It transforms everything. That is the way in which, it seems to me, we 'through patience should eagerly wait for' this blessed hope that is set before us."