24 Martyn Lloyd-Jones Quotes

The glory of the gospel is that when the church is absolutely different from the world, she invariably attracts it.

Faith is this extraordinary principle which links man to God; faith is this thing that keeps a man from hell and puts him in heaven; it is the connection between this world and the world to come; faith is this mystic astounding thing that can take a man dead in trespasses and sins and make him live as a new being, a new man in Christ Jesus.

Faith is a refusal to panic.

Human will-power alone is not enough. Will-power is excellent and we should always be using it; but it is not enough. A desire to live a good life is not enough. Obviously we should all have that desire, but it will not guarantee success. So let me put it thus: Hold on to your principles of morality and ethics, use your willpower to the limit, pay great heed to every noble, uplifting desire that is in you; but realize that these things alone are not enough, that they will never bring you to the desired place. We have to realize that all our best is totally inadequate, that a spiritual battle must be fought in a spiritual manner.

Always respond to every impulse to pray. The impulse to pray may come when you are reading or when you are battling with a text. I would make an absolute law of this always obey such an impulse.

It is grace at the beginning, and grace at the end. So that when you and I come to lie upon our death beds, the one thing that should comfort and help and strengthen us there is the thing that helped us in the beginning. Not what we have been, not what we have done, but the Grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. The Christian life starts with grace, it must continue with grace, it ends with grace. Grace wondrous grace. By the grace of God I am what I am. Yet not I, but the Grace of God which was with me.

I can forgive a man for a bad sermon, I can forgive the preacher almost anything if he gives me a sense of God, if he gives me something for my soul, if he gives me the sense that, though he is inadequate himself, he is handling something which is very great and very glorious, if he gives me some dim glimpse of the majesty and the glory of God, the love of Christ my Savior, and the magnificence of the Gospel. If he does that I am his debtor, and I am profoundly grateful to him.

A depressed Christian is a contradiction in terms, and he is a very poor recommendation for the gospel. Nothing is more important, therefore, than that we should be delivered from a condition which gives other people, looking at us, the impression that to be a Christian means to be unhappy, to be sad, to be morbid, and that the Christian is one who "scorns delights and lives laborious days."

To be a Christian is not only to believe the teaching of Christ, and to practice it; it is not only to try to follow the pattern and example of Christ; it is to be so vitally related to Christ that His life and His power are working in us. It is to be "in Christ," it is for Christ to be in us

There is nothing which so certifies the genuineness of a man's faith as his patience and his patient endurance, his keeping on steadily in spite of everything.

If we only spent more of our time in looking at Him we should soon forget ourselves.

We must not concentrate overmuch upon our feelings. Do not spend too much time feeling your own pulse taking your own spiritual temperature, do not spend too much time analyzing your feelings. That is the high road to morbidity.

There is something essentially wrong with a man who calls himself a Christian and who can listen to a truly evangelistic sermon without coming under conviction again, without feeling something of his own unworthiness, and rejoicing when he hears the Gospel remedy being presented.

To dwell on the past simply causes failure in the present. While you are sitting down and bemoaning the past and regretting all the things you have not done, you are crippling yourself and preventing yourself from working in the present. Is that Christianity? Of course it is not.

Prayer, in many ways, is the supreme expression of our faith in God.

As Christians we should never feel sorry for ourselves. The moment we do so, we lose our energy, we lose the will to fight and the will to live, and are paralyzed.

Avoid cleverness and smartness. The people will detect this, and they will get the impression that you are more interested in yourself and your cleverness than in the truth of God and their souls.

Love is not just a sentiment. Love is a great controlling passion and it always expresses itself in terms of obedience.

The Scriptures do grant clearly by their teaching that it is possible for a Christian to be depressed. Not that they justify this, but they do recognize the fact.

The tragedy is that many of us are living desperate Christian life. Sunday comes and we get some strength, and then we lose some on Monday; a good deal is gone by Tuesday and we wonder whether we have anything left. On Wednesday it has all gone and then we exist. Or perhaps refreshment comes in some other way, some meeting we attend, some friends we meet. Now that is the old order of things, that is not the new. He puts a well within us. We are not always drawing from somewhere outside. The well, the spring, goes on springing up from within into everlasting life.

We all tend to go to extremes; some rely only on their own preparation and look for nothing more; others, as I say, tend to despise preparation and trust to the unction, the anointing and the inspiration of the Spirit alone. But there must be no "either/or" here; it is always "both/and." These two things must go together.

The gospel is open to all; the most respectable sinner has no more claim on it than the worst.

Faith holds on to truth and reason from what it knows to be fact.

Holiness is not something we are called upon to do in order that we may become something; it is something we are to do because of what we already are.