Are We Too Healthy?

I love to read biographies. I find history and particularly the lives of those who have walked before us fascinating. One of the things I cherish most about a good biography is learning valuable lessons from another’s experience. It’s important to learn from the past and to recognize that most problems have a way of coming full circle. This seems to be the case when it comes to the health of the church and of individual believers.

Dr. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones was a Welsh preacher who lived and preached in London England during the twentieth century. He was a fascinating man who was on the verge of becoming a world-renowned physician before abandoning medicine to pursue his divine calling to proclaim the Word of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Throughout his life he proved to be a stalwart for the faith, defending it against the liberal thinking of the day. His uncanny ability to carefully diagnose problems and to remedy them with sound biblical logic and principles was unrivalled. When the “evangelical” church was caving to the currents of the culture, Lloyd-Jones stood boldly to “preach the Word… in season and out of season (2 Tim. 4:2).

His concern for the superficiality that seemed to characterize the evangelical church caused him to reflect upon the reasons and solution for such a plight. He believed that the hallmark of a true experience of God was a sense of awe, and accompanying it, a sense of unworthiness. While he strongly warned against the dangers of morbid introspection, self condemnation and professions of constant failure, he did not shy away from stating that the weakened state of the church was a result of a defective sense of sin and a defective doctrine of sin. Consider the following quote:   Keep Reading >>>