Martyn Lloyd-Jones Quotes

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.

The Christian faith is ultimately not only a matter of doctrine or understanding or of intellect, it is a condition of the heart.

Whenever you put happiness before righteousness, you will be doomed to misery. That is the great message of the Bible from beginning to end. They alone are truly happy who are seeking to be righteous.

The terrible, tragic fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man's troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but change his environment. That is a tragic fallacy. It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell.

I am not asking whether you know things about Him but do you know God, are you enjoying God, is God the centre of your life, the soul of your being, the source of your greatest joy? He is meant to be.

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.

I sometimes think that the very essence of the whole Christian position and the secret of a successful spiritual life is just to realize two things... I must have complete, absolute confidence in God and no confidence in myself."

Faith is the refusal to panic.

The nearer a man gets to God, the greater he sees his sin.

Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?

There are ideas in our hearts, there are wishes, there are aspirations, there are groanings, there are sighings that the world knows nothing about; but God knows them. So words are not always necessary. When we cannot express our feelings except in wordless groanings, God knows exactly what is happening.

If you look at your past and are depressed it means that you are listening to the devil.

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.

The most vital question to ask about all who claim to be Christian is this: Have they a soul thirst for God? ... Is their life centered on Him? Do they press forward more and more that they might know Him.

The church is always to be under the Word; she must be; we must keep her there. You must not assume that because the church started correctly, she will continue so. She did not do so in the New Testament times; she has not done so since. Without being constantly reformed by the Word the church becomes something very different.

There is nothing more foolish or self-defeating than for a Christian to say that he is not interested in doctrines.

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

The ultimate test of our spirituality is the measure of our amazement at the grace of God.

What is preaching? Logic on fire! Preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire. A true understanding and experience of the Truth must lead to this. I say again that a man who can speak about these things dispassionately has no right whatsoever to be in a pulpit; and should never be allowed to enter one.

Conviction is not repentance; conviction leads to repentance. But you can be convicted without repentance.

The Christian is a man who can be certain about the ultimate even when he is most uncertain about the immediate.

Man is at his greatest and highest when upon his knees he comes face to face with God.

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 not something partial or piecemeal: it takes in the whole life, the whole of history, the whole world. It tells us about creation and the final judgment and everything in between.

The gospel is meant to control and govern everything in our lives.

Spiritual depression or unhappiness in the Christian life is very often due to our failure to realize the greatness of the gospel.

The Christian is not superficial in any sense, but is fundamentally serious and fundamentally happy. You see, the joy of the Christian is a holy joy; the happiness of the Christian is a serious happiness. ... it is a solemn joy, it is a holy joy, it is a serious happiness; so that, though he is grave and sober-minded and serious, he is never cold and prohibitive.

You can have knowledge, and you can be meticulous in your preparation; but without the unction of the Holy Spirit you will have no power, and your preaching will not be effective.

We should go into His presence as a child goes to his father. We do it with reverence and godly fear, of course, but we should go with a childlike confidence and simplicity.

The eternal everlasting God has become our Father and the moment we realize that, it transforms everything.

You are either a Christian or you are not a Christian; you cannot be partly a Christian. You are either "dead" or "alive"; you are either "born" or "not born".

You pray and make your requests made known unto God, and God will do something.' It is not your prayer that is going to do it, it is not you who is going to do it, but God. 'The peace of God that passeth all understanding'-He, through it all, 'will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus'.

Be still, and know that I am God. We must not interpret that 'Be still' in a sentimental manner. Some regard it as a kind of exhortation to us to be silent; but it is nothing of the sort. It means, 'Give up -or 'Give in' and admit I am God'. God is addressing people who are opposed to Him.

The devil's one object is so to depress God's people that he can go to the man of the world and say: There are God's people. Do you want to be like that?

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

The devil is so subtle that he dominates man and persuades him at the same time that he is not being dominated.

To love to preach is one thing; to love to whom you preach is quite another.

All teaching and all truth and all doctrine must be tested in the light of the scriptures.

The ultimate cause of spiritual depression is unbelief. For if it were not for unbelief, even the devil could do nothing. It is because we listen to the devil instead of listening to God that we go down before him and fall before his attacks.

What is the chief end of preaching? I like to think it is this: It is to give men and women a sense of God and His presence.

Grace is favor shown to people who do not deserve any favor at all.

We must cease to think of the church as a gathering of institutions and organizations, and we must get back to the notion that we are the people of God.

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

There is a very real danger of our putting our faith in our sermon rather than in the Spirit. Our faith should not be in the sermon, it should be in the Holy Spirit Himself.

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

People who think that once they are converted all will be happy, have forgotten Satan.

If you doubt your sins have been forgiven, that in itself is sin.

You must be made miserable before you can know true Christian joy. Indeed the real trouble with the miserable Christian is that he has never been truly made miserable because of conviction of sin. He has by-passed the essential preliminary to joy, he has been assuming something that he has no right to assume.

There is no happiness finally, there is no peace, there is no joy except we be right with God. The miserable Christian is wrong in his ideas as to how this rightness with God is to be obtained.

Though we claim to believe the whole of Scripture, in practice we frequently deny much of it by ignoring it.