D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones – Page 3

“Salvation, if we may so put it, is entirely the idea of God; it emanates from and has its source and origin in God the Father. Now this is a staggering thought! So often you and I feel we have to placate God because of sin, sin in us, sin in our mind and whole outlook and thought, sin in the world. We tend to think of God as being opposed and antagonistic to us, and therefore we are always thinking of him as Someone we have to appease and placate. We regard God as Someone who is unwilling to be kind and gracious to us and to love us. We think of him as Someone in the far distance in his eternal glory and absolute righteousness who is not well disposed towards us. We feel we have to put forward these great efforts in order to get him to look upon us with favour.

This is a complete fallacy. Salvation has originated in the mind of God – it is God’s own purpose…

It is not only God’s idea…it has been perfectly planned from the very beginning to the very end. Here we come to something that is the source of the deepest assurance and consolation that any Christian person can ever know in this wold of time. What could be more comforting and reassuring than the fact that there is nothing contingent about this salvation. nothing accidental, nothing that needs modification? It is a perfect plan. God has planned it from eternity before the foundation of the world, it is eternally in the mind of God.”

The above selection comes from pages 57-58 of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ book, The Assurance of Our Salvation . Click here for more info.

“The Christian must not retaliate….he must also not feel resentment. That is much more difficult. The first thing you do is to control your actions, the actual reply. But our Lord is not content with that, because to be truly Christian is not simply to live in a state of repression. You have to go beyond that; you have to get into the state in which you do not even resent persecution. I think you all know from experience the difference between the these two things. We may have come to see long ago that to lose our temper over a thing or to manifest annoyance, is dishonoring to our Lord. But we still may feel it, and fell it intensely, and be hurt about it and resent it. Now the Christian teaching is that we must go beyond that. We see in Philippians 1 how the apostle Paul had done so. He was a very sensitive man – his Epistles make that plain – and he could be grievously hurt and wounded. His feelings had been hurt, as he shows quite clearly, by Corinthians, the Galatians and others; and yet, he has now come to the state in which he really is no longer affected by these things. He says he does not even judge his own self; he has committed to the judgement of God.

But we must go further…When you are persecuted and people are saying all manner of evil against you falsely, you ‘rejoice’ and are exceedingly glad.’”