From the TeachingtheWord Bible Knowledgebase

Part 3 of a series. Read part 1 and part 2.

Postmodern Evangelicals are trying all kinds of approaches to the problems of the nations - except the one that God says will work. Today we continue the true story of a man who took God at His Word, despite opposition from the Evangelicals of his day. His commitment to the authority of the Bible revitalized a church, revolutionized a city, and rescued a nation from disaster.

In the first and second articles of this series, we saw an unlikely man come to an unlikely place for the start of a revolution in the church; we saw the flame quickly kindled as the new man rejected failed church-growth strategies and relied strictly on the power of God and His Word. Today we focus on the man God used, the passion God placed within him, and the parallels for our time.

Arguably the 20th Century's Greatest Preacher

Some readers may have already identified the man who came to Sandfields and turned the church upside down. His name was David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and the year was 1927.¹ Port Talbot was a seaport and industrial center on the southern coast of Wales. Sandfields was the local popular name for a struggling church near a sandy beach, whose official name was Bethlehem Forward Movement Church.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones was born in Cardiff, not far from Port Talbot. A brilliant student, he entered medical school in London at age sixteen and qualified as a doctor in his early twenties. But in his twenty-eighth year, not long after his conversion, he became convinced that God wanted him to heal men's souls, not merely their bodies. He left a promising and lucrative career as a medical doctor and clinical researcher to answer God's call to become a full-time minister of the Gospel of Christ.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones would become arguably the greatest Evangelical preacher of the twentieth century. He continued in active ministry until shortly before his death in 1981. He is better known for his later work as pastor of Westminster Chapel in London, and for a number of other ministries he helped establish. But his eleven early years at Sandfields had a spiritual impact that extended beyond the walls of that church to the borders of his native Wales, to the whole of Great Britain, and beyond the British Isles to the ends of the earth. Like the concentric ripples caused by the impact of a stone tossed into a calm lake, the spiritual revolution that began at Sandfields in 1927 continues to have an impact today. Later in this series we shall return to Sandfields, and examine some of those results.

Striking Parallels

Conditions in the postmodern Evangelical church parallel conditions in the Welsh Evangelical church of the 1920s to an amazing degree. The church's problem is the same - lack of spiritual power. Today's church is trying the same kinds of non-solutions that the Welsh Evangelicals tried but Martyn Lloyd-Jones rejected. Only the external packaging has changed. But in this age of instantaneous mass communication, those non-solutions permeate the church not at the slow and bumpy pace of a Model T Ford but at the speed of light, and they know no boundaries. Churches around the globe have immediate access, by satellite television and the Internet, to every new experiment the church in America decides to try out - and every new heresy - and to every problem and disaster that comes with it. The failings of the Evangelical church in America quickly become the failings of the church around the globe.

The American church may be turning the world upside down, but certainly not in the way that the church of the book of Acts did (17:6). The New Testament church turned the world upside down by sticking to first principles and staying "on message" - the Gospel of Christ and the doctrine of Christ preached on the foundation of the sole authority of Scripture, in reliance on the Holy Spirit. It did nothing else. Today's church, constantly experimenting with every fad of the marketplace, does a thousand other things. Thus it propagates the weakness of the spirit of fear against which Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached in his very first sermon at Sandfields - fear of falling out of favor with the world, and not the power of a sound mind controlled by the Spirit of God (1 Timothy 3:6-7).

Same Problem, Same Solution

Just as the problem is the same, the solution is the same. It has been the solution to the problems of the church in all times. God has not changed. His Word has not changed. His answer for a lost and dying world has not changed. His design for the church has not changed. God and His Word have not moved, the church has moved.

Today's Evangelical church may be plugged into the electronic global village, but spiritually speaking it is the church unplugged - disconnected from the Source of true power. The church needs to return to first principles, as the church at Sandfields did.

The preacher who will revolutionize a church is the Scripture-driven preacher - the blood-bought, Spirit-anointed man who operates under the sole and unique authority of the inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God, and no other authority; the man who preaches the Word expositionally, as Scripture commands; the man who relies, come what may, on the Holy Spirit of God for the results. The revolutionized church that will result from such a man's preaching is the Scripture-driven church.

This was the approach to ministry practiced by three of the greatest preachers of the 19th and 20th centuries, men God used in phenomenal ways: Charles Haddon Spurgeon, George Campbell Morgan, and Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Their overlapping ministries spanned a period of 130 years, from 1850 to 1980. They succeeded by staying "on message" in vastly different and rapidly changing environments.

When Spurgeon was born in 1834, the British Empire was approaching its zenith but would soon crumble. Man could travel twenty-four miles an hour by sea, with a favorable wind. The fastest means of communication was an express rider on horseback. When Lloyd-Jones died in 1981, the Soviet empire was at its zenith but was about to crumble. Man was traveling 24,000 miles an hour through space. The technologies of the Information Age were seamlessly connecting the entire globe in real time.

All three men happened to be British, but the reach of their ministries transcended national and cultural boundaries. Their Gospel preaching touched all classes of people on every continent during their lifetimes. And through their writings (and in Lloyd-Jones' case, recordings), their preaching continues to touch many today.

Interestingly, none of the three had any formal training from a Bible college, institute, or theological seminary. But two of them (Spurgeon and Morgan) would found such schools, and all three would teach in them. All three focused on the Bible as the Word of God, alive and powerful, the critic of the thoughts and intents of the heart (Hebrews 4:12). At one point in his ministry, during a crisis of faith, G. Campbell Morgan locked away all his books for an extended period - except the Bible. He knew that the answer to any crisis of belief is the Word of God alone.

Such a passion for the Word must become the passion of the man in the pulpit in the 21st century.

As we continue this series we shall ask and answer the question, "What does God do when a church experiences the renewal of Scripture-driven thinking?" For the answer, we shall examine God's workings in the early days of the church in the book of Acts, examine the results of the revolution at Sandfields and how they came about, and see the quiet revolution that has begun in a few churches in our day. We shall see that a renewal of Scripture-driven thinking in the pulpit and the pew can radically transform the Evangelical church, making it successful in the only way it truly can be - on God's terms, not man's.

Next: The Scripture-Driven Church in Acts

References:

1. The facts recounted in this series are drawn from following sources: John Davies, A History of Wales (London: Penguin Books, 1994); Bethan Lloyd-Jones, Memories of Sandfields, 1927-1938 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1983); D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1972); Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880-1980 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); and Ian H. Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years (Banner of Truth, 1982).

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