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A MAN SENT BY GOD

GRAHAM HARRISON

IT would be an impertinence to attempt an assessment of the life of one so recently taken away from us, and whose memory is still fresh and fragrant. Suffice it to say, his works do follow him. But it is surely right that in thankfulness to God for that life and work we should acknowledge at least some of the ways in which we were blessed of God through him.

Many another minister, like myself, would gladly admit that, under God, he has been the greatest spiritual influence on our lives. What we saw in him we so often admired and in our own feeble ways aspired to emulate. To us he was a friend and a brother and a father all rolled into one. How kind he was to us as we turned to him for help and guidance. How patient as we poured out our complaints and sought his help. How loyally he stood by us when we were in trouble and difficulties.

To all his natural powers of intellect (and they were indeed formidable) was added a spiritual perception and understanding that most of us would say were quite unparalleled in our experience. Truly, if any man ever had the gift of wisdom it was he. Almost instinctively he seemed to discern the real problem at issue, and then he would bring to bear upon it the principles of Scripture that were relevant to it.

It was this knowledge of the Scriptures that was one of his most remarkable assets. I remember him once telling a group of ministers how during the early years of his ministry, whenever he did not know where in the Bible a particular text that he wanted to locate was to be found, he deliberately eschewed the help of a concordance but searched for the text until he found it. It was a discipline that evidently stood him in good stead—for he surely never forgot where those texts were. A journalist who once wrote a feature on him said that he could locate texts like a computer—but unlike those marvels he never seemed to hiccup! Woe betide the man in a ministerial discussion who started glibly throwing texts around with scant regard for their meaning and context. Many has been the aspiring theologian who collapsed like a pricked balloon when, having quoted that part of a text that seemed to suit his argument, he was asked by the Doctor, 'And what does the Apostle say in the rest of the verse?' Ignorance would then be informed and the man would wish that he, like his late lamented argument, could sink into oblivion.

He read avidly and tremendously widely, so that he was always remarkably informed about issues and subjects that were scarcely even names to some of us. But he did it for us and for the gospel. His memory really was phenomenal and it was quite an event to catch him out in it. If you travelled with him by car, not only would your knowledge of the local geography be increased considerably by the end of the journey, but also you would learn snippets of 20th century and earlier Welsh church history as you passed by various chapels and villages. 'I remember preaching there in 19... and . .' Out would pour the anecdotes and reminiscences. You only wished that the journey were longer.

It was in the discussions that he chaired with such unique excellence that these gifts came together with tremendous profit for us ministers. He was a firm believer in the so-called 'Socratic' method, by which he would get us talking and debating in a most helpful May.

When things flagged he would make some comment that gave a new impetus to the discussion. All the while he was carefully guiding us to the place where biblically he wanted us to be. Then would come the best part of the day—the part that we were all really waiting for. He would sum up. It was in fact an extempore mini-sermon that would bring things home to us most relevantly and powerfully. I think I understand what a Western Mail reporter wrote of him back in 1957 '. . . Dr. Lloyd-Jones is not an intellectual preacher, he is an exhorter.' Whatever might be true of the former part of the statement, certainly the latter was a most accurate description. He had this power to arouse you and to stir you. Year after year he would send us away from our annual Ministers' Conference at Bala (which he attended unfailingly so long as his health permitted) with a fresh vision and a renewed sense of our calling. It would be true to say that many of us got through the next twelve months and its troubles largely on the basis of that exhortation, in which unfailingly we had been called back to the things that really mattered.

And what can we say of his preaching? To be sure, he believed in it—and that in a day when many others were turning from preaching to dialogues, dances and dramas. Not so the Doctor. For him preaching was the great means ordained by God for the extension of His kingdom and honoured by Him down through the centuries to that end. Some called him the last of the great preachers, as though the species, like the dodo, reached extinction with him. He disagreed. He knew that God is the One who makes preachers and He could be trusted to raise up such in years to come. He went on record as saying that he would not cross the road to hear himself preach. But, thank God, a multitude of others did not share his opinion. They could and did cross not only roads but hills and valleys for the joy and thrill of being brought into the presence of God by His servant. His was the prophetic voice of authority. That same Western Mail journalist said of him 'On behalf of his faith he has no more modesty than an Old Testament prophet, and no hesitation in loosing bears on the children of darkness.' Which probably gives the wrong impression, for he sought to win men for Christ, not to savage them.

It need hardly be said that he had a great love for his native land. To the end he was unashamedly and unmistakably Welsh—which has never been, and is not now, a fashionable thing to be in London. In this Magazine back in 1969 we carried an interview that Dr. Gaius Davies conducted with Dr. Lloyd-Jones on the subject of 'Nationhood'. I remember getting one of those letters that it is the inevitable lot of editors to receive. It came from an irate doctor in England cancelling his subscription to the Magazine. The Doctor's views (and presumably ours, for we had printed them) were castigated as being 'ridiculous, small-minded and utterly unworthy of Christians'. It was no wonder, continued our correspondent, that the spiritual state of Wales was as it was. And he ended by telling us to get back to the cross, unless we preferred our 'bardic Gorsedd'. The irony of the situation was that Span (the magazine of the Pan-African Fellowship of Evangelical Students) asked permission to reprint it, and did so. Apparently they felt that it showed great understanding of colonial-type attitudes and situations, and that it brought clear biblical principles to bear on them. It was most warmly received in black Africa, although it seems that some parts of darkest England could not quite stomach it!

Undoubtedly he was the single most formative influence on the generation of men who were called to the ministry in the decades following the Second World War. What a blessing it was for us that in him were combined the strong doctrinal framework of biblical Calvinism together with the evangelistic fervour and passion of the Methodists. To the end he was in fact a Calvinistic Methodist, and he took delight in explaining to the incredulous that these twin qualities rightly cohered and belonged together.

Spurgeon used to say of John Bunyan that wherever you pricked him his blood was Bibline, for the very essence of the Bible flowed from him. The same would be true of the Doctor. The biblical gospel was what he stood for and preached. And how he urged us to do the same thing! He had no time for the modern evangelical fads and fashions of preachers becoming socially involved, or dabbling in art or literature. Why bother, when in any case all of those things had failed? Only the gospel could succeed. And, remember, here was no theoretician from the Metropolitan suburban Bible belt, but someone who had spent the first eleven years of his ministry in the South Wales of the depression, with its grinding poverty and unemployment.

He knew that the answers to the world's problems were not to be found in politics but only in the gospel. That was why he steadfastly set his face against bringing politics into the pulpit, as seems to be the increasing fashion with the resurgence among some evangelicals of what seems strangely like a reincarnation of the old 'social gospel'. It was not that he had no political views. Indeed it was fascinating to discuss these issues privately with him and to hear his perceptive comments on contemporary situations and persons, often comparing the latter with some of the great political orators he had listened to in his youth. I sometimes used to think that to have let him loose among our latter-day pygmy politicians would have been a sight wondrous to behold!

Inevitably, of course, a man of such stature and boldness was criticized. And he was, after all, only a man, albeit one greatly used of God. Like Cromwell, whom he esteemed so highly, he would want to be depicted 'warts and all'. There were many times in his ministry when his must have sounded like a voice crying in the wilderness. He must often have been a lonely and isolated man as he stood his ground on a succession of issues for which he was misunderstood and not infrequently vilified. His refusal to participate in the crusade-style evangelism that swept England from Harringay onwards, and that coupled unbiblical techniques with a patronage that compromised the gospel, was misinterpreted to mean that he had no interest in evangelism. To which the sufficient answer would have been to have dropped into Westminster Chapel on any Sunday evening.

Westminster Chapel

Then when he retired from Westminster in 1968 it was not unknown to hear some provincial oracles complain, why had he not designated and groomed his successor? But he wisely knew that such was God's work and that the God who raised him up could be trusted to care for His own. Others might theorize about the sovereignty of God: he believed it and rested in it!

Earlier there had been his call for Evangelicals to secede from the denominations and to come together in a true evangelical unity. Perhaps more than any other single issue this led to men who formerly seemed to admire him now departing from him. He knew full well what would be the reaction before he made the call. But it was his faithfulness to the gospel and his zeal for God compelled him to make it.

It would be false to the facts to pretend that all evangelicals agreed with his emphasis on the need for and the availability of the sealing or the baptism of the Spirit as an experience distinct from and subsequent to conversion. But he was preaching this before anyone had ever heard of such a thing as a charismatic. If only his guidelines had been followed, what errors of polarization might have been avoided! He rested his case on the careful exposition of Scripture, on an unrivalled knowledge of the history of revivals, and on a realization that it is the baptism of fire—y bedydd tân—that makes a man a great preacher.

To him, more than to anybody else, can be traced, under God, the new interest in and allegiance to reformed theology. He taught us that there was such a thing—and then, when some of us had the bit between our teeth and were in danger of bolting, he wisely and firmly reined us in. Who that ever heard him will forget him preaching (although it was advertized as a 'closing address') at the 1960 Puritan Conference on I Corinthians 8:1-3 on the theme 'Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth'? He was most visibly moved—and it was in turn deeply moving.

But it was often like this—at no time more so than when he was pressing on us the desperate need for revival. Lesser men criticize him for this, as though there were something potentially dangerous and enervating about it. He knew all about the need for reformation—after all, was it not what he had been engaged in all his ministerial life? But he saw that without a visitation from God—something 'phenomenal', as he used to say—our best efforts will never save the day. There was therefore something beautifully appropriate about the fact that he was taken back to Bethel C.M. Chapel, Newcastle Emlyn, for the funeral. There his wife's grandfather—Evan Phillips—had ministered, spanning the gap between the '59 and the '04 Revivals. And his commemorative plaque looked down on us throughout the service. Up there in the gallery young Evan Roberts (who was well known to the Doctor) had had mighty experiences of God that were part of God's preparation of his servant in 1904. The place may be dead now, but our God is the God of the eruptions! And no one taught us that so faithfully and urgently as the beloved brother whose mortal remains lay there before us in the coffin.

For some weeks, maybe months, we had feared that he would be taken from us. It is still hard to realize fully that the voice that sometimes sternly held us back from folly, or, more often perhaps, kindly counselled us in our troubles, is now silent here on earth. None of us who remain can remember a time when he was not there to turn to in the final human analysis. But now he is gone.

Just a few years ago—before his declining health was to ensure that he was absent from the Westminster Fellowship for extended periods— he told us a story. Some of us felt at the time that there was a strange significance about it. In retrospect I am utterly convinced that he knew what he was doing and that he did it deliberately. It concerned Ebenezer Morris, the great Calvinistic Methodist exhorter (and later minister) at the end of the 18th and during the first quarter of the 19th centuries. He had been ill and it was feared that his departure was at hand. Men in great distress and apprehension came to visit him, fearful for the future. But he was raised up and preached a sermon. His text: Hebrews 8:1 — 'Now of the things which we have spoken this is the sum: We have such an High Priest . . 'Don't be worried about when I am gone', said Ebenezer Morris— 'We have such an High Priest.' And he asked them what the task of the high priest was in the Old Testament. Then he gave them the answer: to keep the fire alight on the altar, and to keep the lamp continually burning.

I thank God for David Martyn Lloyd-Jones. And I thank God even more that 'We have such an High Priest.'

The author is Minister of Emmanuel Evangelical Church, Newport, Gwent.