Study and Worship

[Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached 372 sermons on the Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans on Friday evenings at Westminster Chapel in London between 1955 and 1968. Some people considered these Bible lectures rather than worship services. He reacts strongly against that idea in this excerpt from one of his last sermons in the series – Coty]

Bible study should never be regarded as an entity in and of itself. … I call our Friday night meeting a service and that is what it is. I do not recognize a Bible lecture or anything like that; I do not understand it and I do not believe in it. There is only one way to expound the Scriptures and it must always be the same way.

Now some people do not agree with that. They say, ‘Oh, no, you need Bible lectures and you need Bible instruction; you must not apply it, and you must not preach.’ I think that is absolutely fatal. The Bible is always to be preached, and must always be applied.

Still less do I believe in holding examinations on peoples’ knowledge of the Scriptures. To sit an examination on your knowledge of the Bible, in the way you would take an examination in geometry or chemistry or history, is to ask for trouble. … People have this knowledge, they have it all classified and divided, and it is all purely intellectual, purely academic, purely theoretical, and it is all wrong. People who study the Bible in this way are guilty of the very thing that the Apostle tells us [in Romans 14] we should never be guilty of.

And so I come to this: the church has often got into trouble through neglect of this principle in the matter of theological seminaries. … You will often find evangelical people saying that the trouble with the church today stems from the colleges, and, of course, they are perfectly right. But here is the question: Why has there been trouble in the colleges? And the answer is because theology has been taught as a subject.

People in earlier times used to boast that theology was the queen of the sciences. What they really meant was that it was the most interesting and the most profound of all the studies that a person could ever be engaged in, and, of course, that is right. But they should never have put it into competition with the others; it does not belong there. No, we must say that theology is different from every other study.

Why? Because with every other study you can be objective, and the more objective you are the better. You are detached, you look on. But if you study theology like that, it would be better for you never to have started. What is theology? It is the study of God. And can you study God objectively? Can you just look on intellectually? You cannot, it is impossible. To be strictly accurate, you cannot study God in any sense, but if you are trying to get knowledge about God and to know God, your whole attitude is immediately different because this is worship. When you are studying sciences or history, then you can lounge in an armchair or lie on you back in bed. But you should not study theology like that, because the study of theology always involves a relationship with God. That must never be forgotten. Indeed, if I may use [Romans 14:17], I can put it like this: The kingdom of God is not logic-chopping about particular theological points of view or definitions, but it is my relationship to God – ‘righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.’

It is obviously necessary that the man who is to preach and teach should be rendered capable of doing so. … He therefore needs a certain amount of training. That is all right, but the history of this matter shows very clearly that the moment you have a theological college there is danger and those involved must be watchful and careful. …

You will find, if you go into the history of these matters, that the people who, say two hundred and three hundred years ago, formed academies and colleges for the training of preachers, always realized the danger of separating theory from worship. So they reduced the course to the minimum, and tried to make it as practical as they could. But – and this was the most important thing of all – it was all in an atmosphere of worship. So the lecturer on theology would never dream of starting his lecture without prayer, without worship, without adoration, without reminding the students that the ultimate object was to bring them to a greater knowledge of God, in order that they might be better able to impart this truth to others; they always kept their teaching ‘living.’ I am thinking, for example, of the Independents like Philip Doddridge and others, who started their academies; I am thinking of William Tennent, who started the famous Log College, which later became Princeton University and the Princeton Seminary. …

These men always safeguarded the study of theology, but the trouble was that as the years passed and as the spirituality of the professors and teachers went down and down, so the element of worship was forgotten and theology became an abstract science to be handled like any other subject. …

You will find that evangelical people in this century have failed to remember this principle. They have become more concerned with academic qualifications and results, with degree and diplomas … than with the spirituality of the men who are being trained. These men are packed with theoretical knowledge, and often a man who goes in with his heart ablaze with the truth and the desire to preach it and to propagate it, comes out as a man whose head is full of knowledge but who has lost the fire, and is neither a preacher nor really an adequate teacher. …

The troubles that have arisen in all these areas have come because men have forgotten that the kingdom of God is not this, that or the other, but ‘righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.’ Throughout the centuries there has been a divided church and a dead church, a quarrelling church and a scandalous church, simply because this great principle has either been forgotten or has not been implemented.

[Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans: Liberty and Conscience, Exposition of Chapter 14:1-17 (Banner of Truth, 2003), p. 212-215. This message was preached in 1968. Italics are in the original; I added the underlining. You can download or listen to the audio of this sermon via this link (the sermon is entitled “A Sense of Balance (1).”) The excerpted section begins at 33:16 of the recording.]

Beginning Romans

We begin this Sunday a new series of sermons on the book of Romans, The Power of God Unto Salvation to Everyone Who Believes.

Throughout church history, God has used this letter time and again to bring many to faith and to restore His church to Gospel truths. Read the biographies or the writings of Augustine, of Luther, of Bunyan, of Wesley, and you will see the great influence of the book of Romans.

The title of our series is taken from Romans 1:16, which reads in part, “the gospel . . .  is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.”

Note three key truths in this brief sentence:

  1. The Gospel is not only Good News. It is not only an offer or invitation. It is a power. It is a power granted to people. And it is a power that is effective, that produces a result: salvation.
  2. And what can we say about this salvation? The Gospel not only saves us from God’s just wrath – His righteous punishment, from hell itself – which all men deserve (Romans 1:18, 3:23). Nor does the Gospel save us only from our self-destructive passions and desires (Romans 1:24-27). That is, the Gospel is not simply a get-out-of-hell-free card. Rather, the Gospel saves us unto being Christlike (Romans 8:29). The Gospel transforms us from the inside out (12:2). It is indeed the power of God unto salvation, unto becoming what God created us to be.
  3. This Gospel, this power unto salvation, is to everyone who believes. It is not to all Jews because they are descended from Abraham; it is not to those who have the Scriptures because they have the Scriptures; it is not to those who prove themselves worthy or who look righteous in the eyes of others. Rather, this power unto salvation is for all who look away from themselves and look to the power of God unto salvation, who look away from their own efforts and look to Jesus who has already made the effort.

So this Gospel, this power – this Spirit-wrought ability to be conformed to Christlikeness – is yours now as a gift, if you believe, if you trust, if you depend on Christ alone. As the Apostle says to those who have received this power, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Romans 13:14).

And that present, in-this-world salvation from slavery to sin culminates in the eternal, joyful state – when we, as “heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ” are glorified with Him (Romans 8:17) and revealed as the sons of God (Romans 8:19).

That’s the glorious theme of the letter to the Romans.

So I encourage you: Read the book in its entirety, noting the way Paul weaves this theme throughout. Let this letter begin to dwell in you richly – and pray with me that God would use this great epistle for His glory in the life of DGCC as He has used it so often in His people over the centuries.

But how are we to approach this letter? How should we go about interpreting it?

Consider these three guidelines:

  1. Look at the context. Many of you have heard me quote D.A. Carson: “A text without a context is just a pretext for a proof text.” We must look at the context, then look at the context, then keep looking at the context. How we interpret any one verse must make sense in the flow of thought in the surrounding paragraph, in the chapter, in the letter, in the New Testament as a whole, in the story of the Bible as a whole. While this exhortation holds for the interpretation of all Scripture, the near context is especially important when interpreting Romans. Paul is always a logical thinker who advances his argument systematically, but in Romans – unlike, say, his second longest letter, 1 Corinthians, where he addresses a series of somewhat separate issues in the Corinthian church – he sustains his argument over most all of the book.
  2. Ask the right question. If you don’t ask the right question you cannot get the right answer. And if the question you ask seems to have no good answer, perhaps you are asking the wrong question. As a possible example, consider Paul’s account of his struggle with sin: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15). Many interpreters ask the question: Is Paul talking about his pre-Christian life, or his life as a believer? The question itself presupposes that he is talking about one or the other. And in the history of interpretation of Romans 7, scholars have marshaled strong arguments for one answer to that question or the other. But what if both non-Christians and Christians can experience such a struggle – and yet neither all non-Christians nor all Christians have that struggle? In that case, we would have asked the wrong question, and the question itself would have diverted us from properly understanding the passage. We have to ask the right questions.
  3. Know the Old Testament. We cannot understand the book of Romans without an understanding of the Old Testament. Paul quotes the Old Testament about fifty times in this letter – an average of almost four times a page in my Bible. He draws time and again on Old Testament stories: Adam, Abraham, Jacob and Esau, Pharaoh and Moses, David. He speaks of Old Testament ideas and uses Old Testament categories: Law, circumcision, remnant, sacrifice. We must dig into the Old Testament if we are to dig into and profit from Romans.

So join me in eagerly anticipating what God will do through our time in this great book. May these truths dwell in us richly, so that we may become what God intends us to be individually and corporately, and therefore we might play our role in bringing about “the obedience of faith for the sake of His Name among all the nations” (Romans 1:5).