[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.]