The Promise of the Father: Overloaded Fuses of Love

The Father made a promise to his people. Acts 1:4–5 tells us that Jesus assured his disciples that they would receive that promise from the Father—the gift of the Holy Spirit. We see the heavenly delivery of this gift in Acts 2. What came with that promise? Well, there are different aspects we could highlight—purity and power just to name a couple. But another astounding reality that comes with the Father’s promise is the promise of his permanent, unmediated, abiding presence.

God’s salvation program has always aimed at him dwelling with his people. This is what makes God’s people his people. Moses understood this and longed for the presence of God.

 

And he [Moses] said to him [YHWH], “If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. 16 For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?” (Exodus 33:15–16).

 

And so God promised to dwell and did dwell with his people. Consider Leviticus 26:11,

 

I will make my dwelling among you, and my soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people (Leviticus 26:11–12).

 

And he remained with them in this special way until, because of their ongoing rebellion, God’s glory departed the temple, and he handed them over to exile (Ezekiel 10:18; 2 Chronicles 36:20–21). But God’s story of salvation did not end there. God has already written the end of his story of salvation, and he will dwell with his people in a way never known or experienced before. Revelation 21:1–4 gives us as close a glimpse as we can get on this side of the new heavens and new earth of the wonders of the ineffable future reality to come,

 

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:1–4)

 

This is the endgame, eternity in God’s joyous presence for those who have surrendered to King Jesus (Psalm 16:11). And, in God’s grand wisdom, how is it that we get there? By God’s presence with us now.

Ezekiel and Jeremiah, having experienced both the fall of the seat of God’s earthly kingdom, Jerusalem, and the exile of God’s people, foresaw and longed for the day when God’s presence would return in a new way to his people under a new covenant. He would not only dwell with them. He would dwell in them.

 

And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God (Ezekiel 36:27–28).

 

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people (Jeremiah 31:33).

 

And, what again is the payoff of God dwelling with his people? It’s Moses’ insight we noted above. God’s presence with his people identifies them as God’s people. God’s presence with his people assures them, they are his. Jeremiah foresaw this new covenant promise of God’s abiding presence resulting in knowing God in a new, intimate, expansive way never before seen,

 

And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 31:34).

 

This is the promise of the Father—the gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift of God’s permanent, abiding presence with and within his people—that Jesus poured out on his people in Acts 2. This is the gift he has given us who are in him. Put simply, the promise of the Father, the gift of God’s presence in us by the Holy Spirit, is the gift of assurance. It is the sure knowledge that God’s is ours and we are his. God’s presence in us by the Holy Spirit assures us that we are his children,

 

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, (Romans 8:14–16).

 

And at times God delights to overwhelm us with the presence of his Holy Spirit in order to fill us with fresh knowledge of his abiding presence with us and love for us. Martyn Lloyd-Jones captures such experiences well, saying,

 

“The fuses of love are so overloaded they almost blow out.”[1]

 

And, when the fuses of love are overloaded with the knowledge of God’s love for us, that’s when we sing his praises and declare his mighty works through the gospel of Jesus with such joy and boldness that the world takes notice and the kingdom of God advances. Again, Lloyd Jones,

 

The subconscious doubts…are gone! And in their place is utter and indestructible assurance, so that you know that you know that you know that God is real and that Jesus lives and that you are loved, and that to be saved is the greatest thing in the world. And as you walk on down the street you can scarcely contain yourself, and you want to cry out, “My father loves me! My father loves me! O, what a great father I have! What a father! What a father!”[2]

 

The Father made a promise. And what the prophets of the old covenant foresaw, we get to experience in the new covenant. We live with the permanent, abiding presence of God dwelling in us by the Holy Spirit. And because of this, we know him, we know his love for us, and we know we are his children. And he delights to remind us of this at the most unexpected times in fresh, wonderful ways. If you haven’t experienced that in some time, just ask your Father for it. For your Father delights to give you the Holy Spirit (Luke 11:13). In this way—you being filled with the Holy Spirit and the knowledge of God and his love for you, which leads you to declare his mighty works of salvation through Jesus because of your joy in him—in this way, God will take his kingdom to the ends of the earth. Through your overloaded fuses of love, the Father will make his kingdom come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

[1] Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable: Power and Renewal in the Holy Spirit (Random House Publishing Group, 2000).

[2] Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable.

The Christian’s Acid Test

[With Hurricane Ian ravaging Florida and pouring rain on us, let’s turn to Pensacola, Florida in 1969, when Hurricane Camille was about to hit the US. Martyn Lloyd-Jones – then 70 and on his final trip to the US – preached “The Acid Test” on 2 Corinthians 4:17-18, which reads in part in the ESV, “This light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” This devotion is taken primarily from the final two-thirds of the sermon. You can download or listen to the entire sermon here; the book containing the nine sermons preached in Pensacola is available here – Coty]

In [2 Corinthians 4:17-18] we have the acid test of our profession of the Christian faith…. [Orthodoxy cannot be such a test.] Because of the terrible danger of a mere intellectual assent, orthodoxy, while it is absolutely essential, is not sufficiently delicate to merit the designation of acid test…. [Neither is morality nor experience.] If you make the test of experience the acid test, what have you to say to the many cults that are flourishing round and about us? After all these cults give people experiences….

[So what is the acid test?] The acid test of our profession is our total response to life, to everything that takes place within us and around us. Not partial but total…. The acid test of our profession is this: What do you feel like when you are sitting in an air-raid shelter and you can hear the bombs dropping round and about you, and you know that the next bomb may land on you and may be the end of you? That is the test. How do you feel when you are face-to-face with the ultimate, with the end? [Or we could put it this way:] The ultimate test of our profession of the Christian faith is what we feel, what we say, and what our reaction is when a hurricane … or a tornado or some … violent epidemic, a disease that brings us face-to-face with time and eternity, with life and death – [when one of these comes]. The ultimate question is, what is our response then? Because that is exactly what the apostle is saying here….

Paul is surrounded by many troubles and trials and problems. They could not have been worse. Yet he looks at them all and says, “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.”…

So here is the great test for us. Can we speak like this? Do we speak like this? We may be orthodox. That is not enough. We may be good people. That is not enough. We may have had some great thrilling experience. That is not enough. How do we stand up to the ultimate questions?…

[Note that this is not stoicism.] Stoicism is the exact opposite of Christianity…. The philosophy of Stoicism is the philosophy of resignation. It is the philosophy of putting up with it, taking it, simply standing and refusing to give in. Stoicism is negative, whereas the very essence of Christianity is that it is positive. Christians are not people who are just bearing with things and putting up with them. They are triumphing. They are exulting. They are “more than conquerors” (Rom. 8:37)….

A Christian is a man or woman who has an entirely new view of the whole of life. How is this? It is through believing in the Lord Jesus Christ. There was a time when Paul could not speak like this. The problems and difficulties of life pressed upon him. He could not face them. But in Christ, everything changed. Paul will tell you in the next chapter of this epistle, “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Cor. 5:17)…. Not that [the problems and difficulties] changed, but Paul has changed, and he sees them in an entirely different manner. Everything is seen in the light of Christ….

What has happened to him? Well, he is now in a new relationship to God. He knows God as his Father. He knows his sins are forgiven. He knows that nothing will be able to separate him from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. He has believed the message concerning Jesus Christ and him crucified. That is the sole explanation. That is why he has an entirely new outlook, an entirely new view of the whole of life….

The difficulty with us is that we are all so immersed in the petty problems of life that we do not see life as a whole. And what this Christian faith gives us is the capacity to see life steadily and to see it whole….

[Christians have a new perspective in two respects. First:]

Notice how the apostle puts it: “Our light affliction, which is but for a moment.” Now this is most important. One of the first great things that becoming a Christian does to men and women is to give them a right view of time…. It is time that defeats people. Take a man and his wife who suddenly lose their only child. All their affection and interest had been settled on this child, and, oh, how happy they were together! Suddenly their son is killed in a war or drowned in the sea. Someone who is dearer to them than life is suddenly taken away, and they are bereft. And this is what they say: “How can we go on? How can we bear it? How can we face it? Six months, oh, how terrible. A year. Ten years. Twenty years. It’s impossible. How can we keep going? We’ve lost the thing that made life worth living.” The tyranny of time. Time is so long.

But Paul puts it like this: “Our light affliction, which is but for a moment.” Surely, you say, Paul was just a wishful thinker. This is just psychology, after all. How can he say “but for a moment” when life is long and arduous? Ah, the answer is quite simple. The apostle, as a Christian, knows what to do with time. There is only one thing to do with time, and that is to take it and put it into the grand context of eternity.

When you and I look forward, ten years seems a terribly long time. A hundred years? Impossible. A thousand? A million? We cannot envisage it. But try to think of endless time, millions upon millions upon millions of years. That is eternity. Take time and put it into that context. What is it? It is only a moment…. Christians are already seated “in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:6). They belong to eternity, and they are free from the tyranny of time.

But notice the second respect in which Christians have a different perspective: “our light affliction.”… Watch what he says. The apostle does not say these [afflictions] are light in and of themselves. That is not what he says at all. What he says is that they become light when contrasted with something else….

The apostle Paul has a picture. Do you see it? Here he is with a table in front of him, and on the table is a balance, a pair of scales. There is a pan on one side and a pan on the other side, and he puts in one pan his toils, troubles, problems, and tribulations. And down goes the pan, with all that unbearable weight. But then he does a most amazing thing. He takes hold of what he calls “a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.”… He puts that on the other side. What happens? Down goes the pan, and that first weight was nothing. He does not say that it was light in and of itself but that when you contrast it with this “far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” on the other side it becomes nothing….

Here is his secret. He sees into the glory by faith. And having seen that, everything else becomes light, almost trivial. Everything the world has to give means nothing to him now. He knows that all this can be lost in a second. If a hurricane comes, everything goes. In any case, death will put an end to it all. He does not live for that. “The things which are seen are temporal.” Your homes, your cars, your wealth, everything can vanish in a flash. There will be nothing left…. But as for these other things, … we have “an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven” by God for us (1 Pet. 1:4). Let your hurricanes come one after the other, and all together it will make no difference. Let men set off all their bombs in the whole universe at the same time, this inheritance remains solid, durable, everlasting, and eternal. That is the secret. Once you have had a glimpse of this glory, nothing else can depress you, nothing else can alarm you, nothing else can get you down….

[Note then the purpose of such afflictions.] Those afflictions make you look at “the things which are not seen.” So they work for you. They drive you to this glory. They force you to consider it afresh. Far from getting me down, says Paul, they make me more sure of the glory of which I have had a glimpse—“a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” My dear friends, this has been the secret of the saints throughout the centuries….

The one question for each of us is this: Do we know something about this glory? Do we set our affections upon it? Do we live for it? Do we live in the light of it? Do we seek to know more about it? That is the secret of the Christian….

May God produce in this evil age a body of men and women who can look at this life, which they share with everybody else at the present time, and, when everything goes against them to drive them to despair, can say, “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.”

The Power of the Resurrection

[From D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, God’s Ultimate Purpose: An Exposition of Ephesians 1 (Baker, 1978), excerpted from p. 399-422. These chapters are based on three sermons on Ephesians 1:19-20 preached in 1954; audio of those sermons is available online: first, second, third.]

[The resurrection] is the proof, beyond every other proof, of the fact that every obstacle and hindrance and enemy set in our path shall be overcome. The raising of the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead is proof positive and absolute, that even the ‘last enemy’ has been conquered and defeated….

Whatever may be true of our experience, whatever may be true of the world and its darkness, whatever may be true of the seeds of decay and of illness and of death that are in our bodies, and howsoever great is the power of the last enemy, we can be certain and confident of this, that nothing can prevent the carrying out of God’s purpose with respect to us. There is no power that can withstand Him; there is no might or influence that can match Him, there is no possible antagonist that can equal Him. The mightiest foes, the devil, death and hell have already been vanquished, and the resurrection of Christ is the proof of it….

Do you realize the exceeding greatness of His power in you? Do you realize the energy of the strength of His might that is already working in you? And do you realize that because it has begun it will continue, and continue until you will find yourself ‘faultless and blameless, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing’ in the presence of God?…

It is most important that we should realize that the Apostle is praying here, not that the Ephesians may have more power, but that they may come to know the greatness of the power of God that is already working in them…. We are not Christians and cannot be Christians apart from this mighty working of the power of God…..

The most urgent practical question for every Christian is this: Are we aware of the fact that the almighty power of God is working in us? Do we realize that we are what we are solely and entirely by the grace and the power of God? Do we realize in our own personal lives and experiences that it is this exceeding great power of God that accounts for everything in the Christian life? I press these questions again because I am convinced that the main trouble with most of us is our failure to realize the greatness of the salvation into which we have been brought, and which we enjoy together.…

Somehow or another we do not grasp the idea of this mighty working of God in salvation. Far too often we think of it solely in terms of forgiveness. We think of the Christian life as just a matter of knowing that we are forgiven, and then our living the Christian life as best we can…. When we come to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, do we realize that it was the greatest manifestation of the energy of the strength of God’s might that the world has ever known. According to the Scriptures nothing but the almighty power of God could have raised Him again from the dead, and exalted Him to the high position where He is at this moment at the right hand of God. We forget that He was ‘declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead’” [Romans 1:4]….

Nothing but the power of God can make us believers. But it is also by this selfsame power that we continue in the Christian life. It takes the same power which enabled us to believe to enable us to continue at all in the Christian life. We would not be able to stand for a single hour in the Christian life were it not for this power of God that is working in us….

If you have the life of God in you, if He has started ‘a good work’ in you, He will not give it up, He will bring it to perfection. If you will not be led by Him, you will be driven; if you refuse to be enticed and attracted, you will be chastised. God wills our perfecting, and he will stop at nothing less. The work will go on, the power of God will continue to be exercised in us until we are faultless…. He wills that we should be holy and without blemish in His presence.

Is there anything more important for us than to know all this? We are in the hands of God, and He is working in us. He has given us the power to believe, He is working in us now, fashioning us, molding us, bringing us to perfection. We cannot escape it, we are in His hands and He will go on with the work. Blessed be his name!

Oh that we might know this more and more, and realize the high privilege of our calling, the marvel, the miracle of this new life which is all from God, and which is all by God. My comfort, my consolation, my strength, my assurance, is to know that God is working in me; and that He will never cease to work in me until I stand before Him in glory.

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.]

The Business of Preaching

“”The business of preaching is not merely to make the hearer feel a little happier while he is listening or while he is singing particular hymns; it is not meant to be a way of producing an atmosphere of comfort. If I do that I am a quack, and am a very false friend indeed. No, the business of preaching is to teach you to think. We may have to be severe, to chastise you, and to show you that your thinking has been altogether wrong. And not only so, but also to show you that you have not grasped the doctrines, because the comfort that is given by them is a deduction drawn as the result of working them out for yourselves.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans 8:17-39 – The Final Perseverance of the Saints, p. 24.

Similarly, Ray Stedman from “The Glory of Preaching,” presented at the 1982 Congress on the Bible: “It is the business of the preacher to change the total viewpoint about life of every member of his congregation, and to challenge the secular illusions of our day, and strip them of their deceitfulness, and show people how human wisdom fails, . . . and point out to them what that failure is doing to them if they follow it. The instrument is the exposition and proclamation of these mysteries of God.”

When Do You Give Up on Someone?

When do you give up on someone?

Think of someone you have prayed for time and again, someone who has heard the Gospel and rejected it for years. Should you conclude, “It’s hopeless – this person will never come to faith.”

We considered Jesus’ story about two sons last Sunday:

“What do you think? A man had two sons. And he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ And he answered, ‘I will not,’ but afterward he changed his mind and went. And he went to the other son and said the same. And he answered, ‘I go, sir,’ but did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.” (Matthew 21:28-31)

The sermon emphasized the second son; consider now the first. He initially refuses to obey his father. Later, however, he regrets that decision and fulfills the command.

Any follower of Christ who speaks the Gospel regularly has heard such refusals. God makes His appeal through us: “Be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ!” (2 Corinthians 5:17-21). Yet as we make this appeal, many reject the command. Like the first son, they answer, “I will not.” Even after multiple appeals, many continue to say no.

But gloriously, many also, after decades of refusal, change their minds, come to faith in Christ, and are reconciled to God. We could tell of those among our own church family, but instead hear of “Staffordshire Bill,” who came to faith in a poor town in Wales around 1930, under the ministry of Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Bill was near 70 years old at this time. He drove a fish-cart around town, pulled by a pony, selling fish door to door – and it was not uncommon for the pony to pull the driverless cart back home after Bill, drunk, fell back, asleep, into the rear with the fish. One evening Bill was drinking in a club:

There he was, drinking himself into his usual sodden condition, and as he afterwards confessed, feeling low, hopeless, and depressed, trusting to the drink to drown those inward pangs and fears which sometimes disturbed him.  There were several men in little groups of twos and threes in the Club room, drinking and talking, and suddenly he found himself listening, at first involuntarily but then anxiously, to a conversation between two men at the table next to his [discussing Lloyd-Jones’ preaching]. . . . ‘Yes,’ said the one man to the other, ‘I was there last Sunday night and that preacher said nobody was hopeless – he said there was hope for everybody.’  Of the rest of the conversation he heard nothing, but, arrested and now completely sobered, he said to himself, ‘If there’s hope for everybody, there’s hope for me – I’ll go to that chapel myself and see what that man says.’ . . .

[He aborted his first two attempts to attend, as his nerves failed him.] The third Sunday evening he was again at the gate, ‘wondering nervously what he should do next’, when one of the congregation welcomed him with the words, ‘Are you coming in, Bill?  Come and sit with me.’

That same night ‘Staffordshire Bill’ passed from condemnation to life.  ‘He found,’ Mrs, Lloyd-Jones tells us, ‘that he could understand the things that were being said, he believed the gospel and his heart was flooded with a great peace.  Old things had passed away, all things had become new. The transformation in his face was remarkable, it had the radiance of a saint.  As he walked out that night, [a church member introduced him and said], “Mrs. Jones, this is Staffordshire Bill.” I shall never forget the agonized look on his face, for he flinched as though he had been struck a sudden blow.  “Oh no, oh no,” he said, “that’s a bad old name for a bad old man; I am William Thomas now.”‘

William Thomas was a new creation. He died at peace with God three years later.

How many times had Staffordshire Bill heard something of the Gospel? How many times had he refused to obey the call? How many times had he cursed those who spoke to him of Jesus?

The power of God can transform the greatest drunk and the most arrogant intellectual, the vilest criminal and the most upstanding citizen. God commands all: “Be reconciled to Me!” There are many “first sons” who have responded, “I will not!” But, like Staffordshire Bill, God may not be done with them.

So be His mouthpiece. No matter how many rejections you have heard, no one is hopeless. “In Christ God [is] reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:19). So don’t give up. Be His ambassador. And may God be pleased to bring many who have rebelled for decades into His family.

[The story of Staffordshire Bill is taken from Iain Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years (Banner of Truth Trust, 1982), 222-223.]