A Feast from John 4, Courtesy of Lloyd-Jones

Posted: Monday, May 11, 2009 at 5:02 am ET

Martyn Lloyd-Jones was, by any fair measure, one of the greatest preachers of the twentieth century.  His ministry at Westminster Chapel in London ranks among the most influential in Christian history.  "The Doctor," as he was known, was a master expositor and a most effective communicator.  He was also firmly grounded in historic Christian orthodoxy, with a clear commitment to Reformation doctrine and a deep concern for the vitality and integrity of evangelical Christianity.

Now, more than a quarter-century after his death, fifty-six previously unpublished sermons on John 4.  The sermons, preached in 1967 and 1968, represent Lloyd-Jones at his best.  Living Water: Studies in John 4 [Crossway] is a gift to us today.  If you have not started your collection of writings by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, start now.  Living Water is a good place to start.

An excerpt:

Now I want to add a few words here as an aside.  I am speaking to people who in name, I have no doubt, are evangelical people and evangelically minded.  I think the greatest charge that can be brought against evangelicals in the last ninety years or so, since the 1870s, is that we have grievously failed at this point.  We have tended to reduce this glorious gospel, and the life that it gives, to just a question of forgiveness, as if everything happens when a person makes a decision, as though that is the beginning and the end of the gospel.  The glory, the bigness, the greatness, the complete intellectual satisfaction, has not been preached and expounded as it should have been.  Indeed, evangelical people have often been charged, and I am afraid it has been a true charge, of being afraid of the intellect.