From Dr. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones:
I remember a woman who was a spiritist, and even a medium, a paid medium employed by a spiritist society. She used to go every Sunday evening to a spiritist meeting and was paid three guineas for acting as a medium. This was during the thirties, and that was quite a large sum of money for a lower-middle-class woman.
She was ill one Sunday and could not go to keep her appointment. She was sitting in her house, and she saw people passing by on their way to the church where I happened to be ministering in South Wales. Something made her feel a desire to know what those people had, and so she decided to go to the service, and did so. She came ever afterward until she died and had become a very fine Christian.
One day I asked her what she had felt on that first visit, and this is what she said to me. She said, “The moment I entered your chapel and sat down on a seat among the people, I was conscious of a power. I was conscious of the same sort of power as I was accustomed to in our spiritist meetings, but there was one big difference. I had a feeling that the power in your chapel was a clean power.”
--Elizabeth Catherwood and Christopher Catherwood, eds., The Christ-Centered Preaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones: Classic Sermons for the Church Today (Crossway, 2014), 34
HT: Dane Ortlund.
The same account is given John Piper's sermon:
ReplyDeleteA Passion for Christ-Exalting Power: Martyn Lloyd-Jones on the Need for Revival and Baptism with the Holy Spirit
Here are some other things Piper said:
"Lloyd-Jones had enough extraordinary experiences of his own to make him know that he had better be open to what the sovereign God might do. For example, Stacy Woods describes the physical effect of one of Lloyd-Jones' sermons.
In an extraordinary way, the presence of God was in that Church. I personally felt as if a hand were pushing me through the pew. At the end of the sermon for some reason or the other the organ did not play, the Doctor went off into the vestry and everyone sat completely still without moving. It must have been almost ten minutes before people seemed to find the strength to get up and, without speaking to one another, quietly leave the Church. Never have I witnessed or experienced such preaching with such fantastic reaction on the part of the congregation (see note 48)."
"Several times in his life he had a kind of prophetic premonition that went beyond the ordinary. On January 19, 1940 he wrote to the wife of a friend, Douglas Johnson, who had suffered a coronary occlusion.
I have a very definite and unmistakable consciousness of the fact of [Douglas'] complete and entire recovery. That kind of thing, as he will know, is not common with me. I report it because it is so very definite (see note 50)."
Liberals rejoice! An infinite source of clean energy!
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