These words are from a sermon D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached in 1952. He is addressing the greatness of the gospel as shown in John 17 and “this generation’s” tendency to subectivize and shrink it. It would seem that the generation to whom he spoke these words was not so different from the generation of which we are part. These are powerful words for his day, today, and coming days:
“I am not talking about people outside the church, but about ourselves, who are inside the church. It may well have be that we have all been influenced by the climate of thought and by this morbid interest in psychology and in analyzing ourselves, but whatever it is, we have become self-centered and that is the curse of this generation. We are always looking at ourselves, at how things affect us and at what we want for ourselves. Now there are many possible explanations for that, which need not claim our attention now, but that fact of the matter is that we are slaves to our own habits and states and desires, and to our own likes and dislikes, and the result is that we approach everything from the standpoint of what it means to us. And the tragic thing is that we tend to approach the gospel of Jesus Christ in that particular way, with the result that we fail to realize the truth either about ourselves or about this wonderful salvation which we have, because particularize on points. We look solely on what the gospel has to say ‘to me’, how the gospel can ‘help me’, and we fail, therefore, to hear what the gospel has to say about us, and we fail to realize the scope and the greatness of the vastness of the gospel itself. . . Charles Wesley says ”Tis mercy all, immense and free,’ and yet so often the impressions given that the gospel is something subjective and small, something which just does this or that. . . The tragedy of the subjective approach is that it is essentially so selfish that eventually it fails us.”
– D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Assurance of Our Salvation
