Top 50 D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The chief thing is the love of God, the love of souls, a knowledge of the Truth, and the Holy Spirit within you.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

2. “The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

3. “There are so many people trying to diagnose the human situation; and they come to the conclusion that man is sick, man is unhappy, man is the victim of circumstances. They believe therefore that his primary need is to have these things dealt with, that he must be delivered from them. But I suggest that that is too superficial a diagnosis of the condition of man, and that man’s real trouble is that he is a rebel against God and consequently under the wrath of God.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

4. “The Son of God became man that the children of men might become children of God.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

5. “If my preaching of this cross is not an offense to the natural man, I am misrepresenting it.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

6. “In a sense the most approachable Person this world has ever seen was the Lord Jesus Christ.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

7. “The way to love God is to begin to know God’s love to you.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

8. “Now the word ‘abiding’ makes people become sentimental. They think of abiding as something passive and clinging, but to abide in Christ is to do what He tells you, positively, and to pray without ceasing. Abiding is a tremendously active thing.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

9. “Which comes first with you, righteousness and holiness or experiences? There is no more urgently vital test that we can apply to ourselves than that. The proof of the life of God in the soul is that we say, “Though he slay me, yet will I love him.” I do not care what happens to me. If all goes wrong with me, it does not matter. I still desire him above everything else.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

10. “Talk to yourself, and though the devil will suggest that because you do not feel, you are not a Christian, say: ‘No, I do not feel anything, but whether I feel or not, I believe the Scriptures. I believe God’s Word is true and I will stay my soul on it, I will believe in it come what may’.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

11. “It is an essential part of the gospel that conviction must always precede conversion; the gospel of Christ condemns before it releases.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

12. “You show me a man who does not pray very much and I will tell you the real problem of that man. It is that he does not know God, he does not know God as his Father. That is the trouble.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

13. “You see, the joy of the Christian is a holy joy, the happiness of the Christian is a serious happiness.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

14. “The great need of the church today, in our sadness and in our slowness, is to discover the secret of the burning heart.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

15. “There can be no more urgent question at this present time than just this: What is Christianity? I say that because this Gospel is the only hope in the world today. Everything else has been tried and found wanting. Everything else has failed. You will not find hope with the philosophers or with the statesmen, and you will not find it in the so-called religions of the world. Here is hope, and here alone.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

16. “What is the chief end of preaching? I like to think it is this. It is to give men and women a sense of God and His presence.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

17. “You must say to yourself: ‘Whatever happens I am going on’. You do not give in or give way.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

18. “The Christian is confronted by two ways only, and if we are not on the strait and narrow way, we are on the wide and broad way.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

19. “If you were to feel more interest in Christ you would be less interested in yourself.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

20. “I say, therefore, with reverence and on the authority of the Word of God that God sees your sins no more; He sees the righteousness of Christ upon you. Lay hold of that.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

21. “We are all in such a hurry, we want everything at once. We believe that all truth can be stated in a few minutes. The answer to that is that it cannot.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

22. “I sometimes think that the whole art of the Christian life is the art of asking questions.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

23. “I preached as never sure to preach again And as a dying man to dying men.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

24. “It is possible for a Christian to be perfectly orthodox and yet to be defeated, and to be living a defeated and a useless life.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

25. “The cross of Christ justifies God; He remains holy because He has punished sin in the death, the shed blood, of His Son.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

26. “And if one feels anything in the presence of God save an utter poverty of spirit, it ultimately means that you have never faced Him.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

27. “Our danger is to submit ourselves to our feelings and to allow them to dictate to us, to govern and to master us and to control the whole of our lives.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

28. “There is nothing more hateful than a man who deliberately tries to play on the surface and superficial emotions of people. I have no interest in that except to denounce it.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

29. “Great preaching always depends upon great themes.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

30. “If only we saw the things of which we are guilty so continually in the sight of God, and in the sight of utter holiness, we should hate them even as God Himself does.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

31. “Anyone who thinks that he can live the Christian life himself is proclaiming that he is not a Christian.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

32. “To rejoice is a command, yes, but there is all the difference in the world between rejoicing and being happy. You cannot make yourself happy, but you can make yourself rejoice, in the sense that you will always rejoice in the Lord. Happiness is something within ourselves, rejoicing is ‘in the Lord’.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

33. “So there is nothing more vital for us to realize than this very thing: the Christian life, the Christian faith, is not something that we add on to what we have; it is something that is done to us.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

34. “Adam, where are you?” In every respect, where are you, man? Where are you, woman? Come out of that hiding place and face the truth, for you have to. You are in God’s world. You are God’s creature, and you cannot avoid him. You cannot evade him. You have to deal with him. And if you do not listen to him in life, you will have to listen to him in death. When your name is called out at the great judgment throne in eternity, you will have to step forward and listen to the verdict.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

35. “I will not glory, even in my orthodoxy, for even that can be a snare if I make a god of it... Let us rejoice in Him in all His fulness and in Him alone.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

36. “How easy it is to read the Scriptures and give a kind of nominal assent to the truth and yet never to appropriate what it tells us!”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

37. “The Church is in eclipse at the moment, but what does it matter? It is God’s! And the Church will be brought to the place which God has purposed for her. Christ will come again. And he will come, probably as he did the first time, when we will all feel utterly hopeless and filled with despair and say that the Church is finished and that nothing can be done. He will come and he will scatter his enemies.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

38. “To love to preach is one thing, to love those to whom we preach quite another.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

39. “There are people who have an almost perfect knowledge of the letter of the Scripture but have never known the message of the Scripture.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

40. “The preacher must be a serious man; he must never give the impression that preaching is something light or superficial or trivial.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

41. “We have to be poor in spirit before we can be filled with the Holy Spirit.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

42. “Like many of my fellow preachers I acknowledge that my best and severest critic is my wife.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

43. “There is nothing to add to that. Any man who has had some glimpse of what it is to preach will inevitably feel that he has never preached. But he will go on trying, hoping that by the grace of God one day he may truly preach.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

44. “According to the Scriptures happiness is never something that should be sought directly; it is always something that results from seeking something else.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

45. “The primary task of the Church and of the Christian minister is the preaching of the Word of God.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

46. “Faith means that I deliberately shut myself down to this Book, the Bible. I refuse to philosophize. I refuse to ask certain questions. People are always asking them. They want to understand the doctrine of the Trinity. You cannot. You will never understand it. It is too great. So you accept it; and you stop asking questions.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

47. “The Gospel edifies and evangelizes at the same time.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

48. “The tragedy of the world today is that it starts too near to its problems.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

49. “The world is tremendously busy trying to cover up its nakedness, trying to get back again the glory that has been lost.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

50. “It is because we belong to Him that the devil will do his utmost to disturb and upset us. He cannot rob us of our salvation, thank God, but while he cannot rob us of our salvation he can make us miserable. He can, if we are foolish enough to listen to him, seriously limit our enjoyment of our salvation.”

— D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones