Lloyd-Jones on the Sermon on the Mount

As part of my regular sermon preparation each week, I spend a fair amount of time reading commentaries of individual books of the Bible. A good commentary need not inspire, but it should help the reader understand the meaning of any given text. Because this involves technical questions of language and context, reading them can become a dry and even tedious affair. Many of the newer scholarly commentaries, as they interact with the work of other scholars, sometimes read more like commentaries on commentaries rather than explanations of Scripture. And they are big, some taking up the shelf space of two or even three Bibles.

These commentaries are important and have their place, of course. But it is always refreshing to spend some time in a work that speaks to the heart as much as to the mind. In preaching through the Sermon on the Mount in recent months, one gem I've discovered that does just that is D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones' book, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount. It is a collection of 30 (!) sermons he preached on the subject during his pulpit ministry at Westminster Chapel in London.

It is a wonderfully clear and insightful series of messages on what is probably the most familiar but most misunderstood teaching of Jesus. The Sermon on the Mount, and particularly isolated statements from it (e.g., "Judge not, that you be not judged"), has been taken as the ultimate expression of what Jesus was really all about: improving the world with a new social ethic, showing humanity the right way to live, etc. Throughout these sermons, however, Lloyd-Jones places the teachings of Christ in their proper gospel light. Far from being merely a superior moral code, the Sermon on the Mount is teaching that both depends upon the grace of God in Christ, and leads to the grace of God in Christ. As Lloyd-Jones puts it, "...we are not told in the Sermon on the Mount, 'Live like this and you will become Christian'; rather we are told, 'Because you are Christian live like this.' This is how Christians ought to live; this is how Christians are meant to live." And, "There is nothing that so leads to the gospel and its grace as the Sermon on the Mount."

This approach, I hope, has been reflected in my preaching. The moral imperatives contained in the Sermon, which must be declared and impressed upon the hearts of God's people, ultimately ought to bring us back to God's saving and enabling grace in the gospel of Jesus Christ. In preaching through the Sermon on the Mount, I hope my congregation has heard much about the grace of God from the pulpit, even as I have sought to proclaim the righteousness Christ demands from his disciples.

One enduring quality of Lloyd-Jones' sermons is how well he puts things. Here are a couple of quotes:

On loving our enemies: "...our treatment of others must never depend upon what they are, or upon what they do to us. It must be entirely controlled and governed by our view of them and of their condition."

And on prayer: "You will find that the outstanding characteristic of all the most saintly people the world has ever known has been that they have not only spent much time in private prayer, but have also delighted in it."

This is a eminently worthwhile book to buy and read.