Lessons From Lloyd-jones On Preaching And Politics

“I was never worried for a second about a man like Hitler.”

This isn’t the statement of a madman or of someone privileged enough to be removed from the horrors of the war. These are the words of a pastor who was under immediate threat from the Nazi leader and who’d put on the full armor of God and prepared for battle.

Adolf Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939; the very next day, Martyn Lloyd-Jones was installed as an associate pastor at Westminster Chapel in London, where he would faithfully preach for the next 30 years.

One year after the preacher took the pulpit, Hitler began his bombing campaign over London. Of the roughly 700 churches in the area, 624 were damaged by the bombings and 91 were totally destroyed. To the surprise of many, Westminster Chapel, one of London’s largest churches at the time, wasn’t destroyed in the bombing blitz.

Iain Murray, in his classic biography on Lloyd-Jones, writes about one Sunday morning when a bomb hit close to the Chapel right in the middle of Lloyd-Jones’s Lord’s Day prayer. The bomb shook the entire building, and plaster and dust fell down on the congregation, including on “the Doctor,” as Lloyd-Jones was known. After a pause, Lloyd-Jones simply continued his prayer and the service went forward unimpeded.

Lloyd-Jones offers a needed corrective to our politically anxious times.

Some Christians resort to despair, while others attempt revolution. What we need is a political theology that still preaches Christ when the bombs go off. Here are three lessons we can learn from Lloyd-Jones’s ministry in a time of political crisis.

Refuse Saul’s Armour

When it became apparent that England was entering the war, Lloyd-Jones sent his wife and their two children back to Wales and away from the city, not knowing what would become of it. In a brief and urgent correspondence to his wife, he writes, “Leave yourself and me too, and everything in God’s hand and you will find peace and rest.” With bombs flying overhead, many in the church were calling for a revolution, but Lloyd-Jones was calling for prayer.

With bombs flying overhead, many in the church were calling for a revolution, but Lloyd-Jones was calling for prayer.

Because of fear and panic, many began to abandon the weapons of the church and replace them with the weapons of the state. But Lloyd-Jones refused to blur the lines.

When the war was at its worst and his congregation had been reduced to few because of death and displacement, he remained resolute in affirming 2 Corinthians 10:4: “The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds” (KJV). Lloyd-Jones refused to allow revolutionary alliances and tactics to infiltrate the church:

Alas, far too often the church has tried to meet the world and its persecuting power with like weapons to those employed by the enemy. She has made alliances with the state and she has tried to strengthen herself in a material sense. She has been slow to discover what David discovered long ago in his fight with Goliath, that she cannot fight in the armour of Saul, but must ever use her own weapons with which she is familiar and with which she is meant to use.

Lloyd-Jones saw a parallel between those in Saul’s armory who were looking to outfit David for battle with new calls from within the church to align herself with the state. Like David’s pitiful sling, prayer may appear in the world’s eyes woefully insufficient weaponry against fascism. But God’s weapons are greater than the weapons of men.

Reject the Partisan Gospel

Lloyd-Jones saw that the church was particularly vulnerable to political idolatry when fear had gripped the people. Like the Israelites shaking at the sight of Goliath, we often feel the only reasonable response is to find our own “strong man” to fight our battles. Throughout the church’s history, we’ve often turned to national politics.

In a talk titled “Living in Revolutionary Times,” Lloyd-Jones rebukes the evangelicals of his day, who “seem to think that they are innovators in saying that we should all be taking an interest in politics and social matters.” But this is nothing new. Lloyd-Jones recalls, “They do not seem to have heard of the ‘social gospel’ craze of the earlier part of this century. All this has been tried with great thoroughness.”

A preacher unaware of the dangerous pitfalls the church has already fallen into is sure to lead his congregation into one of those pits. This was the great danger, in Lloyd-Jones’s mind, of harnessing power for the church through political means. Any talk of political revolution inside the church—or a call to Christianize the nation—is a call to put on Saul’s armor again.

In that same talk, Lloyd-Jones cautions preachers against the temptation to quickly gather a crowd by preaching politics. His words feel even more timely today:

I well remember certain men who were concerned about social and political matters, and who constantly preached on such themes, and packed their chapels for a while, but only as long as they preached politics. The moment they began to preach the gospel truly the crowds left them. Politically-minded people are always ready to make use of the church, but they always abandon and shun her when she ceases to be of any value to them.

American pulpits have been infected with this kind of partisan preaching for decades now, on both the left and right. It draws crowds but does a disservice to the gospel. It’s important for Christians to offer a robust political and social ethic, but not at the expense of the gospel. The former flows from the latter, and the order is irreversible.

Remember the ‘Leaven’

For Lloyd-Jones, spiritual resurrection—not political revolution—would save the world. The church didn’t need a theology of liberation but a theology of “leaven.”

Drawing a straight line through the New Testament, he says, “The Christian is represented as ‘salt’ in society and ‘leaven,’ and surely the whole point of those comparisons is that Christian influence is to be a quiet influence and a slow process of influencing society.”

Any talk of political revolution inside the church—or a call to Christianize the nation—is a call to put on Saul’s armor again.

In times of political crisis, such as our own, we’re tempted to forget this basic biblical principle. We must remember that “the kingdom of God is like leaven” (Matt. 13:33). If we’re to have social and political influence, it’ll only happen through preaching and preserving the gospel, so that regenerate Christians can be salt and light in the public square.

On May 21, 1943, when Westminster Chapel was finally seeing signs of stability after the bombings, Lloyd-Jones wrote a letter responding to a congregant who was thanking him for his faithful preaching. He ended by saying, “The supreme need of the hour is intense prayer for spiritual revival on the part of Christian people.”

The Doctor was interested in treating the disease, not the symptoms. That’s why he could speak with such audacity, testifying that he was “never worried for a second about a man like Hitler.” As wicked as Hitler was, he was merely symptomatic of the spiritual disease of the human heart—to which the gospel alone is the cure.