Two ways to quench the Spirit, according to Martyn Lloyd-Jones

This is the second in a series of articles written by Adam Ramsey of Liberti Church, Gold Coast, Australia, exploring what we can learn from Martyn Lloyd-Jones today in relation to the Reformed faith and a Scriptural understanding of spiritual experience.

The essays, of which there are five in total, need to be taken together. They are taken from original, yet- to-be published research undertaken by Ramsey for his Doctor of Philosophy thesis. Read the first article here.

They essays also, we hope, represent something of the generous-hearted, thoughtful, Biblical approach that en was founded 40 years ago in 1986 to embody.

Foremost among the preachers of his generation in the 20th century, Martyn Lloyd-Jones stood out as a man whose life and ministry were profoundly shaped by the authority and sufficiency of Scripture.

He firmly believed that nothing else could adequately explain the situation of the entire world as it presently is, except for the Bible¹. His commitment to expositional, “verse-by-verse” preaching across the decades of his pulpit ministry exemplified Paul’s apostolic charge to “preach the Word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Tim.4v2). Those who heard him preach, and those who read his sermons later in his many published works, can observe a holy trepidation in his opening, teaching, and proclaiming of Scripture. He approaches God’s Word with “the same sense of reverence one must have when approaching God Himself.”²

In light of the authority of Scripture, the Doctor’s hermeneutical posture can be summarised by the apostle Paul’s words in 1 Thessalonians 5v21: “test everything; hold fast what is good.” For Lloyd-Jones, it was imperative that everything be sifted through the authoritative sieve of Scripture; and everything that came out the other side of that sieve was to be embraced with steadfast fidelity. Why? Because like the apostle Paul, Lloyd-Jones was motivated by more than simply possessing correct doctrine about God. His commitment to Biblical authority refused to be contained to little more than an intellectual exercise. Echoing the synthesis that he saw in Scripture of doctrine and doxology, Lloyd-Jones was motivated by a faithfulness that included theological precision in step with historic, orthodox Christianity, as well as a persistent desire for deeper experiential communion with God. It was precisely this experiential orientation to the Holy Spirit that made him vigilant not to “quench the Spirit” (1 Thess. 5v19). Thus, his hermeneutic was marked by a dual fidelity: to the text of Scripture as the authoritative rule of faith, and to the Spirit as the essential illuminator of Scripture and mediator of God’s presence in daily experience.

This posture carried two significant implications for Lloyd-Jones, both of which he believed had the capacity to quench the Spirit. First, he exhibited a principled suspicion toward any doctrine or spiritual experience that could not be substantiated by the witness of Scripture, believing that “all teaching and all truth and all doctrine must be tested in the light of the Scriptures.”³ This led him to challenge some of the practices and theological emphases within the Charismatic movements of his era, particularly where subjectivism, sensationalism, or novelty appeared untethered from Biblical warrant. Second, however, his commitment to Biblical authority also made him wary of dismissing authentic spiritual experiences – attested to by Scripture – that yet transgressed the accepted norms of his own Reformed Evangelical tradition as it was in the 20th century. In the introduction to Lloyd-Jones’ book, Prove All Things, his grandson Christopher Catherwood remembers him saying: “‘Be open … be ready to listen, but never uncritical’ – or, as the apostle Paul put it, ‘Prove all things; hold fast to that which is good’ (1Thess.5v21).”⁴ It is on this point that Lloyd-Jones serves as an important paradigm of convergence between Word and Spirit. For him, a thoroughgoing evangelical commitment to the authority of Scripture required not only rejecting the extra-Biblical, but also resisting the impulse to domesticate the supernatural dimensions of Christian experience in the name of tradition or respectability. The Doctor maintained a delicate equilibrium between discernment (“test all things”) and openness (“hold fast to what is good”), not in spite of his evangelical distinctive on Scripture, but because of it.

Quenching the Spirit, by failing to “test all things”

The first error through which someone might quench the Spirit, was in their failure or refusal to test a theological belief or spiritual experience against the ultimate standard of Scripture. In his lectures on “Great Doctrines of the Bible, delivered in the early 1950s after the Second World War”, Lloyd-Jones asserted: “If I cannot prove to you that the doctrine which I hold is found in the Bible, or that the Bible proves it or demonstrates it, then I must reject it.”⁵ All Christian belief and dogma “must be pure, unadulterated Scripture” that is plain, clear, and perspicuous across the pages of the Bible.⁶ Scripture is the definitive and authoritative test, and the normative means through which God has promised to speak to His people. Lloyd-Jones elaborates on this critical role of Scripture in its verifying capacity, writing: “The Bible suggests, therefore, that the Holy Spirit normally speaks to us through the Word. He takes His own Word, He illumines it, and takes our minds and enlightens them, and we are thus made receptive to the Word. Through such a process we are able to check all the experiences that we may have, so that we may be sure that we are not being led astray or deluded. It is not right, therefore, to speak of the Spirit or the Word, but rather of the Spirit and the Word, and especially the Spirit through the Word.”⁷

Every doctrine and belief, had to be grounded in, and tested by, the Bible. Leith Samuel, who worked closely with Lloyd-Jones after the war, remembers the beginnings of the Westminster Fellowship – a Monday morning gathering of some 40 or so ministers – who came together for the discussion of theological and pastoral issues “under the Doctor’s sharp Biblical eye.”⁸ At the close of each session, his “summing-up statements, often brilliant, always pithy and lucid, took us to the Biblical heart of every issue.”⁹ No matter the topic of conversation, Scripture would have the final and decisive say on the matter.

Lloyd-Jones was openly suspicious of, and ready to condemn, “anything that claims to be a fresh revelation of truth.”¹⁰ This included prophetic utterances spoken within the gathered church that went untested and consequently grew into theological dogma that became defining for any denominations. Lloyd-Jones cites the case of Seventh-day Adventism as illustrative of this danger, noting how the movement originated when “a man called Russell and a woman called Mrs Eleanor White claimed that the Holy Spirit had revealed directly to them the exact year when our Lord was going to come.”¹¹ The Doctor observes that while the event did not happen, of course, the failure to critically assess the subjective revelations of its founder set in motion an entire movement of churches that were built upon the neglect of Paul’s apostolic injunction to “test all things”.

Another example that Lloyd-Jones offers in this same vein, is his critique of “a teaching which has gained great popularity in evangelical circles, concerning what is known as ‘the secret rapture of the saints’.”¹² After explaining the doctrine of the Rapture, he asked his hearers if they knew the origin of this belief, going on to argue that it did not exist until it was given forth as a prophetic “utterance” in a church service presided over by Edward Irving: “The people who hold it seem to assume that this has always been the teaching of the church, that it is truly Biblical teaching, but do you know its history? The answer is that this teaching was first put forward in 1830. It had never been heard of before.”¹³ Because this utterance was given in a way that claimed the Holy Spirit as its origin, it went untested and was accepted.¹⁴

The Doctor diagnosed a similar danger in the Charismatic Movement that he described as “an uncritical acceptance of everything”.¹⁵ This was particularly true in the realm of spiritual experience that went untested by Scripture, and became unanchored from orthodoxy, which led to the twin snares of fanaticism and mysticism; both as examples of what the Bible describes as “false fire”.¹⁶ Quoting 1 Thessalonians 5v21, Lloyd-Jones is adamant that Christians must not “accept everything that is reported. No; the Bible tells us to exercise our critical faculties and to prove and test them.”¹⁷ When we refuse to, we can easily become caught up in fanaticism, like the example of a minister who was “marvellously used of God in the Welsh revival of 1904/1905”.¹⁸ Retelling the story, Lloyd-Jones said: “He lived in a place about four miles from the sea and one day he announced that it had been revealed to him by the Spirit that he would be enabled to walk on the sea. So he actually went down to the shore in an attempt to do so, which of course ended in nothing but complete failure. And that man, godly saint as he was, was very often depressed and unhappy. Why? Because an evil spirit had, I think, come in and tried to counterfeit and had pressed him too far; this would have been a mere spectacle, with no spiritual benefit.”¹⁹

On the other snare of mysticism, Lloyd-Jones describes what frequently takes place when subjective spiritual experience is untested – particularly as it pertained to direct impressions of leadings from the Holy Spirit. As we will see, Lloyd-Jones did not reject that the Spirit still led, impressed, and spoke to people, or that the revelatory gifts had ceased. What he rejected was such experiences without an authoritative standard against which they may be measured. He offers the following scenario: “Let us imagine I follow the mystic way. I begin to have experiences; I think God is speaking to me; how do I know it is God who is speaking to me? … How can I be sure that I am not the victim of hallucinations, since this has happened to many of the mystics? If I believe in mysticism as such without the Bible, how do I test my experiences? How do I prove the Scriptures; how do I know I am not perhaps being deluded by Satan as an angel of light in order to keep me from the true and living God?”²⁰

The key to understanding his thinking, is in the phrase “without the Bible”. In his view, it must always be the Spirit and the Word; never one at the expense of the other. Should a person begin to speak “less upon the Scriptures” while spending more time on seeking “direct messages from the Spirit, then you are entitled to have all your suspicions aroused and it is your duty to be on guard”.²¹ As far as it pertained to the verifying authority of all doctrine and experience, Lloyd-Jones left little doubt: “My only authority and final standard with regard to these matters, with regard to a knowledge of God. The evangelical doctrine tells me not to look into myself but to look into the Word of God.”²²

Quenching the Spirit, by failing to “hold fast what is good”

For Lloyd-Jones, quenching the Spirit was not limited to a failure to test all things against the benchmark of Scripture. In fact, he discerned an even more perilous tendency much closer to home within his own theological tribe. He regarded the gravest danger confronting evangelicalism in his time to be the growing acquiescence to a theologically-correct lifelessness within the wider church that he termed “dead orthodoxy”.²³ In such churches, both the lived reality of genuine spiritual experience along with the Scriptural witness that affirmed such experiences was being marginalised or dismissed outright. This condition, in the view of Lloyd-Jones, constituted not only a neglect of the Spirit’s activity in the life of believers, but a functional rejection of the Spirit’s sovereignty in the Scriptures.

“Far be it from me to attempt to defend excesses of fanaticism,” he wrote, “but I am certain that our danger today is to be so afraid of such things as to be guilty of quenching the Spirit.”²⁴ Here Lloyd-Jones was primarily directing his critique toward those within his own Reformed Evangelical constituency, who in their suspicion of experiential excess, were impoverishing themselves of Biblical realities, intended by God for His people. In doing so, they not only robbed themselves of the power of God by failing to “hold fast to what is good” (1Thess.5v21); they also quenched the Spirit.²⁵ He elaborates by explaining that to “quench” means, “to put a damper on, to fight against, to discourage. So quenching the Spirit is something, alas, about which we must all know something in experience. It means tending to argue instead of responding; it means putting up questions and queries. Quenching the Spirit may not only be done in private, but in a gathering, in a church service, in any fellowship of Christian people.”²⁶

Lloyd-Jones recognised that the experiential dimensions of the Christian faith have, throughout church history, frequently been accompanied by the risk of excess and imbalance. Yet he perceived a troubling overcorrection among fellow Reformed Evangelicals – a theological overreaction so extreme that, in seeking to avoid one doctrinal ditch, they inadvertently plunged into another. He observed that in their eagerness to distance themselves from unbridled emotionalism and charismatic excesses, many had abandoned the legitimate experiential richness affirmed in Scripture. By doing so, he says, men and women throughout the 20th century have exhibited a tendency to “pass the truth, which is somewhere there in the middle, and are again at a non-scriptural extreme … In their fear of the excesses and the riotous emotionalism that have so often been mistaken for a true work of the Spirit, there are many Christian people, it seems to me, who have been guilty of quenching the Spirit.”²⁷ His critiques here are a call for spiritual discernment and spiritual openness.

To retreat from the supernatural dimensions of Christianity out of fear or formalism or cultural discomfort, and to diminish any spiritual experience that Scripture clearly attests to as being the work of the Holy Spirit upon God’s people, is, in Lloyd-Jones’s estimation, to undermine the authority of Scripture itself and thereby quench the Spirit. Lloyd-Jones illustrates how this tendency might manifest within the context of the gathered church: “This has often happened: in a meeting … you begin to be afraid as to what is going to happen and to say, ‘If I do this what will take place?’ That is quenching the Spirit. It is resisting His general movement upon your spirit. You feel His gracious influence, and then you hesitate and are uncertain or you are frightened. That is quenching the Spirit.”²⁸

While his views on the gifts of the Spirit will be explored in depth in the next chapter, a brief mention of the hermeneutical principle that we have been considering – “Test all things, hold fast to what is good” (1 Thess.5v21) – as it pertains to them, will be helpful for establishing his unwillingness to minimise what Scripture attested to. At stake for Lloyd-Jones was the integrity of Scripture as the Word of God. In their zeal to preserve the authority of Scripture, some Evangelicals were – ironically – forfeiting significant parts of the very Scripture they purported to submit to, thus doing violence against the very Scripture which they treasured. Yet it was precisely his Evangelical underpinning on the authority of the Bible that not only kept him from rejecting outright the Charismatic Movement, but also brought forth his critiques against fellow Evangelicals. As Catherwood reminds us: “the Doctor held, as in all things, to a Biblical balance and sense of proportion. On the one hand, he felt that to say that all the gifts had ceased with the end of the apostolic era was “nonsense”. “The Scriptures never anywhere say that these things were only temporary – never!” On the other hand, “All these gifts … are under the sovereignty of the Spirit. He decides when and how and where.”²⁹

Lloyd-Jones exercised great care so as to not quench the Spirit, either by going beyond the teaching of the Scripture, nor by minimising its content, but always remaining open and sensitive to the spiritual realities of which it spoke.³⁰ His distinctive theological convictions and his deep sense of Biblical proportion were forged through his exegesis of God’s Word.

FOOTNOTES

1. Lloyd-Jones, Authority, 41.
2. Meyer, Lloyd-Jones on the Christian Life, 125.
3. Lloyd-Jones, Authority, 60.
4. Lloyd-Jones, Prove all Things, 12.
5. Lloyd-Jones, Great Doctrines of the Bible vol. 1, 40.
6. Ibid, 41-42.
7. Lloyd-Jones, Authority, 63-64.
8. Samuel, “A Man Under the Word”, in Martyn Lloyd-Jones: Chosen by God, 199-200.
9. Ibid, 200.
10. Lloyd-Jones, Prove all Things, 79.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid, 80.
13. Ibid, 81.
14. Ibid, 82.
15. Ibid 57.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid, 60.
18. Ibid, 86.
19. Ibid.
20. Lloyd-Jones, Life in Christ, 90.
21. Lloyd-Jones, Prove all Things, 76-77.
22. Lloyd-Jones, Life in Christ, 90.
23. Lloyd-Jones, Revival, 68.
24. Lloyd-Jones, Prove all Things, 66.
25. Lloyd-Jones, Great Doctrines of the Bible vol. 2, 246.
26. Ibid, 261.
27. Ibid, 245.
28. Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable, 206.
29. Lloyd-Jones, Prove all Things, 12-13.
30. Lloyd-Jones, Great Doctrines of the Bible vol. 2, 262.