The Life of Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Iain Murray)

The Life of Martyn Lloyd-Jones

The life of Dr. Lloyd-Jones has been the subject of comment and assessment in many publications and these have been taken into account. The main purpose of this further biography, however, is to put Dr Lloyd-Jones’ life before another generation in more accessible form. The big story is all here.

When Lloyd-Jones left medicine, he intended only to be an evangelist in a mission hall in South Wales. No one was more surprised than he in being called to a ministry which would eventually affect churches across the world.

How this happened is here explained, but the theme is the person described by F. F. Bruce: “A thoroughly humble man. He was a man of prayer, a powerful evangelist, an expository preacher of rare quality, in the fullest sense a servant of the Word of God.”

Behind that theme a greater one emerges. In Lloyd-Jones’s own words: “My whole life experiences are proof of the sovereignty of God and his direct interference in the lives of men. I cannot help believing what I believe. I would be a madman to believe anything else – the guiding hand of God! It is an astonishment to me.”

Contents

1. “A Welshman Now!”
2. School days: Tregaron and London
3. The World of Medicine
4. “All Things Made New”
5. The Call to the Minstry
6. Bethan and Aberavon
7. A Different Preaching
8. Early Days at Sandfields
9. A Leader without a Party
10. A Local Revival
11. The Church Family
12. Enlarged Work
13. Leaving Aberavon
14. England and War
15. Inside the Family
16. The Emerging Leader
17. New Agencies
18. Westminster Chapel, 1943-45
19. Guidance Confirmed
20. Wales and the Summer of 1949
21. A Rising Tide of Youth
22. Sundays in the 1950s
23. Opposition
24. An Awakening of Books
25. Unity: Ecumenical or Evangelical?
26. Crisis Years
27. Controversy
28. The End of an Era
29. A World Pulpit
30. The 1970s
31. “Dying … He Worshipped”

About the Author

Iain Hamish Murray, born in Lancashire, England, in 1931, was educated at Wallasey Grammar School and King William’s College in the Isle of Man (1945-49). He was converted in 1949 through the ministry at Hildenborough Hall, Tom and Jean Rees’ Christian conference centre in Kent. It was at Hildenborough later that same year that he first met Jean Ann Walters, who was to become his wife (they married in Edgeware on April 23, 1955).

After service with the Cameronians in Singapore and Malaya, he read Philosophy and History at the University of Durham with a view to the ministry of the English Presbyterian Church (his parents’ denomination). It was at Durham that he began to read the Puritans, whose writings were to become a lifelong passion. After a year of private study, he assisted Sidney Norton at St John’s Free Church, Oxford, in 1955–56, and it was here that The Banner of Truth magazine was launched, with Murray as its first editor.

From 1956 he was for three years assistant to Dr Lloyd-Jones at Westminster Chapel and there, with the late Jack Cullum, founded the Banner of Truth Trust in 1957. He left Westminster in 1961 for a nine-year pastorate at Grove Chapel, Camberwell. With the world-wide expansion of the Trust, Iain Murray became engaged full-time in its ministry from 1969 until 1981 when he responded to a call from St Giles Presbyterian Church, Sydney, Australia. Now based again in the UK, he and Jean live in Edinburgh. He has written many titles published by the Trust, in whose work he remains active. He is still writing.

The Life of Martyn Lloyd-Jones