New Testiment Studies

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Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Regeneration –

a summary from Out of the Depths: Psalm 51

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© Martyn Lloyd-Jones 2011 (Fearn: Christian Focus Publications).

Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Regeneration

Editor: The brief introduction and comments in colour are by Clay Lovegrove. He invites readers discussion by email. 

Let us admit it, that no man by nature likes to be told he must be born again. It is true of all of us. Our ultimate trouble is our pride, our self-satisfaction, our self-esteem and our self-confidence. The gospel comes and deals a mortal blow to that self, and we do not like it. People have never liked it and they dislike it still. It is an uncomfortable and a humiliating doctrine, and yet it is of the very essence of the Christian position. It is all put perfectly in these two verses: ‘Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts... Create in me a clean heart, O God’ (vv. 6 and 10).

Why must we be born again? That is the question. What is it that makes the rebirth an absolute necessity if we are truly to become Christian? The first answer is this — the treachery and the insincerity of our natures. David admits that in these words: ‘Behold, thou desirest truth [or sincerity] in the inward parts.’ That is the trouble. You see the steps through which David has gone? He has been examining himself, he has come to recognize his sins, the things he has done. Then he goes a step further and says, ‘There is something rotten within me, within my heart, and in a sense I can do nothing about it, because I have come to see that I cannot trust myself. I lack sincerity in the depths of my very nature and being.’ What a terrible confession for a man to make about himself! And yet it is something that every Christian must of necessity have come to see. Jeremiah put it in these words, ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked’ (Jer. 17:9). A great saint put it in a hymn in these words,

I dare not trust the sweetest frame.

Do you trust yourself? If you do, you do not know yourself. Have you not yet discovered the twists and the turns and the perversion in your own heart? Have you not come to see the insincerity that is down in the centre? We are all hypocrites, we are all playing at make-believe, we are all pretending to be something we are not. Am I romancing or am I stating the simple truth? Should we all be perfectly happy if our imaginations and secret thoughts could be flashed on a screen for everybody to look at? No, these verses are perfectly true, and in that state and condition we are utterly helpless because we are concerned with God. We can pretend with one another, we can say we are sorry in order to be forgiven and yet not really mean it in our hearts, but the other person does not know. We want to get out of a difficulty, we want to avoid the pain, so we say we are sorry. But when we are dealing with God, all that is utterly useless. ‘I am face to face with you, O God,’ says David, ‘and you desire truth and sincerity in the inward parts. I cannot get away from you.’ The Word of God, says the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, ‘is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart’, and ‘all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do’ (Heb. 4:12, 13). Ah, if you are simply concerned about getting rid of your feeling of guilt and unhappiness and nothing more, I say you are not yet in the truly Christian position. The Christian goes further than that: he realizes this fundamental need of a central sincerity. He sees himself through the eyes of God. He knows he is being read as an open book, and whatever other people may see in him and think of him, he knows that God is reading the thoughts and intents of his heart and everything about him in the very recesses of his life. He knows that his nakedness is open to the eye of Almighty God.

But further, I know that I cannot make myself sincere. I resolve to be sincere, but I find I am still playing with myself, I fool myself. I keep my ledger with my profit and loss account, and I am very successful in balancing my account. I am always on good terms with myself, I am an expert, to use the modern word, at rationalizing myself and my actions. I can explain what I do to myself, and it is all right for me to do it, though I condemn it in others. That is what I find about myself. I am not honest and sincere in the very centre of my life — but ‘thou desirest truth in the inward parts.’ And, try as I will, I am aware of this fundamental dishonesty, this insincerity down at the very centre of it all, and I cry out to God that He must do something about it. I see there the need of the rebirth. The thoughts and intents of my heart are of vital importance. I realize that there I am in a realm which I cannot control, and I fall back upon God and His omnipotence.

The second need of the rebirth I can put in this form. It is due to my ignorance and lack of wisdom. Listen again to verse 6: ‘Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.’ Oh! David knew his own heart so perfectly. You see the steps through which a man passes? First of all I have gone on heedlessly. I am then pulled up and arrested. Ah, yes, I say, I should not have done that. Then I go on to ask what made me do it and then I ask, How can it be put right? I am so insincere, I can do nothing. What can I do, then? I do not know what to do, I am helpless, I admit it. What do I need? ‘Well,’ said David, ‘what I need above everything else is wisdom, I need light and illumination. I confess quite frankly that as I try to handle my own case I come up against this blank wall. I cannot get right. I need some light from the outside.’ Every Christian knows what I am talking about. You come to that desperate point at which you say, ‘Well, what can I do? I cannot trust my own thoughts and ideas. I must have something outside myself. I need light to be thrown upon myself.’ That is what these verses mean. David is crying out for wisdom in the hidden part. In other words, no man is truly a Christian until he realizes that human knowledge and wisdom and understanding are not enough; until he has come to see with Pascal, one of the greatest philosophers of all time, that the supreme achievement of reason is to bring a man to see the limits of reason and to make him cry out for revelation. I need wisdom. I need light. I need light upon my own heart. I am a very bad physician of myself because I know that I am not honest with myself. I do not face things squarely, I always want to defend myself, so I cannot treat myself. I need light on myself from the outside. I need more wisdom with respect to my true condition. I need light about holiness, how to live a holy life. I need light on God, I need the wisdom that I cannot provide for myself. I search but I cannot find it. I read biographies of the great men of the world who have not been Christian, and I know that they have failed in life. They could not find happiness; I cannot find it. What can I do? I must ask God for it. Have you cried out for wisdom, have you sought for knowledge? If you have got to that point, then you are on the high road to salvation. Have you reached the stage of saying, ‘I cannot think any more, I have thought until I cannot think any longer. What can I do? O God, cast light upon my condition!’? If you offer that prayer you will get the light. The man who cries out for this revelation and divine illumination never does so in vain. I need wisdom in the hidden part; I believe God can supply it.

But then, you see, David goes on to the next step. He realizes now, as the result of this wisdom that God has given him, that he needs a clean heart, that he needs a new nature. I need not keep you with this. There is a passage in the seventh chapter of the Gospel according to Mark that really puts the whole thing perfectly (Mark 7:14-23). ‘Look,’ said our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in effect to those people, ‘Do not blame your circumstances and conditions and surroundings for what you are. It is not that which goes in that defiles a man, it is that which comes out. You are paying attention to the washing of hands and the washing of the platters, and things like that; you are blaming your difficult position, the things that are around and about you. You say, “I am in this filthy world and it takes me all my time to try to keep myself clean.” No,’ said Christ, ‘that is not the trouble; the trouble is in your own heart. It is not that which enters in which defiles the man, it is that which comes out; it is out of the heart that come evil thoughts, murders, fornications, adulteries and all the evil things that he lusts after.’ Now we all know that that in some shape or form is true of every one of us. The trouble is in us. You see how David came to that conclusion at long last; he has faced himself and he says, ‘I am a murderer, I am an adulterer, I am rotten, I have been responsible for the death of innocent people — ah, the terrible question that confronts me is this, What made me do it? Was it Bathsheba or the other people? No, it is something foul and cankerous in me, in my heart, that made me lust. It is not what I see that is the trouble. It is this within me that makes me interpret things as I do. It is I myself— “Create in me a clean heart, O God.”’ Have you come to that position about yourself? Have you come to see that all your problems and difficulties arise from that central cause? That, I say, is something that happens to every true Christian. Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.’ The trouble with man is not that he does certain things that he should not do; it is that he ever has a heart to do them. It is this thing within us that makes us desire; though our conscience tells us that we should not do these things, yet we do them. That is the curse, this thing in the heart. We need a clean heart.

But David goes further: he realizes he can never produce it. He knows perfectly well that all the resolutions in the world can never change the heart. They can only control a man’s actions up to a point. There is a value in the idea of New Year resolutions; as far as they go, they may make you a better man. You can control your actions up to a point, but when you try to cleanse the heart, I assure you that the more you try, the blacker you will find it becomes. Read the lives of the saints and find how those wonderful men who tried to cleanse this foul heart always discovered increasing foulness, and at the end found it to be utterly hopeless. That was why David cried out with this great word, ‘Create in me’ — God alone can give me a clean heart, God alone can give me a new nature. ‘My only hope’, said David, ‘is that He who created the world out of nothing and made man out of the dust of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life, will create within me a clean heart and give me a new nature.’ That is the cry of the Old Testament. David had seen it in its essence, he had seen that that was his fundamental need. And the fundamental need of every man is an operation of God in the centre of life. O, do you know, my friend, that that is the very essence of the New Testament gospel and its wonderful message? Why did the Lord Jesus Christ come into this world? Why did He live, and die that death upon the cross and rise again? What is it all for? Was it that you and I might be forgiven and go on sinning, and then come back, and having lived somehow from sin to repentance and repentance to sin, just slink into heaven and avoid the punishment of hell and its terrible consequences? That is a blasphemous thought! He did it all, as Paul says in writing to Titus, ‘that he might... purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works’ (Titus 2:14). No, the glorious message of the gospel is not only that I am forgiven. Thank God, I am forgiven; the first statement is that my sins are blotted out like a thick cloud — God forgives me. But I am not satisfied with that. I do not want to go on sinning. I want to tackle this central problem. I want to live a life that is worthy. I want to get rid of this thing within me that makes me sin and makes me lust to sin. And this is the answer of the gospel — this wondrous doctrine of the rebirth and the new creation, being born again, becoming a partaker of the divine nature. The Son of God came down to earth and took upon Him human nature in order that He might start a new humanity, a new race of people to form a new kingdom. And what He does is this: to those who come to Him and realize they need a clean nature within themselves He gives His own nature. ‘If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new’ (2 Cor. 5:17). I should be very unhappy for anybody to think that the gospel tells men, ‘Yes, God is love, and because God is love He has forgiven you in Jesus Christ. Very well, because of that, turn over a new leaf and start living a new life.’ That would be to me a negation of the gospel. No, the gospel does not just forgive you and urge you to go back and live a better life. It gives a new life. It offers to make us sons of God, it offers to make us partakers of the divine nature. Its message is that God comes to dwell in us. As Paul puts it, ‘I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me’ (Gal. 2:20). You are not left to yourself, you are not sent back to the hopeless task of trying to improve yourself. God gives you a new life, a new start, a new beginning. You become a new man, you will find yourself in a new world with a new power and a new hope.

‘Create in me a clean heart, O God.’ Any man, I say, who offers that prayer with sincerity will always be answered. ‘Ye must be born again,’ said Jesus Christ; and a man who realizes that and who submits himself to Christ is born again. He has new life, the life of God in him; the centre of the trouble is cleansed by God, and he finds within himself a new outlook, a new power, a new hope, a new man.

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