No Other Foundation Can Be Laid: Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones on What Makes the Church a Church
In June and July of 1956, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones spent several consecutive Sunday mornings at Westminster Chapel on three verses. Ephesians 2:20 to 22 contains the last of Paul's three pictures of the church: not a kingdom, not a household, but a building, a temple in which God takes up residence. Three sermons from that stretch press a question the contemporary church tends to answer by changing the subject. What actually makes a church a church?
No Other Foundation Can Be Laid
Paul writes that believers are "built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone" (Ephesians 2:20, KJV). Dr. Lloyd-Jones takes the architectural language at full weight. You cannot discuss a building without knowing what it rests on.
The foundation, he argues in "The Only Foundation ," is not the apostles as personalities. It is the apostles as teachers: their doctrine. Man dead in trespasses and sins, under the wrath of God. The deity of Christ. The substitutionary atonement. Regeneration by the Spirit. That body of teaching is the foundation, and a foundation cannot be repeated, extended, or trimmed. Quoting Paul to the Corinthians, he insists that "other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid" (1 Corinthians 3:11, KJV).
He is preaching into the ecumenical mood of the mid-1950s, in which unity had become the first thing rather than the result of something prior. A unity you construct, he replies, is not unity at all.
"It is the truth that brings us to God. It is by the truth we are sanctified."
―Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, "The Only Foundation"
It Is by the Truth We Are Sanctified
That sentence does two things at once, and the second is easily missed. Truth is not merely the door into the Christian life. It is the instrument by which a person is then made holy. Sanctification is not a mood or a season of unusual feeling. It is what happens as the truth concerning God, ourselves, and grace does its slow work.
He will not permit the question to remain vague. It is not enough to call oneself a Christian and treat definitions as divisive. Doctrine is not the ornament on the Christian life. It is the load-bearing structure.
What Happens Before Anyone Enters the Church
In "The Growth of the Church ," Dr. Lloyd-Jones turns to an unexpected text: 1 Kings 6:7. Solomon's temple was built of stone "made ready before it was brought thither, so that there was neither hammer nor axe, nor any tool of iron heard in the house while it was in building" (KJV).
The shaping happened elsewhere, out of sight. He reads this as doctrine. The preparation of a Christian is the secret work of the Holy Spirit in the depths of the soul, and the world sees none of it. A man may live in the same house and know nothing about it. Sometimes the person himself does not yet know. He only knows he has become dissatisfied with his own life and cannot account for it.
"To become a Christian means that we are subjected to a power and to a force that is beyond our understanding."
―Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
He guards the statement immediately. This does not make Christianity irrational. It makes it supra-rational: once inside, nothing is more coherent; from outside, nothing looks stranger.
Why the Church Grows Without Getting Bigger
From that premise follows the most uncomfortable claim in the series. "The greatest trouble with the church today is that she's too big." A church whose membership is a mixed multitude, some regenerate and some merely resident, is not a strong church with problems. It is a compromised temple.
God is not interested in numbers, Dr. Lloyd-Jones argues, but in purity, in a vessel fit for the Master's use. He points to the Gospels, where Christ often appears to spend His time refusing people rather than recruiting them. He left the world with a handful of untutored men.
Note Paul's verb. The building "groweth" into a holy temple. Growth here is organic and upward from the foundation, not additive. A congregation can enlarge for years without growing at all.
Why Revival Never Comes Through Activity
The third sermon, "Parts of the Whole ," asks what each stone is for. Dr. Lloyd-Jones is severe about the answer his own century had settled on: give the new convert something to do. He calls this putting doing before being, and follows it to its logical end: a woman proposing to move her dying father into a home so that she would be free to keep her speaking engagements. Activity had displaced the plainest duty in front of her.
He then turns to Matthew 7 and Matthew 25. In both, the people Christ turns away are the ones reciting their accomplishments, and the people He blesses cannot recall having done anything at all. “When did we do that?”, they say.
"The people he blesses are the people who feel they've done nothing. The people he dismisses are the people who thought they'd done everything."
―Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, "Parts of the Whole"
The remedy is therefore not a better program. The greatest need of the hour, he says, is a mighty spiritual awakening in the whole church, and it comes through prayer and humbling rather than increased human effort.
The Question the Foundation Puts to You
All three end in the same place, with a question aimed at the listener rather than the institution. Do you know what you believe about the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you know Him? The foundation was laid once. The only question is whether you stand on it.