For Lloyd-Jones, God’s way of
salvation is open to all men everywhere.
There is not one man, woman or child anywhere who needs to remain under
the wrath of God. And “since all have
sinned and come short of the glory of God,”[1]
all need to be delivered from the consequences of that sin. And the good news is that God in his great
mercy has provided the way for lost guilty sinners to be saved from that
judgement.
Let me mention some other
things that Lloyd-Jones has said about that this is his evangelistic sermons,
and come from his Authentic
Christianity, volume three, 2003.[2] In these sermons, he speaks about the Jews’
rejection of Christ and “all that he had come to do for the human race.” In the next paragraph, he speaks of “the
great tragedy of the human race.” He
uses phrases such as, “God’s way of saving the human race.” “The Son of Man came to that which was lost,”
the entire human race. The entire human
race is lost, which very thing the Son of Man came to do – that was his design
in coming into the world and dying for it.
He spoke of “God acting for the salvation of humanity,” and in the next
paragraph, he quotes Jn.3:16. The Doctor
obviously equates “the world” with “the human race” and “humanity,” and in his
Philippians’ sermons, he equates it with “mankind.” So there is a basis there for preaching
evangelistically that acknowledges that God is sovereign in salvation, but it
also takes with equal seriousness the awful plight that the human race is in
because of sin. The Gospel preacher,
then, can say to anyone, indeed, to everyone, that atonement has been made for
you in the death of Christ, he has died to save you on condition that you
repent of your sin, and trust the only Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. We can say that to people. If you come penitently and believingly to
Christ, he will receive you, he will save you, he will make you his very
own. And when you come believing that he
has paid the price for your ransom,[3]
then when you stand back and examine that, there is no reason for you not to
come. There is every reason in the world
why you should come to him, because everything has been done that needs to be
done for you to come and be accepted by the God who is demonstrating his love
for you in the fact that Christ did come and die, and in the fact you are
hearing this kind of message from a human being’s lips.
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