Martyn Lloyd-Mondays

Everybody picks a day of the week to have a theme. My favorite author/preacher is D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones so I'm going to have Martyn Lloyd-Mondays. The following is taken from his third volume, "The Unsearchable Riches of Christ," of his eight volume Ephesians set. The reason I pick this quote, which may seem outdated, is that it is quite applicable today in light of the logical positivism that so many people hold to.

One of the surest signs of a Christian understanding is that we see through the utter folly of Victorianism and Edwardianism, with their utterly false optimism. They believed that the world was advancing and developing and progressing quite inevitably. With Tennyson they sang about the coming of 'the Parliament of man' and 'the Federation of the world'. The twentieth century was expected to be marvellous, all as the result of secular knowledge, especially scientific, and education and culture. As regards the Bible they would hold on to the ethical, moral teaching of our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount. But, of course, they were too clever, they were too scientific, to believe in miracles or the supernatural. As long as we taught everyone the 'ethics of Jesus' all men would embrace and love one another and there would never be another war. We do not hear so much about that now, and of course it is not surprising. After having experienced the horrors of two World Wars, and in the light of what is happening in the world at the present time, there is little evidence to suggest that we have arrived at the golden era in which men, having achieved sanity as the result of education, turn their swords into ploughshares. The evidence points to an almost opposite conclusion. The foolish vapid optimism of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, which lingered on to 1914, and which some tried to revive even after 1918, presents rather a pathetic aspect today.

If you change a few words, dates, and names, this is something that is precisely accurate to today. Like a sniper preacher, shooting from 50 years ago, the doctor is right on target even today.