D Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years 1899-1939

Volume 1 of the Authorised Biography

When Martyn Lloyd-Jones, physician, preacher and Christian leader, died in 1981 after more than 40 years in London, few knew the remarkable story of his formative years. Now that story is narrated for the first time. From his rural Welsh background to St Bartholomew's Hospital (where at the age of 23 he was Chief Clinical Assistant to Sir Thomas Horder, the King's Physician) then to a struggling Calvinistic Methodist Mission Church in Aberavon, South Wales. He appears successively as schoolboy, dairyman's assistant, political enthusiast, debater, doctor, and finally Christian preacher.

Some regarded his change of career as romantic, others as foolish. The one thing of which Dr Lloyd-Jones was sure was that his settlement amid the industrial depression of South Wales was no sacrifice: ‘I gave up nothing, I received everything. I count it the highest honour God can confer on any man to call him to be a herald of the gospel’.

This volume traces the unforgettable events of his first pastorate and his wider ministry in Wales where, by 1933, the press reported: ‘he draws thousands to hear his message in all parts of the Principality’. Then there were his first visits to North America, and finally his settlement at Westminster Chapel, London, on the eve of World War II. While some saw him as ‘the modern Moody’, and others as ‘the last of the Calvinistic preachers', Iain H. Murray's work makes constant use of hitherto unpublished material, and is able to present Dr Lloyd-Jones’ own view of his life and ministry.