“Yes, but you will never know any joy until you know Christ. He is the source of joy; He is the fount of all blessings; everything comes through Him.”1
“The trouble with man is not in his intellect, it is in his nature–the passions and the lusts…and though you try to educate and control man it will avail nothing as long as his nature is sinful and fallen and he is a creature of passion and dishonor.”
“According to Scripture, the trouble with man by nature is not that he is incomplete but that he is dead.”
“I am profoundly grateful to God that He did not grant me certain things for which I asked, and that He shut certain doors in my face.”
“To love to preach is one thing, to love those to whom we preach quite another.”
“There are people who have an almost perfect knowledge of the letter of the Scripture but have never known the message of the Scripture.”
“If my preaching of this cross is not an offense to the natural man, I am misrepresenting it.”
“If only we knew something of the glory and the wonder of this new life of righteousness, we should desire nothing else.”
“A man who is truly Christian, as we have already seen, never objects to being humbled.”
“Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”
“There is nothing more important in the Christian life than the way in which we approach the Bible, and the way in which we read it.”
“Holiness is not something we are called upon to do in order that we may become something; it is something we are to do because of what we already are.”
“Philosophy has always been the cause of the church going astray, for philosophy means, ultimately, a trusting to human reason and human understanding. The philosopher wants to encompass all truth; he wants to categorize and explain everything, and that is why…(philosophy is) diametrically opposed to the preaching of the gospel.”
“The ultimate test of our spirituality is the measure of our amazement at the grace of God.”
“The gospel is open to all; the most respectable sinner has no more claim on it than the worst.”
“You are always on duty in the Christian life, you can never relax. There is no such thing as a holiday in the spiritual realm.”
“Man is at his greatest and highest when upon his knees he comes face to face with God.”
1 All of these quotes are from the websites below:
Inspirational Quotes by Martyn-Lloyd Jones
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones Quotes (Author of Spiritual Depression)
The Apologist commentary: Grace is God’s priority Work.
Mr. Blattman’s “Martyn Lloyd-Jones Quotes that Inspire – Part III” gathers a set of Lloyd-Jones bullets that orbit one main reality: grace is God’s work from top to bottom, and we bring nothing but our need.
Key threads in his selection:
Christ is the only source of joy and blessing.
Humanity is not “a bit broken” but spiritually dead.
Grace exposes our pride.
Grace levels the playing field (Gospel is open to all)
Grace produces holiness and vigilance.
Grace reorients our posture before God. (on our knees)
So Curt’s commentary presents Lloyd-Jones as a surgeon of the soul, exposing our deadness, exalting the sheer wonder of grace, and insisting that everything in the Christian life flows from what God has already done in Christ.
There is a brutal simplicity in Lloyd-Jones: you are not a “work in progress” that God just needs to polish; you are, by nature, dead. And dead people don’t ask for help, don’t reach for God, don’t “improve themselves.” If anything good happens, it starts with God walking into the graveyard and calling your name.
That’s why grace must come first, last, and everywhere in between.
A man named Neveu put it plainly back in 2011 to a rescue-mission crowd: when you finally hit your last dollar, your last day, and the weight of all those wrong choices, you discover you cannot carry your own life.
All you have left is the possibility that God might intervene. “When all you have is grace…God’s grace sustains us.”
That’s not sentiment. That’s triage.
1. Grace is not God helping you; grace is God resurrecting you.
Lloyd-Jones says man is not incomplete, but dead. Curt’s quotes land the punch: education cannot fix a sinful nature, philosophy cannot reason its way into life, and “the most respectable sinner has no more claim on the gospel than the worst.”
If salvation is by grace alone, then God is not a life coach. He is the One who walks into the wreckage you built, pays the full bill at the Cross, and hands you a new heart you did not earn.
The “priority of God’s work” means exactly this: God moves while you are still dead, still blind, still hostile. Anything after that is response, not contribution.
2. Grace is sufficient in the thorn, not instead of it.
Neveu didn’t flinch from Paul’s thorn. He reminded the relief mission room that Paul begged for relief and God said no. Not because God was cruel, but because He was teaching Paul something
… more valuable than comfort.
“My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.”
God is not nearly as impressed with our comfort as we are. Romans 5: suffering → perseverance → character → hope; and that hope does not disappoint, because God has poured out His love into our hearts. Grace is not the removal of every thorn. The presence of Christ in the wound and the power to keep going when the flesh is screaming to quit, is what we have.
when all you have is grace…
Lloyd-Jones would nod here, maybe, slightly. Real spirituality is seen in how amazed we are at grace, not how quickly God removes every irritation. The humbler you are, the more you see grace everywhere; the prouder you are, the more grace may seem like an insult.
3. Grace must be converted into action or it is being wasted.
Four movements of a life soaked in grace:
Faith: relationship with Christ.
Family: those closest to us.
Ministry: our service to others.
Worldview: how we walk through this broken world as Christians.
Apostle Paul, ex-murderer, meets grace on the Damascus road and his first two questions are: “Who are You, Lord?” and “Lord, what shall I do?” That is grace doing what it always does: revealing Christ, then demanding obedience.
Grace that never touches your schedule, your relationships, your habits, your service, your suffering, is not grace embraced.
It is grace admired from a distance. The Cross is an offense precisely because it says: you bring nothing; Christ brings everything; now follow Him.
4. When all you have is grace, live like it.
Neveu told a relief mission room of tired, hungry, angry, half-broken people: “Grace is the best gift Christians can share because it is the best gift we have ever received.”
And then he raised the uncomfortable question:
Do others actually see God’s grace working through you?
Lloyd-Jones would not soften that. He would press it:
If Christ is the fount of all blessing, then seeking joy apart from Him is spiritual insanity.
If grace is God’s free gift to the dead, then pride is not a quirk, it is treason.
If the gospel puts the “respectable” and the “worst” on the same level, then there is no room left for religious swagger.
So when all you have is grace, stop treating it like an accessory to your life and start treating it like your only oxygen.
Trust the Lord with all your heart. Guard your heart with all diligence. Live as if your life depends on grace, because by the word of God, it does.
“Grace does not polish the old life. It resurrects a dead one and then commands it to walk.”