I was a fourteen-year-old boy. I had received a terrible school report which I had hidden from my parents. Even though I had been a Christian for three years my Christian life was a disappointment. Church was boring. I read the Bible every day, a chapter a day, but if you asked me what I had read I would have had no idea. I was grateful for the little piece of ribbon that reminded me of my place.
I had never read a book before in my life, apart from my strange routine of reading the Bible, but I was in a church where the most interesting people loved to read. So, at the age of 14, I was prompted to buy a book. I went to the market and saw an author everyone was talking about. He had died the previous year and there were lots of his books. My favourite colour at the time was blue so I bought the blue one. Little did I know at the time, my life would never be the same again. It was a book by Martyn Lloyd-Jones on Ephesians 2. I guess I have read thousands of books since but nothing influenced my life like this.
I hid the book and would read it on my own. I was incredibly slow to start, taking 50 minutes to read a chapter. It was so negative at the beginning but so fascinating. The world I lived in, the person I was, was being explained from the Bible and it was all so bleak and so true. Then the chapter ‘But God’. Only two words but it would be difficult to express how powerful they were to a teenage boy. I am a sinner, the world is under God’s wrath: ‘But God’. Now I was gripped. I couldn’t put the book down and I didn’t care who knew I was reading it. I became obsessed. This is what the Bible is about – Jesus, God, me, the world around me, Satan, hope, life, good works.
I started to read faster. We went on holiday to France and I was cramped in the back of the car with a brother, sister and a little brother, and I read. I simply couldn’t put it down. As we worked through Ephesians 2 God was speaking, each verse was incredible. I thought it couldn’t be any greater but it turned out that each verse was a step to the next verse until the extraordinary climax as Lloyd-Jones sees it in verse 18.
The impact of these sermons was way beyond any description I could write. ‘Lost in wonder love and praise’ is a pretty poor description of what I knew and what I felt.
At the end, I remember sitting on a deck chair and thinking that every chapter of the Bible must have as much joy, wonder and glory as this chapter for that’s what Martyn Lloyd-Jones seemed to be saying. I knew I must find it all. I saw how small Ephesians chapter 2 was in the Bible and thought what an adventure this will be. If only I could find it, if only others would see it. I sold my snooker table and bought Matthew Henry’s commentary (what a buy that was!), but nothing compared to Lloyd-Jones God’s way of reconciliation. Some books are interesting, helpful and thought provoking. Even now, I look back and see how much this book influenced my thinking on sin, hell, the world, the gospel, the Old Testament, the Trinity and the blood of Christ, and also led me to read other older books by great men.