March 19 Daily Devotional

Behold the servant of the Lord

The Christian is a man who of necessity must be concerned about keeping God's law.... We are not "under the law," but we are still meant to keep it; the "righteousness of the law" is meant to be "fulfilled in us," says the Apostle Paul in writing to the Romans.... So the Christian is a man who is always concerned about living and keeping the law of God. Here he is reminded how that is to be done.

Again one of the most essential and obvious things about a Christian is that he is a man who lives always realizing he is in the presence of God. The world does not live in this way; that is the big difference between the Christian and the non-Christian.

The Christian is ... not, as it were, a free agent. He is a child of God so that everything he does, he does from this standpoint of being well-pleasing in His sight. That is why the Christian man, of necessity, should view everything that happens to him in this world entirely differently from everybody else....

The Christian is not worried about food and drink and housing and clothing. It is not that he says these things do not matter, but they are not his main concern; they are not the things for which he lives. The Christian sits loosely to this world and its affairs. Why? Because he belongs to another kingdom and another way. He does not go out of the world; that was the Roman Catholic error of monasticism.

The Sermon on the Mount does not tell you to go out of life in order to live the Christian life. But it does say that your attitude is entirely different from that of a non-Christian because of your relationship to God and because of your utter dependence upon Him.

Studies in the Sermon on the Mount, i, pp. 26-7

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“Text reproduced from ‘A First Book of Daily Readings’ by Martyn Lloyd-Jones, published by Epworth Press 1970 & 1977 © Trustees for Methodist Church Purposes. Used with permission.”

Comments on D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, A First Book of Daily Readings

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