June 24 Daily Devotional

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It is not the time of your entry into the Kingdom that matters but the fact that you are in the Kingdom. ... How foolish it is to mourn the fact that we were not in earlier, and to allow that to rob us of the things we might be enjoying now. It is like a man going to a great exhibition and discovering that there is a long queue. He has come rather late. He arrives at the exhibition but he has to wait a long time, he is about the last to get in. What would you think of such a man if, having got in through the door he simply stands at the door and says, "What a shame I wasn't the first to get in, what a pity I wasn't in earlier" ? You laugh at that, and rightly so, but... you are probably laughing at yourself, for that is precisely what you are doing spiritually. "O that I have left it so late." My friend, begin to enjoy the pictures, look at the sculpture, enjoy the treasures. What does the time of your entering matter?

The fact is that you are in, and the exhibition is there, all spread out before you.... Go back to the twentieth of Matthew again. Those men were the last to enter the vineyard, it was the eleventh hour, but they were in. That was the thing that counted. They had been taken hold of, they had been employed, they had been brought in. It is the being in that matters, not when you come in, or how you come in. ... It is not the mode or manner of conversion that matters, what matters is the fact that you are saved. But people will sit down and worry about how they came, the time, the mode, the manner, the method. It does not matter at all; what matters is that you are in. And if you are in, rejoice in it, and forget you were ever out.

Spiritual Depression, pp. 86-7

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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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