By Dylan Budd, TGC. (Photo: British Library/Unsplash)
“I was never worried for a second about a man like Hitler.”
This isn’t the statement of a madman or of someone privileged enough to be removed from the horrors of the war. These are the words of a pastor who was under immediate threat from the Nazi leader and who’d put on the full armor of God and prepared for battle.
Adolf Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939; the very next day, Martyn Lloyd-Jones was installed as an associate pastor at Westminster Chapel in London, where he would faithfully preach for the next 30 years.
One year after the preacher took the pulpit, Hitler began his bombing campaign over London. Of the roughly 700 churches in the area, 624 were damaged by the bombings and 91 were totally destroyed. To the surprise of many, Westminster Chapel, one of London’s largest churches at the time, wasn’t destroyed in the bombing blitz.
Iain Murray, in his classic biography on Lloyd-Jones, writes about one Sunday morning when a bomb hit close to the Chapel right in the middle of Lloyd-Jones’s Lord’s Day prayer. The bomb shook the entire building, and plaster and dust fell down on the congregation, including on “the Doctor,” as Lloyd-Jones was known. After a pause, Lloyd-Jones simply continued his prayer and the service went forward unimpeded.
Lloyd-Jones offers a needed corrective to our politically anxious times.
Some Christians resort to despair, while others attempt revolution. What we need is a political theology that still preaches Christ when the bombs go off. Here are three lessons we can learn from Lloyd-Jones’s ministry in a time of political crisis.
Refuse Saul’s Armour
When it became apparent that England was entering the war, Lloyd-Jones sent his wife and their two children back to Wales and away from the city, not knowing what would become of it. In a brief and urgent correspondence to his wife, he writes, “Leave yourself and me too, and everything in God’s hand and you will find peace and rest.” With bombs flying overhead, many in the church were calling for a revolution, but Lloyd-Jones was calling for prayer.