The sermon discusses the life of Bethan Lloyd-Jones, wife of D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, and her impact as a woman who lived for Christ. It explores her commitment to the mission of the Great Commission, her struggles with anxiety, her journey of salvation, and her unwavering support for her husband in the face of trials and opposition. The sermon highlights her reliance on God and the legacy she left behind.

Well, we're going to go back to the island of England, and we're going to be spending some time with Bethan Lloyd-Jones, who is the wife of D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, who you might have heard of and perhaps even read his biography. You might say, well, we've been dealing a lot with women that have lived 400, in some cases 500, years ago. And now we're fast forwarding really to the late 1800s. She was born in 1898 and died in 1991.

So some of you young ladies might have been born in the same century that she died in. And so we're looking at her, but one of the catchphrases or slogans of the Reformation was the Latin phrase semper reformanda, always reforming. In other words, the reformation is never entirely done because there's always areas of obedience and areas that we want to continue to draw closer to God. And so we're gonna be taking a look at this woman, this mother, this wife named Bethan. And it's very common oftentimes that wives of well-known men, faithful preachers and missionaries, a lot of times they're often overlooked.

I hadn't known all that much about Bethan before actually reading her recent biography. And the beauty of these wives though, what you find is the beauty of these wives is they wouldn't have it any other way. They're not somehow resentful that their husbands were seen in a particular way and then themselves were were not seen you might say the same with susanna spurgeon who you know is married to charles spurgeon and if you look at in terms of well-known preachers for example charles spurgeon might have been the best most faithful well-known preacher of the nineteenth century I would argue that martin loy jones was probably most powerful preacher of the twentieth century and yet his wife oftentimes was in the background, and yet she was beside him all the way. The title of this brief biography or brief sketches is really a woman for all seasons, and we'll see why that is the case. But she bore fruit through her whole life, through various places, circumstances and stages, and her secret, if you want to know the secret not only of Bethan, but if you want to know the secret of any of these women that we're looking at, it's what her husband said is this, a life spent in communion with God.

Isn't that beautiful? She knew the Lord, she had communion with Him. One of the most beautiful things, things that will carry you all the way. And so what makes her worthy of examination is that she subordinated many of her plans, her ambitions, her comforts for the mission of the Great Commission. And she actively pursued God and the good of his church.

So a wonderful example we're going to take a look at. But really I think it's good to look at her because we don't have to go back hundreds of years to find godly examples. But you can look back and maybe even around you to see women who are exemplifying what it means to live for Christ. And so, as I said, she was born in 1898. She was born in London.

And she was born to very loving, wonderful parents, so the opposite of Lady Jane Grey. But her parents were wealthy. They were very, very wealthy. She had servants, you know, they had kitchen staff. They even had a tennis court.

Later on when she meets Martin Lloyd-Jones, before they get married, she whipped him in tennis numerous times, and so that might explain his kind of distaste for tennis later on. But she was quite athletic as you can imagine. And so she could have become a socialite. And what I mean by that is she could have just become kind of one of these women to talk of the town, you know, furthering away her time, you know, going to balls and collecting baubles and building up a name for herself. And that might have been a pursuit she might have taken.

They went to a church in London. It was a church that preached in Welsh. So she was of Welsh descent. Welsh or Wales is on the same island as England. So you've got England, you've got Scotland up in the north, and a little bit to the west is the country of Wales.

It's a very, very small country. And so they belong to a church called Charing Cross Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church. That's quite a mouthful, right? That was a long name. And so they preached in Welsh.

And in 1904, at the age of about six, she and her eight-year-old brother, they make their way over to Wales because in Wales at that time they were having revivals, true revivals. People were actually being saved like in the 1800s and 1700s. It was really a time of excitement. But she came back from that and as she got older she began to pursue a medical career and so she actually became a medical doctor and so all of a sudden you see this woman who's at really almost an aristocratic level and all these opportunities are opening up to her in terms of a career she could have pursued socially she actually received if you can believe this if you can believe this 27 marriage proposals can you imagine that man after men and the first one was Martin Lloyd Jones and the last one was Martin Lloyd-Jones. So a lot of activity going on there.

But one of the things about this woman, she was beautiful, she had all these things that are beck and call, but even after she became a Christian and all throughout her life She suffered with anxiety. She was a nervous kind of person that would, you know, just always be worried and have different, her imagination would run off on her at times. You know, they came to the United States one time and she was staying in a hotel or a motel and in the middle of the night there was noise outside. Well, she thought they were being surrounded by red Indians. She thought, you know, this is just kind of this frantic, maybe she had watched too much Western, I don't know what it is, but her husband ended up being able to calm her down and so on.

But it was just kind of, her imagination would run, And you can imagine in every area of life, it would be her default to worry and to be anxious about different things. Well, she ended up getting married, as we know, to Martin Lloyd-Jones, but it's interesting how they met. They really came from two different worlds. She had this very kind of high class level, and his family was involved in a dairy business in London. And very stratified society in that time, where you wouldn't necessarily cross except in one place, and that was in the church.

And so they actually ended up going to the same church and she met Martin at the age of, he was 15 in 1914. And so they met when his family started coming to the church. And so the next nine years, their paths would cross primarily at this church. And it wasn't love at first sight. One of the things she didn't like about Martin was that he was a year and a half younger than her.

So that was one thing. And then also, anytime they did communicate, they would be constantly arguing. There would be arguments because she was quite opinionated, had a strong will, and so they didn't just hit it off at the first time. But later on she heard a rumor that Martin had proposed to someone else and it wasn't true. But all of a sudden she realized I she was disappointed.

She actually cared for For Martin she she she wanted to be with him And so it was a rumor it was false and he ended up coming back and proposing and so In 1927 they were both married and they had a wonderful marriage. The biographer says after that really the only thing they argued about was who loved who more. And so that was their theme. But he was a doctor and so you see Martin Lloyd-Jones as a doctor and he wasn't just a doctor but he was basically a royal doctor he was really climbing up the ladder in terms of a medical career like no one else but something happened God arrested him and he received a call to the ministry and his whole passion was to preach Christ and when people would look at him and say you're gonna give up a career in the medical field to go and be a pastor somewhere are you crazy? Other people would marvel and say you are?

Amazing that you would do this. He says I gave up nothing That's how he saw it he saw being called of God to serve God and to preach the message of the gospel is the greatest and highest calling and so as They receive this calling what happens is he's gonna not just stay where he is, but he's gonna abandon his medical career, and they end up deciding they're gonna move across the country to Wales. So they're leaving London, the bustling town and city, massive city of London, with a wife that's nearly an aristocrat to a humble Welsh town on the coast. And he ministers and they minister together really during the time, just before actually the Great Depression, but she's wholeheartedly behind her husband. So she's leaving all of this behind and this is why I say she's really a wife or a woman for all seasons she wasn't kind of going with whatever she was able to gain or get.

That wasn't where her sights were set. But she was looking to where she could serve her husband in this particular case. And so, how did she describe her husband? Well, this is what she says at this early stage when he was still very young and he was just beginning his ministry. He says this, how on fire he was to tell people what Christianity meant and his wish to be in some raw place, hard place, where people were conscious of their need.

So in terms of how he preached, this man was a preacher, a preacher's preacher. You know, he loved his people, he loved his Lord, he loved the lost. He really had a real love for the lost. And he said this about himself. He says, if my preaching of the cross is not an offense to the natural man.

I am misrepresenting it." What a way to speak. He understood that the gospel is scandalous and it debases the pride of man when it exalts our great God. And so here's a man who didn't take his marching orders kind of from the weather vein of human opinion, but from the compass of conviction and what he believed about the truth of the Word of God. And here's a question just early on as we're looking at this. Are you a dad?

Are you aspiring to be a dad that is like that? Not to take your marching orders from the weather vein of human opinion, but from the compass of conviction. And daughters, is that the kind of man that would attract you? Is that the kind of man that you would look for in terms of a husband to lead you and to help care for you as you grow in the Lord. Well, it's really worth thinking about that.

He wasn't an arrogant man, though some people would accuse him of that, but he simply knew what he believed and he preached it with fervor. Well, In terms of married life, it's interesting, right? You come from an aristocratic family, and guess what? She had never ever cooked a meal. They had servants, they had kitchen staff and all of that.

And so she was totally undomesticated because She had been raised really for the medical field, and so she became very good at cooking, but it took a lot of practice. And she had moved from a house in London with a tennis court and servants to this tiny little Welsh village home. And so where they would have known great financial security as both of them being doctors, now they were really again just really at the mercy of being supported in the ministry with the people in a small Welsh town literally on the precipice of the Great Depression. So you can see a lot of different areas conspiring against them, but they loved the people there in Wales. And when they got there, they had all these, you can imagine, right, your upper class, they got all of these fancy, fancy wedding gifts, silver and all this different stuff.

Well they packed all of that away because of the people that they were going to be ministering to. They didn't want them to feel uncomfortable. And she dressed to fit in. She was always neatly dressed but she didn't she wasn't ostentatious. She wasn't trying to draw attention to herself or elevate herself by class.

And so she's got new surroundings, a new marriage, and a new church. And this is what's going on in her life. Well, you might say, and I hope it might have crossed someone's mind at this point, is have we got the cart before the horse. You know, she's married, and she's actually in the ministry, but I haven't talked about her coming to actually know the Lord. And that's because up until this time, she's still dead in her sins.

She's not actually a Christian. There was an assumption in these days, and it's not dissimilar to the time that we find ourselves in here in the South, where Southern Baptists, that kind of thing, there was an assumption that church attendance equaled being a true Christian. That if you're going to church, Well, of course, you're a member, you're doing all these things. It's like living in the Bible belt in those times. And so you can be outwardly moral, but never truly born again.

And so Martin, her husband, really began to notice this. When he was preaching, everywhere he went, he realized that there was this massive chasm between true life and just morality and formality. And so he began to preach this more and more. In fact, in his entire life, in his entire ministry, He spent 11 years at this church, 30 years at another church, and then 10 years preaching later on. Over 50% of all of his sermons are evangelistic sermons in churches, telling sinners in the churches where life can be found and calling them to repentance in the church.

It's amazing. And so he took seriously what Christ said when he said, Most assuredly I say to you that unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Well, one day his wife, Bethan, was on a bus in Wales with another member of their church. And it was a kind of blunt character, not a very cooth individual in the sense of just mannerly and knowing all the ways to interact with someone of her class. And this person says, now Mrs.

Jones, your husband is always saying we must be born again. Well, how about you Mrs. Jones? Are you saved? And that question jarred her like no other question had ever jarred her.

It had a profound effect on her for the rest of her life, obviously, because it caused her now to realize, am I saved? Am I not saved? All these questions started swirling within her mind. And so it's a good question to ask yourself as well. Do you have anyone in your life that would ask you the hard question where you stand with God and doesn't just assume that all is well because of externals?

It's really worth it. And if you have a father or a mother or a friend who would ask you this, what a wonderful thing. It can be very abrasive at times. But it's also one of the best and most important questions. Do you know the Lord?

Are you saved? Do you know Jesus Christ? Well, she says it like this, explaining her conversion. She says, I was born into a Christian family, christened as a baby, confirming the christening on becoming a church member at 12 years old. And so I did not know what else was needed.

I was afraid of God, afraid of dying, and eschewed evil because of this. I tried to do all that a Christian should do in such duties as church attendance. And I accepted the Bible as the Word of God. But I had no inner peace or joy. And I knew nothing of the glorious release of the Gospel.

I rejoiced to see men and women converted and I envied them and sometimes wished when I saw their radiant faces and changed lives that I had been a drunkard or worse so that I could be converted I never imagined that I needed to be converted having always been a Christian or that I could get any more than I had already. God graciously used Martin's morning sermons to open my eyes and show me myself and my need. Church attendance, outward morality, she attended the revivals, The Welsh revivals when she was a little girl, but none of that penetrated the stony heart. And it wasn't until two years after being in the ministry with her husband that she actually bowed the knee to Jesus Christ. Well, what a wonderful thing that was.

And her life obviously began to change as a result of that. The peace that she had never known that had escaped her for so long actually became hers. What a wonderful, wonderful testimony. But she was a woman as I mentioned, a frail temperament, she was a bit of a warrior. And you know, they spent about 11 and a half years in this church in Aberavon, in Wales.

And you know, they had two daughters when they were there, Elizabeth and Anne, but before World War II. So they moved to Aberavon just before the Great Depression. Now they receive a call to go to London before World War II. So their timing seems a little bit off, but they keep moving into these difficult places and difficult times. And obviously all of it wrapped up in the sovereignty of God.

And so the war began, and it really led to four years of separation between Martin and Bethan. You could imagine, right, as a husband, his primary interest is, how can I keep my wife away from the bombing? So she would be out in the countryside somewhere and he would be in London. And so they had this kind of, they'd be able to communicate with letters and they'd be able to visit and so on. But he would constantly be wanting her out of the city because London was a target for bombings.

They would often be bombed. And you could just imagine just the level of stress in the nighttime raids when planes would be flying over and bombs nearby would be going off. I mean, it's hard for any of us, I think, to even see a parallel in our own lives of that, but they made it through. And so here they were at this church in Westminster, called Westminster Chapel, and here was the challenge that now came upon them. In all the war going on, There was also a war going on in the church because there were some Men in the church who didn't quite like her husband and they had major criticism for Martin Lloyd Jones there was an older preacher a real preachers preacher named dr.

Campbell Martin Morgan and He was a solid preacher, but he was kind of a, you know, not quite like Martin Lloyd-Jones, who would be a little bit more, quote-unquote, in your face, and very specific. And so one member actually refused to go to church any time Martin Lloyd-Jones would be preaching. And in 1943, when Morgan retired from the ministry, the deacons conspired against Martin Lloyd Jones to get him removed from the church entirely. So there's this kind of work to just do this. And that's not a knock on our faithful deacons, by the way.

But it was hard. It was hard for a wife. You can imagine these constant attacks at every level going down on her own husband. A lot of times it's harder for the wife to hear what's being said about her husband than for the husband to hear about what's being said about him. But she watched his life, and this is what she said.

She said, he was far too evangelical for them. He made them feel like sinners. I know I just watched and waited and saw how, in nearly every case, he or his gospel won them. And many who had been less than inviting became his firmest friends. He just exemplified Christ.

He preached the gospel. He didn't try to get into any tit for tat or anything like that mountain offensive. He just continued faithfully, and those who were opposing him at the beginning became his most faithful friends later on. And these trials, the ones that they had in Wales and then the war and now this trial was almost smaller in comparison to what was going to come. And so what happened in 1966, a far more significant trial came upon them and Martin Lloyd-Jones became really one of the loneliest men in the world because of his stand for the truth.

He wasn't a man who would compromise on the things pertaining to the gospel for the sake of fellowship and unity. And so there was something called the National Association of Evangelicals and there was a controversy because they were all pushing for ecumenism. Just let's put aside doctrine for a while And if we can do that we get exposure to a broader audience where we can preach our message And that did not resonate with martin loy jones. He did not simply want to put away Doctrine in order to get a broader audience He thought that was disingenuous And he did not want to weak he knew what would happen by the way when you do that is you never ever ever Get back to the truth It's like the seeker sensitive if you try to win people with entertainment you never actually get past Entertainment because you've got to keep them with what you won them with And so he didn't want to go for that whatsoever. And so his message, he got up in that conference and said, no, that we should not do that.

And his message cut across the policy that was becoming very popular. His theology, his view of man and God, it brought him into inevitable conflict with the vast majority of the people and the kind of tide of the time. He was accused of being a separatist and that he was told that his message would minimize his influence and he didn't care. He wanted to just preach faithfully the gospel and the train of men who have preached the gospel before him. And so all these intense pressures, these great undercurrents were upon him.

And really the very definition of Christianity was being changed right before his very eyes. And you know, I was thinking about this in terms of Pilgrim's Progress and how John Bunyan explained it. And when he describes one named Mr. Byens, if you've read Pilgrim's Progress, here's a man that was constantly flopping in a weathervane, you know, whatever the way the wind blows, I'll go with the flow. And so it says it like this, Mr.

Byens, these are his words, they are for holding their notions, speaking of the kind of hardline people that are orthodox, they are for holding their notions, though all other men be against them But I am for religion in what and as so far the times and my safety will bear it They are for religion when in rags and contempt But I am for him when he walks in his silver slippers, in the sunshine, and with applause. And so this man was taking hit after hit after hit, and we don't know for sure exactly, but he ended up getting cancer two years later, likely because of a lot of the stress. We don't know exactly, but he didn't die. He recovered from that. But he would go through many, many more trials, and him and his wife would go through this together.

She was really a strong backbone for him. He called her his best and severest critic. Almost sounds a little bit like Katie Luther. She would tell him when he maybe missed something or wasn't doing what he should or he was misprioritizing and yet they had such a deep love for one another. Well, She was carried along with her faith in Christ.

And you know, one of the things that really strikes you is that over time, the Lord Jesus had become her closest companion. And that was really what undergirded her strength. Everyone who met her really was struck by her godliness. People would look at her and just see a woman who loved God even people that opposed her husband They really noticed that and her own daughter says it like this She loved her Bible and was a fount of knowledge for all of us including my father at times, on the Old Testament. Its teachings, its stories, and its people.

And then I love this. The latter, you almost felt she knew as friends, particularly Abraham. When she would speak of saints of old, it was as though she was speaking of friends, people that she actually knew. What a wonderful way to read your Bible in that real lively sense and you get to actually know the people that you're reading about. Well, her verse, when she was going through difficulties, her verse, everyone would call it her verse, was Psalm 119, 165.

Great peace have those who love your law, and nothing causes them to stumble. And though she was of a fearful temperament, all it did when she became a Christian, and as she matured, what it would do is it would just simply drive her more and more towards her savior. She was fearful but that anxiety would cause her to find more and more rest in God and I think you'll often find that you know in every single individual whether it was depression and Martin Luther or something else in another person a flaw that actually ends up becoming the pressure that that produces the fruit or produces the The the the output for Christ in their lives and it was wonderful She had to fight to trust God, but God always helped her. Well the hardest trial of her life was now upon them. They'd been in Wales for a long time.

She had, as we said, stripped herself of many of the things in London. She went into London with her husband during the war on the back of the Depression. They were attacked initially in the church and then her husband was attacked on a global level and then he got cancer and then you have all the other things that just daily cares and all the other challenges that you have raising children and being a pastor's wife all these things coming against her but the hardest trial as you could probably imagine was was just about to break over her and it was Martin's death. Well Martin Lloyd-Jones preached his last sermon at Brother Jeff Thomas' church in Aberystwyth, Wales. We got a chance to hear him a couple of months ago.

Wonderful preacher. If you ever get a chance, look up Jeff Thomas and listen to this man preach. Well, Martin Lloyd-Jones preached his last sermon there on the coast of Wales. And that was it. After that he could no longer preach.

He was just too worn. He had cancer. He was sickening. And they had weathered many storms together, but now it was time to part. And he had time.

One of the beautiful things is it wasn't instant, but he had some time, and you kind of saw the gradual decline, and she was able to really care for him privately. She really took that as a time to serve her husband. She was really doting on him and caring for him. And so after 54 years of marriage, he died in 1981. And so she was his greatest encourager through all of the storms, all of the difficulties and she was really his quiet strength.

But after 54 years of being attached, all of a sudden now, her husband was no longer there. And her daughters, you know, her daughters would spend time with her and that by this time they have grandchildren and so on and one of her daughters commented that often times they would take mom out for coffee and they might just see mother during the course of the conversation looking wistfully over at a old couple over there in the corner. You know, they'd be talking and the mom would just be looking and I guess wondering what it might be like if only Martin was still alive. You could see the heartstrings were so, so attached, even eight, ten years after he had passed away. And though his death left a vacuum that no person on earth could fill, she didn't just sit back and pine away, but she tried to live contented as a widow.

She tried to serve her family and do anything that she could to just really invest in the next generation. And so just in conclusion, looking at this woman's life, again I just want to point to the fact that strong reforming women did not only live in the 16th century, right? God is raising them up right now around the world. There might be women in this place or in other parts of the world in different continents that God is working in. And stories are really being written today that might be biographies for tomorrow.

And you might want to think about not becoming a subject for a biography, that's no way to live at all, but thinking about living godly and just serving God in whatever sphere he's given you, like this woman, a behind-the-scenes sphere that she took and served so faithfully. And now we're reading about her, almost 30 years after her death. It's wonderful. And here's the thing, right? The same God that was at work then is still at work today.

And so in the end, it really doesn't matter how well you're known, if anything's ever written about you, even if you're remembered when you pass away, but what will matter is did you know the Lord? Did you actually know the Lord? And if you think of her funeral, in comparison to her husband's funeral, there's no comparison where he had thousands of people at his. Hers was on a rainy day where maybe hundreds, very few people came to her funeral. But what matters most is that she was known of God and she knew her God and that's what we all should aspire to and so what she left behind for the cause of Christ she now enjoys exponentially more and there's one quote you probably have heard before only one life will soon be passed.

Only what's done for Christ will last. And you may be frail, feeble, or fearful. But Christ is mighty, lean on Him. You might not see yourself as able to weather much, but let that be the thing that drives you more to lean on Him. And so just know your God.

The reason why she was a woman for all seasons is because she had a God for all seasons. And we have a God for all seasons. So may God touch our hearts, our minds, and cause us to look to him more and more. Let's just gather our hearts in prayer. Father, we do thank you for the life of Bethan, Lloyd-Jones, for women that serve in obscurity, who support their husbands and love their families, who give good counsel.

Lord, even though they're racked with frailties, you use them mightily. Lord, you are such a good God. I pray that you would strengthen each one of us and cause us, oh Lord, to not look at our frailties as a means of uselessness, but oh Lord, may it drive us to be useful for you, to love you more and to cling to you and seek your face. Lord, we do thank you. Amen.