Great Doctrinal Deductions vs Sentimentalism

I’ve been pondering these lines from a Martin Lloyd-Jones sermon on Eph 1:6. I don’t think they are in the published version of the sermon, and I don’t know the MLJ canon well enough to footnote it, but here’s what he says as he gets ready to preach on God accepting us “in the Beloved:”

Now facts are very important but facts in and of themselves are not sufficient. A number of people may look at the same facts and may interpret them in a different manner, so that it is essential to our salvation that we should know something of the meaning and the significance of the facts as well as of the facts themselves. There are many for instance who no doubt during these coming days will consider certain facts, but they’ll sentimentalize them, they won’t draw any great doctrinal deductions from them. It’ll be something purely emotional without any intellectual content, and they will find a certain amount of emotional release but they will never know the power of God unto salvation. So I say nothing is more important than that we should always take together with the facts the interpretation of the facts. And that is the thing that makes the scriptures so unique and so vital to us: that they always combine the exposition with the statement of the facts. And we must never separate the one from the other.

There’s something vital here. I instantly want to start varying some of Lloyd-Jones’ language, because some listeners will be distracted by his apparent preference for the cognitive-intellectual over the emotional-experiential. He began preaching through Ephesians in the early 1950s, and that was a long time ago. We’d talk a little differently now, and the most loaded words are the one most likely to hit us wrong.

But here’s where he nails it: Some listeners receive biblical teaching and seek instant emotional impact, immediate application not only to their own lives but to the things that are most on their minds right now. This is to sentimentalize the facts of salvation. Even if you’re on the side of emotions, and are jealous to guard the relational/affective domain as the domain where God works deep spiritual transformation, you can’t champion the word “sentimentalize.” To sentimentalize biblical truths means to avoid their real meaning; it marks a shallowly emotional failure to apply the truth, not a success in applying truth.

Instead, says Lloyd-Jones, we receive the word in its saving power by drawing “great doctrinal deductions” from what it says. Again, yes: I don’t want to reduce salvation to the cognitive domain, but what saved the Ephesians was “the word of truth, the gospel of [their] salvation.” (Eph 1:13)

The warning is especially apt for a sermon on being “accepted in the Beloved.” A sentimental response, bringing mere emotional release, would grasp the idea of being God’s beloved. A great doctrinal deduction would be that Christ, the Son, is the Beloved of the Father, in whom God is well pleased. And –the next great deduction– that it is in him, in that Beloved, that our acceptance is true in a way we could never have grasped sentimentally.