Saturday, August 16, 2014

A Profound and Practical Implication of the Union of Body and Soul

Horder's (the medical chief) notes revealed that perhaps as many as 70 per cent of his private cases could not be classified under recognised medical criteria at all.  'Eats too much', 'Drinks too much' and similar comments, pointed to signs and symptoms with origins normally outside the province of medicine.  Strange though it may sound, it was in a temple of scientific humanism -- Horders' clinic -- that Lloyd-Jones was helped to see the fallacy of the argument that modern man is so different from his forebears that historic Christianity is no longer relevant.  He discovered that man in his fundamental need of a changed relation to God has not changed at all: 'All the changes about which men boast so much are external', he observed. 'They are not changes in man himself, but merely in his mode of activity, in his environment.' The real problem which he now saw written large on Horder's case notes was neither medical nor intellectual.  It was one of moral emptiness and spiritual hollowness.  Horder's card index was to him almost what the vision of a valley of dry bones was to the prophet Ezekiel.

--Iain Murray, The Life of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, 1899--1981, p.47-48 (emphasis added)

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