Tag Archives: J.D. Jones

Love and Nothing

17 Thursday Mar 2022

Posted by in 1 Corinthians, Love

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In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul begins his discourse on love with a reference to a series of wonderous actions. But each of these marvels, Paul says the action counts for nothing if it is not done in love:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

1 Corinthians 13:1–3. It is easy to take Paul’s language of “nothing” as a mere rhetorical flourish.

But this illustration by a once well-known preacher J.D. Jones provides a well-constructed illustration which makes plain the substance of the Apostle’s argument. This illustration works first by referencing a commonplace which is instantly comprehensible by audience (a “naught” is a zero). Second, the illustration maps back onto Paul’s argument of “nothing”. These things without love are actually nothing.

Jones uses the symbol of “nothing” to illustrate his point:

“Love” is no “adjunct” to the Apostle. It is no “minor interest.” It is not something that competes for place with work and politics and play. It is the thing that gives everything else value. It is the thing that confers upon everything else its worth. The gifts Paul mentions in these verses were not insignificant and commonplace gifts. They were the greatest and most coveted of gifts. And what he says of them all is that they are valueless without love. They are like a row of ciphers without a digit in front to give them value. Write down a row of noughts. Write down a dozen of them, and what do they amount to? Exactly nothing! And if you were to write a thousand of them they would be nothing still. But put a figure in front of those noughts and they at once become significant. They stand for something, they mean much. Put three noughts down and they amount to just nothing. Just a “I” in front of them and they mean a thousand. And it is like that with gifts and powers, says the Apostles. They count for nothing without love. Life itself is nothing without love. It is no mere “adjunct,” no mere “minor interest.” It is that which makes life significant and worth while; it is that which lends to every gift its worth.

J. D. Jones, The Greatest of These: Addresses on the Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians (London: Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1925), 39–40.

The wilderness had been changed into green pastures

14 Monday Oct 2019

Posted by in Psalms, Uncategorized

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You remember how Greatheart in the Pilgrim describes the Valley of Humiliation as the best and most fruitful land in all those parts, and how that Mercy protested that she was as well in that Valley as she had been anywhere else in all their journey. That is only the old Dreamer’s way of saying that bare and sterile places have often turned out to be “green pastures.” And that is why God “makes us to lie down” in places from which we shrink. That is why He allows loss and trouble and disappointment to befall us. He knows what graces these things and their like beget in the soul, how they breed sympathy and tenderness and humility and dependence on God. They are indeed amongst the richest and most succulent pastures. And so God makes us to lie down in them in spite of ourselves. And later we come to recognize His wisdom. We realize the gain that has come to us. “It was good for me that I was afflicted.” That was a man for whom the wilderness had been changed into the “green pastures.” It is only in retrospect we recognize all this. While we are in the midst of life’s hardnesses and difficulties and trials they may appear to us to be anything but “green pastures.” But when we look back, in the mellow light of life’s evening time, we shall realize we owe some of life’s richest blessings to its troubled times, and shall be ready with David to confess “Thou makest me to lie down in green pastures, thou leadest me beside the still waters.

The King of Love, J D Jones (1922)

If A Man Die

10 Saturday Dec 2016

Posted by in Preaching, Sermons, Uncategorized

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A sermon truly begins with the listener: Why should I listen to this man? He asks for my attention, why should I care? (Now, note, I am not saying that the Words of God should not be carefully attended to. That is unquestionably true.)

When one comes to a sermon, the preacher has the duty to presenting the great matter of eternity before him. Baxter rightly wrote, “I preach as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.” But too often sermons which begin with cute, often funny stories, cannot command that sort of gravity. If the sermon merely begin a joke, how do we ever get to matters of eternal consequence?

This introduction by J.D. Jones certainly opens up a matter of profound gravity. He also immediately makes it to Scripture. He asks a question and answers with the Text. He also demonstrates by means of a contemporary reference (WWI), that the question is immediately relevant:

IF A MAN DIE—

THERE is no question to which the human soul more eagerly desires a clear and sure answer than this one: “If a man die, shall he live again?” It is an old, old question. Job asked it long ago in an agony. The one fact he could see, the one fact which admitted of no challenge or dispute, was the tragic fact of death. “Man dieth and wasteth away; yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the river decayeth and drieth up, so man lieth down and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be roused out of their sleep.” And yet, if the grave really was the end, if death was the very last word, it seemed to Job that life was just a tangled web of injustice and wrong, and that there could not be a wise and good God at the heart of things. That sorely-tried patriarch passionately desired an assurance that man should live again. He almost demanded a future life to rectify the wrongs and waste and distresses of this. There is entreaty, there is pathetic appeal, there is passion and desire in this question: “If a man die, shall he live again?”
Thousands and tens of thousands of people are asking that same question with a similar urgency in these days of ours. The awful harvest which death has been reaping in the Great War has made it the question of questions for a vast host of bereaved fathers and mothers and wives and lovers. They want to know—what of their beloved dead? Is a grave in France or Mesopotamia, or beneath the waters of the North Sea the end of them, or shall they live again?

J. D. Jones, If a Man Die (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1918), 9–12.

Thou Shalt be Peter

03 Tuesday Feb 2015

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“Thou art Simon … thou shalt be Peter,” said Jesus, and at that Simon lifted up his head and his heart. His redemption began at that moment. Courage and high resolve entered into his heart there and then. He was saved “by hope.”

“Thou art … thou shalt be,” in that contrast you have the optimism, the redeeming optimism of Jesus. No man can be a redeemer who has not a “shalt be” for the persons he seeks to redeem. Plato could not be a redeemer to the poor and low-born of Greece, he had no “shalt be” for them. Priests and scribes could not be redeemers to the publicans and sinners of Palestine. They had no “shalt be” for them.

There are plenty of men who can diagnose the condition of mankind to-day with exactness, who can point out the ill and describe the malady, but they can do nothing to redeem, because they know no cure. Thomas Hardy can describe with terrible fidelity man’s misery and woe, but he can do little to redeem him; he has no “shalt be.”

But Jesus Christ is fitted to be the world’s Redeemer just because He has a “shalt be” for every one. Taking us just as we are, He tells us of something better and nobler, which by the grace of God we may become “Thou art … thou shalt be.

He has a “shalt be” for us, no matter how desperate and hopeless our case may appear to be.
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