It Is All Useless

MLJ:

My dear friend, we must make this perfectly clear. When you come into the Christian church and listen to this gospel as it is in truth, you must realize that everything you are in the world is of no value. It does not matter who you are, what your natural ability is, what your degrees and diplomas, your academic attainments, what knowledge you may have garnered. It is all useless to you. When you come into the realm of the church, the Pharisee is as helpless as the publican. The greatest sage is as helpless as the newborn babe. . . .

Thank God that his way of salvation is so utterly and entirely different from ours. . . . What does the gospel demand of us? Simply that we know that we are paupers, simply that we repent and admit and confess that we have nothing at all, that we are blind and lost and damned and hopeless and helpless.

--Martyn Lloyd-Jones, 'The Great Watershed,' in Setting Our Affections on Glory: Nine Sermons on the Gospel and the Church (Crossway, 2013), 41, 43