Speaking from deeply personal experience, Martin recounts the death of his long-time wife and the grieving process that followed. This booklet is culled from sermons Martin delivered to his own church in the weeks after his wife’s passing. He deftly expounds Scripture’s teaching about life beyond this life. Though surface-level, this is a helpful resource all Christians—not just for those who will lose a loved one, but for those called to comfort them as well.

In Christ, I am no longer obligated to earthly thoughts and emotions, nor should I let them rule me: instead, I can be controlled and therefore contented by the truth of God. [19]

Our emotions were not created by God to have ultimate authority over us. Where we fail in this area, as in any other, our guilt and sin are covered by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Yet the difficulty of this command, and our frequent failure in seeking to obey it, does not alter our calling. We must use the power of the indwelling Spirit to make an ongoing, scripturally directed effort to reign in our emotions. [24]

God’s salvation, though appropriated by individuals as individuals, is not an individualistic salvation. In planning, procuring, and applying His saving grace in Christ, God has something more wonderful in view. He is committed to something more than providing and imparting a righteous and legal title to heaven for individuals, and working in those individuals by the Holy Spirit in order to make them perfectly fit for heaven. Rather, God has an ultimate purpose to constitute nothing less than a whole new humanity in Christ. This new humanity He identifies as His church, His bride, His body, His temple, His nation, and His royal priesthood. [52]

When the Bible speaks of hope for the Christian, it does not speak of a wish or even a strong desire. Biblical hope is a confident expectation of and longing for a purchased, promised, but not-yet-realized blessing of God’s redemptive grace. And the Bible makes very clear that the primary focus of our “hope” is the ultimate completion of our salvation when we receive our resurrected bodies at the return of our Lord Jesus Christ. [80]

What does it mean truly to “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ”? It means that, forsaking all hope and confidence in anything you have done or have not done to make yourself right with God, you cast yourself upon Jesus Christ to find salvation—the salvation made possible by His perfect life, His substitutionary death, and His validating resurrection. [112] 

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In this brief book, Martin examines the role of the Holy Spirit in preaching, explaining that His power and presence are intrinsically necessary for the very act of proclaiming God’s Word. Martin shows how the Spirit’s work in Scripture is tied to bold statements of truth and contends that He does the same today. Preachers are admonished to work hard, study harder, and be prepared—but never to trust in their own intellect, devices, or presentation.

The strong emphasis we can see unfolding throughout the book of Acts is that the Spirit is present in His agency and operations in conjunction with utterance that, again and again, is described as bold utterance. It was proclamation prompted and made possible only by the present agency and operation of the Spirit. [13]

Just as we do not know how to pray as we ought but the Spirit helps us in that dilemma by His personal agency and operation, so He helps us in the situation of our helplessness to preach as we ought. [15]

The reason God has ordained preaching as His unique method for dismantling the kingdom of darkness and building the kingdom of His Son has more to it than the bare statement of truth. God has given this unique place to preaching because in preaching, the effect of truth on the redeemed man who preaches is both manifested and embodied in the very act of conveying that truth. [34]

It is the height of spiritual cheekiness to be grieving the Holy Spirit because of an area of ethical controversy with God and then to pray for His special assistance and presence in our preaching. Such praying borders on an attempt to engage in a kind of pagan manipulation of the Deity. [47]

If we are so determined that our neat sermon will get preached out that we will not indulge such holy expansions, digressions, or omissions, we may well be quenching the Spirit. It is better to preach a ragged and less than neat sermon in the power of the Holy Spirit, than to preach a neat and polished sermon without His unction. [60]

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While brief in nature, Martin expertly examines the Scriptural basis for the obedience of God’s people to His commands. Even though Christians are not ‘under the law’ in a binding sense, we are not to adopt a passive approach to our growth in Christ. Martin discusses the nature of obedience, as well as both its roots and rewards. The product is a helpful booklet and somber encouragement that obedience to our Lord’s commands is not optional.

The Christian life is not ‘Let go and let God.’ It is true that in all our obedience we are to seek and depend upon the power of the Holy Spirit; yet if we ‘let go’ (i.e. become passive nonparticipants in the war against remaining sin), God will not do for us what He has commanded us to do. God will not obey for us. [7]

The will of God ought to be obeyed because it is the will of God. If there were no positive fruits arising from such a life, no rewards attached to it, we ought to be motivated to live in this way simply because it pleases God for us to do so. [19]

Obedience to Christ manifests the genuineness of our profession. Love, like faith, is displayed in deeds, not in words alone. By our deeds we prove to ourselves that we really are what we claim to be—lovers of Christ and lovers of God. [19]

Do you desire to have solid assurance that you are a real Christian, a real love of Christ? Do you long to enjoy communion with God and assurance of His love? If your answer to these questions is yes, you will find these blessings only in the course of a life of principled obedience. [20]

Jesus didn’t die to have a people who turn aside from doing His will at every whim and impulse of their feelings, a people who are ruled by their moods. He didn’t die to have husbands love their wives only when they feel good, or wives submit to their husbands only when the mood hits them, or children obey their parents only when they want to, or people pray and come to the house of God only when they feel like it. No, Jesus died to have a people conformed to His own moral image of a life of principled obedience. [22]

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This booklet contains the transcript of a message delivered by Martin in 1967 concerning the nature of preaching. Martin asserts that most problems with modern-day preaching stem from failures of either the man or the message, though he is quick to point out that two are not really separate issues. His emphasis is on the personal holiness and discipline of the preacher, stating that a preacher’s message grows out of the soil of his own life.

All failures in preaching today are basically the failure either of the man who preaches or of the message he brings. We dare not separate these two things—the man and the message—because there is a deep fusion of the man and the message in the work of preaching. [4]

The soil out of which powerful preaching grows is the preacher’s own life. This is what makes the art of preaching different from all other arts of communication. [5]

No preacher is furnished to preach simply by possessing a gift to analyse a text and by the ability to explain it by word of mouth. If the word he would preach to others has not first of all been the instrument of his own personal indoctrination and instruction unto sanctification, he is not fit to declare it to others. [9]

People look upon doubt as the most terrible thing in the world. What we fail to realize is that doubts which are produced by honest self-examination in the light of the objective standard of the Word of God may be the best thing that ever happened to some people. Doubts will never damn a man, but sinful presumption will. [23]

Perhaps the most difficult part of a regular pulpit ministry is the work of application. But just as a competent physician who longs for the health of those committed to his care will not be content unless he knows the specific maladies of his people and is able to apply specific remedies, so the true servant of God will press beyond the generality of need and of God’s ability to meet that need; he will labor to know the specific expressions of sinful need and then to apply the specific remedies set forth in the fullness of our Lord Jesus Christ. [27] 

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