Far Above Rubies

The Life of Bethan Lloyd-Jones

Lynette G. Clark

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781916223
• Year: 2016

1

OPEN HOMES AND OPEN HEARTS

You have given me the heritage of those who fear your name.

Psalm 61:5b

Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.

C.S. Lewis

ANCESTRY

Powerful preachers

Cadair Idris is one of the most striking mountains in North Wales, situated near the towns of Machynlleth and Dolgellau. Legend has it that if someone spends a night asleep on it, they will awake the next morning as either a poet or a madman!¹ Christmas Evans was neither of these, though he was certainly possessed of the imaginative gift of the poet. Born in South Wales in 1766 and ‘born again’ while a young man, he was to become a preacher of extraordinary power in North Wales, planting churches in what is known as the Lleyn Peninsula and on the island of Anglesey. He became involved, however, in a bitter religious controversy for about five years and lost his joy in the Lord and his spiritual usefulness. It was while he was travelling on a lonely road near Cadair Idris that he had an encounter with God which restored him and led to renewed blessing in his ministry. From his diary we have a description of what happened that day:

I was weary of a cold heart towards Christ, and his sacrifice and the work of his Spirit—of a cold heart in the pulpit, in secret prayer, and in the study … On a day ever to be remembered by me, as I was going from Dolgellau to Machynlleth and climbing up towards Cadair Idris, I considered it incumbent upon me to pray, however hard I felt my heart, and however worldly the frame of my spirit was. Having begun in the name of Jesus, I soon felt as it were the fetters loosening, and the old hardness of heart softening, and, as I thought, mountains of frost and snow dissolving and melting within … I felt my whole mind relieved from some great bondage: tears flowed copiously, and I was constrained to cry out for the gracious visits of God, by restoring to my soul the joy of his salvation … This struggle lasted for three hours; it rose again and again, like one wave after another, or a high flowing tide driven by a strong wind, until my nature became faint by weeping and crying. Thus I resigned myself to Christ, body and soul, gifts and labours—all my life—every day and every hour that remained for me:—and all my cares I committed to Christ.²

The effect of this experience on his preaching was soon to be felt by the people. Like Cyclops of old he had but one eye, but that eye could transfix vast congregations as he preached simply and graphically. Multitudes were spellbound and moved to the depths of their being as he brought his powerful imagination to bear upon the truths of Scripture, which he proclaimed with such singular effect.

But what link did this powerful Welsh preacher of the nineteenth century have with the wife of another Welshman, who was one of the greatest preachers of the twentieth century? While God’s grace and salvation do not ‘run in the blood’, there is, nevertheless, such a thing as ‘the heritage of those who fear the Lord’, and Bethan Lloyd-Jones was blessed with such a heritage. Her great-great-grandfather was a cousin of Christmas Evans: to be precise, he was a first cousin twice removed.³

Although Evan Phillips did not exercise the same measure of spiritual influence as Christmas Evans, he was, nevertheless, a godly man and powerful preacher, and was certainly every bit as colourful a character as his illustrious relative. It is with Evan Phillips that we shall begin to trace the family background and the varied influences for good which helped to mould the godly lady whose portrait we are to study.

Family life was very happy

Evan Phillips was born in 1829, and he married Ann Jones in 1859. In 1860 he was ordained a minister in the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church, and later that year he became the minister of Bethel Chapel, Newcastle Emlyn, in Cardiganshire. He was a preacher of considerable ability and power:

… [he was]one of the great preachers of his age. His ideas were so fresh and sparkling, his pictures so natural, and his eloquence so persuasive that the ‘twenty-minute preacher’ won a very special place for himself. His sermons were characterised by a combination of the poet’s imagination, the teacher’s acumen, and the evangelical’s ardour.⁴

This is high praise indeed for someone who lived at a time when Wales was blessed with numerous powerful preachers. It would seem that the gift of the poet’s imagination, which had so animated Christmas Evans’ sermons, ran in the blood of this family. A graphic way of preaching was something which characterised both of these ministries. And, as we shall see, a vivid imagination was something which Bethan Lloyd-Jones inherited from the Phillips side of her ancestry.

Evan Phillips and his wife Ann were blessed with eight children. Evan was devoted to his family—so devoted, in fact, as to lead on occasion to somewhat amusing, if not downright eccentric, behaviour on his part. When he went from home to preach, although reluctant to leave his family behind, he was always ready a good hour before the appointed time, and he would then expect all the family to help him on his way and to escort him to the railway station. A wife and eight children traipsing from the house to the station would have been quite an affair! But his devotion to his family was such that, when he was away preaching, it was certainly not a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’, but much more one of ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’. Evan Phillips was not just reluctant to leave home; he was sometimes disinclined to stay at the places that he visited when he actually arrived there. On numerous occasions he insisted on having a meeting in a church at which he was a visiting preacher moved from 6 p.m. to 3 p.m. so that he could return home earlier! At least on these occasions he stayed for the afternoon meeting. But there were times when the congregation was to be disappointed:

Whenever Evan Phillips was absent from home he had a ‘hiraeth’ (longing) to return. On several occasions we discover he left the place he was preaching at, to return home, as his ‘hiraeth’ was so intense …We read that when he was preaching on a certain occasion in Liverpool—one of the children, where he was staying, began to sing, ‘Home Sweet Home’—he instantly fetched his coat and said, ‘I’m going home, I can’t stay here a moment longer!’ ⁵

It was not that he was anxious about his family. Quite the contrary! He was always concerned for his children, but confessed that when he was away from home he ‘gave them up to God’ and had no concern for them whatsoever because he knew God cared for them more than he could ever do so. It was simply that he loved to be with his family. And it is evident that his family life was very happy indeed. Something of the atmosphere of the home in which Bethan Phillips’ father was nurtured was, in turn, to pervade the home in which he would bring up his children, and this was to be carried on when Bethan became Mrs Lloyd-Jones.

In Ann Jones, Evan Phillips found a wife who was truly of noble character and who complemented him well. She was endowed with a very practical nature. She is described by her husband’s biographer as being of strong character, tender, distinguished and humble. She was very caring for all the poor in the neighbourhood and always turned a deaf ear to any gossip. And Ann, like her husband, loved her home more than anywhere else—so it is just as well she did not have to leave in order to preach!

If Evan could be somewhat eccentric, then it also has to be said that Ann’s way of supporting and encouraging her husband was sometimes unconventional. On one occasion, Evan was very loath to leave home and to preach at Carmarthen, though the reason had nothing to do with a reluctance to leave his family; rather, he was convinced that if he went, he would return in his coffin! One wonders if he was suffering from a touch of the hypochondria to which—as Dr Lloyd-Jones would later claim—preachers are particularly prone. If he was, his wife soon encouraged him to think differently: she said he could not disappoint the congregation and that, since the people of Carmarthen should not be put to any expense, the best thing to do would be to call for the undertaker to get Evan measured up for a coffin before he left! Needless to say, he fulfilled the preaching engagement. This concern about his health could sometimes lead him to take drastic measures. His biographer gives an amusing example:

… [he was] prone to bouts of depression and melancholy. When two of his close friends died the same week Evan Phillips became convinced that he would die. He retired to his bed to meditate on the brevity of life and the emptiness of men’s hope. ‘Two have gone,’ he groaned, ‘there is bound to be a third—and that will be me.’ This was his constant cry. One morning Mrs Phillips went out to feed the pigs. She noticed that one had died. Immediately she shouted to her husband, ‘Evan, the third has died, you are safe to come down now!!’ He left his bed! ⁶

Ann Phillips was clearly a shrewd and sensible lady, who knew how best to handle her husband. He laid great store by his wife’s judgment, particularly where it concerned his preaching. On one particular Saturday evening he confided in her, with great concern, that he had nothing to give to his people the next day—truly, a preacher’s nightmare. She replied that she was not sure that he ever had anything to say! Although this upset him, it must have been the very thing he needed to hear, because the next day he preached with great liberty and power. On another occasion she asked Evan to explain to her what exactly he had given to the people after a morning meeting. Before he could answer, she said, ‘If you have no better for this evening, I would advise you to stay at home so that they can have a prayer meeting!’

Although the medicine Ann administered to her husband was acerbic, it is clear that her concern was the well-being of the people. Thus on another occasion she asked him, ‘Do you really think that the people will be sustained till next week on the basis of tonight’s sermon?’⁷ The question—asked in the 1880s—is a revealing one, and bespeaks an attitude to the ministry of God’s Word which would be shared by Bethan Lloyd-Jones’ husband in the next century. Since this was something which was so central to Dr Lloyd-Jones’ conception of preaching; and since, like her grandmother, Mrs Lloyd-Jones sought to help her husband in his ministry—‘My work is to keep him in the pulpit’, she would sometimes say—it will be profitable briefly to explore what lay behind Ann Phillips’ question to her husband.

For some today, preaching is little more than an exposition of a verse or passage of Scripture: the text is explained, and is then applied by drawing out lessons for belief and behaviour in the contemporary world. The thinking behind Ann Phillips’ question was that preaching, while never less than this, was to be much more: it was to feed and nourish the soul from one week to another. Thus, if people were illiterate and could not read the Scriptures for themselves or if they were too poor to possess their own copy of the Scriptures, they could ruminate throughout the week on what they had heard on Sunday. Furthermore—and this was the emphasis which Dr Lloyd-Jones maintained throughout his ministry—the task of preaching is not simply to inform but to transform. One of the ways in which this was to be achieved was by stirring the people’s affections, so that the effect of the message will be to stimulate appetite within them for the Word of God.⁸

Ann Phillips perfectly understood the complexities of her husband’s personality. Her presence in the church services was vital to him. The observation was made that Evan did not attain great heights in respect to his preaching when she was absent! She was exactly the kind of wife needed for a man with his vivid imagination and of such a nervous disposition. She provided balance in the face of his extremes. One can only surmise that had she not been the critic and spur to him that he found her to be, it is unlikely that his preaching would have had the impact which it did. This having been said, she clearly lacked the diplomatic touch which, we shall see later, Mrs Lloyd Jones possessed when assessing her husband’s ministry. ‘The Doctor’ was to refer to her as ‘my best critic’. How something is said can be as important as what is said: ‘A word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver’ (Prov. 25:11, niv 2003).

One thing which certainly characterised Evan Phillips’ household was a care and generosity towards other people: if Evan and Ann Phillips loved their family, they were not absorbed with their family to the exclusion of others. They loved to entertain God’s servants, and there was always a meal at hand for any who passed by. Evan’s salary was very small—just £15 per annum—but they were fortunate that his wife’s family were comfortably placed and contributed to their needs. The Phillipses were very generous with all that they had, and we will see this characteristic in Tom Phillips, Bethan’s father, who had grown up in this atmosphere of love and open-handedness. We are told that later in life the Phillips children found it hard to leave their home and that Dr Tom Phillips never departed without tears. But leave he did, travelling to London in the 1890s to make his way in the big city. There he met and married Margaret Jenkins.

The distinguished ‘London Welsh’

Bethan was born to Thomas and Margaret Phillips on 19 May 1898, the same day that Gladstone died,⁹ which also happened to be Ascension Day. Thomas Phillips became a deacon at Charing Cross Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Chapel. Prior to this they had attended another Welsh chapel, during which time Bethan was born. The family was one of the distinguished ‘London Welsh’ who had made their way in the capital city. They lived comfortably in Harrow, a London suburb: the house had a tennis court and the family had kitchen staff and a gardener.

Dr Phillips was an eminent ophthalmologist or eye specialist. One of his patients was fellow Welshman David Lloyd George, who would become the British Prime Minister from 1916–1922. Although he had patients and friends who were drawn from the upper echelons of society—and when Bethan was born, British society was far more stratified along ‘class’ lines than it is today—Tom Phillips always had time for those from the ‘lower’ end of the social scale and for those whose lives had been ravaged by time and bad fortune. Much of his work was done amongst those who were too poor to pay, and he was always ready to help those in need.

One evening while attending the chapel, Bethan’s father noticed, at the end of the meeting, an elderly lady in the front row weeping profusely. When he enquired into her distress, he found that she had been dismissed from her employment as a cook on the grounds that she was too old: she had been in service to this family for forty years! She felt utterly bereft, having no family and no reason to return to her homeland of Wales. Without hesitation, Tom Phillips took Miss Jones home to become his family’s cook, and she lived with them for many years. In his own words, ‘She was a boon and blessing to the family’. On another occasion, he found a fellow Welshman who was unemployed, drunk and in the gutter, with nowhere to live. He too was taken to the Phillips’ home and became their gardener. This bigheartedness of her father—which he had learned from his own father—was a wonderful example to Bethan, and in later years was to be the pattern of her own life.

Mr Phillips was to play a significant part in the life of Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Bethan’s father encouraged open debate in his adult Sunday School class, which Martyn attended from 1917–1924, and such good-natured friendly discussion between the two men probably continued when Martyn married into the family some years later.

Bethan’s mother had been a school teacher. She was a fine Christian, although a somewhat private individual. However, this did not prevent her from operating an ‘open house policy’. Elizabeth can think of at least four nephews and nieces, as well as many other individuals, who needed help at one time or another and whom were taken into the home by her grandmother. We know that early in her life she held to the Keswick ‘higher life’ teaching.¹⁰ Margaret Phillips was a very clever woman and quite advanced and ahead of her time in her thinking: she, like Thomas, believed that girls should be as well educated as boys—a belief which, in the West, we take for granted today but which, in those days, was not at all a widely held idea. Margaret’s closest friends were dairy owners. Both Elizabeth and Ann remember being behind the counter at their grandparents’ shop. Many of the Cardiganshi...

Table of contents

• Title
• Indicia
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Prologue: a smile in the place of tears
• 1 Open homes and open hearts
• 2 Given … a sort of gift
• 3 Love is more than skin deep
• 4 A wife for all sea
• 5 'Cinderella’s chariot for me'
• 6 Ministry matters
• 7 Over twenty years of life
• 8 Wonderful way with words
• 9 In journeyings oft en
• 10 Ever-widening circles
• 11 A time to put one’s feet up?
• 12 Through the portals of death
• Epilogue: A tale of two women
• Questions for reflection
• Appendices
• Bibliography
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