In John’s early days as Rector, Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the minister of Westminster Chapel (close to Buckingham Palace), handed him a small booklet. It was a reading plan covering the whole Bible, created by Robert Murray McCheyne, a Scottish minister who died in 1843, aged twenty-nine. He compiled this reading plan for his own church members in St Peter’s, Dundee. It begins with the four ‘great beginnings’ in Scripture – Genesis (the birth of the universe), Ezra (the rebirth of the nation after Babylonian captivity), Matthew (the birth of Christ) and Acts (the birth of the body of Christ). It is now probably the widestused reading plan in the world.
John was touched by the gift from Martyn Lloyd-Jones, whom he admired and respected. He began to use it straight away. He loved it, and he used it day by day, year by year, for the rest of his life, often giving copies away to friends. The reading plan was published again when John was elderly, under the title More Precious than Gold. John wrote at the front: ‘Nothing has helped me more than this to grasp the grand themes of the Bible.’
