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The spiritual and the psychological are not the same thing. This is a fact which Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones emphasised at several points in his ministry. It is possible in preaching to exert a pressure on people’s feelings and imaginations which can move them to action, quite independent of any understanding or faith response to the gospel message. Lloyd-Jones used the example of a preacher who described a burning building to illustrate the need to flee the judgment to come. The word-image became so vivid that his congregation literally fled, not from hell fire and the wrath of God, but from the church building, convinced that it was on fire! For the same reason, Lloyd-Jones was critical of some of Jonathan Edwards’ sermons, such as the famous “Sinners in the hands of an angry God”, because he felt that its intense descriptions could terrify people quite independent of the gospel truth being proclaimed. In 1957 William Sargant, a controversial researcher in psychiatric medicine, publishe