Lloyd Jones on the main art of following God

I have a deep respect and admiration for Martyn Lloyd Jones. If you're not familiar with him, you should alleviate that problem immediately and pick up his Studies in the Sermon on the Mount or Spiritual Depression: It's Causes and Cure. If you're a pastor and preaching is a regular part of your service to God's people, his book Preaching and Preachers is a must read. Over the last couple years many of his sermon recordings (which were originally only captured for church members who were too sick to gather with the church on Sundays) have been released here at MLJ Trust. If you're looking for more then I also recommend Iain Murray's double volume biography. There are a handful of defining principles I've learned from MLJ and one of those is the importance of knowing yourself well enough to preach to yourself. Here's a classic excerpt from Spiritual Depression: 

I say that we must talk to ourselves instead of allowing 'ourselves' to talk to us! ... I suggest that the main trouble in this whole matter of spiritual depression in a sense is this, that we allow our self to talk to us instead of talking to our self....Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you...The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, questions yourself...And then you must go on to remind yourself of God, who God is, and what God is and what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say: 'Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within  me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.' (Spiritual Depression, 21)