Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Over a century ago, Dwight Lyman Moody sought opportunity by moving west from Boston to Chicago.
He came to make his fortune. He ended up founding both the Moody Church and the Moody Bible Institute. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, the overflow from the life of D.L. Moody is very much alive right here at the Moody Church.
Tell us about this brief series on D.L. Moody, a hero of faith. You know, Dave, I have to speak to you very honestly and say that Moody is fascinating because of the fact that his education was really limited, perhaps grade three or four.
He had to teach himself how to read. And here's the reason that even though we've read many biographies of him, the reason that we are fascinated is because there's no connection between his humble beginnings and the fame and the way in which he reached his generation for Christ. Absolutely amazing.
Speaking without a microphone to 20,000 people in London, night after night for a couple of weeks. So in this series of messages, I just want to remind us here at the Moody Church of our history, but more than that, to inspire all of our listeners to help them to understand what God can do through a man who was totally dedicated to him. So I want you now to listen carefully, and then at the end of this message, I'm going to be giving you some contact info for a resource that we think will be a great blessing to you beginning January 1st. Our Father, we ask that as we speak about a man who had such a great impact in America and the British Isles, we ask today, Father, that the same Holy Spirit who empowered him and motivated him, may that Holy Spirit be here as well to give us receptive hearts, willing hearts, obedient hearts, to take the path that is most lasting. We ask today, Father, that you might overcome barriers in our own lives that would hinder us from being wholly yielded to you and your will.
In Jesus' name, Amen. Someone described him this way. He dropped out of school when he was 13, but he inspired students at Cambridge University in England and founded an internationally known school and church. He once preferred to only teach children because he was uncomfortable with adults due to his lack of education, but he ended up being one of the most persuasive orators of all time. He was born on a remote farm in rural Massachusetts, but became famous for conquering the whole cities for Christ. He was in love with money, but ended up changing his priorities and living in austere conditions so that more money could go for the spread of the gospel. Someone else wrote, he had the impulsiveness, quick temper, and rough humanity of the Apostle Peter, the single-mindedness and strategic skill and heartiness of the Apostle Paul, and the love and the steady growth and devotion to God of the Apostle John. The man, of course, is Dwight Lyman Moody. Even though I've had the privilege of being the pastor of Moody Church for 28 years, I've never taken out time publicly like this in a service to give you something of a biography of his life. I thought that I would speak only once about D.L. Moody and then I realized that this has to be two parts.
And so this is the first part of a two-part series. Why do I do it? I do it because first of all, we should know something about our own history, something about our origins. I do it so that we might understand better our own vision and to clarify who D.L. Moody was.
The name D.L. Moody is very famous around the world in evangelical circles, but when you leave that group and you go into the wider world, they don't have a clue as to who Dwight Lyman Moody was. I saw the confusion myself a few years ago.
We have relatives, my family does, on my side in Germany. When they discovered that Wanda's son is the pastor of Moody Church in Chicago, they, of course, did some investigation and they wondered, what about this name Moody? So they looked it up in a dictionary. And they discovered, true story, they discovered it was irritable, depressing, unpredictable. And so they communicated and said, what in the world is the Moody Church?
So we've got some PR work that we have to do. But the other reason I tell the story is because we need to be inspired to do great things for God like Moody did. What an inspiration he is to us. You may say, well, you know, I come to church to hear the word of God.
Well, you will hear the word of God today through the life and the lips of Dwight Lyman Moody. There was nothing in his history that would ever make us think that he would be famous. In fact, he had some very, very humble origins, born the fifth child of a large family on a farm in Massachusetts. His father died when he was four years old. His father drank too much whiskey and was in debt. So when he dropped dead one afternoon, Betsy Moody had the presence of mind to ask the oldest child to go and to hide some of the tools. And she herself took a calf and took him to another pasture because the creditors came and they took everything.
They took the horse, they took the buggy, they took the cows, they even took the firewood. And it was two months after that, actually one month after that, that she gave birth to twins, meaning that now there was a family of nine. No wonder Dwight dropped out of school when he was about in grade four or five to help with the family. But when he was 17, he decided that he wanted to go to Boston. He wanted to be a salesman and his uncle had a shoe shop there in Boston. And the uncle said, yes, you can come and sell shoes if you attend the Mount Vernon Congregational Church.
So D.L. Moody did that and that's where he was introduced to Edward Kimball, who was his Sunday school teacher. Now here's Moody.
He's 17 years old. He goes to this class and the teacher Kimball says, please turn to the Gospel of John. And he's looking for the Gospel of John in the Old Testament. And so Kimball, in order to avoid further embarrassment because the other kids were rolling their eyes and giving stares, he took his open Bible, gave it to Moody and took his back so that he taught now from the Bible of Dwight Moody.
And Moody never forgot that act. The fact that his Sunday school teacher was willing to keep him from embarrassment immediately endeared him to his teacher. Kimball went to visit him in the shoe shop, discovered him in the back, was hesitant to go in, but decided that he would. And then and there explained the gospel that Jesus loved him. And if he believed on Jesus, he would be saved.
And there Moody was received, of course, by God. He accepted Christ as a savior. And he said that he knew it. He said immediately everything was different.
He said the sun shone more clearly and the birds even sang more loudly. He was converted. But when he became a member of the church or tried to, he was rejected the first time around because they asked him this question, what has Jesus Christ done for us? And of course the kid was nervous, but he said, well, I think that Jesus has done a great deal for us, but I cannot think of anything in particular right now. So they said, okay, we need to wait.
And by the way, when you become a member of Moody Church, if you give that answer, we'll ask you to wait as well before you become a member. But the next year he did become a member. Now he wanted to go to Chicago. He's only 19 years of age, but he has this great desire to go west. So for $5 he buys a train ticket and comes here to Chicago because he has another uncle who works in the shoe business. And when Moody came here, it was with one desire and that was to earn $100,000, which in the 1850s was huge.
We're talking millions in our money. And he set about to do it, but he also joined or became a member, yes, of the Plymouth Street Congregational Church here in the city. And he asked if he could teach Sunday school and they said, no, you have to understand he was uneducated.
His grammar was atrocious. And so they said, no, but they said, you can get some of your young people in the church. So he rented four pews in those days. You rented pews and he filled them with these kids. And the other members of the church were not too happy because of some of the smells that came from those four pews and some of the rowdiness of the kids.
But Moody said, it's okay if I don't teach Sunday school as long as I can bring some of these young people to others who can teach them. There was a great revival going on here in Chicago at that time. We're in 1858 Metropolitan Hall, which no longer exists. It's at the right across the street from the Thompson Center.
I checked this out years ago. Metropolitan Hall was filled for prayer every noon. I went across the street to the Historical Society many years ago and looked at the old microfilms of the Chicago newspapers to see what God did. And that's a phenomenal story. Moody attended these meetings and he wrote back to his mother and said, Oh mother, I go to meeting every night.
Pray that it will continue until every knee is bowed. But Moody then began to work at a mission which was located where Moody Bible Institute is today, but he was still unhappy. And the reason is because even this mission did not minister to the poorest of the poor. So he went to what was known in those days as the sands. The sands was an area along the Lake Michigan. This was the worst part of Chicago. It was known as a little hell. Chicagoans didn't go there.
Even the police only gave it scant attention. Someone said regarding this place that it can be described with bad women and worse men who had fallen too low to feel at home anywhere else. And that's where Moody began to minister because he said, nobody here will complain if I don't know how to speak properly and if I don't know how to read. So he rented a saloon, an abandoned saloon and had meetings there every Sunday evening for these kids.
The kids didn't want to come. So he used sugar candy. He used pony rides to try to entice them with various contests.
He also used pennies that he would give them and eventually the kids began to come. Now he was criticized. He was criticized because the people said, you're bribing kids to come to your Sunday school. And he defended it and said, what difference is that than having a wonderful choir and a beautiful architecture to try to entice people to come to church. Moody didn't care even though he was criticized for what was known as candy missionary sugar that he was using with the children. A man from Peoria by the name of Reynolds came to visit the Sunday school and he said that there was Moody and these are his words with a little Negro boy on his lap and next to candlelight and Moody was trying to read the story in the Bible of the prodigal son but stumbling over the words and missing some because he didn't know them. That ministry began to grow until there were 300 children. He needed more space. So then he moved to what was known as the North Market Hall, the North Market Hall which held about 1000 or 1500 kids.
Now here's the point. Moody knew that in order to get these kids who were so rowdy and so rough he was going to have to train them and break them in something like you do wild horses. I mean they were the kids were doing somersaults and all kinds of stuff. So what he did is he had a regimen that he put them through in those meetings and it was basically you sing one song then you have a Bible study then you allow for rowdy time. Everybody has rowdy time for a few minutes. It's true and then what he do is it do it over again song rowdy time Bible study. He kept this up for two hours convincing other teachers to come and help him of course to do this and and pretty soon the kids were disciplined enough that he could actually divide them into separate Sunday school classes.
That's what he did. His Sunday school because of enticements, you see he was called crazy Moody for a reason. I mean you know he went to the sands, his pony, he did crazy things.
I could tell you some of those. I may have time for one or two today but you see the Sunday school began to grow and now we're in 1860 Abraham Lincoln is elected president of the United States and he is here in Chicago on his way to Washington to be inaugurated and Lincoln is willing to leave a dinner party early to go to visit the Sunday school and that's what Lincoln did. The president said that he will come as long as he doesn't have to speak but before he left Moody said if Mr. Lincoln desires to say a word as he goes out of course all ears will be open. So Lincoln turned around and gave a brief address ending with these words. With close attention he's speaking now to all of the children that are there.
With close attention to your teachers and hard work to put into practice what you learn from them some one of you may also become president of the United States in due time like myself as you have had better opportunities than I had. After the president visited the Sunday school D.L. Moody noticed a difference instead of people calling him crazy Moody they now referred to him as brother Moody and that was an improvement. It was during this time that D.L. Moody had a huge struggle on his hands.
It was an internal struggle. You see he was making lots of money. Imagine he was making five thousand dollars a year now selling real estate. The idea of banking a hundred thousand would certainly be in reach if he were to stick with the program but internally there was this battle because he really fell to that he needed to go into full-time work and others said it but he said he would not listen to it. He he had no time for the idea that he should leave his business to go to full-time work and it was during that period of time that an incident happened that will teach us the first transforming lesson in D.L.
Moody's life. It happened this way he had a class of girls that was so rowdy that when he spoke to them and tried to teach them they shouted in his face. He gave them to another teacher and essentially the same thing happened and this teacher came to him and said I'm dying. I have blood in my lungs.
I'm very weak. I have to go back east by train to die and to be with my mother and and he said but my burden is that none of these girls have trusted Christ as savior. So Moody said well let's take my carriage and and let's visit them and and so they did. The man was very weak in fact he could scarcely do it but they went to the first girl whose name was Mary. They explained the gospel that Jesus loves you and he died for sinners and you can receive him and Mary got saved. They went to the second girl and the same thing happened over a period of 10 days they visited these girls and at the end of 10 days every one of them had come to saving faith in Christ.
Now D.L. Moody wanted to have a farewell service for the dying teacher and he invited the girls to come and at the end Moody knelt and the teacher knelt and they prayed for one another but now I want you to hear in his own words Moody's account. He says he prayed for me as superintendent of the school after he prayed I prayed and when I was about to rise to my surprise one of those scholars isn't that sweet he's calling these girls scholars they're about 12 years old. One of these scholars began to pray and she too prayed for the superintendent.
Before we rose from our knees every one of the girls had prayed. It seemed as if heaven and earth came together in that room the next day I went back to the store but to my great amazement I lost all ambition for the business. D.L. Moody said that after that the idea of earning you know stockpiling a hundred thousand dollars meant absolutely nothing to him. He said that this was so transforming it lit a fire in his heart that never went out. He prayed later and said oh God let me die rather than miss the blessing I had that evening and that's when the decision was made that he would leave business behind and he would now give the rest of his life to children and to the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
What a remarkable story of devotion to the Lord. D.L. Moody said he'd have never made this decision to leave business were it not for that event. Now let's just think for a moment what if D.L. Moody had said yes to money. The first lesson that we learned from him is he said no to success as it is generally defined. He said no to that and he said yes to significance, eternal significance.
But what if D.L. Moody had said hey I'm going the money route. Could you imagine no Moody Bible Institute and instead of a Moody Bible Institute maybe we'd have a Moody hotel because this was the day when many millionaires were made. Remember this was the day of Marshall Fields. This was the day of Mr. Palmer of the Palmer house.
This was the day of Cyrus McCormick who made farm machinery. This was the day. Now wouldn't that be something no Moody Bible Institute but a Moody hotel. No Moody church but a Moody shoe shop and then we'd be stuck possibly with just a Moody pub instead of a Moody publisher. Wouldn't that ever be awful? Can you imagine that?
D.L. Moody decided that God would be first and people would be more important than earning money. Parenthesis he raised more than 1.8 million dollars in his lifetime for various projects.
None of it stuck to his fingers. None of it. He lived an austere life of poverty so that the gospel could go out because once you have had the joy of seeing people's lives transformed by the gospel nothing can ever take its place again. We have a marvelous heritage. Let's think for a moment about our own church here at the Moody church. Now how wonderful it is that when we built the Christian Life Center that the second floor is totally devoted to children. And of course my friend you're going to have to listen to Running to Win next time to find out more about the Moody church.
But ultimately my vision is much greater than that. It is for you, your church, your ministry and your opportunity to get the gospel of Jesus Christ to as many people as possible. I'm holding in my hands a new devotional. It's a unique devotional. It's actually a book on science 365 pages with color photographs that have to do with showing the uniqueness of God's creation. And of course we find out that in the book of Job God referred to a number of different animals.
Now if you are reading this devotional on May 14th you would read about bloodhounds. I find this fascinating. They can pick up a scent that is 12 days old. But the question is asked how does evolution explain the nasal chamber with 300 million scent receptors? You know I read this and I smile and I just rejoice in the fact that evolution cannot answer these questions.
All of these animals are uniquely created. So each day you'll be introduced to a new aspect of God's creation and in this way your worship will be enhanced. For a gift of any amount we're making it available for you so that you will have it January 1st. Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Now the title of the book is Without Excuse.
It's based on the book of Romans where we read that even those who don't have special revelation are still without excuse because of creation. Increase your faith in God's creative activity. Let me give you that contact info again because this is a matter of some urgency. Go to rtwoffer.com or pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9318. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 N. LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. D.L. Moody was determined to do the will of God. Next time the evidence of a life wholly committed to do just that. Thanks for listening. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.
