Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Jesus never lived like the King He was. Neither did D.L.
Moody. Both had a laser-like focus on doing the will of God. Both lived simple lives.
Both had few possessions. What mattered to Jesus and to Moody was people, that they might hear the way of salvation. 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, when you think about the legacy left by D.L. Moody, have you ever thought about what legacy you're leaving for the years ahead at Moody Church?
Well, Dave, I'm going to answer your question in just a moment, but before I do, there's something that you hinted at in your intro. I've been to the grave of D.L. Moody in Northfield, Massachusetts, and on his tombstone is his favorite verse. The world passes away and all of its lusts, but he who does the will of God abides forever. And certainly, when you think about it, comes back to the legacy of D.L.
Moody. It abides now, and it will abide forever. In my case, if people remember me, I trust that what comes to mind is, they will say, he preached the gospel. If that were my legacy, I would be most satisfied.
All of grace, all undeserved, how God took a farm boy from Saskatchewan, Canada and gave me all the opportunities that I have had. May I ever be remembered as someone who preached the gospel. Well, at the end of this message, I'm going to be giving you some very important contact info because you want a new devotional beginning January 1st. I think you're going to be blessed by the opportunity that you will have to receive a unique devotional, always focused on God's creative activity.
You stay tuned. D.L. Moody decided that God would be first and people would be more important than earning money. Parenthesis, he raised more than one point eight 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, we're thinking one hundred and thirty years after Moody began what today we call the Moody Church. And he died in eighteen ninety nine.
So we're more than one hundred years after his death. How wonderful it is that when we built the Christian Life Center that the second floor is totally devoted to children. And now we have taken the unprecedented step of stepping out in faith and saying that we are hiring and bringing on staff a wonderful man who is going to be the head of the family ministry, making sure that in every department of our family ministries we can say to the city of Chicago that if you want to go to a place that is not only family friendly, but family safe and a place where you know that you'll be welcomed and helped. Let it be the Moody Church.
That's our desire and that's our vision. There's a woman whom all of us know who had her own experience, something like Dwight L. Moody. She was in the advertising business.
Her name is Danita Travis. And her desire was to have an award in advertising. But God led her into children's ministry. And so as a result of her faith and vision, beginning here and then going to Cabrini Green, recognizing that we have presently in the city of Chicago our own sands area, the poorest of the poor, those that are most under resourced. We began then that ministry in Cabrini Green and it has expanded to Altgeld and to the Austin neighborhood. Let me say in parenthesis, this is a very expensive ministry because Danita rightly saw that you can't do what she wants to see done under the good hand of God simply by volunteers.
There are nearly 50 people on the payroll, many of whom, most of whom are actually full time. But what a transforming ministry this is for those neighborhoods. And what an opportunity for hundreds of volunteers to be involved in the lives of children. You know, people who are 90 years old and over have been asked this question. The question that they are asked is, what would you do over again? What are your regrets? Almost all of them said something like this. They said, we wish that we had spent more time investing ourselves in that which will live beyond us.
My friend, when you are involved in the ministry of children, leading them to Christ and taking them by the hand and taking them where they need to go, you can be sure that you are investing heavily in that which will outlive you. D.L. Moody.
Yeah, you can clap if you want. D.L. Moody has been in heaven for what to us appears to be a long time.
So I don't think he's at all knowing what's going on here on earth. But this week, as I was thinking about this, I thought, you know, if D.L. Moody knew, if he knew what we were doing here at the church, all we can to have a ministry to children.
If D.L. Moody knew about by the hand, the club for kids, which in many respects far, far exceeds any of his original vision and work. If he knew that we were raising funds for the redemption project to help build an orphanage in India for girls who are being rescued out of sexual slavery, D.L. Moody would say, yeah, go for it. That's my kind of ministry. And that's what God is calling us to do today is to follow that legacy.
Now, very quickly, in 1862, D.L. Moody married Emma Revell. Good idea. D.L. Moody had all of the characteristics of ADD, attention deficit disorder. I'm serious. Flighty, patient, began many ministries, didn't want to continue them, but always recruited others. Great at recruiting.
Everybody. Recruit. Well, you can use your gifts over here.
You can do what I'm doing. He'd show them how and then he'd move on. And sometimes doing, yeah, silly things. I mean, I'm talking about finding a girl that he invites to his Sunday school and next week he sees her and she wasn't there. She sees him and she begins to run. He chases her down the street, up an alley, through a saloon, into her apartment. She is under the bed.
He pulls her out by her leg and talks to her and to her mother and leads the family to Jesus Christ. By the way, by the way, don't do that or you'll be arrested, I can assure you. All right. They didn't call him crazy Moody for anything, for no reason. You know, the Bible says, let your light shine.
D.L. Moody's light was basically a blowtorch, actually. That's the kind of man he was. And Emma Revell, and by the way, her brother began, you know, the Revell publishing company. Emma was his balance wheel. That's what he called her. She somehow helped him with his schedule. She answered his mail.
She became, in effect, his chief of staff, keeping him from people who did nothing but waste his time. And certainly, I mean, she saved Moody Bible Institute. I mean, there was such a disagreement as to how the school was to be founded. Deal, Moody resigned. I'm out of here. You guys, you guys can't get along.
I want nothing to do with it. She writes a 19 page letter explaining Dwight's frustration, and she encourages him to telegraph that he is rescinding his resignation. And that's how come Moody Bible Institute exists today. Remarkable woman. 1864, two years after he is married, 1864, you have the beginning of the Illinois Street Church, the Illinois Street Church, which, of course, is our date for the beginning of the Moody Church. Now, there was another event that transformed Moody. If the first event was the salvation of these girls when Moody said, my aims are too small, aiming at money is too low, I have a grander purpose for which to live. The joy of seeing these young people come to know Christ as savior. The second event happened seven years after the Illinois Street Church was founded.
You have the great Chicago fire. Deal Moody is preaching in North Market Hall. His sermon is, what will you do with Jesus who is called the Christ?
And then he tells the people, think about it and come back next week. But before the meeting was over, there were fire sirens and bells were ringing and Chicago was burning. It was a wooden city in those days.
Hundreds of miles even of wooden sidewalks, three and a half miles of the city of Chicago, three and a half square miles of the city of Chicago burned 90,000 people without homes, 300 people dead. And Moody never saw that crowd again. And he said to himself, I've learned one lesson to always press the claims of Christ upon people because you do not know whether or not there will be a tomorrow. If the first lesson was the need to trade his idea of success in for significance, for eternal significance, the second lesson was to concentrate only on the gospel. Before the fire, Moody was involved in so many different things that he couldn't focus on the one thing to which God had called him. Eventually he would say, this one thing I do and not these 40 things I dabble in.
Dale Moody was constantly concerned about the one thing. He kept the main thing, the main thing, which is the gospel. And to him, the Chicago fire was kind of a template. It was a recognition that this is the way in which the world really is. The world is burning and people are going to hell.
And our responsibility is to rescue people from the fire, so to speak. Moody has been frequently criticized for not having quote a social conscience, but that's not true. If we had time, I would tell you about all of the things that he did socially. Maybe in the next message, I can mention his trips to the civil war and the scenes there and how he helped the soldiers and all of the things that Dale Moody was involved in. Someone has well said that there were two fires in Chicago.
One fire was the fire which eventually was contained, the great Chicago fire, but there was another fire going on in Chicago and that was the fire that had been lit in D.L. Moody's heart. He was passionately involved in soul winning for the rest of his life and he did it in his large rallies. Next time I'm going to tell you that this man, this is unbelievable, but there are 60 biographies written about Moody, but all of the writers say that it is conservative to say that D.L. Moody preached in his lifetime to 100, 100 million people. Imagine that without a PA system, without jet planes, and this church was dedicated in 1925.
D.L. Moody died in 1899, so if you do the math, you know that he never preached in this particular building, but D.L. Moody is the one you see who has given the inspiration to the great ministries that we think about when we even think of the name Moody, but on that original church, 1964, there was a sign that said these words, ever welcome in this house of God are the strangers and the poor. Moody never lost sight of the poor despite his fame. Did you know that that sign is also on our church?
If you've never seen it, let me tell you that do it before you leave today. You go out the Clark Street side and you find the cornerstone and above the cornerstone, there is this plaque, the D.L. Moody Church and Sunday School, ever welcome to this house of God are the strangers and the poor. Isn't it interesting that a few years ago when a number of us met together to decide the focus of Moody Church and who we really were, we came up with a 14-word statement and we call it the promise statement that Moody Church is a trusted place where anyone can connect with God and others. We're trying to carry on in our own way the legacy and the vision of D.L. Moody. A number of years ago when we did a survey, we discovered that we have present with us about 56 different nationalities, that is to say, countries of origin here at the Moody Church.
Let me tell you about last Wednesday. I was leading prayer meeting and the thought occurred to me as we were singing one of the hymns, wouldn't it be interesting to give praise to God in different languages? There weren't a whole lot of people there, it wasn't as large as we'd like to see prayer meeting be, but we began to ask people to identify themselves who have a different country of origin or who speak a different language. And then what we did while all of us were standing is people gave praise to God one after another in the different languages.
A young woman who was near the front, I asked her to keep count and she thought that it was about 14 or 15 different languages within this small group. I mean it was blessed. We had Korean, we had Japanese, we had Hungarian, we had Albanian, we had Chinese, we had Spanish, and it ended with someone who has a different country of origin giving God praise in German of all things, a language that I think God also understands.
I think some of you maybe missed all that. I won't repeat it, but think about it for a moment. Imagine in this small group, 15 different tongues, 15 different languages giving praise to God.
You've often heard me say I want Moody Church to look like heaven where people come from every tongue, every nation, in every language, in every culture, all of whom give praise and honor to God as Lord and as Savior. What does all this mean for us? A couple of things. First of all, very important for us to realize, two lessons. Number one, what we need to do is to be done with success the way in which the world defines it. And what we need to do is make decisions that are going to give us eternal significance. Jesus put it this way. Jesus said that those who save their lives, those who play it safe, those who are self-absorbed, those whose goals are definable in terms of this world, those who say I'm going to earn money, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that. If you save your life, Jesus said, you lose it. But if you lose your life for my sake, he says, and for the sake of the gospel, he said, you will find it. There's a different way also that Jesus put it. He said, except a kernel of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abides alone.
But if it dies, it bears much fruit. In the next message, I'm going to tell you about something that happened to D.L. Moody that is so revolutionary that if we followed his path, we also would transform this city as God began to work in his life and in his heart. But one thing is sure, there came a time in D.L. Moody's life when he died to everything that D.L.
Moody wanted to do. And he said, he has only one ambition and that is to do God's work and to spread the good news of the gospel, which really is the second lesson. Our focus must always be the main thing, the main thing being the gospel of Jesus Christ. Of course, we are involved in holistic ministries. Of course, we help and we feed the poor and we help clothe the naked. And we we do all of those things that are so much an outgrowth of our faith in Jesus Christ.
And we build orphanages and we raise money for children's ministries. But at the end of the day, we know what the end game is. We know it is the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And I could not be true to D.L. Moody nor true to the scriptures if I just left you here today without appealing to you that you if you've never trusted Christ as savior, that you would come to know him, his forgiveness, his love and his matchless grace. It is available to all those who savingly believe on him.
D.L. Moody began being an orator only by telling Bible stories to children. That's where it all began. But he developed his ability to speak and he was quite a preacher. Someone said of Moody, he was a plain man who preached the plain gospel plainly.
That's the way to describe him. His sermons had imagination. They had immediacy. They were sermons that help people to get excited about what it was that Moody was preaching about. And so what I'd like to do today is to conclude with just a paragraph of D.L. Moody's messages, just one paragraph of one of his messages. And I conclude this way as an appeal to you. Hear this not as the words of D.L. Moody. Hear it not as the words, my words to you, but think of it in relationship to your soul and your eternal salvation. Here we go.
And by the way, I'm not impersonating him. I don't know how D.L. Moody spoke, although we have about ten words of D.L. Moody on a recording. Can you believe that? 1899 people were beginning to record voices and we have that in our possession. But here, listen to the words of D.L.
Moody. I can imagine when Christ said to that little band around him, go ye into all the world and preach the gospel. Peter said, Lord, do you really mean that we're to go back to Jerusalem and preach the gospel to those men who murdered you?
Yes, said Christ, go. Hunt up that man that spat in my face and tell him that he may have a seat in my kingdom. Yes, Peter, go find that man that made the cruel crown of thorns and placed it on my brow and tell him I will have a crown ready for him when he comes into my kingdom and there will be no thorns in it. Hunt up that man that took a reed and brought it down over the cruel thorns driving them into my brow and tell him that I will put a scepter in his hand and he shall rule over the nations of the earth if he's willing to accept salvation.
Search for the man that drove the spear into my side and tell him that there is a nearer way to my heart than that. Tell him I forgive him freely and that he can be saved if he will accept salvation as a gift. Those are the kinds of words preached by Dwight L. Moody. I say to you today, no matter where you are, I appeal to you.
I wish DL Moody were here to do it, but he's not. I appeal to you in the name of Jesus. If you've never received him as savior, he can forgive you. You come with your shame, you come with your regrets, and you even come with your unanswered questions, but you come to receive. You come to be forgiven and you come to be transformed by the same gospel that changed the life of Moody, changed the life of thousands and thousands of children, and the same gospel that is still doing it today. You come to Christ. You know, I've read a number of DL Moody's sermons and what they had was a sense of immediacy, imagery, conviction that ripped people's hearts, how effective he was as an evangelist. But I'm holding in my hands a very special devotional.
It's really based on science. 365 full color pages that you can read each day of the year, and in doing so, you will end up worshiping God regarding the uniqueness of his creative activity. Now, in the book of Job, for example, God talked about goats. He spoke about the wild donkey, the wild ox, the ostrich.
This is taking a look at God's creation, not just animals, but astronomy, anatomy. It'll be a fascinating book for you to have. Here's what you do. Go to rtwoffer.com. It's rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. I'm going to be giving you that contact info again because I believe that this devotional that is so unique is going to be a blessing to you 365 days of the year. Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Come to an understanding of why it is that evolution simply cannot answer the big questions. I'll see you next time.
