Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. How is it that a shoe salesman with a grade school education could eventually preach to enormous crowds on two continents?
The only explanation? God chose to use DL Moody to reach vast multitudes with the Gospel. Today, a vow made and a vow kept. 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, getting an advanced degree now seems mandatory to get a decent job. Why do we place such value on education when God seems to use people of simple backgrounds?
You know, Dave, I look at it a little differently. The reason that Moody was not well educated is he did not have the opportunity to be well educated. So there's nothing wrong with being well educated and getting degrees.
As a matter of fact, the Apostle Paul was one of the most educated men of his time, and God used him to write books such as the book of Romans. So we should get all the education we possibly can. But this is a good thing to emphasize. If all that you have is a full head and an empty heart, you have missed the purpose of your education.
Speaking of education, you know, there's one way that we can be educated every single day of the year. I'm holding in my hands a very special devotional, and I'll tell you why. It is really 365 full color pages on issues of science and God's creation.
When I read this book, I have to smile because it really shows that there's no way that evolution can account for life, for astronomy, and for other subjects. For a gift of any amount, we're making it available for you. Here's what you can do.
Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Enjoy the creative activity of God every day of the coming year. So the question before us is rather simple. Why is it that God so mightily used Dwight Lyman Moody? Fifth grade education, came to Chicago as a shoe salesman intending to make $100,000, ends up working in the poorest part of the city with children, and then eventually becomes an evangelist where tens of millions of people flocked to hear him speak. He was also admired by presidents. Last time I told you about how Abraham Lincoln came to his Sunday school class, and President Grant sat on the platform in one of his campaigns, D.L. Moody's campaigns in Philadelphia. D.L. Moody shares with Billy Graham the distinction of being one of the most famous evangelists of all time.
How did it happen? Here you have a man who in many respects had nothing in his background to suggest that God would use him this mightily. He was the kind of person who was humble. He was the kind of person who eventually turned out to be a great speaker, even though education wise, he never did catch up.
Spurgeon, the great British preacher, said that when D.L. Moody preached, he could pronounce the word Mesopotamia in two syllables. It is often said that when Moody was reading the scripture, he'd get to a word he couldn't pronounce, and so he'd stop and he'd talk for a moment and then he'd pick up on the other side of the word. Who was this man, Dwight Lyman Moody? This remarkable man who founded the Moody Bible Institute and the Moody Church, was president of the YMCA, traveled to the scene of the Civil War at least four times and had campaigns, had campaigns here in America, all throughout the United States, perhaps 36 cities at least I counted. Who was D.L. Moody?
First of all, before I tell you a little bit about what God did in the British Isles through his ministry, D.L. Moody of course didn't do it alone. He knew the power of song.
Now D.L. Moody himself was not able to sing. He sang, but he was tone deaf. Have you ever been beside someone who is tone deaf, by the way, and they love to sing? What it sounds like is a note on a piano that's supposed to be silent at that particular moment.
But D.L. Moody knew that it was song that touched people's hearts. When he heard a song like the sands of time are sinking or rock of ages, he was driven to tears just listening to the words. And so he wanted to have someone who would join him in helping with singing because D.L. Moody believed that singing not only honored God, but it also elicited a response of all those who participated in song. He also knew that people would forget his sermons. And so he said, but if we teach them a song, they will remember that song for as long as they live. So one day when he was in Indianapolis, there was this meeting going on and there was a man who was praying too long.
D.L. Moody was a man who was in a hurry and he was very impatient. And he said one time when a person was praying too long, if this gentleman would cut something at the beginning of his prayer and cut it off at the end and put some fire in the middle, he'd be better off. When this man finally finished his prayer, there was a man there, a Presbyterian minister, who said to someone sitting next to him, whose name was Iris Sankey, he said, Sankey, when this is over, why don't you stand up and sing? So Sankey did. And he sang, there is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins.
So D.L. Moody went to Sankey later and said, who are you? What is your name? Are you married? Where do you work? And Sankey said, well, I work for the revenue service. I have a government job, which I enjoy very much.
And why are you asking? And Moody said, well, you're going to have to give up your job because you're coming with me, he said, and you're going to be my song leader. Took six months for Sankey to agree, but eventually he did.
He moved from Pennsylvania to Chicago, and this became his headquarters. And he and D.L. Moody traveled together for 25 years. It is impossible to over exaggerate the impact of Sankey's ministry in the great campaigns that I shall tell you about in just a moment. As a matter of fact, as a result of their singing, they came up with a hymnal called Sacred Songs and Solos. This hymnal and the American counterpart, which was called Gospel Songs, it is estimated that these hymnals, they sold between 50 and 80 million copies all throughout the British Isles. Everyone had them in their own.
Let's fast forward. Three years ago, I was leading a tour to the sites of the Reformation in England and Scotland. And there I was in St. Giles Church where John Knox used to preach.
And I met someone there who knew something about history. And she said, oh, yes, she said, Moody and Sankey, she said they had a great impact on Scotland and in England. And then later on that day, before we went through the Edinburgh Castle, I said to the tour guide that I was the pastor of Moody Church. Oh, he said, and he kept coming back to Moody, coming back to it. And he said, I have to tell you why. He said, my grandmother had a copy of the Moody Sankey hymnal on her piano and she used to play all of those Gospel songs.
The impact was enormous. But how do I tell you the story of how God used Dwight Lyman Moody? I want to give you just one little vignette, one little example, and we're going to use as our example the crusade that took place in Great Britain in 1873. It was really Moody's fourth trip to the United Kingdom. 1873, he arrives there and he is under the impression, sometimes Moody didn't plan too well, he's under the impression that there are people in Britain who are expecting him and who are preparing meetings. He lands with Sankey and his wife and discovers that nobody has planned anything. In fact, the two men he was depending upon had died.
A third man did nothing, had no plans whatever. So Moody said, as they were sitting in the hotel wondering what to do next, that God has closed the door here in Britain and if he doesn't open it, we shall not be the one who opens it and we shall simply return back to the United States. But he remembered that he had an invitation to preach in York. He had received the information but he had not even responded by letter because he was not interested actually in preaching in York. But nonetheless, he had the letter with him and so they looked up the man and now we're talking about communication in the 1800s. It took several days to connect and the man connected back to him and said, Moody, you have to let me know in advance when you're going to come but we are interested in having you. Moody immediately sent a telegram back and said, we are going to arrive in York tomorrow. Let's begin the meetings on Sunday.
And they did. The thing that happened in those meetings is that people were convicted of their sins. People began to understand that the gospel was for sinners and D.L. Moody, as he preached, he kept emphasizing that. Later on, after he was in York, he went to Newcastle and D.L. Moody was the kind of person who loved to do things spontaneously. And in Newcastle he was preaching to a large crowd and there was a woman with a baby and the baby, as babies sometimes do, was screaming and everybody was staring at her because you know how annoying a baby can be in a big meeting.
And D.L. Moody saw the situation and immediately on the spot he said, we're going to have a meeting for mothers and the only ones who are going to be able to attend the meeting are mothers who have babies. And so what they did is they sent all of the messengers throughout all of the parts of the city and they brought all the mothers that they could possibly find and they had a meeting with mothers and their babies. Somebody said it wasn't a meeting, it was a squealing.
But D.L. Moody preached and Sankey sang and the women wept to think that they were being included in this special play. From Newcastle he went then to Edinburgh and now he begins to receive worldwide fame because in Edinburgh seven weeks he's preaching the gospel to large crowds. Somebody said when he went to Glasgow, and this is regarding Glasgow now, he was born on a surge week after week through a bleak winter into the spring.
The meetings continued in churches, the city hall and at last at the Kibble Palace the enormous glass exhibition building generally called the Crystal Palace. On foot by horse, tram by train, in trim carriages and creaking cabs people came. From shipyards and mills and grimy tenements where the air was heavy with soot and bitter winds swept cheerless streets.
From the sumptuous houses, from middle class homes where sacred songs and solos that is the hymnal was on every cottage piano. People were thoroughly aroused either to opposition or sympathy. And he is there in Glasgow week after week, night after night in the Crystal Palace. Now you need to understand that when he left in the final meeting there in Glasgow it is estimated that between 30 and 40,000 people gathered as an overflow crowd. And they gathered in the botanical gardens and D.L. Moody stood on the roof of a house and he preached to them and everyone, almost everyone was able to hear him. By now his sermons were printed in newspapers around the world sometimes front page in their entirety the media was printing everything that he said.
And then after that he went to London and he was in London for about four months night after night filling halls and auditoriums and theaters and stadiums and the people simply couldn't get enough of this man. When he was there he preached the gospel. Now the people in Great Britain had sort of thought that the good news of the gospel is that God received saints and Moody was there to tell them that God loved sinners. And this was news to a lot of people because they had bought into some of the extremes of what is known as Calvinism where only the elect are saved which the Bible does teach but they had so emphasized that to the exclusion of whosoever will that people were glad to know that God actually did love sinners.
One day when Moody was preaching he said these words, a young man told me last night that he was too great a sinner to be saved. Why there the very men Christ came after? This man receiveth sinners and eateth with them. The only charge they could bring against Christ down here was that he was receiving bad men.
They are the very kind of men he is willing to receive. All you've got to do is to prove to me that you are a sinner and I will prove to you that you've got a savior. And the greater the sinner the greater the need of a savior. You say your heart is hard well then of course you want Christ to soften it.
You can't do it yourself. The harder your heart the more need you have of Christ. If your sins rise up before you like a dark mountain bear in mind that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin. There is no sin so big or so corrupt or so vile but that the blood of Jesus Christ can cover it. So I preach the old gospel again. The son of man has come to seek and to save that which was lost. That's the way D.L. Moody preached.
Remember as I told you last time a plain man preaching the plain gospel and preaching it plainly. London made him of course even more famous than Glasgow and Edinburgh. By the time Moody returns and he had been in the British Isles for nearly three years. By the time he returns of course he's met by all of the newspaper people and the media of that era because Moody was now known around the world and he basically told them he had nothing to tell them except that he needed to go to Northfield to get some rest which is very understandable. London alone the estimate is he had between 100 and about 150 meetings the estimate is with 2.5 million people in London hearing him directly.
What a legacy. Now I have to tell you about the city of Chicago. He comes back and he begins to have crusades in all of the major cities of the United States and also in Canada.
I counted up at least 36. He's six months in St. Louis. He's in Boston twice. He's in Philadelphia and when he was there he was there months at a time. That was the remarkable thing and people kept streaming to hear him. Fifth grade education but preaching the gospel and he had that ability to do it and they came and they listened.
What about the city of Chicago? Well in 1893 you have the World's Fair here in Chicago and D.L. Moody always was looking for opportunities to preach the gospel. He was very creative always thinking about how can we strategically reach our era and reach our time and so D.L. Moody thought of something. There were some Christians who wanted to just boycott the World's Fair because they said it's open on Sunday and Moody said let's not have a boycott.
Let's do something positive. So what he did is he recruited pastors from Germany and France and Poland and all of the countries of Europe and he brought them over here because he wanted everyone who came to the World's Fair to be able to hear the gospel in their own language and then he recruited about 200 evangelists and Bible teachers. Moody Bible Institute was about six years old at the time so he took them from his training school and he began to put them in ministry and they hired tents to be built and they were in theaters and churches and everywhere preaching the gospel and it is believed that tens of thousands of people were saved in 1893 during the time of the World's Fair.
What a man he was. Now we still haven't answered the question though why did God so mightily use D.L. Moody? Ultimately we only know that that's in God's providence and in his sovereignty because we can't pry into his diary and find out why but we do know that there were some things that D.L. Moody did that gave God much liberty and much joy in blessing him. If you were here last time you'll remember hearing me say that first of all he turned away from success to significance. When he said no to a hundred thousand dollars when he said no to making money because of those girls that were converted in that Sunday school class Moody said that from now on money can't tempt me and money never did tempt him after that. He had received a taste of what it was to lead people to Christ. There was a second decision that Moody made and that is to go from many things to one thing not to these 40 things I dabble in but this one thing I do passionately driven to see people come to faith and trust in Jesus Christ and that's all that really mattered he was consumed with it but there's another reason that God used him and that was that Moody understood in ways perhaps that we do not what is called the filling of the Holy Spirit. When he was here in Chicago there were two women who continually prayed that he might have the anointing that he might have the filling of the spirit and Moody used to tell them don't pray for me pray for the unsaved but they continued to pray for him anyway. After the great Chicago fire that we talked about last time Moody was in New York trying to raise funds to build the new church and when he was there he had an experience of the Holy Spirit that he never forgot. He was walking down Wall Street and suddenly it seemed as if the presence and the joy and the love of God came upon him in a way that was gripping.
As a matter of fact he had to ask a friend and said can I just stay at your place and give me a room so that I can just be alone. He had such an encounter with God at that time that it seemed to him as if God didn't stay his hand if God wouldn't he might even die there on the spot in the presence of the Lord God. Deal Moody never forgot that time he said he could scarcely talk about it but he knew now what it was like to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
He said the difference was this it was previously as if I was carrying water with a bucket and I was tired. He said after I had this experience in New York it was as if I was being born along by a river and he referred to the words of Jesus who said that he who believes in me from within him shall flow rivers of living water that there is such a thing as an artesian well which can bubble up within us the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Every Christian receives the Holy Spirit at conversion. We are indwelt with the Spirit in fact Paul says if you do not have the Spirit you are none of his so we all have the Holy Spirit but there are many people who never experienced the fullness of the Holy Spirit. They don't understand the work of the Spirit as the Spirit of God leads people along. Now there were some folks who believed that Moody was really a Pentecostal because he experienced the blessing and the fullness of the Spirit but D.L.
Moody never did talk in tongues that was never a part of what he was into. How do we interpret this experience of the Spirit? Should we seek it? Well yes we should first of all seek God and if God then is pleased to give us an experience like that that's up to him. It's not our responsibility to seek an experience as such but as we seek God and as we are pure before God, God may indeed choose to anoint us in a very special way for whatever ministry we have no matter what our vocation is we may experience the fullness of the Spirit.
One of the reasons that many of us don't is because in the Bible purity and the fullness of the Holy Spirit are related and for many Christians their cup of joy has sprung a leak because sin causes that to happen and there are many Christians who have no joy at all they are like a cup half full trying desperately to spill over but they don't have enough for themselves much less for anyone else but D.L. Moody entered into the fullness of the Holy Spirit in a way that was indeed remarkable. One day somebody said to him D.L. Moody what you are doing has to be a work of God because I see no connection between all of the things that are happening in your meetings I see no connection between that and you and D.L. Moody said that's true and I hope it always stays that way. Isn't it refreshing to hear about a life that has been so fervently lived for the glory of God?
Whenever I hear about D.L. Moody and know something about his history and all that he accomplished my own heart is revived. Well the new year is almost here and I'm holding in my hands a book that we think will be of tremendous blessing 365 days of the year. Let me ask you a question is there someone in your life who believes in evolution if so this book is for them.
This book is really a book on science but very readable intending to be read by the common person just like you and me. For a gift of any amount we're making it available for you so that you make sure that you have it by January 1st. Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337.
Learn about the animals also learn about astronomy learn about your own body the uniqueness of God's creation. Here's what you do right now go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. You can write to us at Running to Win 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard Chicago Illinois 60614. God got a hold of D.L. Moody and redirected his purpose from the business of the world to the business of the kingdom of God. Next time a final look at D.L. Moody a hero of faith. Thanks for listening for Pastor Erwin Lutzer this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.
