Lessons from the Life and Death of D. L. Moody

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D. L. MOODY

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Rev. R. a. .ITORREY

Superintendent of the Bible Institute Chicago

New York Chicago Toronto

Fleming H. Revell Company

Publishers of Evangelical Literature

Copyright, igoo

BY

Fleming H. Revell Company.

Lessons From the Life and Death of D. L. Moody

“By the grace of God I am what I am: and His grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all; yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.” — I Cor. XV. lo.

This passage of Scripture sums up the life of the Apostle Paul in a single sentence. It also sums up, describes, explains and interprets the life of D. L. Moody. Mr. Moody differed in many notable respects from any other man of the century. This verse explains wherein he differed and why he differed. He has labored more than we all, and accomplished more than we all; but it was altogether the grace of God that made him to differ. The grace of God bestowed upon him “was not in vain.” He let grace have its perfect work. The grace bestowed upon us is often in vain. We will not accept it in its fullness and let it work out its glorious consummation. 3 The life and death of Mr. Moody are full of lessons. Lessons that it would take volumes to fully recount. We must confine ourselves to some of those that are most striking and fundamental.

I. The first lesson is the great possibilities that are open through the grace of God, to a poor, uneducated, and spiritually unpromising boy. His parents were poor; his father a country stone mason with seven children. All his property consisted of a plain little house, with one or two acres of poor land, and this mortgaged. When the oldest child was but thirteen and Dwight only four, the father suddenly died. The widow was left with seven children to support, and the mortgaged home. A month after the father’s death, two more children were born. It was a life of hard toil and little promise that D. L. Moody faced from early boyhood. He had meagre opportunities for education, and did not take to what little he had. Furthermore he was not a spiritually minded boy. When he offered himself for church membership in Boston at eighteen years of age, he was refused immediate admission to the church. The pastor and church have been criticised and laughed at for this, but the pastor and church were right, for he knew so little about salvation, that when the question was put to him “What has Christ done for us all, for you, which entitles Him to our love,” his reply was “I do not know. I think Christ has done a good deal for us, but I do not think of anything particular as I know of.” But the church while holding him back, did not cast him off nor neglect him. It appointed a committee of two to watch over him with kindness and teach him the way of God more perfectly. But this poor boy, poorly educated, poor in spiritual promise, became the mightiest religious leader of the century; and I think it may be added the greatest man of the century; for when the fame and influence of our great generals, great statesmen, great authors, and great scholars have been forgotten, his fame and influence, and thank God his influence more than his fame, will not be forgotten, but will live on.

2. The second lesson is the importance of personal work. Young Moody was not converted by a great sermon, but by the quiet personal work of a layman — his Sunday-school teacher. Have many sermons been preached in this century that have wrought so much, if we look at ultimate results, as the personal dealing of this Sunday-school teacher? Let Sunday-school teachers take courage.

The importance of personal work is taught not only by Mr. Moody’s conversion, but also by his life work. It was by untiring effort as a personal tvorker, on the street, in the store, in hotels, in saloons, on the cars, everywhere, that Mr. Moody learned to be a mighty worker for Christ.

3. The third lesson that we should learn from the life of Mr. Moody is the power of persistence. As we have already seen, Mr. Moody had little promise when he started, but he had one thing that always has large promise in it. He had the habit of keeping at anything he undertook, until he accomplished it. Nothing ever discouraged him. At the outset everything was against him as a public speaker. His grammar was very bad; his sentences were hard to understand. He had not much to say that was worth listening to. But he was sure that God had called him to speak, and so, though people of good sense advised him to keep still, he kept on talking until he could get more hearers, and more deeply interested hearers, and more responsive hearers than any man of his day. During the last meetings of his life, he spoke to an audience of 12,000 people, and many thousands were turned away who could not get in. In the truest sense, he was without question the greatest orator of our day.

His persistence was shown also in his getting a place for himself in Sunday-school work. He was not wanted; but he kept pegging away, until he not only had a great Sunday-school himself, but largely revolutionized the Sunday-school methods of the world.

He had hard work to get recognition among Christians. He was at one period called “crazy Moody,” later he was the target of the most bare-faced and outrageous falsehood. The first thing I ever heard about Mr. Moody was a lie, which I took for granted was true. When he began his great work in London, it was reported that he and Sankey were sent there by a firm of organ makers at a salary of five hundred pounds per year. One of the leading dailies in New York City stated in an editorial, June 22d, 1875: “We are credibly informed that Messrs. Moody and Sankey were sent to England by Mr. Barnum as a matter of speculation.” This lying never stopped. A number of falsehoods have appeared in religious and secular papers within a year. Some of them since his death; of his great wealth, and of the pecuniary demands he made wherever he held meetings. I know from positive personal knowledge, these statements to be absolutely false. But in spite of all this opposition and falsehood, Mr. Moody went right on to the goal without being embittered. He said to me one day last summer, “We will let others do the talking and try and keep right with God and go ahead.”

4. The fourth lesson from Mr. Moody’s life is the power of a consumid Lessons From the Life

ing passion for souls. Very soon after his conversion, Mr. Moody became burdened for the salvation of others, and in season and out of season, gave himself up to the work of bringing men to Christ. He would speak to them in all sorts of places and at all hours of the day and night about their soul’s interest. He was often reproached for his indiscretion in this matter, but not infrequently in the very case where he was told that he had done more harm than good, those spoken to afterward accepted Christ, and dated their conviction to Mr. Moody’s unseasonable importunities. He was at it and always at it. He could not pass a crowd of men without wishing to preach to them the gospel. Riding through a dense crowd with him in Chicago when the mayor. Carter Harrison, lay in state in the Court House, he turned suddenly to me and said, “Torrey, this will not do, we must preach to these men.” One of the opera houses across the way was immediately secured, and all-day meetings began.

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