#d.l. moody

[icannotbejondenden47]

If you say “I will fast when God lays it on my heart,” you never will. You are too cold and indifferent to take the yoke upon you.

D.L. Moody

[slave-of-the-lord-jesus-christ]

So, if we only lead one soul to Christ, we may set a stream in motion that will flow on when we are dead and gone.

-D.L. Moody, The Overcoming Life

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

Moody the Evangelist

In 1856. Dwight Lyman (D. L.) Moody moved from Boston to Chicago for a better job after he had become a Christian in his uncle's shoe store. Within three years Moody felt called to move full-time into ministry, working with the YMCA and helping with evangelistic and social ministries in Chicago. Burdened for the poor youth, Moody established a mission Sunday school in the slums of Chicago. In six years it grew into a church, with Moody as the pastor and is now the famous Moody Church.

But things changed 1871. Mrs. O’Leary’s cow (allegedly) knocked over a lamp in her barn setting off the Great Chicago Fire that destroyed a third of Chicago including Moody’s home, his church and the YMCA. This was the beginning of a new direction for Moody.  While in New York raising money to rebuild his church and the YMCA, “a presence and power” came over him. He felt called by God to redirect his ministry solely to evangelism.

Moody asked vocalist Ira Sankey to join him on an invitation to go to England. They were part of a great revival that was sweeping across the United Kingdom. Moody and Sankey spent two years holding campaigns throughout England, Scotland and Ireland.

Dwight had admired the famous preacher Charles H. Spurgeon and was eager to visit the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London. They became good friends. Spurgeon poked fun at Moody’s American accent by saying Moody is “the only man who could say ‘Mesopotamia’ in two syllables.” Spurgeon later invited Moody to preach at the Tabernacle in celebration of Spurgeon’s fiftieth birthday.  Like Whitefield and Wesley, they were great friends even though they had theological and methodological differences. Moody said after hearing Spurgeon speak, he came back to America “a better man.” Spurgeon said of Moody, “He is a king of men; commanding and finding everybody eager to obey; and all the while utterly lost in his work, and as devoid of self-importance as a new-born babe.”  When Spurgeon passed away, Spurgeon’s wife sent to Dwight her husband’s Bible and a complete set of his sermons.

After the successful evangelistic campaigns in the United Kingdom, Moody and Sankey were internationally famous. Many calls came in for Crusades. They toured cities in the American Midwest and Atlantic coasts when they came back to the US, regularly speaking to crowds of 10,000-20,000. In another trip to England, seven Cambridge University students, led by popular cricket star CT Studd, pledged to go to China with Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission. These men influenced university students in England and the United States to consider world missions.

Moody’s compassion toward the poor, particularly kids, never waned. He opened the Northfield Seminary for Girls and the Mount Herman School for Boys both for educating poor and minorities. He also founded the Chicago Evangelization Society (now called the Moody Bible Institute). He started the initial meetings that later became the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, which led to over 20,000 missionaries sent throughout the world over the next few decades.

“There is nothing novel in the doctrine Mr. Moody proclaims,” said one English Presbyterian minister. “It is the old Gospel — old, and yet always fresh and young, as the living fountain or the morning sun — in which the substitution of Christ is placed in the center and presented with admirable distinctness and decision. It is spoken with most impressive directness, not as by a man half convinced and who seems always to feel that a skeptic is looking over his shoulder, but with a certainty of the truth of what he says, as if, like our own Andrew Fuller, ‘he could venture his eternity on it’; as if he felt that ‘if he did not speak the very stones would cry out.’”

[craigtowens]

Those who have been greatly used of God in all ages have been men of courage. If we are full of faith we shall not be full of fear, distrusting God all the while. That is the trouble with the Church of Christ today—there are so many who are fearful, because they do not believe that God is going to use them. What we need is to have the courage that will compel us to move forward.

Dwight Moody, in To The Work!

[woodsandhearth]

[enfocateendios-blog]

Las escrituras nos fueron dadas para cambiar nuestras vidas. Pero no basta solo con leerlas, el cambio solo será efectuado cuando decidamos poner en práctica lo que Dios nos dice a través de ellas, cuando seamos hacedores y no solamente oidores olvidadizos.

[breanna-lynn]

“I am so thankful that I have a joy that the world can not rob me of; I have a treasure that the world can not take from me; I have something that is not in the power of man or devil to deprive me of, and that is the joy of the Lord.

D.L. Moody

[wisdomfish]

My friends, let us look this question in the face. If there is anything at all in the religion of Christ, give everything for it. If there is nothing in it—if it is a myth, if our mothers who have prayed over us have been deceived, if the praying people of the last [2,000] years have been deluded—let us find it out. The quicker the better. If there is nothing in the religion of Christ, let us throw it over and eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. If there is no devil to deceive us, no hell to receive us, if Christianity is a sham, let us come out and say so. I hope to live to see the time when there will be only two classes in this world—Christians and [unbelievers]—those who take their stand bravely for Him and those who take their stand against Him. This idea of men standing still and saying, “Well, I don’t know, but I think there must be something in it,” is absurd. If there is anything in it, there is everything in it.

D. L. Moody