Introduction

Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 1 JOHN 4:10

Dwight Lyman Moody never finished school, never learned to spell with confidence, and was never ordained. He began his working life wrapping shoes in the back of his uncle’s shop in Boston, and when he first asked to join a church he was turned away because he could not explain what he believed. Twenty years later he was the best-known preacher in the English-speaking world. He filled the largest halls of London, Glasgow, New York and Chicago; he founded schools, conferences and a Bible institute; and by the time he died in 1899 he had spoken, by the most careful estimates, to millions of people, without a microphone.

It is tempting to explain him by his energy, his business sense or his gift for a story, and he had all three in abundance. But those who knew him best gave a simpler explanation. He believed that God meant what He said, and he could not rest until other people heard it.

One message in a thousand forms

Moody was not a theologian, and he did not pretend to be. What he had was one message, and he preached it in a thousand forms for forty years. The message was this: God loves sinners, Christ has died for them, and the door is open now.

Each part of that sentence mattered to him. God loves sinners: Moody had grown up, as he later admitted, thinking of God as a stern judge, and when he discovered the love of the Father it changed his preaching for ever. In The Way to God he says that the great obstacle to faith is not doubt but fear: “The trouble is that men think God hates them; and so they are all the time running away from Him.” Christ has died for them: he never tired of the cross, the blood, the Substitute who stood where the sinner should have stood. And the door is open now: this was the note that made him a revivalist rather than a lecturer. He had learned, in a night of fire in Chicago, what it cost to let a congregation go home to think about it.

Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation. 2 CORINTHIANS 6:2

That is the thread that runs through every chapter of this book: the love of God, offered today. Moody’s teaching on sin, on the new birth, on faith and repentance, on assurance, on the Bible, on prayer and on the Holy Spirit all comes back to it in the end. Sin is the thing that keeps people from the love of God. The new birth is the love of God making a new creature. Faith is simply taking God at His word. Prayer is the child speaking to the Father. The power of the Spirit is given so that others may hear. And the urgency is there because love will not wait while the house burns.

Why he still matters

Moody is worth reading for at least three reasons.

The first is his plainness. He wrote and spoke for shop girls and dock workers, farmers and clerks, and he assumed nothing. If you have ever wanted someone to tell you in ordinary English what it means to be born again, or how a person can know that he is saved, Moody is as clear as anyone who ever lived.

The second is his warmth. He is often remembered as a preacher of hellfire, and he did not flinch from judgement. But the dominant note in his sermons is tenderness. He wept easily. He preached the prodigal’s father running down the road. He told his hearers again and again that God was not waiting to punish them but waiting to receive them.

The third is his practicality. Moody measured religion by what it did on Monday. His chapters on repentance and prayer are full of men who returned stolen money, women who forgave old enemies, and church committees who could not pray until they were reconciled. He had no patience with a faith that did not straighten out a person’s life.

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on his life, seventeen short chapters set out his teaching. They begin with the love of God, move through what Moody and his friends summed up as ruin by the fall, redemption by the blood and regeneration by the Spirit, then take up faith, repentance, assurance, the Word of God and the sufficiency of Christ. Four chapters follow his book Prevailing Prayer through the nine elements he believed true prayer must contain. The last chapters are on the power of the Holy Spirit for service, the life wholly consecrated to God, heaven, and the urgency of decision.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Moody would have wanted it so. He almost never finished a sermon without pressing his hearers to do something before they left the building, and he regarded a truth that was merely admired as a truth wasted. Read a chapter a day, or one a week. Stop at the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own.

Where he must be read with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and it is right to say plainly at the start where Moody must be weighed rather than simply received.

First, his simplicity was a gift that could become a weakness. He sometimes spoke as though doctrine and creeds were obstacles to be cut away, and his picture of the church as the pole that holds up the brazen serpent, true as far as it goes, leaves little room for the church as the body of Christ, or for the sacraments as more than reminders. He was right that no creed saves anyone; he was less right when he implied that careful thinking about God is a distraction. A faith that knows only one sermon can be thin when the storms come.

Second, the methods of mass revival, which Moody did more than anyone to shape, need care. He pressed for immediate decisions, invited the anxious into an enquiry room, and counted results. Much good was done that way. But the pressure of a crowded hall can produce decisions that do not last, and Moody himself was aware that not every profession was a conversion.

Third, his view of the world and its future ran low. He looked for the return of Christ at any moment and is remembered as likening the world to a wrecked ship, his own work to a lifeboat sent to save as many as he could. That gave him urgency, but it could also make the wider work of justice and culture look like rearranging furniture on a sinking vessel.

Finally, he was a storyteller, and many of his stories came to him second-hand. They are illustrations, not documents. Read them for the truth they carry, not as history.

None of this is said to diminish him. Moody himself would have been the first to say it. He knew he was an unlettered man, and he never asked anyone to follow him. He asked them to follow Christ.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Moody said that people run from God because they think He hates them. What do you honestly believe God feels about you today?

2. Write down, in one sentence, the message you would give a stranger about Christ if you had only a minute. Is it good news?

3. Which of the three gifts — plainness, warmth, practicality — does your own faith most lack?

4. Choose now how you will read this book: a chapter a day, or one a week. Put the time in your diary.

5. Read the first chapter of The Way to God, Love That Passeth Knowledge, alongside this one.

A PRAYER

Father, You loved me before I ever thought of You, and You sent Your Son to be the propitiation for my sins.

Forgive me for the times I have run from You, thinking You were against me.

As I read of a man who preached Your love in plain words, make that love plain to me, and let it change what I do tomorrow.

Keep me from admiring the truth and leaving it where I found it. Teach me to come home today. Amen.