Conclusion

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. 2 TIMOTHY 4:7

Seventeen chapters can make it look as though Moody taught a great many things. He taught one thing, over and over, to anyone who would listen: God loves you, Christ has died for you, and the door is open now. Everything else was that message turned to the light at a different angle. The fall is why we need it. The blood is what it cost. The new birth is what it does. Faith is how we take it, repentance is the turning it requires, and assurance is the peace it brings. The Bible is where we hear it, Christ is its whole content, prayer is how we live in it, the Spirit is the power to pass it on, consecration is the life it asks for, heaven is where it ends, and urgency is what it feels like to believe it while other people do not.

The danger of this book

Moody would have been uneasy about a book that summarised him. He distrusted religion that was admired rather than acted on, and a book like this one can easily become an agreeable way of reading about repentance, prayer and consecration without doing any of them.

Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

So the counsel given in the other volumes of this series applies here with special force. Go back to the chapter that made you least comfortable. For some it will be restitution; for others forgiveness, or the questions about their children, or the plain call to decide. Take its application points and live with them for a month. Moody measured a sermon by what people did afterwards, and so should we.

Two things to carry

First, the love of God. Moody spent the first years of his Christian life thinking of God as a stern judge whom Christ had to pacify, and the rest of it undoing that picture in other people. If you take one thing from this book, let it be his conviction that God is not waiting to punish you but waiting to receive you. Everything else he taught rests on that.

Second, today. Moody learned in one night in Chicago that tomorrow is not ours. He could not bear to let anyone go home without a decision. You do not need to be an evangelist to carry that lesson. It applies to the apology you have not made, the restitution you have put off, the prayer you have not prayed and the conversation about Christ you have been meaning to have for years.

Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near. ISAIAH 55:6

A last word about him

We have been honest about where Moody must be read with care. His simplicity sometimes made doctrine and the church look like obstacles rather than gifts. The methods of mass revival that he shaped could hurry people toward a decision that did not last. His expectation of Christ’s return, right in itself, could make the world look like a wreck to be abandoned rather than a creation waiting to be redeemed. His strong sentences on assurance, restitution and forgiveness can land heavily on tender consciences. And his stories, many of them heard second-hand, are illustrations rather than records.

None of this has been said to diminish him. He would have said it himself. He knew he was an unschooled man who had been turned away by a church committee, and he never asked anyone to follow him. What made him remarkable was not his gifts but his availability. He believed the Bible meant what it said, he gave himself to God without reserve, and God used him to bring more people to Christ than almost anyone of his century.

For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. 1 CORINTHIANS 1:26

He is buried on a small hill at Northfield, above the school he founded for young people who could not afford one elsewhere. It is a fitting place for a shoe clerk who could not spell. The God who chose him has not changed, and is still looking for men and women who will simply be wholly His.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Of all the chapters in this book, which made you least comfortable? Return to it and work its application points for a month.

2. Write down what you now believe God feels toward you. Compare it with what you would have written before reading this book.

3. Name one thing you have been postponing, whether a decision, an apology or a conversation, and do it this week.

4. Choose one of Moody’s own books and read it through slowly, with the Bible open.

5. Pray daily for a month for one person you long to see come to Christ, and look for the moment to speak.

A PRAYER

Father, I have read of Your love, and I am capable of admiring it and doing nothing. Keep me from that.

Thank You that You are not waiting to punish me but to receive me, and that Your Son has made the way.

Give me grace to act today on what I have learned: to turn, to forgive, to put right, to pray and to speak.

Use me as You used a shoe clerk from Northfield, not because I am able, but because I am Yours. Amen.