D. L. Moody (1837 – 1899)

Who Was He?

Dwight Lyman Moody was born on 5 February 1837 in Northfield, Massachusetts, the sixth of nine children. His father died when he was four, leaving the family in poverty. He received only a fifth- grade education and moved to Boston at seventeen to work in his uncle’s shoe store. He was converted in 1855 at the age of eighteen, when his Sunday school teacher Edward Kimball came to the shoe store and led him to Christ behind the counter.

Moving to Chicago, Moody threw himself into Christian work — the YMCA, a Sunday school for the poor children of the slums, and an independent church that grew into a congregation of 1,500. He was a man of enormous energy, warmth, and practical love. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed his church building, he was left with nothing — but what followed was a crisis of prayer that transformed him.

In 1871, while in New York seeking funds to rebuild, Moody was walking down a street when the power of the Holy Spirit fell on him so overwhelmingly that he had to ask God to stop. His preaching immediately changed in power and effect, and hundreds were converted wherever he went. From that point he became the greatest mass evangelist of the nineteenth century.

Together with singer Ira Sankey, Moody conducted crusades across America and Great Britain that became defining moments in evangelical history. He founded the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago in 1889, the Northfield Schools in Massachusetts, and a publishing house that still bears his name. It is estimated that he preached to over 100 million people in his lifetime. He died on 22 December 1899 and was buried in his hometown of Northfield.

A Great Answer to Prayer After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 consumed his church and most of his ministry’s physical foundations, Moody was broken. Two women in his congregation had been telling him for months about the need for the filling of the Holy Spirit. He had brushed them aside. Now, stripped of everything, he began to pray desperately.

While walking the streets of New York raising money for a new building, God met him. Moody himself described it: “I was crying all the time that God would fill me with His Spirit. Well, one day in the city of New York — oh, what a day! — I cannot describe it, I seldom refer to it; it is almost too sacred an experience to name. I can only say that God revealed Himself to me, and I had such an experience of His love that I had to ask Him to stay His hand. I went to preaching again. The sermons were not different; I did not present any new truths; and yet hundreds were converted. I would not be placed back where I was before that blessed experience for all the world.”

The fire of God had fallen in answer to prayer. Moody went on from that moment to preach the Gospel to millions, fill the largest arenas in America and Britain, and change the course of evangelical Christianity worldwide.

Key Scriptures Romans 10:17 — “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the Word of Christ.”

Acts 1:8 — “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

Matthew 9:37 – 38 — “The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into His harvest.”

His Words on Prayer “Prayer does not mean that I am to bring God down to my thoughts and my purposes, and bend His government according to my foolish, silly, and sometimes sinful notions.

Prayer means that I am to be raised up into feeling, into union and design with Him; that I am to enter into His counsel and carry out His purpose fully.”

“In our prayers, we talk to God; in our Bible study, God talks to us; and we had better let God do most of the talking.”

“I would rather be able to pray than to be a great pr eacher; Jesus Christ never taught His disciples how to preach, but only how to pray.”

“Next to the wonder of seeing my Saviour will be, I think, the wonder that I made so little use of the power of prayer.”

“The Christian on his knees sees more than the philosopher on tiptoe. God sends no one away empty except those who are full of themselves.”

Prayer and the Word of God “I prayed for faith, and thought that some day faith would come down and strike me like lightning. But faith did not seem to come. One day I read in the tenth chapter of Romans, “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” I had closed my Bible and prayed for faith. I now opened my Bible and began to study, and faith has been growing ever since.”

“One thing I have noticed i n studying the Word of God: when a man is filled with the Spirit, he deals largely with the Word of God; whereas the man who is filled with his own ideas refers rarely to the Word of God.”

Prayer and the Holy Spirit “The Bible without the Holy Spirit is a sundial by moonlight.”

“I believe firmly that the moment our hearts are emptied of selfishness and ambition and self-seeking and everything that is contrary to God's law, the Holy Spirit will come and fill every corner of our hearts. But if we are full of pride and conceit and ambition and the world, there is no room for the Spirit of God. Before we pray that God would fill us, I believe we ought to pray that He would empty us.”

“The Spirit of God first imparts love; He next inspires hope, and then gives liberty; and that is about the last thing we have in many of our churches.”