God’s Battle Axe – D. L. Moody

        Moody wasborn on February 5, 1837 in Northfield, Massachusetts, United States of America, to Edwin Moody and Betsy Holton. He started his career as an uneducated shoe sales clerk but turned into one of the greatest evangelists of all time. With only a fifth grade education, he seemed to be unqualified for his lifelong calling. His grammar was terrible, and he was far from an eloquent orator. Yet, he took his plain talk approach to evangelism and preached the gospel throughout America and Great Britain, leading hundreds of thousands to Christ. He is remembered today as the most effective evangelist of the 19^th century.

       Moody began life in near poverty on a small farm in Northfield. His father supplemented the family’s meagre farm income by working as a bricklayer. In 1841, when Moody was only four, his father died unexpectedly, leaving his mother with seven children and pregnant with twins. With extreme difficulty, his mother managed to hold the family together, but Moody and his older brothers were required to live and work on other farms as hired hands for several months each year. By the time he was 17, he had accumulated no more than four years of education at the local one-room schoolhouse. Nevertheless, the ambitious teenager was determined to escape the backbreaking toil of farm labour, so he moved to Boston, where he worked in his uncle’s shoe shop as a clerk.

         Moody’s conversion happened in the stockroom of his uncle’s store. Since living in Boston, he had been regularly attending Mount Vernon Congregational Church every week at his uncle’s instance. He was touched by the kindness of his Sunday school teacher, Edward Kimball, who spoke to him of the love of Christ. One Saturday, specifically April 21, 1855, Kimball visited Moody at the shoe shop, where he found the young man alone wrapping shoes in the back room. There he talked with him about his need for a saviour and led him in a simple prayer of salvation. Many years later, Kimball recalled that no one at the church would have ever imagined that Moody would go on to become a great spiritual leader throughout the English-speaking world.

In the fall of 1856, Moody moved to Chicago to pursue the shoe business there. He prospered beyond his wildest dreams, earning over $5,000 a year, an enormous amount in those days. To serve the neglected youth of the city, Moody taught Sunday school and worked as a janitor at the local Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). His Mission Sunday School catered to orphans, the uneducated, the poor, and abused. By 1860, he left his business pursuits to minister full time.

        Eventually, the school outgrew the former saloon building and was replaced by the Illinois Street Church in Chicago, today’s Moody Church. As Moody was making a name as a preacher in Chicago, the American Civil War erupted in 1861. Moody took to the field, ministering to both Union and Confederate troops. After the war, he continued to teach and preach in Chicago. In 1871, the Chicago fire devastated the city, and Moody reassessed his life. He yearned to preach the gospel to the rest of the world.

In 1872, Moody sailed to England to preach the gospel. He returned to that country in 1873. His partner in evangelistic campaigns was Ira D. Sankey, a talented singer and musician, who entertained the crowds and led the hymns. A religious revival swept the United Kingdom at that time, with Moody and Sankey playing a major role. Everywhere they went, masses of people overflowed the buildings.

Against the advice of friends, Moody and Sankey went to Ireland, where Catholics and Protestants had been fighting for centuries. Moody was a simple man who trusted implicitly in God. Denominations and differences meant nothing to him. His burning desire was to take the gospel to as many people as possible. As a result, the Irish campaign was a resounding success.

On returning to the States, Moody settled back in his hometown of Northfield. He and Sankey toured the country for the next three years, filling churches and assembly halls in key cities. Just as he had reached out to the neglected youth of Chicago, he recognised that women would play a vital part in evangelism. Consequently, he founded the Northfield Seminary for Young Women in 1879. Shortly after, he started the Mount Hermon School for Boys, to give the underprivileged an education. By mid-1880, one of his associates in Chicago, Emma Dryer, convinced him to support a training school for men and women in that city. This led to the establishment of the Chicago Evangelisation Society, which later became Moody Bible Institute.

         Despite his tight preaching schedule, Moody was a devoted family man. He married Emma Charlotte Revell in 1862, and they had three children: Emma, William and Paul. Emma gave direction and support to her husband throughout his demanding public ministry life. Besides caring for their three children, she managed the family’s finances and served as her husband’s personal secretary, writing his correspondence. From age 15 until she died in 1903, Emma took every opportunity to teach, including Sunday school classes at the Old Home in Northfield. Moody himself was a fun-loving father who cherished carefree family vacations with his children and grandchildren at their farm in Northfield.

Moody spent the last decade of his life preaching throughout America and tending to his schools in Massachusetts. He died of heart failure in 1899, at the age of 62. On the secret to Moody’s incredible success, a fellow evangelist, R. A. Torrey said, “The first thing that accounts for God’s using D. L. Moody so mightily was that he was a fully surrendered man. Every ounce of that 280-pound body of his belonged to God; everything he was and everything he had, belonged wholly to God.” What more can be added to this endorsement except what the Lord Jesus Christ said to him when he arrived in heaven?

         Moody’s life and ministry teach us many things about God. He is not perturbed by our humble beginnings, including the poverty that dodge many of us in our early years. God requires just one thing from us – total surrender to His will. He can mould us into anything He wants when we give our all to Him. May the Lord grant us the grace to be the men or women that are so immersed in His Spirit that nothing in the world can captivate them.

     **** Culled from Biography of D. L. Moody, American Evangelist, by Mary Fairchild, https://www.learnreligions.com.