BY AARON ALFORD
Meditation: For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes.
—ROMANS 1:16
Quote of the Day: Would you like to have a song, gentlemen?
—D. L. MOODY
Dwight Lyman Moody was born February 5, 1837, the sixth of nine children, to a working-class Massachusetts family. He and his siblings lived a simple, rural life, provided for by the hard work of his father, Edwin, a brick mason. But when Edwin died unexpectedly at the age of forty-one, everything changed. Dwight was just four years old at the time, and his mother, Betsy, was only a month away from giving birth to twins. Betsy was suddenly a single mother of nine children, with little to no options for income. Creditors came for almost everything she had.
Betsy’s family helped however they could, providing firewood in the freezing winter, while the family’s pastor assisted with both food and spiritual support. Friends and neighbors urged Betsy to break up the family and place her children in other families’ homes. Betsy would hear none of that. The family would stay together. Each sibling did his or her part. When Dwight was eight, he was working for extra money with his brother, aged twelve, at a neighboring farm.
For all the hardship he and his family faced, Dwight was known as a mischievous boy with a love for playing jokes. He might set loose a tomcat in the schoolhouse during a recitation of “Julius Ceasar,” or perhaps post signs all over town for an important meeting with a prestigious lecturer, a meeting that half the town shows up for, only to find no such person exists.
He grew up attending church each Sunday and had an old-but-untouchable family Bible in the home, but it was not until he was living on his own that Dwight would encounter God for himself. By the time Dwight was seventeen, he had moved to Boston and was working in his uncle’s shoe store. As part of the arrangement with his uncle, he was required to attend church and Sunday school. His Sunday school teacher, a man named Edward Kimball, helped Dwight develop a true curiosity about the Bible and the Christian faith. Until then, he had known Christianity as an external set of rules, advice for living. But something deeper was awakening.
Mr. Kimball appeared at the shoe store one day, and as Dwight was wrapping up a pair of shoes in the back of the building, Mr. Kimball simply told Dwight how much God loved him and how eager God was for Dwight to love Him in return. That was all it took. All at once, the things that had once been done out of moral obligation became life giving, and life changing.
“Before my conversion,” he later said, “I worked towards the Cross, but since then I have worked from the Cross; then I worked to be saved, now I work because I am saved.”1
He immediately had a zeal for reaching out to those in need of the gospel of grace that had changed his own life, particularly those on the margins of society. Within a few years he found himself working in Chicago, where he spent much of his time in saloons, sharing his faith with anyone who would listen. He was frustrated, however, with the way churches did “evangelistic” meetings: “Services are not made interesting enough,” he said, “so as to get unconverted people to come. They are not expected to come, and people would be mortified if they did come.”2
So Dwight decided that he would do things differently. Though lacking in musical talent himself, Moody knew the power of song. A few days later, Moody, an imposing figure with a large build and generous beard, entered a Chicago saloon. But it was who he brought with him that turned people’s heads: a bright-eyed choir of young people. With every eye upon him, Moody said cheerfully, “Would you like to have a song, gentlemen?”3 No one objected, and the young choir sang a patriotic song.
The patrons, delighted in spite of themselves, offered a round of applause. The youth then sang a hymn, and Moody followed it with an earnest word of prayer. There were tears and sniffles, and when he invited them to his meeting (hosted in a converted saloon itself), half the men present followed him to hear more about this gospel.
Moody always had a heart for those who were suffering and downcast. When the Civil War began, he could not in good conscience enlist, saying, “In this respect I am a Quaker.”4 He did, however, see it as his responsibility to care for soldiers, and not just those of the Union. He visited and held meetings for Confederate prisoners “with all the tender love of a brother . . . and they hailed his coming to cheer and comfort, to instruct and evangelize them, with unspeakable delight.”5
Moody had a spirit of brotherly friendship that reached beyond societal boundaries, and in his preaching he avoided “needless offence to those from whom he most differ[ed] in doctrine.”6
In his evangelistic campaigns, Moody worked closely with local churches across denominational lines. Great care was taken to host his meetings in neutral spaces, especially where there was any contention between local congregations. In return, “men of all sects and churches honored and trusted him, and were ready to do his bidding.”7
And wherever he went, there was music. Today when we think of large revival meetings and stadium-sized evangelism, we take for granted the presence of professional musicians and communal worship. But at the time of Moody’s meetings, this was a novel idea. For Moody, singing hymns was not simply a reflection of an individual’s beliefs, but a path to believing.
“If we can only get people to have the words of the Love of God coming from their mouths,” he once said, “it’s well on its way to residing in their hearts.”8
Moody became friends with Ira D. Sankey, a popular (and mutton-chopped) gospel singer at the time, and the two began working together in a partnership that would last for years. They worked on tours that took them from San Francisco to Vancouver, and along the Eastern Seaboard. They sailed to England, Ireland, and Scotland, hosting meetings for thousands of people. Along the way they befriended Charles Spurgeon and Hudson Taylor. Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs, a songbook compiled by Moody, Sankey, and a man named Philip Bliss, reached a circulation of twenty million and took in more than $1 million in royalties, all of which was channeled through a committee to fund various ministries and schools.
Despite his fame, Moody was always known for treating others as better than himself. This likely stemmed from the fact that, despite becoming a prominent Christian leader, he had received only a fifth-grade education. Early in his ministry, he struggled just to read the story of the prodigal son to a child on his knee. But what many would see as a weakness became a defining strength: humility.
“I have no education,” he said, “but I love the Lord Jesus Christ, and I want to do something for Him: and I want you to pray for me.”9
It was this humility that fostered friendship with Christians of various denominations, and this same humility that drew drunkards and gamblers, soldiers and prisoners, the rich and the poor to hear his words about Christ and the gospel. And they came by the thousands.
Moody’s last series of meetings was held in Kansas City in November of 1899. Presbyterians and Methodists came together to form a choir of five hundred voices. “They sing famously well,” Moody said. “At first, I am told, there was some difference between the Methodists and Presbyterians. . . . The Methodists sang fast, and the Presbyterians sang slow. . . . But we have taught them to pull together pretty well now.”10
He preached his last sermon to more than fifteen thousand people. He spoke simply and passionately on the parable of the great feast and the marriage supper of the Lamb.
“Tonight, my friends,” he said tenderly, “let me say that you are invited, every one of you. . . . God has headed His invitation with ‘whosoever,’ in great burning letters; and if you will go in, God will receive you tonight.”11
Just over a month later, three days before Christmas, Dwight Lyman Moody handed in his invitation and joined the feast. The newspapers proclaimed his death, but according to Moody himself, that wasn’t the full truth:
Some day you will read in the papers that D. L. Moody, of East Northfield, is dead. . . . Don’t you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now. . . . I was born of the flesh in 1837. I was born of the Spirit in 1856. That which is born of the flesh may die. That which is born of the Spirit will live forever.12
CONTEMPLATION
1. What might it look like, in your own life, to preach the gospel? Who, in your city, might “like to have a song”?
2. Do you have friendships with Christians outside of your own local church or denomination? How might you “pull together” with Christians who may believe differently, for the advancement of the kingdom?
3. Moody recognized his limitations and worked with people who could do the things he could not. Where are you gifted? In what areas are you lacking? How might you work with others as a team?
PRAYER
Heavenly Father, in everything we say and do, let us speak and act in love, and with a song of praise in our hearts.
THE BEARDS THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
BY AARON ALFORD
Even as we celebrate the Bearded Gospel Men who have gone before us, we cannot help but mourn for the Bearded Gospel Might-Have-Beens—people who, while having the gospel part down, never grew a great mane of manliness. But take heart! What history hath prevented, our imaginations can provide!
C.S.LEWIS (1898–1963)
Oh, Professor Lewis. He wrote so eloquently of the beard. Whether that was Father Christmas in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe:
He was a huge man in a bright red robe (bright as holly-berries) with a hood that had fur inside it and a great white beard that fell like a foamy waterfall over his chest. . . . He was so big and so glad and so real that they all became quite still.13
or Captain Ransom in That Hideous Strength:
All the light in the room seemed to run towards the gold hair and the gold beard of the wounded man. . . . She had, or so she had believed, disliked bearded faces except for old men. But that was because she had long since forgotten the imagined Arthur of her childhood—and the imagined Solomon too. . . . For the first time in all those years she tasted the word King itself with all its linked associations of battle, marriage, priesthood, mercy, and power.14
Whenever Lewis needed a character who reflected wisdom, strength, and dignity, he knew to give him a beard. One can only hope he has one now in glory!
J. R. R. TOLKIEN (1892–1973)
Of course we couldn’t fail to mention Lewis’s dear friend, the one who helped him find his way to Christianity, the great J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien also wrote beautifully of the beard, giving the entire race of dwarves magnificent beards, not to mention the stately beard of the wizard Gandalf.
THOMAS AQUINAS (1225–1274)
The man who wrote one of the greatest theological works of all time, the Summa Theologica (Summary of All Theology), sadly never seemed to find a reason to let those follicles fly. The world can only wonder what wisdom would have been born of an Aquinian beard. Perhaps we would have gotten a sequel to the Summa Theologica, the Summa Barbalogica (Summary of All Beards).
BILLY GRAHAM (1918–FOREVER, APPARENTLY)
He preached the gospel to millions, famously ending every stadium-filled gospel crusade with the old hymn “Just as I Am.” We love you, Billy, just as you are. But a Billy beard! What a sight to behold such a thing would be! Perhaps, however, it was better this way. Thousands would have come forward at your meetings just to get a closer look at the beard and may have caused confusion with the numbers of those getting saved.
MOTHER TERESA (1910–1997)
Okay, Mother Teresa never had a beard, nor should she have. But she was pretty great, wasn’t she? Dedicating her life to serving the poorest of the poor and becoming a living example of Jesus’ love is simply rad. She was one heck of a Godly Gospel Woman (so much so that she may even have gotten a whole chapter elsewhere in this book about Bearded Gospel Men!).