Chapter 14
Chapter 14
I find some people now and then who boast that they have read the Bible through in so many months. Others read the Bible chapter by chapter and get through it in a year; that is good, but I think that sometimes it would be good to spend a year in just one book of the Bible. If I were going into a court of justice and wanted to win over the jury, I would want to get every witness I could to testify to the one point on which I wanted to convince the jury. I would not get them to testify to everything, but just to that one thing. So it should be with the Scriptures.
Sometimes it is good to study just one topic from the Bible. I once studied the word love, and I spent many weeks studying the passages in which it occurs, until at last I could not help loving people. I had been feeding so long on love that I was anxious to do good to everyone I met.
Take the word sanctification. I would rather take my concordance and gather passages on sanctification and sit down for four or five days and study them thoroughly than have people tell me what they think about it.
I suppose that if all the time that I have prayed for faith was put together, it would be months. When I was president of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Chicago, I used to say, “What we need is faith; if we only have faith, we can turn Chicago upside down,” or rather, right side up. I thought that someday faith was going to come down and strike me like lightning; but faith did not seem to come. One day I read in Romans 10:17, So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. Before, I had closed my Bible and prayed for faith; now I opened my Bible and began to study, and faith has been growing ever since.
Take justification – the doctrine that made Martin Luther such a power. The righteous man shall live by faith (Romans 1:17). When that thought flashed through Martin Luther’s mind as he was in Rome ascending the twenty-eight Scala Sancta steps on his knees (although some people deny that this occurred), he rose and went forth to be a power among the nations of the earth. Justification places a man before God as if he had never sinned; he stands before God like Jesus Christ. Thank God, in Jesus Christ we can be perfect, but there is no perfection apart from Him. God looks in His account book and says, “Moody, your debts have all been paid by Another; there is nothing against you.” People need to quit trusting in themselves and their religion and start trusting in Jesus.
In New England, there is perhaps no doctrine attacked so much as the atonement. The atonement is foreshadowed in the garden of Eden. There we see the innocent suffering for the guilty, the animals slain because of Adam’s sin. We find it in Abraham’s day, in Moses’ day, and all through the books of Moses and the prophets. It is in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah and in the prophecy of Daniel. Then we come to the Gospels, and Christ says, For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life so that I may take it again. No one has taken it away from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again (John 10:17-18).
The apostle Peter wrote: For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit (1 Peter 3:18).
People talk about conversion. What is conversion? The best way to find out is from the Bible. A good many don’t believe in sudden conversions. You can die in a moment. Can’t you receive eternal life in a moment?
When Mr. Ira Sankey and I were in Europe, a man preached a sermon against what he believed were the destructive doctrines that we were going to preach, one of which was sudden conversion. He said that conversion was a matter of time and growth. Do you know what I do when any man preaches against the doctrines I preach? I go to the Bible and find out what it says, and if I am right, I give them more of the same kind. I preached more on sudden conversion in that town than in any town I was in, in my life. How long did it take the Lord to convert that woman whom He met at the well of Sychar? How long did it take to convert that adulterous woman in the temple who was caught in the very act of adultery? How long to convert that woman who anointed His feet and wiped them with the hairs of her head? Didn’t she leave with the word of God ringing in her ears, Your faith has saved you; go in peace? (Luke 7:50).
I would like to know how long it took the Lord to convert Zacchaeus. There was no sign of Zacchaeus being converted when he went up that sycamore tree, but he was converted by the time he came down, so he must have been converted between the branch and the ground. Pretty sudden work, wasn’t it? But you say, “That is because Christ was there.” Friends, they were converted a good deal faster after He went away than when He was here. Peter preached, and three thousand were converted in one day. Another time, after three o’clock in the afternoon, Peter and John healed a man at the gate of the temple and then went in and preached, and five thousand Jews were added to the church before night. That was rather sudden work.
Professor Drummond tells an illustration of a man going into one of our after-meetings and saying he wanted to become a Christian. “Well, my friend, what is the trouble?” He didn’t want to tell him. He became greatly agitated. Finally, he said, “The fact is, I have overdrawn my account” – a polite way of saying he had been stealing.
“Did you take your employer’s money?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know. I never kept account of it.”
“Well, do you think you stole fifteen hundred dollars last year?”
“I am afraid it is that much.”
“Now, look here, sir, I don’t believe in sudden conversions; don’t steal more than a thousand dollars next year, and the year after that not more than five hundred, and in the course of the next few years you will get so that you won’t steal any. If your employer catches you, tell him you are being converted, and you will get so that you won’t steal any eventually.”
My friends, that way of thinking is a waste of time. He who steals must steal no longer, the Bible says (Ephesians 4:28). It is an about-face.
Take another illustration. Here comes a man and he admits that he gets drunk every week. That man comes to a meeting and he wants to be converted. I say, “Don’t you be in a hurry. I believe in doing the work gradually. Don’t get drunk and knock your wife down more than once a month. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to your wife to go a whole month without being knocked down? Once a month, only twelve times in a year! Wouldn’t she be glad to have you converted in this new way? Only get drunk after a few years on the anniversary of your wedding, and at Christmas, and then it will be effective because it is gradual.”
I detest all that kind of teaching. Let us go to the Bible and see what that old Book teaches. Let us believe it, and go and act as if we believed it too. Salvation is instantaneous. I admit that a man may be converted so that he cannot tell when he crossed the line between death and life, but I also believe a man may be a thief one moment and a saint the next. I believe a man may be as vile as hell itself one moment and be saved the next. Our churches are full of people who have never been converted, whose lives have never changed. There are many who have made decisions who have never been converted.
Christian growth is gradual, just as physical growth is; but a man passes from death unto everlasting life as quickly as an act of the mind: He who believes in the Son has eternal life (John 3:36).
People say they want to become heavenly minded. Well, read about heaven and talk about it. I once preached on heaven, and after the meeting a lady came to me and said, “Why, Mr. Moody, I didn’t know there were so many verses in the Bible about heaven.” And I hadn’t mentioned even one out of a hundred. She was amazed that there was so much in the Bible about heaven.
When you are away from home, you look for news about home! You skip everything in the daily paper until your eye catches the name of your own town or country. The Christian’s home is in heaven. The Scriptures contain our title deeds to everything we will be worth when we die. If a will has your name in it, it is no longer a meaningless document to you. Why, then, do not Christians take more interest in the Bible?
Then again, people say they don’t believe in revivals. There’s not a denomination in the world that didn’t spring from a revival. The Catholic and Episcopal churches claim to be the apostolic churches and to have sprung from Pentecost, the Lutheran church from Martin Luther, and so on. They all sprang out of revivals, and yet people talk against revivals! I’d as soon talk against my mother as against a revival. Wasn’t the country revived under John the Baptist? Wasn’t it under Christ’s teachings? People think that because a number of superficial cases of conversion occur at revivals, that therefore revivals ought to be avoided. They forget the parable of the sower (Matthew 13), where Jesus Himself warns us of emotional hearers who receive the word with joy, but soon fall away. If only one out of every four hearers is truly converted, as in the parable, the revival has done much good.
Suppose you spend a month studying regeneration, or the kingdom of God, or the church in the New Testament, or the divinity of Christ, or the Lord’s Day, or holiness, or the attributes of God. It will help you in your own spiritual life, and you will become a workman who need not be ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of Truth.
Make a study of the Holy Spirit. There are probably five hundred passages on the Holy Spirit, and what you ought to do is study this subject for yourself. Take the return of our Lord. I know it is a debated subject. Some say He is to come at the end of the millennium, while others say He will come back before the millennium. What we want is to know what the Bible says. Why not go to the Bible and study it for yourself? It will be worth more to you than anything you get from anyone else. Put down the fiction books and get to the Word of Truth.
Study what the Bible says about separation – being separate from the world. I believe that a Christian should lead a separated life. The line between the church and the world is almost obliterated today. I have no sympathy with the idea that you must hunt up a church record in order to find out whether a man is a member of the church or not. A man ought to live so that everybody will know he is a Christian. The Bible tells us to lead a separated life. You may lose influence, but you will gain it at the same time.
I suppose Daniel was the most unpopular man in Babylon at a certain time, but thank God, he has outhved all the other men of his time. Who were the chief men of Babylon? We do not remember the others, but we remember Daniel. When God wanted any work done in Babylon, He knew where to find someone to do it. You can be in the world, but not of it. Christ didn’t take His disciples out of the world, but He prayed that they might be kept from evil (John 17). A ship in the water is all right, but when the water gets into the ship, then look out. A worldly Christian is just like a wrecked vessel at sea.
I remember once when I spent some time studying the grace of God. I didn’t know the difference between law and grace. When that truth dawned upon me and I saw the difference, I studied for a whole week on grace and I got so filled that I couldn’t stay in the house. I said to the first man I met, “Do you know anything about the grace of God?” He thought I was a lunatic, but I just poured out for about an hour on the grace of God.
Study the subject of prayer. In his sermon “The Two Guards, Praying and Watching,” Charles Spurgeon said:
For real business at the mercy seat, give me a homemade prayer, a prayer that comes out of the depths of my heart, not because I invented it, but because God the Holy Spirit put it there, and gave it such a living force that I could not help letting it come out. Though your words are broken, and your sentences are disconnected, if your desires are earnest, if they are like coals of juniper, burning with a vehement flame, God will not mind how they find expression. If you have no words, perhaps you will pray better without them. There are prayers that break the backs of words; they are too heavy for any human language to carry.
Some people say, “I do not believe in assurance.” I never knew anybody who read the Bible who did not believe in assurance. This Book teaches nothing else. Paul says, I know whom I have believed (2 Timothy 1:12). Job says, I know that my Redeemer lives (Job 19:25). It is not “I hope” or “I trust,” but “I know.”
The best book on assurance was written by a man named John, and it is found in the back part of the Bible. John wrote an epistle on this subject. We call it 1 John. Now if you turn to John 20:31, you will find that it says, These have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name. Then if you turn to 1 John 5:13, you will read this: These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life. That whole epistle is written on assurance. I have no doubt John had found some people who questioned assurance and doubted whether they were saved, and so he took up his pen and said, “I will settle that question,” and he wrote that last verse in the twentieth chapter of his gospel.
I have heard some people say that they were not able to know if they were saved. They had heard the minister say that no one could know whether they were saved or not, and they believed what the minister said instead of what the Word of God said. Others read the Bible to make it fit in and prove their favorite creed or notions, and if it does not do so, they will not read it anymore. It has been well said that we must not read the Bible by the blue light of Presbyterianism, nor by the red light of Methodism, nor by the violet light of Episcopalianism, but by the light of the Spirit of God. If you will take up your Bible and study assurance for a week, you will soon see it is your privilege to know that you are a child of God.
Then take the promises of God. Let a man feed for a month on the promises of God, and he will not talk about his poverty and how downcast he is and what trouble he has day by day. You hear people say, “Oh, how inadequate I am! I am not able to know God better.” My friends, it is not their inadequacy, but it is their laziness. If you would only go from Genesis to Revelation and see all the promises made by God to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, to the Jews and the Gentiles, and to all His people everywhere; if you would spend a month feeding on the precious promises of God, you would not go about with your heads hanging down like bulrushes, complaining about how poor you are, but you would lift up your heads with confidence and proclaim the riches of His grace, because you could not help it.
After the Chicago fire, a man came up to me and said in a sympathizing tone, “Moody, I understand you lost everything in the Chicago fire.”
“Well then,” I said, “someone has misinformed you.”
“Indeed! Why, I was told you had lost all.”
“No, it is a mistake,” I said, “quite a mistake.”
“Have you got much left, then?” asked my friend.
“Yes,” I replied, “I have got much more left than I lost, though I cannot tell how much I have lost.”
“Well, I am glad of it, Moody; I did not know you were that rich before the fire.”
“Yes,” said I, “I am a good deal richer than you could conceive; and here is my title deed: He who overcomes will inherit these things” (Revelation 21:7).
They say the Rothschilds cannot tell how much they are worth, and that is just my case. All things in the world are mine; I am a joint heir with Jesus, the Son of God. Someone has said, “God makes a promise, faith believes it, hope anticipates it, and patience quietly awaits it.”