D.L. Moody

D.L. Moody

“You could hear God weeping over the Prodigal, as he told the story of Betsy’s tears when run-away Isaiah came home again to Northfield. You own soul trembled as he tolled the year-count of the church-bell for funeral services. You were melted like wax under his war stories; your heart cried with joy at a fresh view of Calvary’s cross when he told of the back-firing he saw in early Illinois days, as men strove to escape the red fuin of prairie fires – ‘Calvary is the one safe place to abide: God’s wrath has already burned over there!’ Yes, you were moved to tears; he wanted you to be: ‘I tell stories to make the heart tender, and while it’s tender, I sink the truth in!’” (Richard Ellsworth Day, Bush Aglow, pg. 229).

“My human best, filled with the Holy Spirit.” (Day, Ibid, pg. 275).

“Time fails us to say more. Yet there is still another group of men who were too young to know Moody very well, but were moved as on the tide of the sea just by hearing him, or who never saw him at all, but have been transformed by sensing the after-glow of his ministry. Of such is Henry Allan Ironside, present pastor of the Moody Memorial Church. In the quiet of his study last July he told me with deep emotion his own life story. He was a western boy. Moody held meetings in Los Angeles, in a building where the Temple Baptist Church now stands. It was a temporary affair, with great wooden trusses. One truss was almost directly over Moody. Young Ironside, then about twelve, crawled out on that truss night after night, away above the crowd, to ‘see and hear D.L. from that lofty perch, right over him.’ It was Bethel for Ironside. On that high beam, he wept and prayed, ‘Oh dear God, please let me be a preacher, and preach to crowds just as Mr. Moody does.’ How mysterious the providence of the King. There is Ironside today in Moody’s pulpit, wearing Moody’s mantle. And wearing it with uncommon grace, be it said” (Day, Ibid, pg. 297).