Christianity In Shoe Leather

Christianity in Shoe Leather

Not much ever happened in little Northfield, Massachusetts. Who would have guessed that one of its ragged orphans would change the world? Lyman was only four when his daddy worked himself into an early grave. By the time he was seventeen, he could barely read or write. With two dollars in his pocket, he headed for Boston to work in his uncle’s boot shop.

His pious uncle asked him to promise to go to church on Sundays. But the unschooled teen struggled with the big words in the sermons. He invariably fell asleep. Fortunately, a Sunday school teacher took an interest in the slow learner and led him to Jesus. When church elders heard the news, they shook their heads and declared that Lyman would be of little use to God’s Kingdom.

Soon afterward, he moved to Chicago to sell shoes. What he lacked in book learning and social graces he made up for in dogged determination, becoming the Windy City’s best shoe salesman. He also joined a church where he irritated everyone with his unpolished zeal. His butchered grammar and fractured theology became wildly unpopular. Finally, a delegation of elders advised the shoe salesman, “Leave praying and speaking to those who can do it better.”

So Lyman went to the slums of Chicago to set up a Sunday school. People joked that he was too ignorant to teach even unschooled street kids. Yet by sheer tenacity, he dragged thousands of ragged children to his Sunday school. His venture was so successful that it attracted a lawyer from nearby Springfield. Abraham Lincoln often spoke about the Sunday when he watched “legions of ragamuffin kids study the Bible.”

Then the shoe salesman started his own church. Mostly, he attracted unschooled hicks. When his church was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1871, he teamed up with a gospel singer and became a traveling evangelist. His poor preaching made him the nation’s laughingstock. He spoke so fast that folks couldn’t follow. A reporter held a stopwatch and counted his words. Lyman topped out at 230 words a minute. He also topped the scales at four hundred pounds of weight!

But this obese shoe salesman was determined to get the gospel out by any means. Who would have figured that he would personally lead more than a million people to Christ? Or that he would earn the title Prince of Evangelists? No one expected someone with his lackluster background to establish the largest Bible college in America, one of the world’s biggest publishing houses, and a string of schools that sent five thousand missionaries overseas during his lifetime, making America the largest missionary-sending nation in history!

The world remembers him by his full name, Dwight Lyman Moody. There’s not a Christian in the world that hasn’t been affected by that shoe salesman. D. L. Moody proves that none of us are so devoid of talent that we can’t do so much more, if only we would take up the challenge that spurred him to greatness:

The world has yet to see what God can do with a person fully consecrated to him.

[Jesus said,] “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these.”

John 14:12, NIV