Facing A Hostile Audience

Facing A Hostile Audience

When God chooses people, he often chooses the most unlikely ones.

THE YEAR was 1882 and the American preacher D. L. Moody planned a week of meetings to evangelize the students of England’s historic Cambridge University.

On Sunday, November 5, the first day of the meetings, many Christians from town and a few staunch Christians from the university attended a mass prayer meeting just before the first service. Moody spoke, and while some rejoiced at his message, others were appalled by his American accent and unsophisticated speech.

At eight o’clock the rented hall began to fill with rowdy university students, eventually numbering about seventeen hundred. The brave choir began singing, mocked by students singing back their own songs. While some of the students constructed a pyramid of chairs, another threw a firecracker against a window. Pandemonium reigned.

Then a door opened, and in filed D. L. Moody; his song leader, Ira Sankey; and several Christian faculty members and other clergy. A professor of botany offered an opening prayer with some students yelling out, “Hear! Hear!” Next Ira Sankey sang the hymn “The Ninety and Nine.” The audience listened in silence at first but then began beating the floor with their canes and umbrellas as they shouted, “Hear! Hear!” At the end of each song there were cries of “Encore.” When the boisterous interruptions ruined Sankey’s singing of “Man of Sorrows,” he was close to tears. Several of the most offensive students were asked to leave, and Moody reminded the audience that this was not a political meeting.

Then Moody began to preach on Daniel in the lions’ den. Moody’s monosyllabic pronunciation, “Dan’l,” was too much for the rabble-rousers, and they shouted back “Dan’l, Dan’l” each time Moody said the name. Whenever Moody used any American colloquialism or non-British pronunciation, there was loud laughter. The hecklers were led by a handsome young student in the front row. Moody kept looking him in the eye, but it was to no avail. Probably the majority of the students were listening, but the vocal minority made it difficult for them to do so.

As the students returned to the university after the meeting, Gerald Lander, the handsome heckler from the front row, loudly announced, “If uneducated men will come to teach the Varsity, they deserve to be snubbed.”

The next morning, Monday, November 6, 1882, a bellboy knocked on Moody’s hotel room door and handed him a personal calling card bearing the name “Mr. Gerald Lander.”

Moody invited Lander to his room and recognized him instantly. The student said humbly, “I want to apologize, sir. And I’ve brought a letter of apology from the men.”

Some of the more gentlemanly students, appalled at their companions’ behavior, had written the apology and prevailed on Gerald Lander to deliver it. Reluctantly he went to Moody as an English gentleman who realized that he had overstepped the bounds of propriety. Moody had a long talk with Lander and got him to agree to come again that night to the meeting to prove the sincerity of his apology.

Little did Moody know that one day Gerald Lander, the disruptive leader of the students, would spend his life evangelizing southern China as a missionary.

Reflection

When we hear stories like that of Gerald Lander, we realize how unlimited God is in whom he draws to himself. We must never exclude any names from our prayer list thinking that it is unlikely that God will save them. Are there people for whom you have stopped praying, thinking their salvation unlikely? Don’t give up! Our God specializes in accomplishing the unlikely.

Is anything too hard for the Lord?

Genesis 18:14