Sayings of Dwight Lyman Moody (1837–1899)

1. A man can counterfeit love, he can counterfeit faith, he can counterfeit hope and all the other graces, but it is very difficult to counterfeit humility.
2. Character is what you are in the dark.
3. If I take care of my character; my reputation will take care of itself.
4. Happiness is caused by things that happen around me, and circumstances will mar it; but joy flows right on through trouble; joy flows on through the dark; joy flows in the night as well as in the day; joy flows all through persecution and opposition. It is an unceasing fountain bubbling up in the heart; a secret spring the world can't see and doesn't know anything about. The Lord gives his people perpetual joy when they walk in obedience to him.
5. I find that many Christians are in trouble about the future; they think they will not have grace enough to die by. It is much more important that we should have grace enough to live by. It seems to me that death is of very little importance in the meantime. When the dying hour comes, there will be dying grace; but you do not require dying grace to live by.
6. Joy is love exalted; peace is love in repose; long-suffering is love enduring; gentleness is love in society; goodness is love in action; faith is love on the battlefield; meekness is love in school; and temperance is love in training.
7. The world does not understand theology or dogma, but it understands love and sympathy.
8. If we have got the true love of God shed abroad in our hearts, we will show it in our lives. We will not have to go up and down the earth proclaiming it. We will show it in everything we say or do.
9. The tendency of the world is down—God's path is up.
10. Never think that Jesus commanded a trifle, nor dare to trifle with anything he has commanded.
11. Obedience means marching right on whether we feel like it or not. Many times we go against our feelings. Faith is one thing, feeling is another.
12. A great many people are trying to make peace, but that has already been done. God has not left it for us to do; all we have to do is to enter into it.
13. Careful for nothing, prayerful for everything, thankful for anything.
14. Prayer does not mean that I am to bring God down to my thoughts and my purposes, and bend his government according to my foolish, silly, and sometimes sinful notions. Prayer means that I am to be raised up into feeling, into union and design with him; that I am to enter into his counsel and carry out his purpose fully.
15. Some people think God does not like to be troubled with our constant coming and asking. The way to trouble God is not to come at all.
16. The Christian on his knees sees more than the philosopher on tiptoe.
17. God sends no one away empty except those who are full of themselves
18. Small numbers make no difference to God. There is nothing small if God is in it.
19. It was Dwight Moody who said, "I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And that which I can do, by the grace of God, I will do." With that simple commitment, God used him to bring revival to England and America.
20. If a man gets drunk and goes out and breaks his leg so that it must be amputated, God will forgive him if he asks it, but he will have to hop around on one leg all his life.
21. Man is born with his face turned away from God. When he truly repents, he is turned right round toward God; he leaves his old life.
22. Salvation is worth working for. It is worth a man's going round the world on his hands and knees, climbing its mountains, crossing its valleys, swimming its rivers, going through all manner of hardship in order to attain it. But we do not get it in that way. It is to him who believes.
23. I believe Satan to exist for two reasons: first, the Bible says so; and second, I've done business with him.
24. The great preacher F. B. Meyer once asked D. L. Moody, "What is the secret of your success?" Moody replied, "For many years I have never given an address without the consciousness that the Lord may come before I have finished." This may well explain the intensity of his service and the zeal of his ministry for Christ.
25. I have more trouble with D. L. Moody than with any other man I ever met.
26. God has nothing to say to the self-righteous.
27. When a man has no strength, if he leans on God, he becomes powerful.
28. When God wants to move a mountain, he does not take a bar of iron, but he takes a little worm. The fact is, we have too much strength. We are not weak enough. It is not our strength that we want. One drop of God's strength is worth more than all the world.
29. Temptations are like tramps. Treat them kindly, and they will return bringing others with them.
30. Temptations are never so dangerous as when they come to us in a religious garb.
31. If I walk with the world, I can't walk with God.
32. Some people go back into the past and rake up all the troubles they ever had, and then they look into the future and anticipate that they will have still more trouble, and then they go reeling and staggering all through life.
33. We can stand affliction better than we can prosperity, for in prosperity we forget God.
34. A great many people are trying to make peace, but that has already been done. God has not left it for us to do; all we have to do is to enter into it.
35. Attitudes determine our actions, for good or bad.
36. Be careful for nothing, prayerful for everything, thankful for anything.
37. Sin will keep you from this Book or this Book will keep you from sin.
38. Those who say they will forgive but can't forget, bury the hatchet, but they leave the handle out for immediate use.
39. It is not necessary that we should be able to tell where or how we have been converted, but it is important that we should be able to tell that we are converted.
40. Take courage. We walk in the wilderness today and in the Promised Land tomorrow.
41. Earth recedes, heaven opens. I've been through the gates! Don't call me back … if this is death, it's sweet. Dwight! Irene! I see the children's faces. [Dwight and Irene were his dead grandchildren.]
42. Give me a person who says, "This one thing I do, and not these fifty things I dabble in."
43. If you pray for bread and bring no basket to carry it, you prove the doubting spirit, which may be the only hindrance to the boon you ask.
44. More depends on my walk than talk.
45. I prayed for faith and thought that some day faith would come down and strike me like lightning. But faith did not seem to come. One day I read in the tenth chapter of Romans, "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God." I had up to this time closed my Bible and prayed for faith. I now opened my Bible and began to study, and faith has been growing ever since.
46. Real true faith is man's weakness leaning on God's strength.
47. There are three kinds of faith in Christ: 1. Struggling faith, like a man in deep water desperately swimming. 2. Clinging faith, like a man hanging to the side of a boat. 3. Resting faith, like a man safely within the boat (and able to reach out with a hand to help someone else get in).
48. A creed is the road or street. It is very good as far as it goes, but if it doesn't take us to Christ it is worthless.
49. Seeking to perpetuate one's name on earth is like writing on the sand by the seashore; to be perpetual it must be written on eternal shores.
50. I believe the family was established long before the church, and my duty is to my family first. I am not to neglect my family .
51. You may find hundreds of faultfinders among professed Christians; but all their criticism will not lead one solitary soul to Christ. I never preached a sermon yet that I could not pick to pieces, and find fault with. I feel that Jesus Christ ought to have a far better representative than I am. But I have lived long enough to discover that there is nothing perfect in this world. If you are to wait till you find a perfect preacher, or perfect meetings, I am afraid you will have to wait till the millennium arrives. What we want is to be looking up to Christ. Let us be done with faultfinding.
52. The voice of sin is loud, but the voice of forgiveness is louder.
53. A man can no more take in a supply of grace for the future than he can eat enough today to last him for the next 6 months, nor can he inhale sufficient air into his lungs with one breath to sustain life for a week to come. We are permitted to draw upon God's store of grace from day to day as we need it.
54. The law tells me how crooked I am. Grace comes along and straightens me out.
55. How far away is heaven? It is not so far as some imagine. It wasn't very far from Daniel. It was not so far off that Elijah's prayer and those of others could not be heard there. Men full of the Spirit can look right into heaven.
56. No man can resolve himself into heaven.
57. We talk about heaven being so far away. It is within speaking distance to those who belong there.
58. A holy life will produce the deepest impression. Lighthouses blow no horns; they only shine.
59. God commands us to be filled with the Spirit, and if we are not filled, it is because we are living beneath our privileges.
60. If we are full of pride and conceit and ambition and self-seeking and pleasure and the world, there is no room for the Spirit of God, and I believe many a man is praying to God to fill him when he is full already with something else.
61. The Spirit of God first imparts love; he next inspires hope, and then gives liberty; and that is about the last thing we have in many of our churches.
62. The beginning of greatness is to be little; the increase of greatness is to be less; the perfection of greatness is to be nothing.