NOT JUST SUCCESSFUL GREATNESS BUT SPIRITUAL RESPONSIBILITY
Dr Roberts Liardon, Author of God’s Generals at Dunamis International Gospel Center’s IMFFC2021 (Day 3 Evening Session)
There was a fat man, there are not many fat people in Nigeria like there is in America, we are the biggest people in the world, there is a show called my 600-pound life so everybody on the show is 600-pounds plus, only in America will you have eight seasons. Pray for America, when you come don’t eat our food it is not good, you will become a fat African. We have so many blessings we forget how to discipline ourselves.
- Dwight L. Moody
Dwight L. Moody was called a country bumpkin, a fat person in the village where there was no education and spoke funny. He tried to join the Church but he couldn’t pass the Church membership test. He got saved on the streets of Boston when he was a shoe salesman. He joined the Church but couldn’t pass the test of becoming a member. The Pastor said, we will give it to you, we will ask you the questions and you will just answer, he said no I will not do that, if I can not become a member like everybody else then I will be a visitor all the time and that’s the way he got the title as the world greatest lay preacher of all time. He will never seek for ordination or church membership because he couldn’t pass the test but he would die preaching to over a hundred million people in his lifetime. He got into ministry in Chicago working with the children in the slums of Chicago. Abraham Lincoln will come and visit and will be impressed with his ministry. Sunday school was the big new thing in those days. I love Sunday School, they thought me the Bible in those days, I still remember those verses. He was asked to come to Great Britain for the Sunday School Convention since he had the largest Sunday School in America at that time, he was elected to represent the Americans. They were concerned that the British and the Irish will not like him because he spoke in the country way, he was an overweight country guy that loved the Lord and the ministry was working and all the sophisticated Americans were concerned he was going to embarrass them because of how he was but they had to let the largest Sunday School guy be the main guy, it was Mr. Moody. He gets there and decides not to try to be what he is not. Never try to be what you are not, always be what you are. Say what you say, be happy and be strong and loud, don’t apologize for it all.
He gets up, speaks, the British, Irish and the Scots fell in love with him they thought he was hilarious, they thought he was wonderful, God just blessed him and his biggest crusade began to happen. Fifteen thousand, his largest crusade at that time was thirty thousand people. He goes from a country bumpkin to that British crowd. If he can do, you can do it! He moved across England and the news got back to America and they couldn’t believe that Mr. Moody was that. They saw him as a fat children minister that now became a famous evangelist. He will take up America and pack it out. He lived in Chicago, in Chicago history, they have the great Chicago fire and the night before that fire burnt down most of Chicago, Mr. Moody was preaching that night and he didn’t give an Altar call he said I want you to think about it tonight and tomorrow I will give you a chance to get right with God. That night the fire came and service never occurred the next day and he was so disrupted knowing that there are those who didn’t get the Altar call and he changed his style that every night there will be an Altar call. Don’t forget the Altar call pastors. In all your preaching, don’t forget the message, you must be born again. The healing of your spirit from sin is the greatest. Kathryn Kuhlman said ‘there is something more precious than the healing of the body, when one passes from death unto life, from that moment, the greatest miracle of them all takes place. Her miracles brought people to salvation, not to a famous name or a bigger crowd but the miracle that happened to her was to let the people who were not saved know that He is alive, He is great, He heals and He will save you and they came by the thousands, they ran down the aisle when she was giving the Altar call, I pray I see that again before I die. Moody changed it.
I never thought that I will be in Glory Dome to tell you the stories I read when I was a teenager, I never knew that the book I wrote will become one of the great books in Nigeria. Do you know for twenty-five years, the highest number of buyers of my book is America, second Nigeria. For some reason, the Ministry the Lord gave me connected with that younger generation at that time, some people think I am supposed to be dead because I am a historian so historians are old and dead. I began doing this when I was a kid, when I was twenty-five to thirty, when you were dating the wrong people, I was talking to older women, when you were going to the movies I was going to their house for prayer meetings and getting old ladies and grand papas to pray for me. I have been slapped, spat on, hit and all of those things I have learned how to respond to anything coming and I enjoy it. I am so glad that I wasn’t scared, I was raised by two wonderful women my mother and grandmother, my mother died four months ago, my mother and I worked together for thirty-seven years, everything we did, we did together my mother was an educated woman with two masters and a doctorate, she can run the government and get them out of debt if they listen to her, God gave me her to run my ministry, office and staff so I can go for four months and not have to come back because Mama is in charge, thank God for good Holy Ghost family.
Moody preached another service, that night two people got saved, an adult and a child. The man that was cleaning the hall he had preached met him behind the stage and they were talking, Mr. Moody was sad that only two people got saved that night, he wanted more, the man sweeping the floor stopped and said you know Mr. Moody, it wasn’t two people but one and a half, Moody thought the one and a half is the adult and the child and he turned and said you are wrong, the child is one and he learned something about the importance of children, the reason why revivals fail after you are done is because your children and grand children were not taught. Revival is to always be progressively going forward and not backward. Moody got sick in 1899, John Alexander Dowie a great healing preacher, Moody and Dowie knew each other but they were not good friends, Dowie sent a telegram to Mr. Moody, if you repent from being mean to me I will pray to God and He will heal you, Moody didn’t respond so on December 31, 1899 he died and Dowie lived, it is sad that the two of them could not get along. It is sad that men have not learned to discern the body appropriately.
- Billy Graham and Oral Roberts.
Billy Graham and Oral Roberts, two young men that will come from nowhere into the main consciences of America and then the world. One was Baptist, Billy Graham, I got to meet him before he died, a wonderful man, Billy Graham had seen Oral Roberts on television, they knew each other but they had never met. Billy and his wife and Oral Roberts and his wife were in the same hotel and they don’t know it. What I don’t know is how can these two famous guys be in the same hotel and nobody will tell the other one who is there, God directs the steps of the righteous I think if they had known it would have confused them. God arranged breakfast, Billy and Rose were on the elevator and Oral and Evelyn were standing on the elevator open and when the door opened they recognized each other, hugged each other and they went for breakfast. Billy told Oral, I snuck into one of your tent meetings, he said I came because I saw you and I loved your preaching, souls got saved but I saw miracles and I wanted to see with my own eyes if it was true. I don’t know how Billy Graham will sneak into a tent and nobody sees him but that is what happened. Billy Graham told Roberts and Roberts told me that he cried as he saw Jesus healing people that night. He asked God, can I have a healing ministry like this? Billy said God said there will be those healed while you preach but I need you to preach one thing only, the salvation side of the Cross to your generation, Oral will do this and you must do this and Billy Graham settled into his call and ministry. When he died, he had preached to two hundred and fifty million people, which doesn’t count television and radio but in person. Billy Graham is a great man to admire and follow aspects of his life. I met Billy Graham.
The Lord told me if I will study the Generals, He will make all the ones I like to be my friends and Billy Graham was getting old and I told God he can’t die until I met him. I was in Los Angeles when I saw Billy Graham and I asked him, why are you the great Evangelist of our day, what have you done that makes you great? He said I did the one thing God asked me and I did it well. A key to succeeding in life is to do that one thing that God has given you to do. Obey the grace on your life without shame.
- William Booth
My favorite general besides Kathryn Kuhlman is William Booth and his wife Catherine, they built the Salvation Army. I liked him because he did the Gospel and social justice together for mankind, he was kicked out of the Methodist Church because he kept getting the wrong people saved and bringing them to church. The Methodist Church he was a part of wanted rich people, nice people but Booth brought in prostitutes, drunkards and those people who don’t know how to go to church. After a while they decide to ask him not to bring those people anymore so he left the Church with his wife and went to East London, a bar called ‘the blind beggar pub’. He would stand and preach, some will punch him, once in a while, a guy would fall on the ground and cry to be saved, he would lead him into salvation, take him home and train him for six weeks and say to him you remember how I found you? You go find a pub and do the same thing and slowly the revival starts and they grew so fast that the government of the ministry changed how it ran. In those days, the ministry was run by a community, there were so many people getting saved so they had a meeting and said let us act like the military people, we only come back to the headquarters when you really need us and you leave us.
The government changed. He wanted his wife to preach but she refused but the Lord kept calling, one day as the service was about to end, she went to her husband and said can I preach tonight, he was shocked, stopped the song service and stopped everybody from leaving. He said tonight a miracle is going to happen, my wife shall preach, that night people came from everywhere, that was the day one of the greatest women preachers was born. She was so smart she came to the British government and helped with their decision-making. She accelerated not because she was a woman but because she was anointed and was not ashamed. General Booth will be asked to meet the Royal Family and he will forget the appointment, how do you forget an appointment at Buckingham Palace? Mr. Booth’s assistant found him out in the field of London and said sir you have to go to the Palace. He washed his hands and went with his dirty clothes from the slums, walked in, greets the Royal family and says, I am wearing today your subjects sin and shame, I have been labouring in your city streets that your men might change and be better citizens.
Mr. Booth didn’t have any intimidating factor with people of prestige, he could talk with anybody from the biggest to the smallest. His wife died of breast cancer in 1888, he lived till 1912, as an old man, he couldn’t walk like he used to, he loved to preach. A preacher never retires they just keep getting refired until one day they graduate and go to heaven.
Here is a quote of General Booth, some men send people to give years of bible school, I want to send them five minutes to hell that, that will make them the Greatest Preachers you have ever heard of. The people that came to him were trained for the Gospel and the Salvation Army had a unique place. Once you are sent to a nation, they will make you a coffin and then all your belongings will be put on the coffin and then you will put it on the boat and go with it because you are going to go there and die there, you go with your coffin to bury you once you are dead. I wonder if Nigerians can do that
I hope these stories help illustrate what a general is like? I pray today that you will change because upon this great Church in the of nation Nigeria seats a man of not just successful greatness but spiritual responsibility that demands accomplishments. Remember if the devil can’t stop you he will try to get you so active that you never accomplish anything, be aware of that activity that does nothing. The devil can’t stop you but he can make you so busy that nothing ever gets done. Will anybody come and see you if you die?
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