A little girl named Betty was dusting her father’s neat desk. The pad of paper was perfectly straight. The two sharpened pencils were set at an angle from the paper. Nothing else lay on the desk. As the girl dusted, she moved the ...
6 minBiographical Sketch
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Henry Moorhouse: For God So Loved the World
5 min
Adoniram Judson: An Ambassador for Jesus in Burma
6 min
William Booth: The Founder of the Salvation Army
5 min
George Müller: Asking God to Provide
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Matters of Life & Death is a free teaching series looking at the nature & character of God revealed in Scripture and bringing inspirational stories of people who, with Christ’s power, held fast to God’s Word in their daily lives.
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Topics
Character Qualities
Commands of Christ
Basic Life Principles
Attributes of God
A little girl named Betty was dusting her father’s neat desk. The pad of paper was perfectly straight. The two sharpened pencils were set at an angle from the paper. Nothing else lay on the desk. As the girl dusted, she moved the pencils so that they were angled ever so slightly crooked, on purpose!
Henry Moorhouse is best known to history as “Harry.” This British evangelist loved the Lord with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength. He realized that our love for God is rooted in the great Scriptural truth recorded in I John 4:19—“We love him, because he first loved us.”
February 1812 was a month filled with dramatic changes for young Adoniram. On the fifth, he was married to Ann Hasseltine. The next day, he was ordained as a minister of the Gospel. Two weeks later, on February 19, Adoniram and Ann boarded a ship bound for a land unknown to them on the other side of the world.
At the time that William Booth was born, England was changing fast. The Napoleonic Wars that had ripped apart Europe were finally ended. It was the dawn of the Victorian Age. But in the homeland, all was not well. The Industrial Revolution, the same social transformation that gave England her prosperity, also brought its hardships to the masses of humanity.
“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world” (James 1:27). Many know this verse in the Bible, but few have acted upon it so fully and faithfully as George Müller.
Many people know the name A. W. Tozer. However, fewer know the life of the man behind the writing. Aiden Wilson Tozer was born in rural Pennsylvania on April 21, 1897. He was born into a family of farmers. His parents were very poor. Tozer was one of six children. Tozer’s early education was extremely limited.
The story of Silas Told is rarely told. He was an indentured servant who lived for many years as a sailor. As a sailor in the eighteenth century, he experienced the very worst of humanity. Yet, when he was redeemed by the hand of God, he discovered that true liberty consists of being a servant of God and of his fellow men.
The young mother sat on the train, holding her baby girl in her lap. She watched as another baby nearby was receiving attention and admiration from the other passengers on the train. She hugged her baby close. She softly said, “I wouldn’t exchange you for anyone in the whole world, you darling, ugly baby with the beautiful eyes.”
Susannah is a shining example of a woman who fulfilled God’s will in being a help, meet for her husband's needs. She herself gives the summary of her life as the wife of Charles Spurgeon: “I can see two pilgrims treading this highway of life together, hand in hand, heart linked to heart."
"Take my life, and let it be / Consecrated, Lord, to Thee." These lines have been sung and echoed in many hearts since they were written over 100 years ago. Today we will look at the life of the author. Her name is well-known in the world of hymn writers: Frances Ridley Havergal.
It was a cold winter morning and the snow was falling steadily. A fifteen-year-old boy made his way slowly through the streets of Colchester in the southeastern part of England. All his life, he had been exposed to the Word of God. His father was a pastor. His grandfather was a pastor. But he was as yet a stranger to the Lord Jesus Christ.
It was a simple wedding. It had to be. The bride and groom had only known each other in the last few months, but they were bound together by a purpose greater than themselves. The groom was a young medical doctor named Marcus Whitman who had offered himself as a missionary to the tribes of the Oregon Territory on the west side of the Rocky Mountains.
The prize made the eyes of the lad sparkle with anticipation. His Sunday school teacher had offered a New Testament to any boy in the class who would memorize Psalm 119, all 176 verses! The young boy had never done anything like this before, and he was only nine years old. Sure enough, by the required time, the boy stood erect on the stand and quoted the entire psalm with only five small errors.
In 1890, one brave missionary ventured into the sandy deserts of Arabia to bring the Gospel back to the lands of the Middle East from which it had arisen centuries earlier. Samuel Marinus Zwemer would become known as the Apostle to Islam, a man who unlocked the language, culture, and religion of Islam to the Western World.
Moody’s life, preaching, and legacy have touched many lives all over the world. The boy who had honored his mother and had eaten obediently his simple porridge of cornmeal had grown up to honor the Lord and give the simple, nourishing Bread of Life to hundreds of thousands of souls across the globe.
No one in England ever would have guessed that C. T. Studd would become a missionary. Why? He was the most famous cricket player in England! His name was a household word known throughout England and the entire English-speaking world wherever the sport of cricket was followed.
Ira Sankey seemed to hear a voice say gently to him, “Sing the hymn you found on the train.” But that was impossible! The poem had no tune. In vain, he considered what to do next. Again, compelled by the quiet leading of the Holy Spirit, Sankey pulled out the newspaper clipping from his scrapbook and placed it on the organ.
As a young girl living in Boone, Iowa, the cry of Darlene’s heart was, “Lord, I’d go anywhere for you, no matter what the cost!” This enthusiastic promise she made as a child was tested many times over her long life. She carried with her all her life the lesson learned in prison: “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
More than any other one man, a British politician named William Wilberforce was raised up as an instrument in the hands of God to put an end to the human-enslaving practices of the British Empire. In the generation before his birth, the Great Awakening had swept through the British Isles and the American colonies.
Just after the end of the Civil War, a pastor and his wife welcomed another baby boy into the world. They named their baby John Nelson Hyde, and they devoted their son to the service of the Lord. The father, Pastor Smith Harris Hyde, and his wife Lucinda had prayed that one of their boys would be used mightily of God in the advancement of the Gospel.