The Uneducated Shoe Salesman Who Shook Two Continents

Dwight L. Moody never graduated from the fifth grade. When he first applied to join Mount Vernon Congregational Church in Boston in 1855, the deacons were so unimpressed by his biblical knowledge that they delayed his membership for a year. His grammar was rough. He mispronounced words from the pulpit. One Chicago newspaper critic wrote that Moody "butchered the King's English" every time he opened his mouth.

Yet between 1873 and 1875, Moody preached to over two and a half million people across England and Scotland. Hardened London dockworkers wept. Cambridge scholars sat stunned. When asked how an uneducated former shoe salesman from Northfield, Massachusetts, could move entire cities to repentance, Moody's answer was plain: "I am the most overestimated man in America. God just uses me."

This is precisely what Paul describes in his letter to Corinth. He came not with superior wisdom or polished rhetoric but "in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling." Why? So that their faith would not rest on human eloquence but on the power of God. The Spirit of the Almighty does not require our credentials. He requires our surrender.

Moody understood what the wise of this world consistently miss — that God's deepest wisdom flows not through the impressive but through the available. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God, and He chooses the most unlikely vessels to carry them.