Straight to the Heart

A few weeks ago I posted the first part of a six-part series of blogs entitled “How to Change Your City”. I then got distracted - fittingly enough! - with plans to plant a new church in London. We heard a few days ago that the hard work had paid off and the church plant is going to be live by the end of this year. I can now focus on giving you the full series of blogs outlining “How to Change Your City”, and I am reposting the first blog to restart the series. The final five blogs will all be posted a few days at a time. Enjoy…

The cities of our world are in desperate need of the power of God. If you haven’t worked that out yet, then you must be living in a monastery. Last summer my own city, London, was on fire as rioters and looters roamed free. It’s time for Christians to get serious with God, and to find out how he tells us we can change our cities through his power.

A few months ago, I began looking for someone whom God had used to change my city in the past, and who might prove to be a model for a fresh move of God today. That led to me reading three biographies of William Booth, and over the next few weeks I’m going to blog Ten Things William Booth Did Which Changed The Face of His City. I believe that they are things which we can do to change our cities too.

William Booth was born in 1829, and converted as a 15-year-old in Nottingham. He moved to London in 1850, aged 21, but made little impact on the city which would one day be transformed through his godly example. The real breakthrough only came in 1865, when aged 36 he began to preach to the drunken inhabitants of London’s poor East End. In the three years leading up to 1868, he saw 4,000 converted and planted 13 preaching centres which held 140 services per week. After ten years more, this became 81 preaching stations which gathered 27,280 worshippers each week. By 1884 - less than two decades after his initial breakthrough - he had started 910 corps comprising 2,332 officers, who took revival across the city and to the nations of the world.

We are at a stage in history where God wants to transform not only London but all the other great cities of the world. The question is whether we will imitate the example of William Booth and others like him? In this blog post, let me start with the first factor through which he changed his city:-

FACTOR ONE: RADICAL PERSONAL COMMITMENT TO JESUS

William Booth’s revival began very simply with a personal revival in secret. Although he was only a 15-year-old boy when he was converted, he was determined that Jesus should have all there was of him. He was instantly convicted that some of his friends had given him a silver pencil case to say thank you for a favour he had done for them, but that he had actually only done them the favour because it was in his own interest to do so. He felt a fraud and agonised over the Holy Spirit’s conviction that he had sinned and must make amends. He remembered later:

“The entrance to the Heavenly Kingdom was closed against me by an evil act of the past which required restitution. In a boyish trading affair I had managed to make a profit out of my companions while giving them to suppose that what I did was all in the way of genuine fellowship. As a result of their gratitude, they gave me a silver pencil case. Merely to have returned the gift would have been easy, but to confess the deception I had practised upon them was a humiliation to which, for some days I could not bring myself … I remember, as it were but yesterday, the spot in the corner of the chapel [where God gave me strength], the resolution to end the matter rising up, the rushing forth, the finding of the young fellows I had chiefly wronged, the acknowledgement of my sin, the return of the pencil case – the instant rolling away from my heart of the guilty burden, the peace that came in its place, and the going forth to serve my God and my generation from that hour.”

The reason he moved to London in the first place, aged 21, was that he made another stand for what he saw as God’s call to serve the Lord with all his heart. He was working in a Nottingham pawnbroker’s and Saturday evening was the busiest time of the week, as factory workers pawned their possessions to pay for a night out on the town. William Booth was convicted that he should not work past midnight and therefore “labour on the Sabbath”. He understood the Sabbath to be an expression of Christian faith, where believers put down their tools and stopped working to express their faith that God was God and they were not. His boss might want to work into the early hours of Sunday because he did not trust the Lord to provide for him on the other six days of the week, but William Booth did not. When his friends at church advised him he was being too radical, and when his boss threatened to fire him and throw him out of his lodgings above the shop if he left work early, Booth decided to honour the Lord anyway. “I am willing to begin on Monday morning as soon as the clock strikes twelve and work until the clock strikes twelve on Saturday night, but not one hour or one minute of Sunday will I work for you or all your money,” he told his boss and was duly fired. The most common word which William Booth used for Jesus throughout his life was “the Master”, and he lived from his early Christian days as if he really meant it.

William Booth was asked in an interview towards the end of his life to describe the secret of his success. He replied: “I will tell you the secret. God has had all there was of me. There have been men with greater opportunities; but from the day I got the poor of London on my heart, and a vision of what Jesus Christ could do with the poor of London, I made up my mind that God would have all of William Booth there was. And if there is anything of power in The Salvation Army today, it is because God has all the adoration of my heart, all the power of my will, and all the influence of my life.” The interviewer commented that “I learned from William Booth that the greatness of a man’s power is the measure of his surrender. It is not a question of who you are or of what you are, but of whether God controls you.”

The question, of course, is will we do the same? Many people claim that they want God to revive their city, but few are willing to pay the price-tag of the personal revival which precedes Jesus using us like William Booth. We need to understand what he meant in his hymn, made famous by my friend Lex Loizides, when he wrote a revival prayer for his Salvation Army to sing together: “Oh, see us on Your altar lay, We give our lives to you today, So crown the offering now we pray: Send the fire today!”

Perhaps you are a church leader, longing for God to revive your city. Take note, then, of what happened to Miriam when she was one of the leaders of God’s People in Numbers 12. When she failed to deal with the sin of gossip and maligned someone to her brother privately in her tent - a seemingly innocuous sin - the Lord stopped the whole nation from advancing until she had repented. Verse 15 tells us that “the people did not move on till she was brought back.” Could it be that your church is not moving on because you view your secret sins as innocuous, but God views them as deadly?

Perhaps you are a Christian who is simply passionate to see God’s Kingdom come in your city. If so, you are just like William Booth, the student and the pawnbroker’s assistant. Learn from his life and from the experience of other men like him, such as the missionary CT Studd. He wrote that “What I would have you gather is that God does not deal with you until you are wholly given up to him, and then he will tell you what he would have you do.” If you want your city to turn to Christ through you, you must first turn to Christ in radical obedience yourself. If you want your city to know Jesus as Master, then you must first start living as if he is truly Master of your own life.

This is the first of ten factors from the life of William Booth which I will blog over the next few weeks, but it is the starting point from which the others flow. If you love Jesus and hate sin with the same radical devotion as William Booth, then you are embarking on God’s great training course in how to change your city.