Sep 29

Relevant Insights from General William Booth - Salvation Army Founder

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010 | posted by: admin

William Booth, a British Reform Methodist evangelist, and his wife, Catherine, founded the Salvation Army in 1865, giving birth to one of the greatest and most effective missions in world history. He became the first General in the Salvation Army, and was noted for his great love for God and for people. He was amazingly insightful, deeply passionate, eminently practical, and brilliantly witty. Tonight, I’ve been studying a bit from his life, and realized how prophetic and relevant his thoughts are for us today, so I thought I’d include a few:

“While women weep, as they do now, I’ll fight; while children go hungry, as they do now I’ll fight; while men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I’ll fight; while there is a drunkard left, while there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I’ll fight, I’ll fight to the very end!”

“God loves with a great love the man whose heart is bursting with a passion for the impossible.”

“We are not sent to minister to a congregation and be content if we keep things going. We are sent to make war and to stop short of nothing but the subjugation of the world to the sway of the Lord Jesus.”

“‘Not called!’ did you say? ‘Not heard the call,’ I think you should say. Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. Go stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father’s house and bid their brothers and sisters, and servants and masters not to come there. And then look Christ in the face, whose mercy you have professed to obey, and tell him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish his mercy to the world.”

“We must wake ourselves up! Or somebody else will take our place, and bear our cross, and thereby rob us of our crown.”

“Faith and works should travel side by side, step answering to step, like the legs of men walking. First faith, and then works; and then faith again, and then works again–until they can scarcely distinguish which is the one and which is the other.”

“The greatness of a man’s power is the measure of his surrender.”

“Secular music, do you say, belongs to the devil? Does it? Well, if it did I would plunder him for it, for he has no right to a single note of the whole seven…Every note, and every strain, and every harmony is divine, and belongs to us.”

“If I thought I could win one more soul to the Lord by walking on my head and playing the tambourine with my toes, I’d learn how!”

“To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a pair of new breeches, to give him regular work, or even to give him a University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged you have wasted your labor. You must in some way or other graft upon the man’s nature a new nature, which has in it the element of the Divine.”

“There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterately dishonest that theft is to them a master passion. When a human being has reached that stage, there is only one course that can be rationally pursued. Sorrowfully, but remorselessly, it must be recognized that he has become lunatic, morally demented, incapable of self-government, and that upon him, therefore, must be passed the sentence of permanent seclusion from a world in which he is not fit to be at large.”

“It is against stupidity in every shape and form that we have to wage our eternal battle. But how can we wonder at the want of sense on the part of those who have had no advantages, when we see such plentiful absence of that commodity on the part of those who have had all the advantages?”

“There are different kinds of fire; there is false fire. No one knows this better than we do, but we are not such fools as to refuse good bank notes because there are false ones in circulation; and although we see here and there manifestations of what appears to us to be nothing more than mere earthly fire, we none the less prize and value, and seek for the genuine fire which comes from the altar of the Lord.”

And this prescient quote from Booth came before the dawning of the Twentieth Century:

“I consider that the chief dangers which confront the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and heaven without hell.”

It is this last quote which caught my attention today. My father, Charles Simpson, found it in some notes belonging to my Grandfather, Vernon Simpson. This prompted me to do some further digging tonight. Thank you, Lord, for the Booths, and for their faithfulness to Your mission and Your people! Their words continue to inspire.

I’ll record more Booth quotes as I’m able, and if you have a favorite Booth quote, let’s hear it!

Pastor Stephen Simpson

Covenant Church of Mobile

www.covenantmobile.com

www.csmpublishing.org

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