Overnight, we lost one of the great evangelists of my grandparent’s generation. Billy Graham was born at the end of the first war: my parents were born during the depression. He preached to my grandparents: by the time my parents were adults he was running crusades in New Zealand. And he preached the gospel into his 90s.
The world’s best-known evangelist, the Rev. Billy Graham, died Wednesday. He was 99.
From the gangly 16-year-old baseball-loving teen who found Christ at a tent revival, Graham went on to become an international media darling, a preacher to a dozen presidents and the voice of solace in times of national heartbreak. He was America’s pastor.
Graham retired to his mountain home in Montreat, N.C., in 2005 after nearly six decades on the road calling people to Christ at 417 all-out preaching and musical events from Miami to Moscow. His final New York City crusade in 2005 was sponsored by 1,400 regional churches from 82 denominations. In recent years, he was plagued by various ailments, including cancer and pnemonia.
He took his Bible to the ends of the Earth in preaching tours he called “crusades.” Presidents called on Graham in their dark hours, and uncounted millions say he showed them the light.
However, this generation’s elite damn him. They consider he speaks hate speech. They do not see the need for God, and the very fact that he talked to Presidents they don’t like or said things they don’t like makes him evil. They do not understand the gospel, nor do they understand the Christian life.
For in Christ we are to preach, and do good, and bring unity among believers — Graham would not hold a crusade unless all the churches in an area supported him and were praying for the event — through the spirit. The enemy is unspiritual. They look through our words and writing to find one thing that offends them, and then they shriek their accusations. In doing this, they are just like their master, who is the accuser of all our brothers and sisters in Christ, for he wants us to converge into his damnation, which he (at least) sees clearly.
14Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. 15Those who are spiritual discern all things, and they are themselves subject to no one else’s scrutiny. 16“For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
1And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people, but rather as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. 2I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. Even now you are still not ready, 3for you are still of the flesh. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations? 4For when one says, “I belong to Paul,” and another, “I belong to Apollos,” are you not merely human?
5What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. 6I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. 7So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. 8The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each. 9For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.
10According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. Each builder must choose with care how to build on it. 11For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ. 12Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw – 13the work of each builder will become visible, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each has done. 14If what has been built on the foundation survives, the builder will receive a reward. 15If the work is burned up, the builder will suffer loss; the builder will be saved, but only as through fire.
It is God who gives the growth to the church. Graham taught this. He saw himself as a servant of the Word, and his work was powerful. This led to him being attacked throughout his life, and setting up rules — such as never being in a room alone with a woman not his wife and paying his bills on the day they recieved them — that were designed to minimise the chance of an accusation.
And he was powerful, as VD notes, not by means of his rhetoric, but by the spirit of God.
I once heard Billy Graham preach in person in a football stadium. It was… utterly uninspiring. But the experience was also one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen. Because, you see, when he finished, I was thinking to myself, well, that was certainly a bust.
But then people started coming forward. First dozens, then hundreds. In the end, thousands of people came forward in response to the call. It was totally inexplicable. I had seldom been more astonished in my life, before or since.
A few years later, I read something Billy Graham said about his crusades. He said that before he goes anywhere to preach, he asks thousands of Christians in the area to commit to pray for the events, to pray for God to prepare the hearts of those who will be attending. These volunteers pray for months ahead of time. Then, Rev. Graham explained, he shows up, tells the crowd little more than, “God loves you and you need Jesus Christ,” and the Holy Spirit does the rest.
Now, I can’t prove that is what happened with science, but all I can say with absolute certainty is that whatever it is that made Billy Graham such an astonishingly powerful preacher of the Gospel, it wasn’t his eloquence, his rhetoric, or his logic. But he was a true servant of God and follower of Jesus Christ. May his reward be great indeed.
VD,Vox Popoli
Today, the more astute commentators are looking at Graham’s teaching, and I’m going to quote him from one of those sites.
If you find him hokey, and are underwhelmed: no apologies. He is a man who lived through the depression and the second part of the long war. He is a voice from a generation now dying or dead. But his words bear witness against this time.
Some years ago, my wife, Ruth, was reading the draft of a book I was writing. When she finished a section describing the terrible downward spiral of our nation’s moral standards and the idolatry of worshiping false gods such as technology and sex, she startled me by exclaiming, “If God doesn’t punish America, He’ll have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.”
She was probably thinking of a passage in Ezekiel where God tells why He brought those cities to ruin. “Now this was the sin of … Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen” (Ezekiel 16:49–50, NIV).
I wonder what Ruth would think of America if she were alive today. In the years since she made that remark, millions of babies have been aborted and our nation seems largely unconcerned. Self-centered indulgence, pride, and a lack of shame over sin are now emblems of the American lifestyle.
Yet the farther we get from God, the more the world spirals out of control.
My heart aches for America and its deceived people. The wonderful news is that our Lord is a God of mercy, and He responds to repentance. In Jonah’s day, Nineveh was the lone world superpower—wealthy, unconcerned, and self-centered. When the Prophet Jonah finally traveled to Nineveh and proclaimed God’s warning, people heard and repented.
Billy Graham
If you know the spirit of God, repent. If you find this strange, and know not Christ, seek him and repent. Change your ways. The first step of getting out of psychological infancy — being tossed like driftwood in the waves of fashion — is to realize that you have to change, that you are flawed, and your vices will damn you. Do not be offended that Graham preached against adultery, pornography and perversions: he also preached against corruption, greed and theft.
Instead, repent. The enemy is trying to turn our churches into dark satanic mills, manufacturing a converged race who have lost their souls. Instead find that green and pleasant land where Christ will walk with you.
Finally, know this; though the US state and the international corporations are vectors for degredation, none of us are without guilt. For all have sinend, and fallen short of the glory of God.
We need to repent. For we all have a home awaiting us. May it be with Christ, and not with the accusers of Billy Graham.