A DESERVING TRIBUTE TO A GOD'S GENERAL
Billy Graham
The American Evangelist (1918 - 2018)
EARLY LIFE AND CONVERSION
The son of a prosperous dairy farmer, Billy Graham grew up in rural North Carolina. In 1934, while attending a revival meeting led by the evangelist Mordecai Ham, he underwent a religious experience and professed his “decision for Christ.” In 1936 he left his father's dairy farm to attend Bob Jones College (now Bob Jones University), then located in Cleveland, Tennessee, but stayed for only a semester because of the extreme fundamentalism of the institution. He transferred to Florida Bible Institute (now Trinity College), near Tampa, graduated in 1940, and was ordained a minister by the Southern Baptist Convention. Convinced that his education was deficient, however, Graham enrolled at Wheaton College in Illinois. While at Wheaton, he met and married (1943) Ruth Bell, daughter of L. Nelson Bell, a missionary to China.
By the time Graham graduated from Wheaton in 1943, he had developed the preaching style for which he would become famous—a simple, direct message of sin and salvation that he delivered energetically and without condescension.
EVANGELISM AND RISE
Graham's emergence as an evangelist came at a propitious moment for 20th-century Protestants. Protestantism in the United States was deeply divided as a result of controversies in the 1920s between fundamentalism and modernism (a movement that applied scholarly methods of textual and historical criticism to the study of the Bible). The public image of fundamentalists was damaged by the Scopes Trial of 1925, which concerned the teaching of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in public schools.
In the late 1940s Graham's fellow evangelist in Youth for Christ, Charles Templeton, challenged Graham to attend seminary with him so that both preachers could shore up their theological knowledge. Graham considered the possibility at length, but in 1949, while on a spiritual retreat in the San Bernardino Mountains of southern California, he decided to set aside his intellectual doubts about Christianity and simply “preach the gospel.” After his retreat, Graham began preaching in Los Angeles, where his crusade brought him national attention. He acquired this new fame in no small measure because newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, impressed with the young evangelist's preaching and anticommunist rhetoric, instructed his papers to “puff Graham.” The huge circus tent in which Graham preached, as well as his own self-promotion, lured thousands of curious visitors—including Hollywood movie stars and gangsters—to what the press dubbed the “canvas cathedral” at the corner of Washington and Hill streets. From Los Angeles, Graham undertook evangelistic crusades around the country and the world, eventually earning international renown.
LAST DAYS
in the first half of the 20th century, tent revivals as well as annual revivals in churches in the South and Midwest continued to be an important feature of Protestant church life. After World War II, however, a renewed interest in mass evangelism was especially evident in the widespread support given to the revival “crusades” of the American evangelist Billy Graham and various regional revivalists. Graham's crusades, often conducted in major metropolitan centres, were but the best known of many such revivals.
Evangelist Billy Graham tackled the topic of death often and with surprising frankness for a man who made his living telling people the Good News of salvation in Christ. Graham died Wednesday at the age of 99 in his home in Montreat, N.C. When Graham preached, he said that death was, of course, inevitable. As no one knew when Christ would return, he said, everyone should think instead about the sure thing they did know: the certainty of their own death.
If Billy Graham should have a final word for you in particular reading today, it would be "REPENT OF YOUR SINS AND COME TO JESUS TODAY" as captured in this last video below...
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you till the very end and keep you away from sin... AMEN!