Graham - Hear My Heart

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Graham, Billy

Hear my heart : what I would say to you / Billy Graham.

pages cm

1. Christian lifeBaptist authors. I. Title.

BV4510.3.G73 2013

248.4dc23

2013004152

ISBN 978-1-4767-3430-9

ISBN 978-1-4767-3431-6 (ebook)

I had a Hindu student say to me in Madras, I would become a Christian if I could see one. And when he said that to me, he was looking at me. That was one of the greatest sermons ever preached to me.

B ILLY G RAHAM

By Marshall Shelley

B illy Graham was perhaps the most significant religious figure of the twentieth century, and the organizations and the movement he helped spawn continue to shape the twenty-first.

During his lifetime, Graham preached in person to more than two hundred million people and to millions more via television, satellite, and film. Nearly three million responded to the invitation at the end of his sermons to accept Jesus into your heart. He proclaimed the gospel to more people than any other preacher in history. In the process, Graham became Americas pastor, participating in presidential inaugurations and speaking during national crises such as the memorial services following the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks.

He became the friend and confidant of popes and presidents, queens and dictators, said Columbia University historian Randall Balmer, and yet even in his later years he possessed the boyish charm and unprepossessing demeanor to communicate with the masses.

Billy Graham was born in 1918 in Charlotte, North Carolina. He briefly attended Bob Jones College, graduating from Florida Bible Institute near Tampa and Wheaton College in Illinois. He was ordained a minister in the Southern Baptist Church in 1939; he pastored a small church in suburban Chicago and preached on a weekly radio program. In 1946 he became the first full-time staff member of Youth for Christ and launched his evangelistic campaigns. For four years (19481952) he also served as president of Northwestern Schools in Minneapolis. His 1949 evangelistic tent meetings in Los Angeles brought him to national attention, and his 1957 New York meetings, which filled Madison Square Garden for four months, established him as a major presence on the American religious scene.

Graham appeared regularly on the lists of most admired people. Between 1950 and 1990 he won a spot on the Gallup Organizations Most Admired list more often than any other American. Ladies Home Journal once ranked him second only to God in the category achievements in religion. He received both the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1983) and the Congressional Gold Medal (1996).

Sherwood Wirt, who for seventeen years edited the Graham organizations Decision magazine, cited one Scottish minister who made this observation about Graham: My first impression of the man at close quarters was not of his good looks but of his goodness; not of his extraordinary range of commitments, but of his own committedness to his Lord and Master. To be with him even for a short time is to get a sense of a single-minded man; it shames one and shakes one as no amount of ability and cleverness can do.

Graham was a model of integrity. Despite scandals and missteps that toppled other leaders and ministers, including Grahams friend Richard Nixon and a succession of televangelists, in six decades of ministry no one ever leveled a serious accusation of misconduct against him.

Thats not to say he wasnt seriously criticized. Some liberals and intellectuals called his message simplistic. Some fundamentalists considered him compromised for cooperating with mainline groups and the National Council of Churches. His moderate antisegregationist stance during the civil rights era drew fire from both sides: white segregationists were furious when he invited the agitator Martin Luther King, Jr., to pray at the 1957 New York City crusade; civil rights activists accused him of cowardice for not joining them on protest marches and getting arrested for the cause.

In 1982, when he visited the Soviet Union to preach the gospel at the invitation of the government, he touched off a firestorm of criticism. Despite having met with the Siberian SevenPentecostal dissidents who were seeking political asylumGraham was quoted as saying he had not personally seen any evidence of religious persecution. Some called him a traitor. But he insisted he would go anywhere to preach as long as there were no restrictions on his freedom to proclaim the gospel. He returned claiming he saw the hand of God working in the Soviet Union. He was fiercely attacked for being nave and a tool of the Soviet propaganda machine.

By 1990, however, after the fall of the Soviet Union, his prescience was vindicated when President George H. W. Bush said to the National Religious Broadcasters, Eight years ago, one of the Lords great ambassadors, Rev. Billy Graham, went to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and, upon returning, spoke of a movement there toward more religious freedom. And perhaps he saw it before many of us because it takes a man of God to sense the early movement of the hand of God.

Perhaps Grahams lasting legacy was his ability to present the gospel in the idiom of the culture. He did this brilliantly, making innovative use of emerging technologiesradio, television, magazines, books, a newspaper column, motion pictures, satellite broadcasts, the Internetto spread his message.