On the Day Billy Graham Died
00:00:00.000 | Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art
00:00:06.720 | with me, thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
00:00:10.440 | Well this morning Billy Graham walked through the valley of the shadow of death and into
00:00:14.780 | the arms of the Savior he served so faithfully over the decades.
00:00:18.960 | He was 99 years old.
00:00:21.920 | Pastor John, Billy Graham was a formative influence on you and your ministry and I wanted
00:00:26.200 | to jump on the phone with you today to record a special episode of the Ask Pastor John podcast
00:00:30.440 | to get your immediate response on what's going through your mind today, what you're thinking
00:00:35.120 | about right now, the memories that are coming back to you as you process this news.
00:00:40.600 | Billy Graham, when I was growing up as a teenager and even today in my experience, I said to
00:00:49.400 | Noel this morning, "He was just larger than life."
00:00:56.360 | I didn't expect to get this emotional.
00:01:02.400 | I can remember standing as a 15-year-old on the porch beside the basketball backboard
00:01:15.680 | that was fastened to it.
00:01:17.160 | It's funny how clear this is.
00:01:20.480 | And thinking, "What would we do if Billy Graham died?"
00:01:26.320 | What that captures is an immature kid who doesn't have a big grasp of the sovereignty
00:01:33.160 | of God yet, and yet a profound love for Billy Graham and a profound sense that he's a big
00:01:41.640 | deal in my world and he was a big deal in our world.
00:01:48.560 | He embodied, for John Piper, my parents' religion written across the sky because he was globally
00:01:59.600 | known and globally significant, and yet every word that seemed to come out of his mouth
00:02:04.960 | could have come out of my father's mouth or my mother's mouth.
00:02:09.800 | And so it was a massive affirmation that the same glorious good news was being heralded
00:02:19.960 | by this man that everybody seemed to respect and what I was being taught at home, which
00:02:26.200 | gives to a kid, a teenager, a sense of, "Wow, I'm really on to something glorious here,
00:02:33.400 | something solid, something that responsible, respectable, smart people embrace."
00:02:41.240 | Isn't that amazing that it would have that effect on me as a kid?
00:02:45.520 | I mean the same basic good news.
00:02:48.160 | God is holy and demands allegiance.
00:02:50.840 | Every person on the planet is a sinner.
00:02:54.000 | God is merciful and sent Jesus, his Son, to die in the place of sinners and believe on
00:03:00.160 | the Lord Jesus and you shall be saved.
00:03:02.920 | So that basic gospel was my life as I was growing up.
00:03:09.480 | And there he was saying it on the television and in these massive crusades over and over
00:03:14.480 | again.
00:03:15.480 | And he embodied the same evangelistic fervor that my dad had.
00:03:18.860 | He preached with the Bible folded back in his hand saying, "The Bible says, the Bible
00:03:23.600 | says."
00:03:24.600 | And every time he said that, I said, "That's my book.
00:03:27.920 | That's what I believe."
00:03:30.340 | Some authoritative preaching.
00:03:32.580 | What simple power he had when he opened his mouth.
00:03:37.120 | You know, a sentence that someone else might say and that he might say, they just have
00:03:41.000 | a cataclysmic difference in their effect because of the anointing that seemed to be on Billy
00:03:47.120 | Grimm's authority in preaching.
00:03:50.240 | Same joyful confidence in life.
00:03:52.880 | I mean, he'd go on to all these TV shows where his unbelievers would supposedly try
00:03:57.760 | to get at him and he was just utterly unruffled by anything and could stand his ground with
00:04:04.120 | the simple gospel.
00:04:06.240 | And he stood for the same basic lifestyle of sexual purity and personal holiness that
00:04:12.480 | I was being brought up on.
00:04:15.760 | Same connection with—here's a little personal touch—I mean, Cliff Barrows, the so-called
00:04:21.000 | song leader, lived in our town, and I went to school with his kids, and I saw Cliff Barrows
00:04:28.520 | often and we did various things together as a family.
00:04:32.960 | So I felt like, "There's this man leading this 5,000-person choir, and I know him, and
00:04:38.760 | I go to school with his daughter."
00:04:42.060 | So this was, for me, a very personal connection, not just a formal or religious one.
00:04:50.160 | I met Billy Grimm one time.
00:04:53.080 | I was 14 years old, and it was at Cliff Barrows' house, and it was some Christmas party or
00:04:59.960 | something.
00:05:00.960 | I'm not sure why I was there, but there I was, and my main impression was, "This
00:05:06.560 | man is tall!"
00:05:07.560 | I mean, my dad is 5'7", my mom is 5'1", my sister's 5 feet, my grandmother was 5'1",
00:05:16.400 | I was the giant in the family at 5'9", and here's this gargantuan public figure
00:05:24.080 | towering over me, and I was just amazed that I got to shake his hand as a kid.
00:05:31.800 | His life, that public, big, global dimension, I think had both positive and negative effects
00:05:43.040 | on the church or on American culture.
00:05:45.840 | Let me try to explain what I mean.
00:05:49.440 | Positive in the sense that Billy Grimm imparted, as you can tell from what I'm saying, great
00:05:54.720 | courage to believers, evangelical believers, to speak their faith, because there he was
00:06:02.480 | doing it on the television.
00:06:05.840 | And it also was positive in the sense that his public preaching forced Jesus into the
00:06:14.240 | public arena, into the public square, you might say.
00:06:18.440 | But the downside seems to me to be that inevitably there became a blending of evangelical Christianity
00:06:31.240 | that he stood for and I stood for, and the dominant American culture, because Billy Grimm
00:06:37.960 | really was a quintessential American as well as a dominant voice for evangelical religion,
00:06:46.480 | and therefore there emerges this wedding, often uncritical wedding, of evangelical Christianity
00:06:56.880 | and American culture, which I think we are still paying the price for today.
00:07:06.560 | And it had a couple of negative effects.
00:07:08.720 | One, it took away the prophetic edge of the faith, because if you're wedded with the culture
00:07:17.600 | so intimately, how can you stand outside or over the culture and make prophetic statements
00:07:23.960 | of criticism about the culture?
00:07:27.200 | And the second negative effect it had—and this I think we've only recently begun to
00:07:33.080 | talk about more clearly and forthrightly—is that it made the white, Protestant, evangelical
00:07:43.440 | church virtually unconscious that it had a culture.
00:07:48.160 | When you're swimming in the water, you don't know there's water.
00:07:51.040 | It's just what you are.
00:07:53.440 | And of course, we have over the recent decades awakened globally and in America to the fact
00:08:01.920 | that outside of the kind of evangelicalism that Billy Grimm embodied, there are other
00:08:09.280 | expressions, cultural expressions, of biblical Christianity all over the world as well as
00:08:15.240 | in America, and we were basically oblivious to that.
00:08:20.800 | And when you're oblivious of something, you can make some really unhelpful assumptions
00:08:25.880 | that put people outside that sphere into a light that is not going to be helpful or unifying.
00:08:34.600 | And to his great credit, Billy Grimm, I think, awakened in some measure to the dangers of
00:08:43.000 | this cultural conformity and/or the wedding of evangelicalism with the faith and began
00:08:51.300 | to say things that were very, very helpful.
00:08:54.080 | I've got an article that I think we're going to put up over at Desiring God today where
00:08:57.840 | I quote Martin Luther King to the effect that he said at one point that he thought the Billy
00:09:04.360 | Grimm crusades after the requirement for integration were some of the strongest impacts for the
00:09:13.160 | good of the fight for integration that happened in those days.
00:09:18.720 | So anyway, the public nature of Billy Grimm proved to be both, I think, very positive
00:09:25.960 | and had these negative downsides.
00:09:29.320 | You know, one other thought is the fact that I love to talk about Christian hedonism.
00:09:36.960 | That's who I am, what I've lived for and stood for and tried to say in all my books and preaching,
00:09:44.760 | namely that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him and that the
00:09:49.800 | satisfaction in Him comes to its peak when it overflows in joy in God that meets the
00:09:56.940 | needs of others.
00:09:57.940 | In other words, it produces love.
00:10:00.600 | And Billy Grimm, in his own interesting way, fed this, I believe.
00:10:08.040 | I was just thinking about this this morning and even came to tears again in my devotions
00:10:13.480 | as I was singing "Just as I Am" to myself, because that song, which he ended every service
00:10:22.600 | with, "Just as I Am, without one plea, but that thy blood was shed for me, and that thou
00:10:28.440 | bidst me come to thee, O Lamb of God, I come," it has a verse in it, as if that weren't good
00:10:35.400 | enough, "Just as I Am, poor, wretched, blind, sight, riches, healing of the mind, yes, all
00:10:46.960 | I need in thee I find, O Lamb of God, I come."
00:10:53.280 | That's a massive statement, isn't it?
00:10:55.680 | All I need in thee I find, which if people were listening, they had to realize Jesus
00:11:02.280 | is not a ticket, not a ticket out of hell into heaven.
00:11:06.960 | He is heaven.
00:11:08.640 | He's everything we need.
00:11:11.120 | He is the end of the soul's quest, sight, riches, healing of the mind.
00:11:18.720 | Yes, all I need in thee I find, O Lamb of God, I'm coming, I'm coming.
00:11:25.840 | That's my Christian hedonism.
00:11:27.560 | And I sang it hundreds of times.
00:11:30.000 | We sang it at church, we sang it at crusades, we sang it at home.
00:11:34.600 | Yes, all I need in thee I find.
00:11:37.600 | And then there was one other signature song, right?
00:11:40.480 | How great thou art, and I can see Cliff Barrows, one of the happiest people I've ever known.
00:11:47.760 | I met him recently as we were talking, and he's blind, and he has hundreds of hymns memorized,
00:11:55.160 | and he just overflows with joy.
00:11:57.520 | Well, there he was, the big smile on his face, leading 5,000 people in "How Great Thou Art,"
00:12:06.600 | which has this verse in it.
00:12:10.080 | And when I think that God, His Son not sparing, sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in,
00:12:15.560 | that on the cross, my burden gladly bearing.
00:12:21.440 | I wonder if we ever let that sink in, for the joy that was set before Him, it streamed
00:12:27.560 | back in, and even in Gethsemane and on the cross, He was sustained.
00:12:33.400 | He was not begrudgingly giving His life, He was gladly giving His life for us.
00:12:40.340 | Or the next verse, "When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation, then take me home,
00:12:45.760 | what joy shall fill my heart, and then I shall bow in humble adoration."
00:12:50.680 | There's the connection between joy filling the heart and humble adoration, which is what
00:12:57.360 | I've been arguing all my life, namely that the only adoration that honors God is the
00:13:04.600 | adoration that is overflowing with joy in God.
00:13:08.560 | You can't have dutiful adoration.
00:13:12.460 | It's either real in your heart, or it's not.
00:13:15.160 | So I thank God that the entire team of the Billy Graham crusade efforts, with the music
00:13:24.080 | and the preaching, were feeding my convictions about God being most glorified in us when
00:13:31.840 | we're most satisfied in Him, even before I knew that sentence or knew the term "Christian
00:13:36.920 | hedonism."
00:13:38.320 | So Tony, when I step back and just ask about what was His greatest impact, both on the
00:13:45.440 | world and on me, my answer is thousands and thousands of people came out of darkness into
00:13:55.200 | light.
00:13:56.200 | Their eyes were opened through the work of the Holy Spirit in the mouth of Billy Graham.
00:14:02.400 | Jesus said to Paul, "I'm sending you to open their eyes."
00:14:05.720 | Isn't that amazing?
00:14:06.800 | "I'm sending you to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from
00:14:11.080 | the power of Satan to God, and that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among
00:14:15.960 | those who are sanctified."
00:14:17.120 | That's what happened to thousands and thousands of people.
00:14:22.440 | So if you talk about impact, how can you measure the impact when somebody is not going to go
00:14:28.120 | to hell and spend eternity in misery, but is going to have everlasting joy in the presence
00:14:34.580 | of God because this man opened his mouth, and God Almighty used him to rescue thousands
00:14:43.420 | and thousands of people from everlasting destruction?
00:14:47.280 | Not to mention the earthly impact of all those thousands of people who turned from darkness
00:14:53.400 | to light, and therefore their actions are transformed, and their marriages are saved,
00:14:58.720 | and their children are reared in righteousness, and they're honest now at work, and their
00:15:03.320 | sexual relations are pure, and they do countless good deeds done for the physical good of others
00:15:10.400 | and the eternal good of others, as is so wonderfully embodied in his son's life today, Franklin's
00:15:18.320 | ministry, Samaritan's Purse.
00:15:21.560 | For me, personally, I would have to say that the greatest impact, since I was already a
00:15:29.440 | believer when I got to know who Billy Graham was, the greatest impact was that today I
00:15:35.920 | still love the old, old story.
00:15:40.680 | I love the gospel that Billy Graham preached, and I love saying out loud with people or
00:15:48.440 | privately to God, "How great thou art."
00:15:51.320 | That's awesome.
00:15:52.320 | Are there any distinct marks of his ministry beyond the Christian hedonism that he talked
00:15:55.480 | about?
00:15:56.480 | Are there things that you picked up from him that transferred into your ministry?
00:15:59.360 | Do you hear yourself in him?
00:16:01.600 | How did he influence you in other ways?
00:16:03.760 | Well, I hope—I've already mentioned them in bullet point—but I hope that I have been
00:16:11.040 | a biblically faithful preacher who may not have said the words the Bible says as often,
00:16:18.760 | but oh, it was implicit.
00:16:21.360 | I've always wanted to preach in such a way that nobody cared a hoot what John Piper thought,
00:16:28.440 | but rather, "Look, he's showing us what God says in the Bible," which is what Billy
00:16:35.640 | Graham showed us over and over again.
00:16:38.040 | The Bible says, the Bible says, the Bible says.
00:16:41.000 | And that's the kind of ministry I have wanted to have, I want to have, I want Desiring God
00:16:45.160 | to be that kind of ministry.
00:16:47.120 | Bible-saturated is the way I talk about it.
00:16:50.040 | Not just Bible-based preaching, like you say a verse and then you spend 30 minutes talking
00:16:54.560 | about stories that you've experienced instead of telling people what's in the Bible and
00:16:59.800 | quoting it to them and applying it to their lives.
00:17:02.320 | So that's one thing.
00:17:04.160 | And another is a clarity and directness.
00:17:08.920 | I mean, when he opens his mouth and speaks, there's such pointed, forceful, unabashed,
00:17:18.880 | unhypocritical clarity.
00:17:20.440 | He's just right straight to the point.
00:17:24.280 | And I want to be clear, I don't want to be clever.
00:17:27.040 | I just want my preaching to be clear and anointed and authoritative and forceful the way his
00:17:35.160 | was.
00:17:36.160 | I can definitely see that.
00:17:37.160 | I mean, I can definitely, when I listen to Graham, I can hear some Piper in there, very
00:17:41.520 | much an influence.
00:17:43.320 | A few years ago, you met with Graham again.
00:17:45.440 | Was anything to share from that meeting, anything stand out?
00:17:48.960 | You know, that's right.
00:17:50.840 | When was that?
00:17:51.840 | Do you remember?
00:17:52.840 | Three or four years ago.
00:17:54.800 | What a gracious man.
00:17:57.520 | He had a little tube in his nose, you know, but he could sit up.
00:18:01.240 | He walked in and sat down and we were there.
00:18:04.400 | I think Justin Taylor was with me and we chatted about various things.
00:18:11.040 | And the impression everybody gets when they're in the presence of Billy Graham is of a gracious
00:18:17.120 | Southern gentleman who puts you first.
00:18:21.440 | He doesn't default to himself.
00:18:24.440 | He defaults to the person that he's talking to and he draws you out.
00:18:28.720 | You're there, you want to, you know, we're going to draw him out.
00:18:31.640 | Tell me some interesting stories from your life.
00:18:33.640 | And the next thing you know, he's asking you questions about your life and your ministry.
00:18:38.500 | It was precious in that it simply put a flesh and blood, kind of a closing of the brackets
00:18:46.640 | of my life from the first time I met him at age 14 until I guess I was about 69 or 68
00:18:54.440 | when that meeting happened.
00:18:56.520 | And to have that kind of closure was very, very precious.
00:19:01.400 | Some people are saying with the death of Billy Graham now that there's a major chapter in
00:19:05.680 | American evangelicalism that's closed.
00:19:07.960 | Not just his life, but like a chapter of American evangelicalism.
00:19:11.120 | Do you get that sense at all?
00:19:12.640 | Is that reading too much into it?
00:19:13.680 | I can see what they mean.
00:19:16.220 | There was a group, a very dominant, strong group of newer evangelicals, I guess they
00:19:24.400 | were called from the late 40s, and over the next 20 or 30 years with their dominance of
00:19:30.000 | creating institutions like Fuller Seminary and Christianity Today and represented by
00:19:36.640 | Wheaton College.
00:19:39.520 | And I get that, that there was a kind of remarkable unity around that mid-20th century expression
00:19:47.700 | of evangelicalism, and it has lasted, and that he's the last, one of the last, dominant
00:19:55.060 | figureheads in that movement.
00:19:57.100 | My own sense, though, is that what God is doing in the world is so inscrutable.
00:20:02.620 | How inscrutable are your ways?
00:20:05.500 | How unsearchable are your judgments?
00:20:07.220 | Who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?
00:20:10.480 | I would be very slow to have any neat picture of chapters.
00:20:15.880 | It just seems to me God's story doesn't break easily into chapters, and so if we're
00:20:21.360 | going to talk that way, we better leave lots of holes at the end of the chapter for mighty
00:20:28.720 | influences to flow further on, and for those in this chapter, whatever this is, to reach
00:20:35.580 | back with benefit.
00:20:37.500 | So yeah, I get that, and I would want to say the God of Billy Graham and the strengths
00:20:44.240 | of Billy Graham are alive and well today.
00:20:49.400 | Outstanding.
00:20:50.720 | Would you mind leading us in prayer, maybe, to close, to thank God for Billy Graham's
00:20:55.640 | life?
00:20:56.640 | That would be a pleasure.
00:20:57.640 | Father, I feel today thankful for my father, who was like a little Billy Graham with his
00:21:08.280 | 500-person evangelistic crusades, and Billy with his 50,000 evangelistic crusades, and
00:21:15.960 | I simply stand in awe of the faithfulness and the power of these men in the Holy Spirit.
00:21:26.320 | I bless you that you raised up Billy Graham for the season that you did.
00:21:32.320 | I bless you that you preserved him from scandal and unbelief.
00:21:38.280 | I bless you for pouring out your Holy Spirit on him and all the difficulties surrounding
00:21:45.440 | an evangelistic life in the family, and yet preserving his marriage and preserving his
00:21:53.560 | witness and anointing him for the gathering of tens of thousands—yes, probably hundreds
00:22:01.780 | of thousands—of your lost sheep.
00:22:05.920 | So God, receive our thanks, and I pray that whatever chapter is closing, this next chapter
00:22:14.040 | that we are in would be even more fruitful, a thousand times more fruitful, not over against,
00:22:23.440 | but in part because of Billy Graham.
00:22:26.640 | In Jesus' name I pray, amen.
00:22:32.640 | As we get older, life is pressing in on us.
00:22:37.520 | Get all you can out of it now.
00:22:39.280 | That's the philosophy of many here in South Florida.
00:22:43.940 | You don't have long.
00:22:46.080 | You'll be in eternity.
00:22:48.240 | And the decision you make tonight may decide where you'll be.
00:22:53.520 | Do you know Christ?
00:22:55.760 | The Bible uses the word "depart."
00:22:58.600 | You see, the Bible teaches that we're citizens of two worlds now.
00:23:02.440 | I'm a citizen of the United States, but I'm also a citizen of heaven.
00:23:07.680 | I'm a citizen of another world, heaven, and that's where I'm going.
00:23:13.200 | And I'll be there.
00:23:14.760 | It won't be too many months or years before I go.
00:23:18.880 | The vast majority of my life has already been lived.
00:23:22.240 | My record has already been made.
00:23:26.120 | I don't have very much longer.
00:23:27.920 | I know that.
00:23:30.680 | I don't plan to retire.
00:23:32.960 | I feel like I'm 18 years of age, but I know that I'm not.
00:23:37.200 | I can look at the x-rays when they take the x-rays and see deterioration of a bone here
00:23:42.640 | and there through something that I don't even know what it is.
00:23:46.680 | I can't feel it, but I know at some point I'll feel it.
00:23:49.880 | It'll start having its effect on the body.
00:23:53.200 | We all die.
00:23:54.200 | I'm not going to escape it.
00:23:56.240 | I don't want to escape it.
00:23:57.400 | I want to go, because to be with Christ is far better than to be even in Florida.
00:24:08.920 | Someday you'll read or hear that Billy Graham is dead.
00:24:12.280 | Graham once wrote, "Don't you believe a word of it.
00:24:15.440 | I shall be more alive than I am right now.
00:24:18.880 | I will just have changed my address.
00:24:21.120 | I will have gone into the presence of God."
00:24:24.080 | [BLANK_AUDIO]
00:24:32.220 | you