Should the Lord not take Billy Graham within the next 18 months....and should He....the Lord of Glory.....not return within the next 18 months.....Billy Graham will reach his 100th birthday.This is very significant because Reverend Graham dominated the religious life of not only America but much of the world over the past 60 some odd years. I'm not usually at a lack for words but describing the impact of the crusades and the accompanying television and radio broadcasts would take a lot of words and I would probably mess it up anyway.
His methods were not the soundest and I think that he would admit that the statistics on people who remained committed from his crusades were disappointing, but the shear volume of gospel messages....and he did preach a wonderfully sound gospel message...the shear volume of them in person and on television and radio makes him the most significant evangelist in the last 100 years.
Sometimes, as you most certainly know, one doesn't value something as it should be valued until it is gone. America, and the world, is without this great evangelist today. Yes, his ministry lives on and probably thrives, and Franklin Graham is a potent force for truth and the gospel in the world, but no longer can Americans turn on the television and surf the channels only to alight upon a Billy Graham crusade and thereby hear the gospel of Jesus Christ!. No longer can an entire metropolitan area be immersed in preparations for a coming crusade.
Pulpit to pulpit our preaching in America is weak. Liberalism has destroyed whole denominations and the rest have gotten caught up in either an easy-believism gospel, a health and wealth distortion of the gospel or a CEO type growth mentality where the gospel has to be watered down or people will not stay. Well that sentence probably raised the hairs on the neck of some but believe me there are many pastors out there who say the same thing and lament the condition of the church today.
So we don't have Billy Graham....our preaching is weak.....we have essentially no news media....our educational system drives our children away from God.....our entertainments are the most powerful drug in distorting reality....and science....more accurately technology....is constructing a world that you wouldn't want to live in if you knew where it was going. The following post is from 2015:
I usually turn the volume up and listen intently to the lyrics when Gordon Lightfoot's hit song of 1976 The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald is played on the radio. We had just celebrated our bicentennial in America as the song was released. Bruce Jenner had won Olympic gold as 'the World's Greatest Athlete,' I shook Jimmy Carter's hand as he campaigned in Pittsburgh, and I was only weeks away from getting married. The Edmund Fitzgerald had sunk to its watery grave in Lake Superior less than a year earlier in November of 1975.
We call them hatches today but they were formally called hatchways. A ship's hatches were not sealed and when a storm brewed the crew spread a tarpaulin over the hatch and secured it down with what were called battens. Thus we have had the term batten down the hatches. In Lightfoot's original release of The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald, one lyric went "at seven PM a main hatchway gave in." The singer/songwriter was intrigued by the media coverage of the loss of the American Great Lakes freighter and thus the wreck was immortalized soon after the ship went down.
Have you by any chance noticed how Billy Graham seems to have been going off the deep end for the last few decades with book titles like Approaching Hoofbeats, The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse and Storm Warning which was first published in 1995 and revised in 2010. He's even received some criticism for the severe tone in what has been billed as "his final work" Where I Am, Heaven, Eternity, And Our Life Beyond. One reviewer reported that it was "a significant shift from the approach he took after the first decade of his ministry..."
Billy Graham of course has not gone off the deep end. I think that many years ago I experienced a similar "significant shift." God seems to be removing veils as of late. You might be saying, 'Oh He's been doing that for the last forty-five years starting with Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth.' I agree somewhat but with a qualifier. Those early years and those books were dominated by events and how they might fit into Biblical end-times. We are still preoccupied today with events on earth and in the heavens. What is needed and what these books cannot do is to mortify, and therein is the 'shift' noticed in Billy Graham's writing in the latter part of his ministry that drives one to their knees and then applies the gospel with no holds barred.
What we are seeing today in many ministers of the Gospel such as Billy Graham is an extreme soberness. Soberness in that these 'events' are no longer just a 'connect the dots.' This collapse in everything that we hold dear is more than unnerving! It should drive us to our knees. That others cannot see the full extent of what is happening in America and in the world should be no surprise at all.
I've used a number of nautical terms in these posts of over seven years. (now closing in on nine years) I'm adding another today. Batten down the hatches! I think it high time to batten down the hatches.....close off those areas where sea water can enter....secure the cargo and set a even ballast, for the waves in this coming storm will be merciless, the winds revengeful and the sea unforgiving.
We do have a safe harbor hemmed in by the mountains of the righteousness of Jesus Christ where we can tie onto the dock with 'cords of kindness, (and) with the bands of love' but we have sailed willfully out into this tempest. We are as those of whom it is written in Psalm 107. Let us then also cry to the LORD in our trouble.
Some went down to the sea in ships
doing business on the great waters;
They saw the deeds of the LORD,
his wondrous works in the deep.
For he commanded and raised the stormy wind,
which lifted up the waves of the sea.
They mounted up to heaven; they went down to the depths;
their courage melted away in their evil plight;
they reeled and staggered like drunken men
and were at their wits end.
Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress.
He made the storm be still,
and the waves of the sea were hushed.
Then they were glad that the waters were quiet,
and he brought them to their desired haven.
Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love,
for his wondrous works to the children of men!
His methods were not the soundest and I think that he would admit that the statistics on people who remained committed from his crusades were disappointing, but the shear volume of gospel messages....and he did preach a wonderfully sound gospel message...the shear volume of them in person and on television and radio makes him the most significant evangelist in the last 100 years.
Sometimes, as you most certainly know, one doesn't value something as it should be valued until it is gone. America, and the world, is without this great evangelist today. Yes, his ministry lives on and probably thrives, and Franklin Graham is a potent force for truth and the gospel in the world, but no longer can Americans turn on the television and surf the channels only to alight upon a Billy Graham crusade and thereby hear the gospel of Jesus Christ!. No longer can an entire metropolitan area be immersed in preparations for a coming crusade.
Pulpit to pulpit our preaching in America is weak. Liberalism has destroyed whole denominations and the rest have gotten caught up in either an easy-believism gospel, a health and wealth distortion of the gospel or a CEO type growth mentality where the gospel has to be watered down or people will not stay. Well that sentence probably raised the hairs on the neck of some but believe me there are many pastors out there who say the same thing and lament the condition of the church today.
So we don't have Billy Graham....our preaching is weak.....we have essentially no news media....our educational system drives our children away from God.....our entertainments are the most powerful drug in distorting reality....and science....more accurately technology....is constructing a world that you wouldn't want to live in if you knew where it was going. The following post is from 2015:
I usually turn the volume up and listen intently to the lyrics when Gordon Lightfoot's hit song of 1976 The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald is played on the radio. We had just celebrated our bicentennial in America as the song was released. Bruce Jenner had won Olympic gold as 'the World's Greatest Athlete,' I shook Jimmy Carter's hand as he campaigned in Pittsburgh, and I was only weeks away from getting married. The Edmund Fitzgerald had sunk to its watery grave in Lake Superior less than a year earlier in November of 1975.
We call them hatches today but they were formally called hatchways. A ship's hatches were not sealed and when a storm brewed the crew spread a tarpaulin over the hatch and secured it down with what were called battens. Thus we have had the term batten down the hatches. In Lightfoot's original release of The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald, one lyric went "at seven PM a main hatchway gave in." The singer/songwriter was intrigued by the media coverage of the loss of the American Great Lakes freighter and thus the wreck was immortalized soon after the ship went down.
Have you by any chance noticed how Billy Graham seems to have been going off the deep end for the last few decades with book titles like Approaching Hoofbeats, The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse and Storm Warning which was first published in 1995 and revised in 2010. He's even received some criticism for the severe tone in what has been billed as "his final work" Where I Am, Heaven, Eternity, And Our Life Beyond. One reviewer reported that it was "a significant shift from the approach he took after the first decade of his ministry..."
Billy Graham of course has not gone off the deep end. I think that many years ago I experienced a similar "significant shift." God seems to be removing veils as of late. You might be saying, 'Oh He's been doing that for the last forty-five years starting with Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth.' I agree somewhat but with a qualifier. Those early years and those books were dominated by events and how they might fit into Biblical end-times. We are still preoccupied today with events on earth and in the heavens. What is needed and what these books cannot do is to mortify, and therein is the 'shift' noticed in Billy Graham's writing in the latter part of his ministry that drives one to their knees and then applies the gospel with no holds barred.
What we are seeing today in many ministers of the Gospel such as Billy Graham is an extreme soberness. Soberness in that these 'events' are no longer just a 'connect the dots.' This collapse in everything that we hold dear is more than unnerving! It should drive us to our knees. That others cannot see the full extent of what is happening in America and in the world should be no surprise at all.
I've used a number of nautical terms in these posts of over seven years. (now closing in on nine years) I'm adding another today. Batten down the hatches! I think it high time to batten down the hatches.....close off those areas where sea water can enter....secure the cargo and set a even ballast, for the waves in this coming storm will be merciless, the winds revengeful and the sea unforgiving.
We do have a safe harbor hemmed in by the mountains of the righteousness of Jesus Christ where we can tie onto the dock with 'cords of kindness, (and) with the bands of love' but we have sailed willfully out into this tempest. We are as those of whom it is written in Psalm 107. Let us then also cry to the LORD in our trouble.
Some went down to the sea in ships
doing business on the great waters;
They saw the deeds of the LORD,
his wondrous works in the deep.
For he commanded and raised the stormy wind,
which lifted up the waves of the sea.
They mounted up to heaven; they went down to the depths;
their courage melted away in their evil plight;
they reeled and staggered like drunken men
and were at their wits end.
Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble,
and he delivered them from their distress.
He made the storm be still,
and the waves of the sea were hushed.
Then they were glad that the waters were quiet,
and he brought them to their desired haven.
Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love,
for his wondrous works to the children of men!
