Billy Graham

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[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inLmaG6qR7E]YouTube - Billy Graham - Timeless Truth - Change[/ame]

 

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The Rev. Billy Graham passes away...

The Rev. Billy Graham has died at 99
February 21, 2018 - Billy Graham, the nation’s most beloved preacher, a native Tar Heel who many considered the embodiment of Protestant Christianity, died Wednesday.

The 99-year-old Graham had been in failing health since being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1992 and with hydrocephalus, a condition in which water collects on the brain, in 2000. His wife of 63 years, Ruth, died in June 2007. Graham’s sermons reached millions of people in more than 200 countries – whether in person or over the airwaves. His was a resonant voice and a handsome face. The 6-foot-2 evangelist, with his steel blue eyes and chiseled chin, looked and moved like a Hollywood actor.

His voice was smooth and authoritative. He spoke in declaratory sentences, waving the Bible in one hand and jabbing an index finger at his audience in the other. Graham once said he had a single-minded mission: “My one purpose in life is to help people find a personal relationship with God, which I believe comes through knowing Christ.” He did so with a combination of zeal, integrity and graciousness that won him admirers the world over. Many wryly called him the Protestant Pope.

Friend to presidents

From his humble beginnings as the son of North Carolina dairy farmers, Graham rose to national prominence, befriending every president since Dwight Eisenhower and serving as confidant to many others who occupied the Oval Office. In 1991, in one of his last roles as unofficial White House chaplain, Graham was summoned by former President George H.W. Bush to the White House on the night he gave the OK to send the first squadron of fighter bombers to the Persian Gulf. Later, Graham counseled President Bill Clinton in the dark hours of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Though officially nonpartisan, Graham had been increasingly drawn to Republican candidates. Despite being frail and hard of hearing, he invited onetime Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin to dinner at his Montreat mountain home. But his influence went beyond U.S. borders, and he was a premier diplomat for Christianity. Graham was the first Christian to preach behind the Iron Curtain, and he accepted unprecedented invitations to Moscow and Beijing. When Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited the White House in 1997, Graham met with him privately and discussed religious freedom in China.

Graham traveled widely, mingling as easily with popes and kings as with soldiers and villagers living in mud huts. The Gallup poll consistently ranked him as one of the world’s most admired men. In 1996, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. That popularity has helped boost the ministry of his children, Franklin, his successor, of Boone, and Anne Lotz, his daughter, of Raleigh. In his early years, Graham earned the nickname “God’s machine gun” for preaching hell and damnation to those who strayed. In later years his message softened, as he spoke more about personal redemption. But his theology – with its bright promise of reconciliation with Jesus – never wavered. “We are helpless and hopeless,” Graham once said in a television broadcast, “but when Christ comes in we have a lot of help, and we have hope, and we have forgiveness of sin, and we have the assurance that if we die we are going to heaven.”

Come to Jesus’

See also:

The Rev. Billy Graham TED Talk