Billy Graham - 1 Corinthians 1:18

dr. McCall members of the faculty staff student bodies and ladies and gentlemen that a friends at the seminary that I hear today it's a privilege for me to be here and to have the opportunity of addressing you I came in yesterday afternoon expecting to I have a dialogue with about 25 or 50 students and I think most of you were here and so part of my message today is going to be based on some of the questions that were asked me yesterday afternoon because I feel that that might come to the very core of what may be on your mind more than if I gave a formal address this morning and of course I'm very happy to be here with many old friends like dr. Lewis Drummond whom I've known for many years dr. Beasley Murray and all many of the faculty like dr. Dale moody and others that I've known for many years and of course I commend you on the organist and I think that the authorities of the seminary were very honored us greatly when they call dr. Don who stood to be here but it left us such a gap that we have to call on him from time to time to come back and we're very grateful for the ministry that he has had here in the field of music and to dr. McCall whom I have known he reminded me yesterday when we first met which was nearly 30 years ago and that was before anybody had ever heard of me and not too many it heard of him and we had an interesting discussion and an interesting time together in those days and have been warm personal friends since then and one of the reasons that I have not come to the seminary more often is because I feel that you need what I have to give less than almost any place because I have opportunities to go to succulent adversities and secular tuna tease all over the world and I feel that I'm one person that does have this opportunity and I should take advantage of those situations we're on our way now cliff and I and T W to hold a crusade out in Arizona that will be at Arizona State University many of our truce aides now on the campuses of the great universities and it's a tremendous opportunity to stand and proclaim the gospel in these areas where not every Baptist preacher is able to speak to several thousand students and this is where we give our diminishing energy and strength because at 55 I'll be very honest with you I don't have the physical strength and stamina that I had when I was 35 at 35 I could speak seven times a day and go 12 weeks of 16 weeks as the occasion has been without stopping without a night off and still survive today I cannot do them and so we've had to change our program but I suspect that as I get a bit older I will come more often to seminaries like Louisville and try to share my life and ministering the things God has taught me with you and anything that we have learned anything that we have been able to gather in our ministry around we want you to have and we want to share it with you now our model of course that the seminary here does have a room that has been dedicated to gathering material from our ministry and I feel a little bit like Winston Churchill when they were going to build a monument to him he said no he said wait til I'm dead because he said I may do something after the monuments built and you make ground tear down and that may be true here as well they built a monument well not a monument but it looks like a monument they had what was called a Billy Graham day down in Charlotte North Carolina and they put on the place of my birth sort of a statue and I go back and I actually sometimes think to myself well maybe my body is in that because it looks just like a tomb but I can assure you that as far as I know I'm an excellent help cliff barrows is in better health he and I are having a little bit of a disagreement you know we've been together for 30 years and have never had a disagreement till now he went to hold a revival meeting in the church that I'm a member of the First Baptist Church of Dallas Texas and I saw later [Music] so I sent them a cable I was in France this was about three weeks ago and I sent him a cable and I said please pray that I will have grace to bear this rejection but clip is a great preacher in his own right and so is TW Wilson and one of the great things that has been my privileges to have around me a team of people who have been with me all these years and they know my strengths and they know even better my weaknesses and we have a marvelous fellowship together so much so that when we ever take a holiday or vacation we take it with each other we're afraid to let each other out of our sight but it is a great delight to be here and I want you to turn with me to Corinthians 1 the 1st Corinthians 1 - a very familiar passage and beginning at verse 18 which is so familiar that you don't necessarily need to turn to it but I'm reading from that strange version called the King James which we don't hear much today so it may shed new light on your version now the reason I'm reading from the King James is because the American Bible Society gave me a New Testament that they make for me with big prints so I can read it without my glasses so I when I swallow my pride I'll use my glasses but this morning I'm quite proud to be here and I'm going to use this for the preaching of the Cross is to them that perish foolishness but unto us which are saved it is the power of God for it is written I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent where is the wise where is the scribe where is the disputer of this world hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world I would like to stop there and just comment parenthetically how true that Scripture is in our day of tremendous scientific achievement and yet a crisis in moral leadership all over the world beyond anything perhaps we have known in generations God hath made foolish the wisdom of this world for after that the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not god it pleased God by the foolishness I'm not a Greek student but I'm told that that word means moronic or idiotic of preaching or Proclamation to save them that believe for the Jews require a sign and the Greeks seek after wisdom the Jews would say jump off the building jump off the mountain display something sure the Greeks said give us something lunch ago give us a philosophical system but we preach Christ crucified unto the Jews a stumbling-block and the Greeks or the Gentiles foolishness but unto them which are called both Jews and Greeks Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God because the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men for ye see your calling brethren how that not many wise men after the flesh not many mighty not many noble a call but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty and base things of the world and things which are despised hath God chosen yea and things which are not to bring to nought the things that are that no flesh should glory in his presence in other words when I get to heaven I'm not going to walk around with my shoulders back and say look what I did and how good I was and how many people I preached to and how much I read the Bible and what seminary I went to I'm there by the grace and the love and the mercy of God that no flesh should glory in his presence and all so this brings us to the point I want to talk about this morning communication how do we communicate the gospel in this materialistic scientific rebellious bhangra age don't put the Bible up I'm not through yet verse two of the next chapter which fits right in for I determine for I determined not to know anything among you say Jesus Christ and him crucified when Paul went to Corinth it was perhaps the most pagan the moat one of the most intellectual and one of the most if not the most immoral city in all of the ancient world and if you had gone there as a graduate of Southern Seminary and stood in the middle of Corinth and had been sent by Lewis Drummond to start a church how would you start it what would you do what would you say Paul looked at an intellectual a professor himself a student of go mania what did Paul do to start a church in a pagan immoral secular materialistic society with not a single other Christian in town not even a Baptist he was the only Baptist there what would you do my wife is a presbyterian I hope she hears that but what would you do how would you start Paul said my intellect will not be able to handle it I don't have the logic to the arguments to do it so what did he do he said I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified because Paul knew that there was a built-in power in the cross that has its own communication power the Holy Spirit taking the simple message of the Cross with all of its love and grace and its many facets of the mysterious working of God in the redemption of the human race and proclaiming it with authority and power and this speaks to us it seems today because the 14th verse of the second chapter says but the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God for they are foolishness under him neither can he know them because they're spiritually discerned when I go out to proclaim the gospel of Christ I know that when I'm proclaiming the Karenga as Paul describes it in the fifteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians when I proclaim Christ crucified according to the scriptures they're raised again according to the scriptures when I proclaim it there's a power to and I know that the natural man cannot accept it unless the veil is lifted by the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit takes my message and communicates it to his clerk entries mine it's a supernatural act of the Spirit of God now I want to say a word about some of the deeper levels then we communicate to when we're proclaiming the gospel when I go out to speak and proclaim the Gospel the errors in every congregation or any group whether it's on a street corner in Nairobi or whether it's a meeting in Seoul Korea or whether it's a tribal situation in sari or whether it's a group of Indians in the mountains of Peru or whether it's in a big stadium in New York City or whether it's a group of students at Harvard or Cambridge Oxford I know that there are certain things that are true in the heart and mind of those people that are listening certain psychological factors that exist in all of them they're areas of life not totally met by social improvement or material of fluency jesus said a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things he possesive there's another level to human existence we don't hear much about it on television because we are so taken up today with the material benefits that we forget these spiritual and psychological dimensions first I know that there's a built-in emptiness man keeps crying for something he doesn't know what it is give him a million dollars and it doesn't satisfy give him a billion in a dozen satisfied giving sex and all that goes with it and it doesn't satisfy something deep inside that keeps crying I talked to a man some time ago that's supposedly one of the sex symbols of America a man Sexson and he said you know I've had I've slept with some of the most beautiful women in the world but he said you can tell your congregations that it doesn't bring happiness and peace he said I'm one of the most miserable men in the world there's another level like the girl the Time magazine rude event from Red Cliff she cried for two days finally she told her father where she'd gone home she said father I want something and I don't know what it is well of course you and I know that that one Boyd and the heart is like Tolstoy said there's a god-shaped Blanc that only God can fill and when we proclaimed the gospel we're talking directly to that emptiness the person that you're talking to whether it's in personal witnessing or whether it's before a group may not realize that that's what's causing it but it's there and you can speak to it and you've got a built-in receptivity the second thing is love this which some of us friends are calling cosmic luminous I have a friend at Marquette University there's a psychiatrist a psychologist and a theologian he's getting his doctorate at Strasbourg in theology as well and he's a close friend of my son-in-law who is studying to be a psychologist at Marquette at the moment and I said to him I said what is the greatest problem of the patients that come to you as a psychiatrist they thought a moment and said loneliness and he's a Christian and he said it when you get right down to it he said it's a little illness forgot you can be in a crowd of people at a party and laugh this in New York suddenly with all these people around you and laughing and there's a sudden loneliness and a sweep you just for a moment loneliness in the suburbs loneliness in the ghettos loneliness in Africa loneliness in Latin America loneliness in Japan or loneliness that only God can fill and then you are also speaking to a person that has a sense of guilt the head of a mental institution in London and we were there in 67 cent I could release half of my patients if I found a way that they could get rid of guilt well of course this is what the cross is all about we're speaking directly to the problem of guilt that's already there you don't have to make them feel guilty they already know they're guilty of something we tell them what the guilt is it's repenting against God and the cross is the answer and then there's the problem of death just as death was suppressed of just as sex that discussion of sex was pretty suppressed in the last generation we don't like to talk about death in our generation but death is real I was watching this morning Abbott and Costello on The Today Show maybe you saw they're both dead but they looked alive while you can live on the television in a late movie in see Marilyn Monroe or you can see Clark Gable they look quite alive somehow television has as cushioned debt to the point that we don't realize that it is the last intimate to be destroyed and now will change to nullify to make it operative through things sin death hell that's the message of the cross death is a judgment all are going to die in the greatest crisis that you will ever face in your life is death and when this tornado swept through here and the tornadoes through Kentucky in the matter of seconds you suddenly realize how fragile our life is now in the midst of all this how do we communicate briefly first we communicate the gospel by the authoritative proclamation of the gospel faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God now if I have a criticism of modern American seminaries it's this and I'm not saying southern I'd say this in any cemani I don't think we are putting the emphasis enough on preaching and Proclamation where are the preachers today no ma'am the churches that are calling us right now asking for recommendations the First Baptist Church of Minneapolis the Calvary Baptist Church of New York all these churches have been looking for a year for preacher but they all say in our particular situation we have to have somebody get King preach I noticed it didn't call me but where are the preachers when you have a conference we always see about the same names there all the time the fellows that can preach if you want to go into an area that is wide open them in the ministry today preach per plane now I never took a course in homiletics you will know that I never took a course in speech I never read a book on the speech now how did I learn what a little bit I learned in communicating did you know that I used to prepare a sermon I'd get a book by at least Scarborough down in Texas somebody gave me a book of sermons of his so I just took some of his sermons and I would preach them out loud for 50 times until I was invited to preach my first sermon I'll tell you about my first sermon it was a little Church in Florida they a dr. Moody was telling me last night that he was down near this little church in fact he was in the church where I was baptized I was holding my second revival meeting and in the middle of the revival meeting the minister came up to me and he said brother Graham he said there my church is you remember shippi I said the tenth Avenue Presbyterian Church in Charlotte North Carolina he said home she said please don't ever tell the Deacons he said we'll have to stop the meeting he said they said I may even use much my church well I said if that's the only thing standing in the way he said I said I'll be glad to join your church and be baptized so he took me down to a lake and baptized me that's how I got into the Baptist Church my convictions were very deep at the time I hardly knew the difference between a Presbyterian a Baptist at that time but my first sermon it was in Bostick Florida at the Baptist Church and this man said to me that he wanted me to speak well I was scared to death I prepared full sermon and I practiced all four of them and I knew that each one of them could last about 40 minutes well I've got up and preached all four of them in eight minutes so don't get discouraged just keep going but we need proclamation and I always think of Dwight L Moody I told the story when I was here before I think about Moody and course moody had very little education as you know and he had touched Britain and he had touched America and many of the great social movements of our generation came out of Moody's ministry that we never preached a message on social involvement in his life and the ecumenical movement really started in the ministry of do I tell moody annually was invited to the 5th Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City which at that time was very sophisticated very intellectual it's where the wealth and the leaders of New York went to church and there's quite a controversy over inviting this very rough primitive New England to come and speak but he went and he spoke on Daniel but he couldn't pronounce dan you only said dental and he not only said and he said hey and he loves this congregation and people were embarrassed and some were snickering but moody just kept on going and dr. Bunnell who was then professor of politics at Princeton it was telling me this story and also past a 5th Avenue Presbyterian Church he said that about halfway through that sermon something began to happen to that congregation he said the congregation began to sit on their edge of their seats and he said they were no longer conscious of moody they were conscious of the Spirit of God they were listening to another voice and dr. Benelli said to his class at Princeton Noah is ever preaching until the people are conscious of that other voice are you conscious of that other people conscious of that other voice when you preach and then the second thing well let me finish that point I see my note to say four things Prichard first authority Richard with authority you know we stand up and especially when we get out of seminary we've got our head full of all kinds of things in our search for truth that we forget the authority of the gospel and we have so many ands and buts that people say well I don't think he really has great convictions on this and they have even worse doubts so if you have any doubts keep them to yourself don't share them with the congregation be honest and be frank with them if they ask to fix the things you really need and certainly we can preach the cross and the resurrection and man's response and you know I took this Bible people asked me yesterday about someone asked me about an infallible Bible and so forth last night at the faculty meeting and by the way they served us a dinner last evening the likes of which the world has never seen and palaces and I have eaten with all kinds of people from up and down and I've never had a banquet like served last night and you faculty members that miss that you missed some it took us two and a half hours to eat it and when we got when I got up to say a word I had a full faculty before and they got so excited about that meal that dr. moody got up and recommended that I be invited as an assistant professor to the assistant professor of evangelism here at the seminary and they voted me in my first question was what are retirement benefits I felt out of B Pauline at that point because he was always looking for a jail where he could retire of course I wanted my sabbatical immediately and then secondly pitch it with simplicity dr. James stood up in Scotland said you never preach the gospel unless you preach it with simplicity and he said if you shoot over the heads of you here as you don't prove anything except you don't know how to preach and that's right you can take the profoundest things and say them in simplicity I remember when we had our Berlin Congress on evangelism eight years ago one of the papers read by an American theologian was very deep and very involved that many of the other theologians really didn't understand what he was talking about but there was an African there and he was dressed in his African dress and of course he he hadn't been able to make out a thing that had been said but he went up and he told the speak and he kissed him right in front of everybody dr. McCall was there he probably remembers them and he said you know he said I don't understand a thing you say but I'm so glad that a man that knows as much as you know is on our side [Applause] and that's what I'm feel sometimes Richard with simplicity I have a friend out on the west coast in the Methodist Church and he decided that he was going to have the visual education on Sunday morning for the children before the main service and he would preach his sermon with all kinds of little slides and all kinds of little things that he had made during the week to illustrate his sermon and he found that the older people began to come until the church was packed to hear his children service and his eleven o'clock service was going down and he discovered an interesting thing that the simple he made it the more people came to hear people want simplicity I think that was the secret of the ministry of our Lord repetition wasn't it Denny James Denny and Scotland that said that he reckoned that Jesus repeated himself more than 500 times now that's an encouragement to every evangelist but my problem is I'm on television and I have to get new sermons everywhere I go which has been a great discipline for me and then I preach it to a decision and then secondly my time is going fast nobody told me when to quit but I think it's almost up and I'm only on the first point and I have 13 points secondly we communicate the gospel by the light by the light that you lead did you know that our world today is looking for men and women of integrity that'll back up with their life their ministry a whole the men that have affected me the most in my ministry have not been the great artists so much as the great livers the holiness HC marcin used to be president down here at the Asbury he said he was converted by a Methodist circuit runner riding on his horse he was plowed and cut or corn forgotten and he said that the way that circuit rider sat in the saddle he knew him to be a man of God and he said he never even saw me in the field and when he passed by something about the fragrance of the holy life he lived swept over me and I knelt in the field and gave my life to God Bishop Stephen Neal has said something he said the new idea of the church is worthier than bow instead of holier than thou Paul said adapt no longer to the pattern of this world Paul said I keep my body under and bring it into subjection and I think we once again need to remind ourselves of those passages where Paul said wherefore come out from among them and be ye separate saith the Lord and touch not the unclean thing and I will receive you and I want to tell you three avenues that the devil gets at young preachers and on the preachers money barrels pride and you'll have a battle with all three of them all your life the devil will set traps like live landmine we determined flippin op when we started an evangelism that we were going to and we caused a furor among evangelists throughout the country when we decided to incorporate and have a board and pay ourselves salaries instead of taking love opera but they said you're gonna ruin evangelist what we were doing we were ruining a lot of big incomes but I believe God has honored the way we've handled the fine and on morals that's the reason I traveled with a group of people with me not one time in all these years as my secretary ever written in the car with me and I've never had a meal alone guarding all the time and we've had what we believed to be trapped and pop now the Lord says to humble yourself but I found out in my experience I'm not sure I'd prove this from the Scriptures I like some of you knew that write me a letter about it but I think it could be proven if I don't humble myself God does the humbling for me he's got a way of just kicking you down and if you try to rise a little bit in your own strength now and you go so humble yourself realize that it best and then thirdly we communicate the gospel by our love of our fellow man by this shall all men know that you might follow us in that ye have loved and remember that old story of the laymen in Boston that went into the hotel and walked up to a lady and said the you know Christ she told her husband about it and husband said well didn't you tell him to mind his own business and she said the darling if you'd seen the expression on his face and heard the earnestness with which he spoke you would have thought it wise when you speak to people about Christ do they think that it is your business I can tell you many stories at that point I'm only covering the main points now for we communicate the gospel by a compassionate social concern you say Bella do you believe in the social gospel of course I did I believe that there is a social involvement incumbent and commanded in the scriptures and when I lost touch that lip up can you imagine what it meant to that leper to be touched when he had to say unclean unclean unclean and ostracized forever to die no matter who he was and Jesus touched and Jesus was teaching forever that we have a responsibility to the oppressed in the poor and I think of those people in Africa in my heart I can hardly my food in last night I couldn't help but think of it a hundred million people they estimate this year alone a hundred thousand people this year alone in Ethiopia will die a thirst not hunger but thirst they can't even get water we set some of our people from our team down there and we raise tens of thousands of dollars in our way to send to those and other groups all over the world my help as the Sahara moves south and millions of people attract and that's only one part of the world because I was told the other day by one of our economic experts he said we're one crop away from a massive world famine that will affect even the United States the wild is headed toward a gigantic crisis of food are we concerned that can we do we feel so helpless I feel helpless in all of this but we are to have a compassionate social concern but I am NOT going to stand back though and apologize for the fact that southern bandits all the so-called evangelicals throughout the world have not done their share when the great fundamentalist modernist controversy was raging in the early 20s and the word fundamentalism was used for the first time in 1922 the reaction by certain groups against the higher criticism from Germany and Lee so-called social gospel became some great that they pulled into a shell and gave the evan Jellicle movement a bad name when it came to social involved but evangelicals and Baptists have always been at the forefront of social involvement and we ought to not apologize for go to Nigeria how many schools do we have four thousand schools in Nigeria law that had been put there not people motivated by the gospel of Jesus Christ I was playing golf one day with a seminary president Presbyterian seminary president and he said you know I think a great deal of your father-in-law dr. Nelson Bell he said he's a great churchmen and a great man but he said you know he has no social concern what are you talking I said he was a professional baseball player he studied medicine became a doctor at the Mayo Clinic Chucky's little family in 1916 and went to China for 25 years in the middle of China and did with his hands what you preach about from your air-conditioned pulpit don't tell me he wasn't socially involved when he used medicine is a vehicle for the gospel and I think this is our mistake the church cannot be a copycat of the government the church goes with an extra dimension in social concern we go on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and ever checked we wrote this past year of tens of thousands of dollars to send to the needy in Africa we had written on that check given in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that was our motivation the compassion he gave and we use it as a vehicle that they can see Christ in us so it becomes not just humanism the first time I ever met Prime Minister Wilson is now the Prime Minister pretty shook hands with me he was not then the Prime Minister is the head of the Labour Party and many years ago he said oh yes he said we come from you I knew what he meant because Kerr Hardy had been influenced to the ministry by Darrell Moody and Kerr Hardy founded the British Labour Party but Kerr Hardy was an evangelist all his life and care hearty preached up and down Great Britain just as we do and gave an invitation for people to receive Christ when he founded the British Labour Party because of his social concern but what did in the motivation his conversion experience and you could go one after another and when Martin Luther King got his Nobel Peace Prize they asked him in Stockholm where he got his motivation he said from my father's evangelical preaching fifthly and I only mentioned this one we communicate the gospel by our unity in the spirit I would like to say to Southern Baptist I'm going to give the closing address of the Southern Baptist Convention in June in Dallas one of the points I want to make if we can stay unified and realize that there's diversity in unity we can turn the world upside down for Christ's we have the instruments in our hands right now to evangelize the world before the end of the century for the first time in the history of the Christian Church and this summer we're going to have in July Congress on evangelism and missions in Lausanne Switzerland 3,000 delegates are coming from 152 countries and it will be in my judgment the most historic Congress on evangelism since 1910 at Edinboro accepted the Edinburgh there were only 1100 delegates representing 16 countries this time there'll be three thousand delegates representing a hundred and fifty-two countries the most ecumenical conference on evangelism ever held and we're going to go there not as a legislative body we're going there not to vote on anything we're going there to discuss strategy and means of reaching the world before the end of this century with the gospel this is our task and this is our job and God is calling on you you say well we don't know what about missionary yes we need missionaries I rent the other day and one of the papers that are being sent into Lausanne we need 10,000 missionaries in Europe right now to evangelize the Algerians the millions of Algerians that are in France the millions of Turks that are working in Germany all over Europe that's just Europe and I'm hoping we can get some African evangelists in America because I've met some of the greatest flaming evangelists in all the world in Africa and in Ville and in the Orient and I'm one of those people that believes that the gravitational center of Christianity shifted from the Middle East to North Africa from North Africa to Europe from Europe to the United States and it's now shifting to the Orient it's in the oil where the action is where scholarship is now beginning to emerge in the Christian Church where in many areas the church is growing faster than the population and they're beginning to teach us something about evangelism and missions and dedication and holiness now I'm only a third of the way through and my time is already gone shall we pray our Father we pray that we will be communicators and that we will recognize that the great communicating agent of the gospel is the Holy Spirit we pray that now it's teach us to be men of God and women of God to proclaim thy message at an hour such as the world has never known a challenging thrilling glorious hour to be alive in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ army

Channel: Southern Seminary

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Keywords: Billy Graham, Sermon, Albert Mohler, Southern Baptist, SBTS, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, billy graham sermon, billy graham speech, billy graham chapel, evangelism, evangelist

Id: 92Xs3iJy90Y

Length: 45min 30sec (2730 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2018