Billy Graham - "Time is Short"

the Lisette Kimberly McCall lecture series is honored as are we all this morning by the distinguished lecturer for this year on some occasions one presents a lecturer with a variety of biographical data a list of academic achievements or professional qualifications there are however stellar personalities of history whom one does not introduce one does not introduce the President of the United States one does not introduce royalty of the British Empire one does not so introduce great figures if one have the opportunity of the Reformation a great revivalist of awakenings one can only present such persons to present them with gratitude to Almighty God for the sterling quality of their lives for the devotion of their service and for the undimmed brilliance of their ministry and so today I would not presume to introduce dr. Billy Graham but I do present him to you as the lisette kimbra McCall lecturer and in presenting him to you I do so with gratitude to all night II God for the authentic splendor of his ministry but the gift of His grace and presence that he shares with us this morning and as you come to speak to us this morning dr. Graham I want to share with you a seal of Southern Seminary that you might remember us remember inscribed upon the very center of that the man of God may be perfect thoroughly furnished to every good word dr. Honeycutt dr. McCall members of the faculty student body especially first-year students and fellow evangelist it's a great delight and privilege to be back at this podium it's been my privilege to speak here on a number of occasions and I think on at least two occasions to receive honorary doctor's degrees and it reminded me the first time I went to Cambridge in 1955 they told me to wear my robe and a hood if I had one and so I picked out what I thought was the most prestigious one I had at that time was from Baylor University and so when I went into the study the clergyman who was then the minister of great st. Mary's at Cambridge asked me where that hood came from and I told him Baylor University and he scratched his head and he said he had never heard of it I said well it's the largest Baptist University in the world well he said I don't think you better wear it so dr. Honeycutt has presented me this morning as a doctor and I suppose in a sense I am a doctor that does people very little good as far as physical health is concerned but I heard about this dog down in South Carolina he was a famous hunting dog and they called him preacher and this fella used him every year in one year he went down there and they said oh no said we don't have a dog here named preacher oh he said you must have I've used him every year but I did miss last year all they said we did have a dog here named preacher but some fella from New York came down here and called him doctor and he hasn't been any use since so now I had prepared a lecture for this morning entitled the mission of the church but I was told yesterday by some very eminent professors here that it might be better if I just preach to you I don't I don't know exactly what that what the difference is because I'm gonna give probably the same talk anyway but our member Grady Wilson was out in West Texas and he was preaching to the cowboy camp meeting and one old cowboy came up to him after them had very famous preaches that three or four thousand Cowboys and he said brother Wilson he said I sure do like your preaching you don't give us no doctrine or nothing and that's about the way mine is going to be I had earlier this year I had a debate at Cambridge supposed to be a baton debate it turned out to be a discussion with the forum Archbishop of Canterbury on the subject of the mission of the church dr. Ramsey Bishop Ramsey now and I used to go by and see him many years ago when he was the Archbishop of Canterbury in fact I never went to London before I went to see him at Lambeth and he would serve me some tea and we had become good friends earlier when he was Bishop of Durham and he took me to his little chapel and he always called me Billy G and he said Billy G he said I pray for you every day and he said here's my prayer that God will bless all the things you're doing right and overrule all the things you're doing wrong and I said your grace that's going to be my prayer for you from now on now you cannot be an evangelist without being controversial and I suppose you can't be a theological professor without being controversial or even the head of a theological school the gospel itself is controversial I found out in my travels and now I've preached the gospel in over 60 countries that just the cross itself is controversial but it also is the power of God unto salvation to all of those that believe I want to take a text out of context way out of context if I might because in the seventh by the way this Bible I was asked already what this is it's a Bible and I got this in Paris the other day and it's the new international version in paperback and I hadn't seen one so pretty and I thought that would be good to bring here this morning to start my lecture but in the seventh chapter first Corinthians the Apostle Paul of course is dealing with marriage and for some of you this month this little phrase might be applicable where it says time is short time is short now the Apostle I don't think was talking about eschatology I think he was talking about the fact that our lives are brief someone asked me a few days a few weeks ago at the University of North Carolina where I did give a series of lectures they asked me what the greatest surprise was I just passed my 64th birthday and that had been in the press that I'd had a birthday and they said what is your greatest surprise in life and I answered the brevity of life if I told say if someone had told me when I was 20 years old that life was very short and would pass just like that I wouldn't have believed it and if I tell you that you don't believe it either I cannot get young people to understand how brief life is how quickly it passes it seems like yesterday I was in school you know we have on television today the earlier Today Show and the Today Show and the this morning show and the Good Morning America show and the CBS News Nightwatch and NBC News overnight an ABC News Nightline The Tonight Show Nightline all the rest of it and Entertainment Tonight the Tomorrow People education today everything today reminds us of today and reminds us of the importance of this moment and of this hour and of this minute Richard Picasso was a teenager who gave himself to Christ through one of our television programs and today he's a young evangelist I don't know he may be here fall I know married to a Chinese born soprano a graduate of Julliard and Richard's father was an Italian tenor who got depressed and jumped in front of a train and Richard also tried to commit suicide having gotten into trouble with the law and on drugs then he gave his life to Christ and at a youth meeting he gave a testimony which went something like this as the world turns high the young and restless was in search for tomorrow but alas I was on the edge of night in a secret storm in the hands of the doctors in a General Hospital headed for another world then the guiding light said you're of only one life so give it to me for the days of your lives and since that moment he said I've been going with Jesus Christ all the way I graduated from college 40 years ago this next year a war had just started we had no television nobody never heard the word television as far as I know and I took a course in physics and no jets we went by train and bust everywhere out drove a car the add one no such thing as a holiday in no McDonald's hamburgers I don't know how we made it no Kentucky Fried Chicken no peaches no interstate highways Elvis Presley was just a little boy The Beatles had just been born never dreamed of a space shuttle Roosevelt was seen it was still president seemed like he's going to be president from then on and most of you were not born that are here today and how quickly the years pass the atomic clock at the University of Chicago last year that clock was moved from nine minutes till 12 to four minutes till 12 and we were in they were meeting at Banff in in Alberta and I talked to some of those scientists that moved the clock because we were holding a meetings in Calgary and I talked to some of them in the hotel and they said was there debate about it he said yes there was no debate about moving it but some people wanted to move it to one minute till 12:00 and then reminded me of the little girl the clock had struck thirteen times and she said mother it's later than you think and it's later in your life in my life than we think I was looking forward to seeing Grady Nutt when I came up here now he's an eternity he never dreamed when he got on that airplane that that was his last moment we never know you know in the days of Christ as fast as they could travel was by horse or a camel by 1830 an engine faster than a horse had been developed by 1910 a military aircraft could go 42 miles an hour I flew back the other day from Europe on the Concorde in 3 hours and 15 minutes and now the Columbia space shuttle goes 18,000 miles an hour and we're trying to run a Space Age on a in the debate in the House of Representatives yesterday on the MX we heard various viewpoints expressed and one of those men asked this question is World War 3 in the making I have to answer yes unless we can pray and do something about it and unless God intervenes man with his heart filled with sin and evil and hate and lust and greed has not changed and instead of swords and spears in his hands he now has atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs and biochemical weapons that can destroy the earth in a matter of hours what are we going to do about it the explosive points in the world that we read about every day whether it's in Poland oil Salvador the Middle East of Somalia and Ethiopia or Southeast Asia the iran-iraq II war or the situation in Lebanon which is far from resolved how much longer do we have Orwell's 1984 is just a little over a year away man is the same today as he was in Jeremiah's day when he said the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked who can know it if there was ever a time for the gospel that can transform the human heart it's now the bomb did not make itself the bomb will not explode itself it'll be man and man has to change and the only power on earth that can change man is the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ when our Lord said you must be born again first there's the brevity of time the Bible teaches the brevity of time behold thou has made my days as a hand breadth and mine ages as nothing before thee a thousand years in thy sight uh but as yesterday when it is past and as a watch for hours in the night one day is with the Lord a thousand years and a thousand years as one day like the grass we spring up in like the grass we're mowed down my days are like a shadow that decline it and I'm withered like grass but Thou O Lord shall endure forever and I remembrance unto all generations every one of us here has been given the same amount of time in a day fourteen hundred and forty minutes a day 106 to 8 hours per week the days of our years are threescore years and ten and if by reason of strength therefore school years yet is their strength of Labor and sarra for it is soon cut off and we're passed away and cut off 70 years God allows us and it's interesting to me with all of our medical science we've never passed that magic mark the average American male today lives seventy years and four months the average female seventy-three years and six months more people live to be 70 but the average age of an American is still 70 as taught in the scriptures now 70 years God allows us let's think a moment what do we do with those 70 years the first 15 are spent in childhood all and then 20 years we sleep and then the last five years physical limitations are curtailing your activities they haven't contain mine yet but my fifth year until 70 starts next year only 30 years left and part of that time must be spent in eating meals working and figuring out your income tax things like that what is your life it's even a vapor that appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away the brevity of time that brings us to the urgency of time the Bible says redeemed the time because the days are evil and the days in which we are living of very evil I've just come from Czechoslovakia and from East Germany and just six weeks ago I had the privilege of preaching in Luther's great pulpit the city church in Wittenberg and afterward to take a stroll of the city with the burgomaster the mavs the town and then he gave us a marvelous lunch under the castle in a gorgeous restaurant and he had we'd already with the City Council and we'd already had a good talk and they all told me that they were communists and they were atheists and so forth and so on they got that out of the way then they could talk freely and we had a wonderful time of discussion back and forth and I had preached that morning on Luther's faith and I'd finished studying the life of of Luther and read a number of biographies of Luther and the depressions he went through and all the different struggles he went through and all the things that Luther said and did and his table talks I went into the room where he he gave his table talks to his students he never dreamed that they would tell you not tape recording but writing all that stuff down they're gonna publish it someday and some of it sounds rather primitive and crude but it's very interesting to see the working of that man's mind did you know that Luther at my age had already been dead nearly a year he accomplished all that time younger than I am right now changed the course of history in that short time do you ever hear how he got his wife anybody ever tell you he got some priests talked into getting married because he didn't think a man ought to not be married and he was 41 years of age so he sent over to a place where they were training nuns and kidnapped seven nuns and put them in barrels and got him out and then six of the married priests but one of the priests backed out or something happened and so Luther said well to be honourable I better marry her so he married Kippy and he said boy he said the first year of marriage is the worst year of my life he said to have pigtails on my pillow when I woke up in the morning but in those days they were very evil the days have always been evil evil and good struggling the forces of the devil and the forces of God locked in combat that ends up in every generation it seems in war I've come from an area where they fought the 30-year war between the Catholics and the Protestants in Bohemia and Moravia and Slovakia and all that part of Europe and they still talk about the 30-year war as though it were yesterday and it was back in the 1600s ending in the great battle at White Mountain where the Protestants were slaughtered and what a what a thing it is when you think that you have just one short life to spend and it'll soon be over I heard about a man some time ago on the west coast he was in a Methodist Church and he decided that he was going to tithe his time he would give 10% of his time to the church by going and visiting people he led 20 people the first year to Christ 20 new people he led into the church suppose all of our members tired their time to witness for Christ as we tithe our income for the church then there's the tyranny of time and this is one of the problems with me time runs me the schedule that I've tried to keep the last six months is the heaviest schedule of my entire life I don't know how I got into it I don't know how I ever accepted so many things but I did and somebody asked me some time ago at some University of Seminary where I was speaking they said what is if you had it to do over again what would you do I said I would study more and speak less I have let people pull me to every type of thing in the world to speak and I needed to be on my knees in my study and I would say to your to the students get all the education you can get if I believe in the second coming of Christ if I thought that Christ was coming back tomorrow I wouldn't change one thing if I were you I just study if that's where God led you and you're in the will of God study but while you're studying on the side study the Word of God for your own soul not just for classes not just for grades fill your heart with the Word of God I've found that those who know the Scriptures are the ones that have the power today I have a daughter she never went to college she never went to Bible School she never went to seminary but she teaches the largest Bible class in the state of North Carolina and she studies 23 hours a week for that three hour Bible study and she has 500 in her class and she has several hundred on the waiting list that cannot get into her class why because she's filled with the Word of God and you can ask her any chapter in the Bible any chapter in the Bible and she can outline it for you and she and when she stands up to speak she never used a note she has gotten that word of God so in her heart and mind not only has it transformed her life and her family but it's her whole community and people are you know one of our senators wrote the other day and said two of my daughter's have accepted Christ in your daughter's Bible class and I asked for the privilege of going the other day because they don't allow visitors and they don't allow men but he went and he said I went out of there with tears streaming down my cheeks from what I heard the Word of God filling your heart and your life yes it controls us time controls us older men leaving their wives for younger women how many letters a day we get like that in our office in Minnesota Jesus said as long as it is day we must do the work of him that sent us the night is coming when no man can work the night is going to come in your like yet there was a serenity about the work of the Lord Jesus it's the quality of life not the length Jesus only had 33 years and it ended on the cross to the world he was a failure at that moment yet at the end of his life he said I finished the work that they gave us me to do it doesn't matter whether you live another year or two years of five years I heard about the preacher that was up preaching and he asked how many in the congregation wanted to go to heaven and there every hand was lifted except one fella back there he said don't you want to go to heaven he said yes sir but he said I thought you were getting up a load now we we never know well you know work be finished is there a quality to it is there a dedication to it time can also be a tool but it can also we can also be its slave and you know I think if I had like to start over again in seminary like you are here I'd write down my priorities in life and I'd get committed to certain priorities I try to carefully plan my life like Albert Schweitzer did I admire that part of his life where he carefully planned it and then he lived according to that plan redeemed the time the days are evil the time is urgent and then time also calls for immediate action the fact that time is short calls for something now now is the accepted time doesn't apply just to the unconverted we talk - it applies to us as believers to us as young clergyman's except to time the things we ought to do the classes we ought to take the books we ought to read do it now the family that needs you spend more time now write that letter home now that you've been meaning to write money you ought to give give now time for study do it now people you ought to witness to do it now every time the clock ticks it seems to say now today if you will hear his voice there may not be a tomorrow for you and for me because there's a warning - time time is running out for all of us time is too short for indecision and vacillation do not halt between two opinions fools say that time is long every morning we have 86,400 seconds to spend and to invest and each day the bank named time opens a new account for you and for me it allows no balances and no overdrafts if you fail to use the day's dispositor losses yours we were do you know where more Baptist's are located than any other place in the world now their church historians here that will probably write me strong letters after I say this but most Baptist I have us all that say is up in northeast India in nagaland and I went there for their hundredth anniversary of Christianity and Nagaland and the Baptist had cleared off the roads forests that cut down the trees and they had soldiers behind us with machine guns and soldiers in front with machine guns and it was really a Baptist procession from from the airport to kima which it was I forgot how many miles it was but they'd had a lot of people killed on that road just in the last few weeks before we got there and soca Hema is way up in the mountains and these people these Naga people are lovable wonderful people but there are a warrior people and they were in really a war with India they've taken on all of India necessary but they're a state in India trying to get their independence and so when we got there they said that their first service was going to be in the morning at before daylight at 5 in the morning and they said dr. Graham were expecting you to teach the Word of God at that time I said well look here I said how about some of my associates taking that I said I've got two other services tomorrow one at noon and one and in the evening I said I'll take those two give that early morning service to one of these others I said this fellow here Charlie Riggs is one of the greatest Bible teachers in the world I said how many do you expect all they said we will have at least a hundred thousand I said I'll take that myself but they took us too they took us to a graveyard and here we'll all the tombstones of the soldiers because they had stopped the Japanese at Ko Hema from any further penetration of India during the war that was the great battle that stopped them and here we'll all the Americans the British the Indian graves there and on that great monument that they have they're the people from the grave are saying we gave out today so that you may have a tomorrow many films are being made right now according to New York Times called Armageddon movies it'll be released next year and the scripture says seeing all these things shall come to pass what manner of persons ought you to be what manner of person should we believe I'm going to talk on that tonight a man for all seasons and tell you some of the my own personal experiences in my walk with God and talk about what kind of a man or a woman God can use in the present generation in which we live Betty lytic pointed out in the Los Angeles Times the other day they drink like there's no tomorrow somebody wrote in the French paper the other day Europe is like a person on the Titanic a pop song some time ago said another time in another place and that's what the devil says another time in another place the Gallup poll has just come out in the Princeton Religion Research Center's report you ought to get in read it it'll be in the library called religion in America it's the most comprehensive thing I've read put out by the Gallup poll on religion in this country and I was appalled at how few professing Christians read the Bible daily or pray and even more appalled at how few have daily devotions I don't know how we can claim to be Christians and not have any walk with God I'll tell you if you lived in Czechoslovakia and you were a Christian in East Germany that would be the one thing you do every day you'd pray people ask me do I feel that people are deeper in their faith in those countries than here I say yes where the pressure is the greatest that is the deepest walk with God we have pressures you have pressures a different kind of pressure here but we need men and women who walk with God and if you do that you too can finish the work that God gave you to do shall we pray our Father and our God we pray that I would take these few thoughts on time and help us to realize the brevity and the urgency of time and may we invest what little time we have in the kingdom of God but we ask it in his name army [Music] you

Channel: Southern Seminary

Views: 674,167

Rating: 4.7927842 out of 5

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: 9wyhcZBKZeg

Length: 30min 9sec (1809 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2018