I’m taking medication with a typically horrendous list of potential side effects that includes suicidal thoughts, but I promise that’s not why I wish I could’ve been in heaven when Billy Graham recently arrived. I just wish I could’ve seen a smiling Jesus embrace him and say, “Well done, Billy, my good and faithful servant.”
I never attended a Billy Graham crusade, but when I learned of his passing, I felt a great sense of loss, like a prop had been kicked out from under this world. I agree with so many who’ve said there may never again be someone who so effectively preaches the pure, simple Gospel of Jesus Christ to so many people.
Graham was always under pressure to change the message he preached. He took hits from all sides but always stayed true to the Apostle Paul’s words to Corinthian believers: “For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”
All I’ve read from those who knew Graham best, including his children, confirms that this man lived what he preached. But, like the rest of us, he wasn’t perfect. In fact, when asked if she ever considered divorce, his beloved wife Ruth once famously quipped, “No, but I did think of murder a few times.”
Even though Graham made no bones about being a sinner saved by grace, by all accounts he seemed to measure up to one of his famous quotes: “A real Christian is the one who can give his pet parrot to the town gossip.”
Graham leaves an amazing and in some cases, surprising, legacy of people he influenced or mentored, including Queen Elizabeth, with whom he had a long friendship, and celebrities like Kathie Lee Gifford, Pat Boone, Reba McEntire and Chip Gaines, co-star of the popular “Fixer Upper” TV show, who was discipled by Graham’s son-in-law, the late Danny Lotz.
Gaines said, “(Danny Lotz) challenged me to process what God was doing in my life and train my mind with God’s truth. I learned so much from him, and he always spoke so highly of Billy Graham, who he said talked the talk and walked the walk. So, to this day, I think about talking the talk and walking the walk because of Billy Graham and Danny Lotz.”
It isn’t that there haven’t been or won’t ever be followers and preachers of Christ who are just as faithful as Billy Graham—it’s that we got to see Graham walk out his faith under the most glaring lights for decades. And he did it without getting caught in the traps that bring down too many Christian leaders.
Graham is credited with saying, “If a man of God falls, it is usually one of the three G’s: gold, girls, or glory.” Maybe because he was so mindful of that and so humbly aware of his own feet of clay, Billy Graham didn’t fall. And how refreshing that is. How this world needed his example of a man who was faithful to his wife, prioritized integrity, and walked humbly with God.
I haven’t written anything here you probably haven’t read or heard in recent weeks, as tributes to Graham have fittingly appeared just about everywhere. I’m pretty sure Graham would rather we stop talking about him and just fully embrace and commit to proclaim, with our words and our lives, the simple truth that Jesus is our only hope in this life and our only hope to get to heaven. That would be the highest tribute we could pay him.
The Apostle Paul earned the right to say, “Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1).” I think Billy Graham did, too. The question is: have we?