Thoughts From Billy Graham

Dear Friends,

Have you ever questioned your faith? Have you ever struggled with doubts? Have you ever thought you lost your faith – are you there now? If so I wanted to share this story of when the great evangelist Dr. Billy Graham came to such a crisis point in relation to doubt in his own life – and what it led him to do.

I know everyone is different, and the struggles vary, but just knowing that a man of such faith struggled so intensely with doubt (even after being an evangelist) and came to that crisis point of teetering on the edge, only to come back and remain true – can be a shot in the arm to those in the same place. This “thought,” written by his grandson Will Graham in 2014, is entitled, “The Tree Stump Prayer – When Billy Graham Overcame Doubt” and includes excerpts from Billy Graham’s autobiography, “Just As I Am” published in 1997. Enjoy.

“At the midpoint of the 20th century, he had already been an evangelist with ‘Youth for Christ’ and had preached across Europe in the aftermath of World War II. He had held his first “Billy Graham Crusades” in places like Charlotte, N.C, and Grand Rapids, Mich. He was also the president of Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minn., the youngest college president in the country. Not everything had gone as planned, however. His crusade in Altoona, Pa., had been—in his own words—“a flop.” He felt things had gone poorly, and it left him questioning whether or not evangelism should be his focus.

At the same time, a very good friend and contemporary of my grandfather, a man named Charles Templeton, had begun challenging my grandfather’s way of thinking. Mr. Templeton, who had preached with Youth For Christ as well, had gone on to study at Princeton, where he began to believe that the Bible was flawed and that academia—not Jesus—was the answer to life’s problems. He tried to convince my grandfather that his way of thinking was outdated and the Bible couldn’t be trusted. My grandfather had more questions than answers.

As a young man in his early-30s, all of these things were swirling in his mind… Did he even believe the Bible from which he was preaching, or should he follow Templeton in questioning its validity? It was at this time that my discouraged grandfather reluctantly accepted the invitation of Henrietta Mears to visit and speak at a Christian retreat center called ‘Forest Home.’ Mears had worked at First Baptist Church in Minneapolis for Pastor Riley, who was also my grandfather’s predecessor at Northwestern College, and she was a very well-known and godly woman. She would end up having a huge impact in Hollywood, California, as she served as the director of Christian Education at First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood. She took grief for inviting him to speak because he was not part of the camp’s denomination, but God had a plan in all of this...

You see, while he was at Forest Home, he spent a great deal of time studying the Bible, and he kept seeing the same phrase pop up. “Thus says the LORD… Thus says the LORD…” While my grandfather had always accepted in his head the authority of the Scripture, this became the turning point as he realized in his heart that God’s Word is divinely inspired, eternal and powerful! One night at Forest Home, he walked out into the woods and set his Bible on a stump—more an altar than a pulpit—and he cried out: “O God! There are many things in this book I do not understand. There are many problems with it for which I have no solution. There are many seeming contradictions. There are some areas in it that do not seem to correlate with modern science. I can’t answer some of the philosophical and psychological questions Chuck and others are raising.”

And then, my grandfather fell to his knees and the Holy Spirit moved in him as he said, “Father, I am going to accept this as Thy Word—by faith! I’m going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word.” He wrote in his autobiography that as he stood up his eyes stung with tears, but he felt the power and presence of God in a way he hadn’t in months. “A major bridge had been crossed,” he said.

The resulting change did not go unnoticed. The next day he spoke at Forest Home, and 400 people made a commitment to Christ. Henrietta Mears remarked that he “preached with an authority” that she hadn’t seen in him before. That was August 1949, and mere weeks later Billy Graham would go on to hold the historic 1949 Los Angeles Crusade in the tent erected on the corner of Washington and Hill Streets. That outreach was scheduled to last three weeks, and ended up going for eight weeks as people packed the “Canvas Cathedral” and media outlets nationwide began talking about the upstart evangelist.

Because of that moment, kneeling by a stump at Forest Home, I get to hear stories of lives changed through my grandfather’s ministry. Because of that moment, my own father and I are invited around the world to share the same hope of Christ that my grandfather preached in Los Angeles and hundreds of other locations both near and far. That moment not only changed Billy Graham’s ministry. It impacted eternity.”

If you have wrestled with doubt, you surely know how crushing and debilitating it can be. But you also may have realized (as I have) that for every unbelieving objection to scriptural truths, there is an alternative believing alternative. I can find reasons to believe or reasons not to believe. One must choose – shall I trust God or shall I not.

In a time when I myself wrestled with doubt, I prayed “Lord give me a faith that does not doubt.” Wrong thing to pray! The doubts intensified ten-fold! It wasn’t until months later that I realized this new flood of doubts were God answering my prayer! For they drove me to wrestle through them by finding answers to them! God gave me the opposite of what I asked for to give me what I asked for!

In some cases, it was as simple as remembering that faith is not contrary to reason but above reason. We are called to love the Lord our God with all our mind, using all the powers of our God-given intellect to understand things in this life. But there are many things our minds are too small to ever understand (I don’t care who you are), and in those cases we must go into the higher realms of faith that are above reason.

I realized that faith (as talked about in the Bible) is rarely (if ever) ‘belief without any doubt,' but rather ‘trusting God in spite of our doubts.’ Doubts actually became an invitation to believe more deeply! Other times I had wrongly understood a text. Still other times I had taken as 'literal' what was intended to be symbolic or metaphorical. The Reformers said (much to my help): “The literal meaning of any text is what the biblical author intended. If the author intended it to be taken as a metaphor, then to interpret it metaphorically is the literal interpretation of the text." Many of Jesus’ Parables are simply stories that are extended metaphors. And I could go on and on. “Ask and it will be given, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.”

Living in His All-sufficient Grace, Pastor Jeff