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William Franklin Graham, Jr., was born on November 7, 1918, just a few days after the armistice that ended W.W.I, on a dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina. When he was 16, he accepted Christ at a revival meeting through the ministry of Mordecai Ham, a traveling evangelist. Graham entered the ministry in 1943, the same year he graduated from Wheaton College near Chicago and married Ruth Bell.
From that year on, the chronicle of his ministry's growth parallels that of the nation"s growth -- full speed ahead. Graham became charter vice president of Youth for Christ International and President of Northwestern Schools (college, Bible school, and seminary). In 1949 noted newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst telegraphed his editors to "Puff Graham" in their coverage of the Los Angeles crusade. It lasted more than eight weeks with overflow crowds filling the tent every night. A year later in 1950, Graham founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and began the "Hour of Decision" radio program, still broadcast by more than 900 stations around the world. In the first seven years following graduation, he was off and running wherever the Lord opened a door.
During the fifties and sixties, he took the Gospel "to the ends of the earth." Time magazine was right to deem him as "The man who has preached to more people than any human being who has ever lived." A listing of all the Graham Crusades is at the back of the book.
Part Six entitled New Frontiers describes the last twenty years, 1977-1997, and it's here that we understand the global impact for Christ that Graham has had on many of the world's leaders, past and present. Perhaps the most unsettling to Graham and the one about whom he has the most to say is President Nixon, with whom Graham had a close relationship. "Inwardly I felt torn apart," he writes regarding hearing the Watergate tapes. About the presidential race between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter: "Religious conviction alone was not the most reliable guide as to who would be the best or most effective leader."
But Graham has given the call of Christ and ministered to many more ordinary people, and his stories make clear that he knows the Lord has only one criteria of judgment for rich or poor, mighty or weak, that they "choose Christ, as I did." No matter what the topic, Graham writes about it in a warm, very human, and occasionally humorous tone. He has no grand illusions about his own role in history as he approaches age 80. The book has four sections of photos, many from family collection as well as public occasions, providing a visual sense of Graham's life.
If you have attended a crusade, you will be interested in what the book has to say about how they are conducted, the handling of finances, and security issues. And you will be amazed at the important role Ruth has played throughout Graham's life. The first chapter in the section entitled A Ministry Begins is titled "Ruth." In the last section, a chapter entitled "At Home," Graham writes of his family of five children and nineteen grandchildren. He discusses Ruth's recent brush with spinal meningitis and his own ongoing battle with Parkinson's disease.
After reading the whole tome, after coming to know Dr. Graham's many activities and contacts, we come away convinced that it was all for Christ. Mrs. Frank Keating, the wife of Oklahoma's governor at the time of the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal building in 1995, recalls hearing Billy Graham when he flew there to address the grieving citizens: "As he sat on the platform before his message, I saw a man with physical weakness. But when he stood up to speak, there was energy and vitality. And when he sat down, he was again a man of weakness."
As Billy Graham says at the end of Just as I Am, "To God alone be the glory."
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