Transcript: Billy Graham's Sinner's Prayer: A Lukewarm Tactic?

Dear Billy, I realize that you're quite elderly now, and I really don't know how sharp your faculties are at this stage. I'm only 72 myself, and I have a great deal of trouble with memory already, so I'm amazed at how well you have functioned all these years. I also expect that the chances of this reaching you are quite slim. I've heard you say that you are approachable by common people like myself. Is that true? I grew up following, from a distance, your various crusades around America and around the world. You were something of an idol for me. Over the years, I have had the greatest admiration for how well you have been able to conduct yourself, avoid scandal, and get the right balance between a strong Christian message and patient tolerance with many who did not receive the message that you preached, especially powerful people and celebrities. In my twenties, however, I discovered something as a Christian which had the effect of making me question whether I had ever been a Christian before that discovery. I'm sure that in God's grace, he would forgive me for not having acted on something for which I was ignorant during the first two decades of my life. And I'm sure that God would not punish anyone else, including you, for something about which you may have been ignorant. There are so many things in your autobiography which seem to indicate that you've been searching for truth or at least that you did search for it diligently in your earlier years. But it's possible that you may have missed what I have discovered. I'll get right to the point. What I had missed, and what I fear you may have missed, is Jesus. In particular, his teachings. Surely you know that at the end of the Sermon on the Mount he said that anyone who built their lives on the things that he taught in that sermon would be building on a rock and what they built would never be destroyed Of course, he also said that only a fool would listen to what he said in that sermon and not act on it. Please note that I'm not talking about the name of Jesus, or even the person of Jesus. I'm talking about the teachings of Jesus, as he himself taught in the Sermon on the Mount. I've not heard all of your sermons, but what I have heard gives me a picture of Christianity which is consistent with what my family and much of America assumes to be Christianity as Jesus taught it. But if you've read the life and teachings of Jesus, surely you would know that something eternally significant has been left out of your own teachings. Do you think Jesus would have been able to play golf with several presidents and millionaires? Do you think that Jesus would have even been a millionaire? Do you think that he would have been popular with the other religious leaders of his day? These contradictions between your ministry and the ministry of Jesus have bothered and baffled me. Obviously for you, it's probably a very short time before you're going to have to discuss those inconsistencies with Jesus yourself. What I have noticed, not just in your sermons, but in the sermons that I hear preached in churches all over America is that one can say so many wonderfully inspiring things about God and Jesus. Calling him Lord, Lord is, I believe, how he described it. And it can be done without ever really teaching what he taught. Your crusades usually end with an altar call, where thousands of people streamed to the front of the auditorium to be met by trained ushers. They are led in a prayer which is fed to them line by line, and when it is finished, they are told that they are now born again. They are then passed on to the various denominations who have organized and paid for your presence at the crusade Please accept my apologies if that description is too simplistic But do you ever ask them to open their Bible and find some place where Jesus or one of his disciples ever led someone to say such a prayer? Do you ever get around to teaching them that Jesus said to sell everything that they have and give it to the poor if they want to be one of his followers? to stop working for food or mammon and start working to build God's kingdom, to forsake their families and homes and go into all the world preaching the gospel, to pray, fast, and give to the poor but to do it secretly, to use no such titles as rabbi or master, which are just two other words for doctor, to love their enemies and not drop bombs on them. These are just a few of the teachings that Jesus gave to his followers in the Bible, and he finished by telling them to teach others to do the same things. I found one sermon of yours about counting the cost of discipleship, based on the final few verses of Luke 14. I thought, surely now he will deal with what Jesus taught in verse 33. But instead, it was just one more plea for abstinence from sex and other addictions the sort of thing that all parents would like their young people to avoid. Everything that you stand for, Billy, can be summed up in one word. Respectability. If there are rewards in heaven for respectability, I should think that you would be run up there at the very top of the list. But that isn't how Jesus taught it, is it? He said the false prophets would be invited to say prayers on big social occasions. They would dress in the best clothes, fly first class, and stay at five-star hotels if they had had such things in those days. When someone applied to become a disciple of Jesus he said he had nowhere to lay his head Now where is that being practiced these days Certainly not in your crusades but then not in any church I know of either I'm sure there are a lot of sour grapes in the church world who would condemn you for the slightest slip of the tongue merely because they envy your success in an extremely competitive religious environment. You can rest easy, knowing that no one is going to listen to such critics after you're gone. You will be immortalized here on earth. You have behaved well, maintained a spotless reputation and stayed away from extreme or dangerous doctrines. You are to be congratulated for that. I think the only problem you may face when you stand before God is the same one that virtually all of your critics will have to face. And that is that you left the teachings of Jesus out of the message that you preached almost from beginning to end. I know, as a slightly older person myself, that it is extremely hard to change as we get older. But I want to remind you that even now you can repent, and God will forgive you. It would make such a huge difference to the kingdom of heaven if you could trade all that respectability for one clear, strong statement before you die that what people really needed to do all along was to just sit at the feet of Jesus, listen to what he told his followers to do, and then do those things themselves. I personally have tried to do that for about 40 years now, and I can testify that it works. I still live in the streets and have not been accepted in any church anywhere, but my heart is full of God's everlasting peace. I pray that you may have that too, before you die.