Today marks evangelist Billy Graham’s 99th birthday. Looking forward to his centennial celebration, Zondervan Publishing (@Zondervan) is announcing plans to release A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story by William Martin, in March 2018. Graham himself requested Martin for the project and granted him unprecedented access to the Billy Graham archives and team members, lending this work the authenticity and transparency of no other.
[Read the Bible Gateway Blog post, Cliff Barrows, Longtime Billy Graham Associate, Dies at 93]
“As I have written in this book, I have constantly examined what I have said in an effort to make sure that I was neither shading the truth in Graham’s or his associates’ favor out of gratitude for their helpfulness, nor taking an inappropriately negative slant as a way of emphasizing that I had not been taken in by slick manipulation,” Martin writes. “But since Billy Graham and his associates—like all humankind—have weaknesses, I determined not to gloss those over.
“I have tried to be scrupulously fair, not only because I do not wish the taint of unfairness to mar the most notable scholarly enterprise in which I have engaged to date, but also because I regard fairness as a cardinal virtue,” Martin continues. “I do not imagine, of course, that my judgment is flawless. But the account and the assessments I have rendered have been given with great care.”
In the above video released on his birthday, Billy Graham urges people to seek a close relationship with God and read the Bible every day. He has been praying for a “spiritual awakening” but says that can only happen if “individuals surrender their lives to Jesus Christ.”
He says people need to do “everything we can to follow in the footsteps of Jesus,” which he defines as living a life where people “love one another, help one another,” and live according to Christ’s teachings. He says it is the Holy Spirit who helps people live such a “deep lifestyle” that is focused on “love, gentleness, and patience.”
Graham urges people to read the Bible every day, advising them to start with the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament. And in the Old Testament, to start with the first verse in Genesis.
In A Prophet with Honor, author William Martin begins with a short introduction to evangelicalism and the revivalist movement starting with John Cotton’s messages to the settlers of New England in the 1600s. Other names to follow include Solomon Stoddard, Jonathan Edwards, and George Whitefield through to Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Mordecai Ham, the evangelist under whom Graham came to faith in Christ as a teenage boy in 1934.
Fans of Graham’s autobiography, Just As I Am, will recognize many of the names, places, and events chronicled here, but A Prophet with Honor goes further behind the scenes to explain the conditions that made it possible for Graham to achieve his spectacular success and to reveal how sometimes he succeeded in spite of himself.
As Graham explained when approaching Martin about writing the book, “There are no conditions. It’s your book. I don’t even have to read it. I want you to be critical. There are some things that need criticizing.”
Despite Graham’s humble expectations of a biography that would reveal his true self—warts and all—Martin came away from his research with the overwhelming sense that despite his flaws, Graham was a man of rare integrity. Martin concludes that there will likely never be another like him. “Unless and until that happens, William Franklin Graham, Jr., can safely be regarded as the best who ever lived at what he did—‘a workman,’ as Scripture says, ‘who needed not to be ashamed.’”
See the many books and resources by and about Billy Graham in the Bible Gateway Store.
About William Martin
William Martin (BD, PhD, Harvard) is the Harry and Hazel Chavanne Emeritus Professor of Religion and Public Policy in the Department of Sociology at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Since his retirement from teaching in 2005, he has served as the Chavanne Senior Fellow for Religion and Public Policy at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice. He has appeared on many national radio and television programs, including 60 Minutes, Nightline, 20/20, Today, Frontline, and All Things Considered. He has been published in numerous national and regional periodicals, including The Atlantic, Harper’s, Esquire, and Texas Monthly.
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