Billy Graham on America's Spiritual Condition

Five years ago, in an interview with World Net Daily just after the release of his new book The Reason for My Hope: Salvation, Graham said that with “all my heart I want to leave you with the truth.” “We have been going down the wrong road for a long time.  Seemingly, man has learned to live without God, preoccupied and indifferent toward Him and concerned only about material security and pleasure.

“And yet mankind is also adrift morally and spiritually, confused and fearful because he does not know where he is or where he is going. He lives in a world dangerously torn by hate and violence and conflict, and yet he feels powerless to do anything about them. He also knows his own heart is driven by destructive passions and motives he cannot seem to control or change.

“People need to repent of their sins, turn to God and take the narrow road that Jesus talks about in the Bible. The narrow road means that you forsake sin and you obey God, that you live up to the Ten Commandments and that you live up to the Sermon on the Mount desiring to please God in everything. The narrow road is hard and it is difficult; you can’t do that yourself. You need God’s help and that’s the reason we ask people to come to receive Christ because when you receive Him, the Holy Spirit comes to live within to help us live the life.

“Our world is desperately seeking answers to the deepest questions of life – answers that can only be found in the Gospel. That is the reason for my hope, that there can be changed hearts and a changed society as we yield ourselves to Christ.”

 In 2012 Billy Graham released an open letter to America in the summer entitled My Heart Aches for America. In the letter, Graham wondered what his late wife, Ruth, would think of a nation where “self-centered indulgence, pride and a lack of shame over sin are now emblems of the American lifestyle.” In the letter, as in his sermon The Handwriting on the Wall, Graham compares America to the ancient city of Nineveh, the lone superpower of its time. When the prophet Jonah finally traveled to Nineveh and proclaimed God’s warning, the people repented and escaped judgment. Graham indicated that he believes the same thing could happen in America now.

Banning Liebscher, director of Jesus Culture, an international Christian revivalist youth outreach ministry based out of Bethel Church in Redding, Calif., remarks about the lack of hope in the church. “One of the things that happens is we lose hope and we begin to become hopeless about the state of our nation and when we become hopeless faith isn’t able to grow.”  

Liebscher said Graham’s comparison of America to ancient Nineveh inspires him that “God can still break in and God can still turn a nation. We read in history again and again that as nations would be in decline, moral decline, and there would be violence and sexual immorality and all this stuff, that God would break in, and he would turn a nation, he would turn the hearts of the people. We see it biblically. We see it in history. I think God is speaking again and that hope is coming. Hope is alive.”

David Jeremiah, pastor of the 8,000-member Shadow Mountain Community Church in El Cajon, Calif., remarks about the nation’s moral decline and understands the critical point it is at now. “We’ve continued to slide downward away from the very principles that our country was founded upon – now at an all-time low in all the years I’ve been doing this.” Jeremiah says that national repentance is the only hope America has. “We’ve tried everything else,” Jeremiah said. “There is no other hope. The political process isn’t going to make it happen. We’re not going to elect somebody who is going to immediately turn this thing back. We don’t seem to be able to coalesce as a group of Christians and get anything done together. The Gospel is the power that can change the lives of people, and I believe that’s what Dr. Graham believes in his heart, too.”

An interesting point is the counter-culture that Christians are now finding that they live.  Most Christians surprisingly discover that they live at odds with their society.  Something unthinkable recent as 10 years ago.  Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, author of The Harbinger: The Ancient Mystery that holds the Secret of America’s Future and The Book of Mysteries said one of the mysteries contained in “The Harbinger” is the parallel between the fall of ancient Israel and the fall of modern America.

“In this ancient template, the nation undergoes a metamorphosis in which those who simply hold true to the ways of God, to that which the nation as a whole once held to, now find themselves increasingly at odds with the culture around them,” said Cahn. “The case of Billy Graham – reveals this dynamic. Graham is undoubtedly the most famous face of American and world evangelism. Thus, his recent statements concerning America are all the more noteworthy. They are increasingly at odds with the direction of American culture and have increasingly taken on a prophetic tone. It is a sign of the times.”

Cahn notes that Graham has been known as the “pastor to presidents” and has prayed at numerous presidential inaugurations. “But had he began his ministry today instead of years ago, holding the same views he has always held, it is likely he would have been banned from praying at the most recent inauguration. This is a sign of how much America has metamorphosed in the past half-century – a sign of how great and deep is its spiritual and moral apostasy.”

“It is the hope of the Second Coming that thrills me every day of my life,” Graham said. “I know that he’s coming again, and I know that he’s going to set up a kingdom of which there will be no end,” Graham said. “In Titus 2 it says, ‘Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ.’ Our hope centers in a person, not in circumstances, not in a political party, but in a person.”