I cannot do one thing for you,” pronounced Will Graham, associate evangelist with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and grandson of the famed evangelist.
“I want you to experience a fresh start,” he said. “I want your misery to turn to joy, but you have to do it through the person of Jesus Christ.”
Graham pointed an audience of more than 550 people to Jesus on March 1 at the State Evangelism Conference at Gardendale First Baptist Church.
Before he took the stage, southern gospel trio The Booth Brothers performed and Rick Stone, minister of music at First Baptist Church, Jasper, and the Hunter Street Choir from Hunter Street Baptist Church, Hoover, led the audience in worship.
Rick Lance, executive director of the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM), introduced Graham, who holds mass evangelistic rallies called “celebrations” around the world.
“He is a preacher of the Word in his own right,” Lance said. “You can tell the influence of his father (Franklin Graham) and grandfather, but he himself has been called of God, saved by the Lord Jesus Christ and has been preaching the Word of the Lord around the world.”
When Graham opened his Bible, he addressed the audience on a topic that has seen a lot of attention over the past few years: change.
“What I’m talking about tonight is spiritual change, moral change,” Graham said. “Oftentimes we want change but it seems to be so elusive at times. We can’t seem to grasp it.”
He told the story in 1 Samuel 1 of a woman named Hannah. She was one of two wives of a man named Elkanah, who worshiped the Lord regularly. But beneath the religious observance was conflict: Hannah could not have children, and Elkanah’s other wife, Peninnah, who did have children, tormented her about it.
“Though Elkanah was very religious, his family was experiencing turmoil,” Graham said.
He reminded the audience of when Jesus compared the religious-looking Pharisees to whitewashed tombs and urged audience members not to hide their struggles behind clean appearances.
“Some of you tonight put on a good facade,” Graham said. “You look good on the outside … yet on the inside, it’s death, destruction, misery and decay.”
He asked audience members to identify something that makes them bitter and steals their joy. Graham encouraged them to respond to their troubles the same way Hannah did: by going to the Lord.
“We’ll let every one of our friends know twice how miserable we are, but yet we always fail to go to the Lord,” he said. “He seems to be the last resort, but Hannah went directly to Him. My friends, that’s what we need to do.”
When Hannah poured out her heart to the Lord, Graham said, she was given hope, even though her circumstances hadn’t changed.
“She encountered God and her life was forever changed,” he said. “You see we cannot come in contact with God and leave the same way we came.”
Graham transitioned into a gospel presentation, describing man’s sin against God and vain efforts to make things right.
“Religion is every man’s attempt to get back to a righteous God and they all fail,” he said.
Instead, Graham continued, God sent Jesus to die in our place on the cross, satisfying His wrath, and rise from the dead three days later.
Jesus took our sin, he said, and we got His righteousness.
“Now when we stand before God, God doesn’t see our own sin,” Graham said. “He sees the blood of His own Son covering us.”
Graham invited the audience to come to the altar.
“My friends, this invitation is literally for everyone,” he said. “This invitation is for you to come simply to pray up here, to surrender your misery unto the Lord; the hurt and pain you’ve been carrying, you can give it to the Lord. There might be some of you here today who want to experience Jesus Christ for the first time. I want you to come stand right here in front of me. … All I want is to have a word of prayer.”
As the piano chords of “Just As I Am” echoed through the auditorium, nearly 80 specially trained counselors made their way to the stage as people filtered forward to kneel at the altar to pray and receive prayer.
“Will you come before God?” Graham asked. “He’s waiting with open arms to receive you.”
After he led a prayer for salvation, the audience sang a brief medley of praise songs.
Lance dismissed audience members with prayer, urging them to remember that Jesus entrusted the Great Commission to His followers and empowers them to carry it out.
“May something happen in your life and in the lives of others that can really be change we can believe in,” he said.
Sammy Gilbreath, director of evangelism for the SBOM, believes Graham’s message and the sight of people coming to the altar showed this year’s evangelism conference was about more than talking a good game.
“For the first time in the history of this event, we didn’t just talk about evangelism,” he said. “We did evangelism.”
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