God’s love never changes. Billy Graham explains why you can rely on your heavenly Father in this 1999 message from St. Louis, Missouri. Watch more #MondayNightClassics every Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern.
From our archives,
The Billy Graham Classics.
In Time magazine,
earlier this year,
there was an interview
with George Lucas.
He said, “I think there is
a God.”
“I’m not sure.
“I don’t know what he is,
what he looks like.
“I’m not sure about him.”
That’s maybe how
you feel tonight.
I want to tell you
about him tonight.
I want to tell you
about God.
The first book, the first verse
in the Bible tells us,
“In the beginning God.”
Now where did God come from?
How could he just
suddenly appear?
And in the beginning
there was God.
I don’t know.
Neither do you.
The Bible says that he’s from
everlasting to everlasting.”
How can that be?
I don’t know.
There’s a mystery to it all,
and yet by faith, we believe
that God has no beginning
and he has no end.
(applause)
I cannot even prove to you
the existence of God.
No scientist can.
How do we know
there is a God?
You can’t put him
in a test tube.
You can’t make
a mathematical formula of him,
as Einstein did
in relativity.
You accept by faith that
He is the creator of
the whole universe.
When Charles Lindbergh took
his plane,
The Spirit of Saint Louis,
all the stars that he could see
spread over the entire sky
were just part of
our Milky Way,
just our little galaxy.
But that galaxy is just
one of tiny part of
a universe containing
billions of galaxies
and they’ve found now
that there are galaxies
beyond what they thought was
the last one,
with billions and billions and
billions of planets and stars
and suns.
And last January astronomers saw
a gamma ray burst
that came from way beyond
the galaxy it originated
nine billion light years away.
How long would that be?
Count it up,
you mathematicians.
One light year is five,
well almost six trillion miles.
You know what a trillion is?
I don’t.
But the Bible says,
“In the beginning
“God created the heavens
and the earth.”
And the Psalmist said,
“When I consider the heavens,
“the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars
“which thou hast ordained.”
The Bible says, in Psalm 33,
“By the word of the Lord were
the heavens made and
all the host of them
by the breath of his mouth.”
Think of it.
And then the Bible teaches
in this same passage,
the third chapter of John,
or the next chapter, I guess
it’s in the 4th chapter,
that God is a Spirit.
God is a Spirit.
He doesn’t have a body
like you and me.
He’s not just located
in just one place.
He’s all over the world,
all over the universe
at the same time.
He’s not limited by a body.
He is spirit.
How do you explain that?
I don’t.
But the Bible says
something else about him.
The Bible says, “I am the Lord,
I change not.”
He is unchanging.
In all these centuries
and trillions of years,
He’s never changed one iota.
“In him there is
no variableness,
“neither shadow of turning,”
the Bible says.
God does not change.
The Bible also teaches that
God is a holy God.
“The Lord is righteous
in all His ways
“and holy in all His works.”
The Bible says, “Thou art of
purer eyes than to behold evil
“and canst not look
on iniquity.”
God is absolute purity.
I remember when I was a boy
in North Carolina,
we’d all look forward to the day
when maybe we’d have
a little bit of snow.
We didn’t get much snow
in the place I lived,
but boy, when it came,
we were excited.
And I remember my mother pointed
out something to us
one day when the snow came.
She put out some washing,
some sheets and towels
and shirts and things,
to hang out,
but when the sun came out,
they were dry.
And then she said,
“Look at the snow.
“Don’t you think it’s clean
and white?
“and look at the cloths.”
The cloths that she had washed,
that we thought were
perfectly white were now
dirty in comparison
to that snow.
And that’s the way we are.
In comparison to God,
we’re dirty.
He is absolute holy.
But the Bible also teaches that
God is a God of judgement.
The Bible says, “It is appointed
unto men once to die
“but after that is
the judgement.”
There is going to be
a time of judgement.
And the Bible says that God will
bring every work into judgement,
with every secret thing
whether it be good
or whether it be evil.
“The wages of sin,”
the Bible says, “is death.”
You may confess your sin, but
you must pay the consequences.
When we abuse the environment,
we pay a price.
When we break God’s moral and
spiritual law, we pay a price.
The Bible says that God has
appointed a day in which
He will judge the world.
There is a day already set aside
in God’s calendar in which
He is going to judge
the whole world.
But the Bible also says that
God is a God of love.
The Bible says, “God is love,”
in 1 John 4:8.
In Jeremiah it says, “Yea, I
have loved you
“with an everlasting love.”
A popular song a few
years ago was,
“I cain’t live in a world
without love.”
You don’t have to
because God loves you.
Whatever your background.
(applause)
However many your sins
might have been,
However many mistakes
you may have made.
Whatever your ethnic background,
Whatever your educational
background.
God loves you.
And it’s an everlasting love
and it’s a supernatural love.
It’s something that
we don’t understand.
It’s not eros love,
sexual love.
It’s not phileo love,
which is friendship love.
It’s something beyond.
It’s a supernatural agape love,
that only God has but
He can give it to you
if you come to His Son,
Jesus Christ.
And that’s what Jesus Christ was
doing on that cross.
He was loving you and
taking all of your sins and
all your failures on Him
at the cross.
(applause)
Now have you ever thought
why God created man?
Many people are asking,
“Who am I?”
What am I here for?
Where did I come from?
Why am I here?
Where am I going?
God gave man a choice.
He created him.
Put him on this little planet.
And he said,
He put them in what is called
the Garden of Eden in Iraq.
“But of the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil,
“thou shalt not eat of it,
“for in the day that
thou eatest thereof
“thou shalt surely die.”
God said there’s one tree.
You can have
all the fruit in the garden,
you can eat
anything you want to,
but don’t eat of that one tree.
God was testing man,
because God gave to man
a free will.
He can make his own choice.
He doesn’t make you a robot.
He pushes a button and
you do what he says.
He gives you
the freedom of choice.
And in the Garden of Eden
God told man
from the very beginning.
But what did man do?
Man and woman.
The man and the woman ate
of the tree.
They deliberately did it.
They were deceived by the devil,
because there is
another mystery at that point
that goes all the way
through the Bible
and it comes into our world
today.
The mystery of iniquity,
the mystery of sin,
the mystery of the devil
and demons.
And the devil is very real.
He works hard and
he can deceive.
He can come as
an angel of light,
the Bible says.
He is very deceptive.
He slips up on you.
He comes in your thoughts.
He comes in your mind.
We know that something is wrong.
We read our newspapers
and watch our television
and we know that
something is wrong in our world.
And this is what is back of
the race problem.
It’s sin.
Back of all that is sin.
And sin is breaking of
the moral law of God.
Breaking of
the Ten Commandments.
Breaking of
the Sermon on the Mount.
Also, poverty.
And today we have a desperate
situation, in my opinion,
much of the world is
getting poorer
and some of the world is
getting richer at the same time
and one of these days
it’s going to be a clash,
as there always is.
Man has a terminal illness.
For the mystery of iniquity doth
already work,
the Bible says in
II Thessalonians 2:7.
How many of the Ten Commandments
have you not kept?
The Bible says,
“All we like sheep have
gone astray,
“we have turned everyone
to his own way.”
We want to have our way.
Not God’s way, but our way,
and that’s sin.
And so, our basic problems are
not social.
They’re not educational.
It’s sin.
The breaking of God’s law.
“The wages of sin is death,”
the Bible says,
“but the gift of God is
eternal life
“through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
You see, sin alienates you
from God.
You’re separated from God.
You’re spirit.
You see, you’re a body,
but inside your body is
a spirit, a soul.
And when you die, what happens?
Have you been at the death bed
of someone
and seen them slip out
into eternity?
You wonder what happened.
Well, the real person left
this body.
This body is going to crumble
and decay and go back to dust.
But the real you is
going to live on,
because the real you leaves
the body.
And if you know Christ as
your Lord and Savior
You go straight into
His presence
and you spend
eternity with Him.
(applause)
Now death,
death has three dimensions.
There’s natural death.
We’re all going to die.
When John Kennedy Jr.
and his wife Carolyn
boarded that plane
a few weeks ago
that he was going to fly
they never dreamed that they
would never see home again.
Like other young men and women
their age,
they had great dreams
in their lives.
Their careers,
their marriage.
Two of the most wonderful
young people I have ever met.
I doubt that they entertained
a thought
that they wouldn’t live to see
those dreams fulfilled.
And then there’s another death.
Not only natural death,
but spiritual death.
Your spirit that lives forever,
dies in the sense that
it is alienated from God.
And then the Bible talks about
eternal death.
Some of the words in the New
Testament used by Christ
to describe the penalty for sin
is lost, perish, condemned,
punishment, torment, hell.
You say, do you believe that?
Yes, I do.
I believe the Bible teaches it.
I believe whatever
the Bible says is true.
(applause)
If Jesus said there is a hell,
there is a hell.
I don’t like to think about it.
I don’t like to talk about it.
I don’t like to preach about it,
but Jesus did.
He taught more about hell
than he did heaven.
The Bible says that Jesus Christ
took your sins on the cross.
“For He hath made Him to be
sin for us.”
Think of being sin.
That’s all that Jesus was
on the cross was just sin.
Your sins.
Mine.
All the bad things that
we’ve ever done.
The lies we’ve ever told,
the lust we’ve ever had,
all on him
on that cross.
And his real suffering wasn’t
the physical suffering,
as terrible as that was,
it was the spiritual suffering.
It was our sins.
He had never known a sin
and all of a sudden
all of the sins of the world
are on him.
The Bible says,
“The Lord hath laid on him
the iniquity of us all.”
The Bible says,
“Who his own self bare our sins
in his own body on the tree.”
The Bible says, “Christ also
hath once suffered for sins,
the just for the unjust.”
He died for you
because he loves you.
And from the cross God is
saying, I love you, I love you,
I love you.
I’m giving My Son for you.
He’s taking your place.
(applause)
And then three days later
something glorious happened.
He rose from the dead.
(applause)
Jesus said, “I am
the resurrection and the life.
“He that believeth in me, though
he were dead, yet shall he live.
“And whosoever liveth and
believeth in Me shall
“never die.”
You’re never going to die
spiritually
because Jesus rose from the dead
and died on the cross.
“If thou shalt confess with
thy mouth the Lord Jesus
“and believe in thine heart
“that God hath raised him
from the dead,
“thou shalt be saved,”
the Bible says
in Romans 10:9.
And that can happen to you
right here.
Tonight.
What are you supposed to do
in response?
In order to know that
your sins are forgiven,
To know that
you’re going to heaven,
To be absolutely sure that
your heart is right with God.
First, you must repent
of your sins.
Well, what do you mean
by repent?
The first sermon Jesus ever
preached was on repentance
in Matthew 4.
Someone said, repentance means
sorry enough to quit.
“Repent ye therefore that
your sins may be blotted out,”
said the apostle Peter.
God commands all men
everywhere to repent.
He commands it in Acts 17.
To repent means
to turn around and go
in the opposite direction.
You say, “Well, Billy,
I’ve tried to quit some of
the things I’m doing
that I know are wrong
and I just cain’t.
I’m hooked.
But you can become unhooked by
the power of the Spirit of God.
(applause)
The second thing,
One thing is repentance.
The second thing
Repentance means
to change your mind,
to change your way
and to change your habit.
And the second thing is
to come by faith.
Now faith is not some blind
irrational leap in the dark.
Faith is commitment.
When my wife and I got married,
we didn’t have
our fingers crossed.
The minister didn’t say,
“As long as love shall last.”
He said,
“Til death do you part.”
(applause)
The Bible says,
“Faith commeth by hearing and
hearing by the Word of God.”
We must commit.
I thought a cartoon in the paper
put it very well.
Someone wrote to the pastor
and said,
“Dear preacher, what does
“God forgive you” mean?”
The pastor wrote back and said,
“All your files are deleated.”
And that’s true.
All of our files are deleated.
(applause)
And that’s exactly what
God does.
You don’t have to leave
here tonight
worrying about some things
that you’ve done wrong.
It’s all been taken care of
at the cross.
And you have received it
by faith.
Faith means commitment.
When I stood on this stage
tonight,
it’s the first time
I’ve ever been on this stage.
I committed myself to it.
I’d never been
on here before.
I did it by faith that
the people who built it,
built it to hold a man,
or several people.
That’s commitment.
Have you committed your life
to Christ that way?
Are you sure if you died tonight
that you’re ready to meet God?
If you have a doubt about it,
you make sure tonight.
I’m going to ask you to do
something that maybe
you’re puzzled about,
confused about, uncertain about.
Maybe you’ve heard about the way
we ask people to receive Christ.
I’m going to ask you to receive
him into your heart tonight
by faith,
to commit your life to him
and ask him to come in
and change your life
and give you a peace
and a joy
you’ve never known.
I’m going to ask you to get up
out of your seat
and come and stand here
in front.
And after you’ve all stood here,
I’m going to say a word to you,
we’ll have a prayer together,
there will be a counselor here
to speak to you
if you want to speak to someone
or give you some literature to
help you in your Christian life.
You may be Protestant, Catholic.
You may be a leader
in your church.
You may even be
the pastor of a church.
I don’t know.
You might have been
a good person all your life,
but somehow, down inside,
you’re not sure about
your relationship with Christ
and you want to settle it.
You get up right now and
come and stand here.
If you’re with friends or
relatives, they’ll wait on you.
It will only take a few moments,
but it’s a moment in eternity
for you.
You say, “Tonight Lord,
I say to you,
“I’m sorry that I’ve sinned.
“I turn to you by faith and
receive Jesus who died for me.
“I want to make sure of
my relationship with God.”
(applause)
♪ Just as I am
without one plea. ♪
As hundreds are responding
to Mr. Graham’s invitation
to make a public commitment
to Jesus Christ,
you can make that same
commitment right where you are.
Just pick up the phone
and call the number
you see on your screen.
Special friends are waiting to
talk with you and pray with you
about this most
important decision.
♪ Come to Thee ♪
♪ O Lamb of God ♪
♪ I come, I come ♪
I want to say to you that have
been watching by television
that you can make
this commitment to Christ
right now, where you are.
No matter where you are.
You may be watching
in a hotel lobby,
You may be in a hotel room
or you may be in a bar,
You may be at home.
But you can make this commitment
and let Jesus in your heart.
If you just prayed that prayer
with my father,
or if you have any questions
about a relationship
with Jesus Christ,
why don’t you just call
that number on the screen.
There’ll be someone there
to talk with you, pray with you
and answer those questions.
And remember,
God loves you!
If you would like to commit
your life to Jesus Christ,
Please call us right now
toll free at 1-877-772-4559.
That’s 1-877-772-4559.
Or you can write to us at
Billy Graham
1 Billy Graham Parkway
Department C
Charlotte, North Carolina 28201
Or you can contact us on the web
24/7 at PeaceWithGod.tv
We’ll get the same helps to you
that we give to everyone who
responds at the invitation.
On behalf of Franklin Graham and
the Billy Graham
Evangelistic Association,
thank you for watching and
thank you for your prayers.
(Billy Graham)
I know many people that
have tried everything in life
and they have not found
satisfaction,
inward peace, joy,
assurance and security.
And they’re still searching.
You’ll never find peace
and joy and happiness
until you yield your life
to Christ.
You never will.
You have a moment right now.
The Bible says, now is
the accepted time,
today is the day of salvation.
People are searching for
the answers.
You must make the choice.
It’s urgent.
(Billy Graham)
There’s only one way,
only one hope.
♪ Hear the sound of
a brand-new day. ♪
♪ Witness the story
that never fa-a-ades. ♪
♪ Come, come with me ♪
♪ to the Billy Graham Library ♪