Here are two great evangelists, father and son, they both understand that we need to repent of our sin to be saved, and both understand that we need to know what sin is before we can repent of it!
Billy Graham is one of the worlds best evangelists, he has preached to literally billions of people and millions have stepped forward to recieve salvation! Billy Graham holds the record for most people at the MCG, (around 130,000), and influenced a whole generation.
Billy Graham “The Holy Spirit convicts us...He shows us the ten Commandments; the law is the schoolmaster that leads us to Christ. We look at the mirror of the Ten Commandments, and we see ourselves in that mirror."
Franklin Graham “Each person we meet on a daily basis who does not know Christ is hell-bound. That may make some folks bristle-but it's a fact. When we refuse to warn people that their actions and lifestyles have eternal consequences, we're not doing them any favors. If everybody feels good about his or her sin, why would anyone repent?”
On a side note, does anyone find it interesting that some of the most influencial evangelists ever have all used the law in evangelism? I find it interesting!
Friday, May 01, 2009
Graham Evangelism
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Paul in the first two chapters of Galatians: writes to enable his readers to understand what the gospel is, what his own relation to it is, and where they, his converts, belong on this map. This intention expresses in Paul’s major concern throughout the letter but particularly in its central two chapters, 3 and 4. Here he tells the story of Israel, the people of God, as the story of Abraham and exodus. God made promises to Abraham, promises that (as in Gen. 15, to which, here and in Rom. 4, Paul refers repeatedly) envisaged God’s future rescue of his people from Egypt. God has now fulfilled those promises, Paul says, in Jesus Christ. His aim throughout is to persuade his hearers to understand themselves within this narrative structure, which I have elsewhere characterized as “covenantal.” He wants them, that is, to think of themselves as the children of Abraham, the heirs of the entire Jewish narrative. A good example is 1 Corinthians 10:1-13, written of course to an ex-pagan congregation; the foundation of the argument is Paul’s reference to the wilderness generation as “our fathers.”
Paul’s deep-rooted negation of the Jewish Torah as the mode or badge of membership in this family is, of course, the central problem he faces, and hence the central problem of the letter; this rejection of the Mosaic covenant has influenced many contemporary writers to deny that Paul held any “covenantal” theology at all. Paul utterly discarded the ethnic and Torah-based shape of Judaism in which he had been so deeply involved before his conversion, and to this extent his theology is radical, Galatians 3:24-25 the temporal nature of the Torah, whose purpose was to serve as Israel's tutor until the arrival of the Messiah in the fullness of time. This raises the question of who the “we” is? The context of the whole argument - which revolves around what happened with Paul and Peter at Antioch and what it means to be a member of God’s people. God has one family, not two, and that family consists of all who believe the gospel. Faith, not the possession of or practice of or response to the Torah, is the badge which marks this family, a family that is defined as the people of the Messiah. Galatians 3:23-29 spells this out in detail, taking the argument right back to Abraham where it began. Those who are baptised into the Messiah (something TSA doesn’t practice) are “in Christ” have “put on Christ”. Abraham’s true family are not defined by Torah. The “we” is Israel/Jews not Gentile – the Torah was given to Israel as Paladin has rightly pointed out. The Torah/Law is Israel’s, not the world’s, covenant charter. It was given to bind her to YHWH and to establish her as his people. With Torah as her guide, Israel is the unique, elect people of the one true God. Psalm 147:19-20 spells this out.The Torah was Israel's tutor not the rest of the worlds.
Once again, those who want to preach the law are on the wrong track when it comes to the law and what we should being preaching/proclaiming.
Galatians indicates this as a very basic aim of Paul all through, I am persuaded that he has not simply introduced Abraham, and allusions to other biblical passages and stories, in order to meet points raised by his opponents. Indeed, even if his opponents had never mentioned Abraham, perhaps especially if they had not, Paul would have wanted to tell this story to address and controvert the point the agitators were urging, that Gentiles who wanted to join the people of Israel had to be circumcised. His way of telling the story of Abraham makes it abundantly clear that the promises God made to the patriarch cannot be fulfilled through Torah. According to Galatians 3:10-14, God promised Abraham a worldwide family, but the Torah presents Israel, the promise bearers, with a curse. God deals with the curse in the death of Jesus, so that the promise may flow through to the world, renewing the covenant with Israel as well. According to 3:15-22, God promised Abraham a single worldwide family, but the Torah would forever keep Jews and Gentiles in separate compartments (exactly the problem of 2:11-21 and, we may assume, of the Galatian congregations). God has done in Christ and by the Spirit what the Torah could not do (3:21-22; 4:1-7; cf. Rom. 8:3-4), so that there now exists the single promised multiethnic monotheistic family, God’s “sons” and heirs. According to Galatians 4:21-31, insofar as Abraham has two families, they can be characterized as the slave family and the free; and it is the multiethnic people defined by faith, the people formed through Christ and the Spirit, who are the Isaac children, the free people of God. Paul has other ways of telling the story of Abraham and his family as well (e.g., Rom. 9:6-10:4), but it is this narrative, however articulated, that provides the theological grounding for the formation and maintenance of the community he believes himself called to address.WJE
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