Franklin Graham gives the gospel with material aid rather than waste God’s resources

I read an interesting article by Paul Proctor . I am not sure I agree with everything Paul said in his article but I do agree with much of it. The most interesting part of the article is what Franklin Graham said in “The Gathering interview”.

Franklin Graham is someone I highly respect he has been working in the mission field helping people in physical need for a long time and he always brings the gospel of Jesus Christ along with any material aid. That is in stark contrast to those Christian organizations that are working with world organizations to bring aid to the poor and needy but do not present the gospel of Jesus Christ.

If you remember, Franklin Graham is also the one who took a lot of heat in the news for telling the truth that the religion of Islam is evil and he still says the same thing. I am sure some will not like what Graham says here as well.

Here are a couple of excepts from the Franklin Graham Interview.

Graham: well if you walk around this hotel, probably ninety percent of the people in this hotel are going to go to Hell: the person serving you, the other hotel guests… so there is an urgency. It’s life or death. It’s Heaven or Hell. …

Many people have lost a lot of money investing in the stock market. Some people lost everything. …I look at investment opportunities related to how to win people to Christ – how a person can invest in such a way [not in regards to] financial return, but how to win people to Christ. There’s only one commandment Jesus gave his disciples, that is: Go into the world and make disciples of all nations. It doesn’t say anything about going into the world to create a Christian culture. It says, “Go and make disciples of all nations.”

We live now in a culture that is anti-Christ. The spirit of anti-Christ is here today. It’s in our government, it’s in Europe, it’s in Asia, it’s in the Arab world, and it’s in China. …The spirit of anti-Christ has permeated the world today. So, how much longer until the anti-Christ himself appears on the world stage? I don’t know. But it’s urgent. We have the opportunity to invest right now in the souls of men and women. That is what’s important.

TG: To what extent do you think Christians should be involved in helping to usher in the kingdom of Heaven now, on Earth? Should we be trying to redeem our culture?

Graham: First of all, the Bible didn’t tell me to do that. I can’t Christianize this culture. The god of this world is Satan – this is his culture. He is the god of this age. I’m to preach the gospel. …. God is calling a people for Himself. I don’t know whom He’s calling, I just have to be faithful and preach.

TG: As you travel the world as president of both the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse, what is the main thing you’re hoping to accomplish? How do you want to leave your mark?

Graham: I want to preach the gospel. That’s the main thing. I can feed people all day long. They’ll be a line tomorrow that wants to get fed again. I can provide medicine, hospitals and clinics around the world. There can be tornadoes and earthquakes and we can respond and do all kinds of good work, which is important to do. But if I have not presented the gospel, than I have wasted every opportunity and have squandered my resources. I think for every believer, if you’re not using what God gives you to win people to Christ, you’re squandering His resources.

Missions today means sending somebody for two weeks. It’s going out and staying for a month and then coming back to talk about it at a cocktail party. That’s missions today. But I’m talking about somebody who will give their life to go to a country and absorb themselves into the country – to get to know the culture, the language, and to give their life to that nation for the sake of the cross. We’re not raising missionaries like that or challenging young people like that. …There’s a great need not just around the world, but right here at home to train up another army of young men and women who will go into the world to take the gospel to another generation.

TG: How do we do that?

Graham: Revival. We need revival. Our churches are dead. You have liberalism now that has crept into mainstream evangelicalism. That’s scary.

Full Graham Interview

I just might add that I also think many Christian social aid organizations are squandering their opportunities and wasting the resources given to them by God. The gospel should always be presented with material aid from the Church.

One of the reasons why we do not have full time missionaries is that few people and churches support them. Missionaries that are even associated with well known missionary names have to takes months out of the mission field to raise their own support. Many missionary minded people simply cannot go to the mission field only because they could not raise the required amount of money.

As for those one or two week missionary trips that Franklin mentioned. The people going also have to raise the money to pay for them but far too often people use the trips for some exotic excursion and sometimes tack it unto a personal trip so they can take a tax break on the airfare.

I think the trips where a group from a church goes to third world nations to build a small building hardly qualifies as missionary work. They are going to socialize or boast about what they did or appease their religious self guilt quota. If the people taking these kinds of “mission trips” really cared they could just sent the money to the church that they are supposedly helping and the unemployed natives would have jobs and a mission complex could be built with the money instead of just one small building. It never made sense to me for a bunch of rich Americans to go down to a third world nation like Hatti to build a church building for them when everyone in Hatti can’t find work. It seems the richer the people in our churches the more they want to do manual labor for third world natives instead of providing the funds so the natives can do the work themselves.

It is worth noting that Franklin Graham is also one of the relatively few that are aware of the end times that we live in. He obviously thinks that since the spirit of anti-Christ is now everywhere that this also means the conditions for the rise of the Antichrist figure of Bible prophecy is also very near. The spirit of anti-Christ is even in many of the evangelical churches.

I do hope Christian’s will support Samaritans Purse, it is a first class Christian outfit with a first class astute Christian leader in charge.