Nothing but the Blood - 1. Billy Graham at Great St. Mary's in Cambridge

     From Nothing but the Blood Audio
And He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. —Mark 16

It has been a few months since I've shared Utmost, but we're going to set that aside for a bit and pick up a new topic.

If you haven't heard it already, click the link above or the photo to the left to hear a lesson I gave August, 2014 to Family Ties at PRUMC called Nothing but the Blood. Over the next few months, we're going to attempt to answer the questions:
"Why all the blood?" and
"How can I trust a God that requires blood to cover sin?"

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In 1955, Billy Graham was invited to speak at the University of Cambridge by a small group of Christians attending there. Almost immediately, letters to the editor of the Times of London began pouring in essentially saying: 

I’m sure that Graham is a nice man, but he’s a fundamentalist Christian—the sort that believes that the blood of Jesus is required for salvation. And we all know that sort of thing doesn’t go over here. Further, I can’t imagine what the fine young men and women from the University of Cambridge can learn from a man like this.

Well, this worried Graham so he set about creating eight erudite, high-minded, scholarly lessons. They were totally different than he typically gave. He had one lesson for each night he was to preach at Great St. Mary’s church.

There were about 8,000 students at the University of Cambridge at that time and each night, Graham packed the church with 2,000 students and faculty. On that first Monday and Tuesday night, Graham delivered his prepared remarks and something incredible happened.

Nothing. For Graham, even a young Graham, nothing was a big happening.

So on that Wednesday night, Graham set aside his prepared remarks and said, “Let me tell you what I know about the Cross of Jesus Christ.”

From a sermon given by Tim Keller called the Sacrifice in the sermon series Christ: Our Treasury (The Book of Hebrews), I'll share Dick Lucas' eyewitness account:

I'll never forget that night. I was in the totally packed chancel sitting on the floor with the Regus Professor of Divinity sitting on one leg and the Chaplain of a College who was a future bishop on the other. Both of these were very good men, but completely against the idea that you needed salvation from sin by the blood of Jesus Christ. So dear Billy got up that night and he began at Genesis and he went right through the whole Bible and he talked about every single sacrifice you can imagine. The blood was just flowing all over the place-everywhere for 3/4 of an hour. And both my neighbors were terribly embarrassed by this crude proclamation of the blood of Christ. It was everything they disliked and everything they dreaded. But at the end of the sermon, Billy Graham dismissed the audience and invited anyone who wanted to say behind and make a commitment to Christ. And that night to everyone’s shock, 400 young women and men stayed. 

Over the coming months, using the aforementioned Tim Keller sermon series and catalogued sermons from the the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, we're going to look at what Graham might have said that night, what Graham wouldn't have had time to say and what I didn't have time to say in the Nothing but the Blood audio. 

Stick around. Tell your friends. It's going to be a great time with dear Billy.

I love you.

Read on to Nothing but the Blood - 2. When All is Right or see all the posts in this series by clicking #nothingbuttheblood