School of Evangelism

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APPEAL, PART II − THE SESSION: “THE EVANGELIST’S APPEAL FOR A

DECISION,”
BY BILLY GRAHAM

This study’s readings and videos will help you get to the heart of evangelistic preaching: God’s
passion for the lost.

The session

The Evangelist’s Appeal for a Decision

by Billy Graham

This morning I want to speak briefly on giving the invitation and on the place of decision in our
ministry as evangelists.

First, I would like to say a word about the validity of the evangelistic invitation. Preceding any
valid commitment is personal decision. This is true at the marriage altar. They asked me, “Do you
take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?” I said, “I do.” I was afraid she might get away,
and I said it fast! But I didn’t say it that loud. The minister makes the appeal, and the positive
response performs a magic in two lives. If you go to court, the bailiff says to the plaintiff and the
defendant, “Do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
And the “I do” response validates the legality of the proceedings. At the ballot box in many
countries, you must decide which candidate.

In other words, we’re making decisions all the time, every hour. What shall I wear? Shall I shave
this morning? What shall I eat for breakfast? Maybe you don’t have that choice—you eat what
your wife gives you. Or you don’t eat anything, like me, most of the time. How shall I go to work?
What is my plan for the day?

Every hour we are making decisions. Now, most of them are not life-and-death decisions. I heard
about one man who got a job sorting potatoes. He was culling the small ones out and packing

Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke
and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. 1
2 Timothy 4:2 (NIV)
the larger ones, but the problem was, there were too many middle-size potatoes. And after three
weeks he said to his boss, “I quit!” “Why?” asked the boss. “We pay you well.”

He said, “I know, but it’s those decisions—they’re killing me.”

Some churchmen today ask, is it valid or legitimate to extend an invitation for people to receive
Christ as Lord and Savior? And the biblical answer is a resounding yes!

When a man senses the spiritual emptiness of his life, he’s like a man pursued by his enemies
who comes to a raging river, and he must decide if he will stay where he is and face certain death
or cross over and be safe. His life from that moment on will be determined by the choice he
makes. But when the man chooses to cross over to safety, he discovers the river is too swift and
wide to cross and there’s no bridge. How can he cross over and be safe? Our great privilege, as
evangelists, is to call men and women to cross the river to find life in Christ, and we tell them the
good news that the bridge has been built by God. The bridge is the Lord Jesus Christ at the cross
and the resurrection, and they can cross over the river safely from death to life, from Hell to
Heaven.

The evangelistic invitation is valid for at least two reasons. First, it’s valid because the Gospel
demands a

decision on your part. And second, it is valid because it’s illustrated repeatedly in the Bible. As
Brother Steven just reminded us, the Gospel of Christ demands a decision. It’s not merely a set
of facts to which a person can give intellectual assent. It’s a call for an individual to turn in
repentance from his sin and his neglect of God and turn to Christ as Lord and Savior by faith. And
we’ve heard that explained this morning.

God is at work in conversion. The Bible says salvation is of the Lord. It is the Holy Spirit who
brings conviction of sin. You can’t convict people of sin; only the Holy Spirit can. And that’s the
reason down there in Africa, where he’s talking about, in Uganda—as they do in America or other
parts of the world—they think if they quit some sin, something like smoking or drinking and so
forth, that’s all they need to do. But that’s not true. The Holy Spirit must convict them that
they’re sinners by nature. You were born in sin. David said, “In sin did my mother conceive me”
(Psalm 51:5, KJV). And then you become sinners by choice. When you reach the age of
accountability, you choose to tell a lie. You choose to lust after a woman that’s not your wife.
You choose these things. That is a sin. And then thirdly, we practice sin.

Jesus said when He has come, He’s going to reprove the world of sin and righteousness and
judgment. He was talking about the Holy Spirit. The speaker mentioned a moment ago that
we’re to emphasize that Jesus is Lord, and I wholeheartedly agree with that emphasis. Jesus said,

Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke
and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. 2
2 Timothy 4:2 (NIV)
“No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God”
(Luke 9:62), and this brings up a valid point in an invitation: Don’t tell people that it’s easy to
follow Christ. Make it tough and challenging, as Jesus did. He said, “Strait is the gate, and narrow
is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matthew 7:14). Think of it —
few, only a few. Some people have asked me, do you think Heaven will be large enough for all
the people that are going there? It’s going to be too large. Jesus said only a few are going to be
on that narrow road—it’s too tough.

Oh, there are many professing Christians who call themselves Christians, but they’re really not
totally committed to Christ as Lord and Savior. Jesus said, “If any man will come after me, let him
deny himself”—how many are denying self, our self-centeredness? —“and take up his cross”
(Luke 9:23). What does that mean? I believe that it means that you identify yourself with Christ
on the cross. He said, “I am going to die publicly, openly, before all the crowd. They’re going to
laugh. They’re going to ridicule. Will you come and stand with Me?” You see, if a person comes
to Christ, they may go back to their friends, they may go back to their home, they may go back
to their school, they may go back to their place of work, and people may laugh at them and
ridicule them—or persecute them. “I’ll stick a sword at them,” as [our speaker] said a moment
ago.

When Shackleton, the explorer, ran an ad in the New York paper to recruit men for his venture
to the South Pole, here’s what he said in his ad: “Wanted: Men to spend several months in the
Arctic, long hours, low pay, very little food, poor accommodations.” Do you know what
happened? That ad broke all the newspaper’s records in response to a help wanted ad. Why?
People want a challenge! They want something hard, and the harder you make the invitation
and the tougher you make the invitation, not only does it go deeper, but I believe more people
respond. I’ve learned that. Especially young people. Young people all over the world want
something to believe in. They want someone to follow that makes it tough.

This great truth should make us more and more dependent on God in our evangelism. But we
also need to remember that the Bible underlines the necessity of man’s response to the Gospel.
Conversion is more than a psychological phenomenon. It’s a turning of the whole man to Christ.
It’s a conscious commitment to Christ as Lord and Savior. He is to be your life’s priority. We are
to follow Christ in discipleship. And the invitation is essentially a personal appeal of unqualified
self-commitment to the person of the Lord Jesus Christ—by the intellect, the emotions, but
primarily the will. “I will receive it.”

That’s what I said when they asked me, “Would you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded
wife?” I said, “I will.” I didn’t say, “I think so. I hope so. I’m going to try the best I can.” I said, “I
will.” I’d already made those decisions. I didn’t say she’s a beautiful woman; I didn’t say I love

Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke
and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. 3
2 Timothy 4:2 (NIV)
her—that had been decided. And you decided in different ways. I know in different cultures, it’s
different forms and so forth. In our culture she has to say yes to you privately before you do
publicly. You ask her, “Will you marry me?” Maybe sometimes you get on your knees and ask
her. Sometimes you just ask her—and sometimes she asks you! More and more in our culture in
America, it is the girls that are after the boys. Maybe it is in yours; I don’t know. But the invitation
is essentially a personal appeal for total commitment to Christ. That’s what, to me, faith means.
Commitment!

My wife and I have been married 43 years. And someone asked her, had she ever thought of
divorcing me. She said, “No, but I’ve thought of murder!” You see, we’ve been through our tough
patches too. We’ve had problems, of course—when you’ve got five children and 18
grandchildren, you have some problems. And we’ve had our problems. But you see, we never
thought of separating. I never thought of turning to some other woman, and she never thought
of turning to some other man. Why? Because of commitment. Love is commitment. I am
committed to Ruth for the rest of my life, totally and completely, and will never look at another
woman. And she is committed to me in the same way—through sickness and health and riches
and poverty or whatever, till death parts us. Then she has a right to marry some other guy—and
he’s a lucky man, I’ll tell you.

The whole Bible is an invitation. From “Adam, where art thou?” in Genesis 3, to the final appeal
of the Spirit and the bride in the Revelation 22, the Bible is one invitation to lost humanity after
another to turn to Christ and to God. You could take Moses in Exodus 32, Joshua in Joshua 24,
Elijah in 1 Kings 18, John the Baptist in Mark 1, Jesus in Matthew 4, and many more, all the way
through the Bible.

Every person that Jesus ever called, with the possible exception of Nicodemus, He either called
them to declare publicly or He spoke to them in front of others. Did you ever think about that?
Publicly. That’s one of the reasons I ask people to make a public commitment—because Jesus
did it. When Jesus was walking from Jericho to Jerusalem, a blind man by the name of Bartimaeus
cried out and said, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! Save me! Help me!” And Jesus stood still and commanded
him to brought unto Him in front of a crowd of people. Jesus could have quietly come to the man
on the sidelines, but instead He called him forward publicly.

In front of a crowd of people, Jesus looked up in a tree and called Zacchaeus by name and said,
“Zacchaeus, come down. I’m going to come to your house today.” And Zacchaeus was converted
from the limb to the ground, said D.L. Moody. The apostles followed the same pattern. On the
day of Pentecost, Peter urged the people to repent and believe, and about 3,000 came to Christ.
Now, somebody must’ve counted them, because I believe the Bible has the right figures and
statistics on everything.

Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke
and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. 4
2 Timothy 4:2 (NIV)
You know, people say there are apparent contradictions in the Bible and there are things in the
Bible [they] don’t understand. I want to tell you, there are things in this Bible I don’t understand.
But years ago, I opened it in the moonlight in Southern California in the mountains on a stump
of a tree that had been cut down, and I opened it and laid it out. And I said, “Lord, there are a
lot of things in this book I don’t understand, but I’m accepting this book as Your authoritative,
infallible Word.” I have never had a doubt about the Bible since then. When I quote the Bible, I
know I’m quoting the Word of God, and it has authority. It has its own built-in power, and I have
seen people converted to Christ by giving the most obscure verses of Scripture that you could
ever imagine. I remember one man came to me and told me the thing that God spoke to him
through was one of the begets.

Well, I’d always skipped that part!

The call for the decision—the invitation—is not something just added at the end. It’s not just
an afterthought. May God help us to make that call to decision clearly, effectively, boldly,
without any gimmicks. That’s one of the things that our brother Steven emphasized a moment
ago.

The second thought is the preparation for the invitation. And that’s the reason that in every
Crusade that we hold, we organize as many prayer groups as we can. Sometimes hundreds and
even thousands of prayer groups are organized. And they pray in their homes, they pray in the
churches, and we get thousands of people mobilized for prayer; because, I tell you, the opening
night of any of our Crusades, I can tell whether there’s been prayer in back of the Crusade or not.
There’s a freedom, there’s a power, that comes in answer to prayer.

Then we have our Operation Andrew. Do you know what that is? We learned that from the
British many years ago, and we put it into all of our Crusades. That’s where you get people in a
church or group organized to go get the unsaved and the unconverted and bring them to the
meetings. Nearly all the people that come forward in our Crusades are brought by somebody
else. They don’t come because of the organization; they don’t come because of the advertising.
That will all help—so that when the person goes and asks them to come to the meetings, they
know what it’s about, and that helps a little bit. But the big thing is to go get them. And that’s
one of the hardest jobs we have, and yet in almost all the churches that participate in our
meetings, they organize prayer groups and they organize Operation Andrew.

Then we have the counselor training. That is one of the most important things, because it trains
these counselors to win people to Christ on a one-to-one basis, and when the Crusade is over,
they can’t stop—they keep on winning people to Christ. So, you have many hundreds of people
coming to Christ after the Crusade is over, for months or maybe years to come.

Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke
and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. 5
2 Timothy 4:2 (NIV)
I don’t know how many of you have come to me and said, “I was converted at this particular spot
or that particular spot.” There is a man who came to me yesterday. He said, “You know when you
preached on the side of the mountain in Kilimanjaro many years ago in Tanzania, just south of
Kenya?” I said, “Of course I remember. It’s one of the most beautiful mornings I’ve ever seen.
Thousands of people had gathered.” He said, “I was converted in that meeting.” And he’s now
an Anglican clergyman. And he said, “I may be a bishop someday!” The fellow that interpreted
for me was a young schoolteacher, and his name was Festo Kivengere. And that’s the first time I
ever got to know Festo. In fact, I don’t think too many people outside of East Africa knew of him
at that time. But we showed those pictures and films all over the world, and God used it in a
marvelous way.

When we come to the invitation, every time I give an invitation, I’m in an attitude of prayer
inwardly, because I know that I’m totally committed or dependent upon God. God has to do
the work. But it’s at that moment that I feel emotionally and physically and spiritually drained.
This is the part of the evangelistic service that often exhausts me physically. I think one of the
reasons may be the terrible spiritual battle going on in the hearts of so many people. With me,
it becomes a spiritual battle of such proportions that oftentimes I feel like I’m going to faint.
There is an inward groaning, an agonizing in prayer, that I cannot possibly put into words.

And I’m sure that every true evangelist senses this, whether your invitation is public before a
crowd, or whether it’s one-on-one to a person—just one person. I’ve dealt with just one person,
agonizing so in my soul, wanting that person to say yes to Christ.

I want to speak briefly also on the purposes and methods of an evangelistic invitation. First,
we should make it clear to our listeners that the Gospel demands decision. They cannot remain
neutral about Christ. Not to decide is to decide not to. Now the method of evangelism may vary.
In some situations it could be the signing of a card, the raising of a hand, or better yet, asking
them to come forward to the front of the auditorium or to a side room in an after-meeting as
D.L. Moody used to do—as we used to do in all of our Crusades.

I’m fortunate enough to have a team of people. I remember years ago, Cliff Barrows and I
thought that we could not leave the building—or leave the tent or leave the street or wherever
we were—until we had talked to every single one individually, and it was killing us. And one day
Dawson Trotman—the founder of The Navigators, which some of you know about—came to me,
and he said, “Billy, don’t you trust God, and don’t you trust us? Let me train counselors, and
when you finish preaching, turn them over to us, and [we’ll] take them those next steps.” We did
that, and we became a team of people.

Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke
and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. 6
2 Timothy 4:2 (NIV)
You can get local people in the area, local Christians, to do that. You don’t have to carry a group
with you to do it; they can do it. Get the local people to do it—that’s what we do. All these
counselors that we have in a Crusade are not people we import from somewhere else. They’re
local people. And sometimes we have a few, and sometimes we have many. Now, in some places,
I ask them to just bow their head for a few moments of silence and make the commitment in
their hearts, because in some places, some places, you just cannot [ask for a public response]—
because of law, or because of the type of church you’re in, and you’re trying to win that church
to the cause of evangelism.

In China, where it was said when the missionaries left a few years ago that there were about
700,000 Christians, today there are about 50 million, with no missionaries! How did they do it?
They live the Christian life. The Holy Spirit produced the fruit of the Spirit, and the people saw
that they loved, and they were faithful and they were patient. Many people came to them and
said, “What’s happened to you? Why are you so patient in the midst of all these difficulties?”
And then they were able to tell them that Christ had changed their lives. And that spread quickly
throughout China. So today you have thousands and millions of believers in China.

It also, in giving an invitation like that, helps us to [preserve] the results of preaching the
Gospel. It helps identify the people. That’s why in our Crusades, wherever possible, the
counselor gets the name and address.

And, then, an invitation can be a means of assurance to a person. In later years, they’ll look back
and say, “There was one decisive moment when I said yes to Christ.” I remember some years ago
the great German theologian Helmut Thielicke, who died not long ago—possibly the greatest
theologian in the last two decades in our world—came to our meetings. In his heart he had been
critical, and one of the things he had been critical about was the invitation, but he sat through
the invitation and saw what happened. He wrote me the most gorgeous letter that you have ever
read, about seven or eight pages. I wish I had enough copies to give you a copy of it, because I
asked him if I could publish it and we did publish it. He said, “Don’t ever preach the Gospel again
without giving an invitation. That is the moment. Because those people that came might not
have meant it. It might not have gone very deep with them; it might be like the parable of the
soil. But,” he said, “they’ll have to say the rest of their lives, there was at least one moment that
I stood before God.” And there’s something about that, [but] I don’t have time to go into all his
reasoning on that. And, then, people respond to the Gospel for various reasons—and I’m not
going to go into all that because my time is already finished.

Now, I often find that it’s helpful to confront people with the call to decision throughout the
sermon. From the moment I get up, I’m thinking about that invitation. From the moment I get
up, I’m giving the invitation, whatever I preach on. It took me years to learn that, but I start giving

Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke
and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. 7
2 Timothy 4:2 (NIV)
the invitation right away. I ask questions throughout the sermons and not just at the end. I ask,
“Have you ever turned to Christ? Do you know that if you died right now you would go to
Heaven?” Or perhaps I’ll make statements that make it clear that the Gospel demands decision,
such as, “You can’t remain neutral about Christ,” or, “Let Christ come into your life right now and
cleanse you from your sins and give you a new purpose for living.” Throughout the sermon,
therefore, I often try to make it clear that the Gospel demands decision involving the intellect,
the emotion, and the will. The whole sermon should reinforce that fact.

I would like to say this, just to close. D.L. Moody was preaching once in Chicago. He was the great
evangelist, the American evangelist. In fact, many of the great movements of our generation
started in his meetings, including even the World Council of Churches. Because the Edinburgh
conference of 1910 that eventually led to the founding of the World Council of Churches right
here in Amsterdam in 1948, and many of the other organizations throughout the world, started
in the meetings of D.L. Moody. Moody had no education. He didn’t know how to talk good
English or any other language. But he loved the Lord, and nobody could stop him—he just went
on and on preaching the Gospel and founded great schools and founded many things. Many of
the great social things that you have in your country were started under the work of D.L. Moody.
The YMCA would’ve never been to America had it not been for D.L. Moody—and many of the
other organizations that you know about. Well, anyway, he was preaching in Chicago, and on this
night the place was filled, and he did not give an invitation—one of the few times in his whole
ministry that he didn’t give an invitation. And about that time, they heard the clanging of the fire
engines, and people were shouting, “Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!” And he and his song leader, Sankey,
ran out. The fire had engulfed Chicago. They ran out into the lake. They were able to be saved,
but [many] people in that church [later] burned, and Moody wept and wept and wept. He said,
“To think, I left those people ... to die and had not given an invitation.” He said, “From this
moment on, I’ll never preach the Gospel and not give an invitation for people to say yes to
Christ.”

God bless you and make you even more effective as you call sinners out of darkness into His
marvelous light.

Douglas, J.D., ed. The Calling of an Evangelist. The Second International Congress for Itinerant Evangelists,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Minneapolis: World Wide Publications, 1987.
Last modified: 2/19/2021 7:57 PM

Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke
and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. 8
2 Timothy 4:2 (NIV)