"Billy" Sunday, the Man and His Message / With his own words which have won thousands for Christ

by William T. Ellis

My Father's Business

Be out and out for God. Have a heart-to-heart talk with some people and win them to Christ. The first recorded words of Jesus are these: "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"

The trouble is we are too lackadaisical in religion, indifferent and dead and lifeless. That is the spirit of the committees today in the Church. I think the multitude in the Church will have to get converted themselves before they can lead any one else to Christ. It is my firm conviction, after many years of experience in the work, that half the people in the Church have never been converted, have never been born again. I take up a bottle of water, uncork it and take a drink. That is experimental. One sip of water can convince me more of its power to slake thirst than 40,000 books written on the subject. You know quinine is bitter because you have experimented; you know fire will burn because you have experimented; you know ice will freeze; it is cold; you have experimented.

A man must experience religion to know God. All you know of God is what you read in some book or what you heard somebody else talk about; you haven't lived so that you could learn first-handed, so most of your religion is second-handed. There is too much second-hand stuff in the Church. It is your privilege to know and to have salvation. Jesus said to Peter: "When you are converted strengthen your brethren." You are not in a position to help anybody else unless you have been helped yourself.

So many church members know nothing about the Bible. A preacher will take a text from the Bible and get as far from it as the East is from the West. A young preacher just out of the seminary said: "Must I confine myself in my preaching to the Bible?" Just like a shrimp who would say, "Must I confine my roaming to the Atlantic Ocean?" Imagine a little minnow saying: "Must I confine myself to the Atlantic Ocean?" "Must I confine myself to the Bible?" Just as if his intellect would exhaust it in two or three sermons.

We have cut loose from the Bible, and any man who is living contrary to the Bible is a sinner, whether he feels like a sinner or not. Every man who is living contrary to the laws is a criminal, whether he feels like it or not. A man who breaks the law of God is a sinner, and is on the road to hell, whether he feels like it or like a saint. Jesus came into the world to reveal God to man, and man reveals him to man. The only revelation we have of Jesus is through the Bible. You have got to know Jesus to know God; that's how I get through there. There is no revelation for God to make of himself greater than he has made through Jesus Christ. It is not possible for the human intellect to have a greater conception of God. Every man needs Christ. Jesus is the Saviour that he needs and he has got to know the Bible to show what it is that makes Jesus the Saviour. He needs a Saviour and now is the time to accept the Saviour and be saved. That's what the Bible says. Whatever the Bible says, write "finish" after it and stop.

Feeding the Spiritual Life

Then you need the Holy Spirit. Without him you cannot do anything. The spirit of God works through clean hands. There are too many dirty hands, too many dirty people trying to preach a clean gospel. I have known men that have preached the truth and God has honored the truth, although their lives were not as they should be. But God honored the truth and not the people who preached the truth. But if they had been Christians themselves then God would have honored them more, because he would have honored them and the truth.

Prayer. Three-fourths of the church members have no family prayer. They let spiritual life starve. That is the reason the pews are full of driftwood; that is the reason that religion is but a mirage to many.

Pray God to give you power. Pray God to give you power to carry on his work after you have become converted. I don't preach a sermon that I don't pray God for help, and I never finish a sermon that I don't thank God that I have preached it. Then I say: "Lord, you take care of the seed I have sown in that sermon." I think the Church needs a baptism of good, pure "horse sense."