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

by William T. Ellis

It's Jesus Christ or nothing.—Billy Sunday.

Pauline in more than one characteristic is Billy Sunday. But in none so much as in his devotion to the cross of Jesus Christ. His life motto may well be Paul's, "I am resolved to know nothing among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified." His preaching is entirely founded on the message that "the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin." There are no modern theories of the atonement in his utterances. To the learned of the world, as to the Greeks of old, the Cross may seem foolishness, but Sunday knows and preaches it as the power of God unto salvation. As his closing and most characteristic message to the readers of this book we commend his sermon on "Christ and him crucified."

"ATONEMENT"

"For if the blood of bulls and of goats and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh"—Paul argued in his letter to the Hebrews—"how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God."

No more of this turtle-dove business, no more offering the blood of bullocks and heifers to cleanse from sin.

The atoning blood of Jesus Christ—that is the thing about which all else centers. I believe that more logical, illogical, idiotic, religious and irreligious arguments have been fought over this than all others. Now and then when a man gets a new idea of it he goes out and starts a new denomination. He has a perfect right to do this under the thirteenth amendment, but he doesn't stop here. He makes war on all of the other denominations that do not interpret as he does. Our denominations have multiplied by this method until it would give one brain fever to try to count them all.

The atoning blood! And as I think it over I am reminded of a man who goes to England and advertises that he will throw pictures on the screen of the Atlantic coast of America. So he gets a crowd and throws pictures on the screen of high bluffs and rocky coasts and waves dashing against them until a man comes out of the audience and brands him a liar and says that he is obtaining money under false pretense, as he has seen America and the Atlantic coast and what the other man is showing is not America at all. The men almost come to blows and then the other man says that if the people will come tomorrow he will show them real pictures of the coast. So the audience comes back to see what he will show, and he flashes on the screen pictures of a low coast line, with palmetto trees and banana trees and tropical foliage and he apologizes to the audience, but says these are the pictures of America. The first man calls him a liar and the people don't know which to believe. What was the matter with them?

They were both right and they were both wrong, paradoxical as it may seem. They were both right as far as they went, but neither went far enough. The first showed the coast line from New England to Cape Hatteras, while the second showed the coast line from Hatteras to Yucatan. They neither could show it all in one panoramic view, for it is so varied it could not be taken in one picture. God never intended to give you a picture of the world in one panoramic view. From the time of Adam and Eve down to the time Jesus Christ hung on the cross he was unfolding his views. When I see Moses leading the people out of bondage where they for years had bared their backs to the taskmaster's lash; when I see the lowing herds and the high priest standing before the altar severing the jugular vein of the rams and the bullocks on until Christ cried out from the cross, "It is finished," God was preparing the picture for the consummation of it in the atoning blood of Jesus Christ.

A sinner has no standing with God. He forfeits his standing when he commits sin and the only way he can get back is to repent and accept the atoning blood of Jesus Christ.

I have sometimes thought that Adam and Eve didn't understand as fully as we do when the Lord said, "Eat and you shall surely die." They had never seen any one die. They might have thought it simply meant a separation from God. But no sooner had they eaten and seen their nakedness than they sought to cover themselves, and it is the same today. When man sees himself in his sins, uncovered, he tries to cover himself in philosophy or some fake. But God looked through the fig leaves and the foliage and God walked out in the field and slew the beasts and took their skins and wrapped them around Adam and Eve, and from that day to this when a man has been a sinner and has covered himself it has been by and through faith in the shed blood of Jesus Christ. Every Jew covered his sins and received pardon through the blood of the rams and bullocks and the doves.