As 1975 came to a close, Billy Graham commented on the civil unrest, uncertainty, increased crime and drug addiction, massive debt, and pattern of broken homes that plagued not only the United States but many parts of the world.

“Being a Christian is more than just an instantaneous conversion; it is like a daily process whereby you grow to be more and more like Christ.”
― Billy Graham

On this eve of the bicentennial year. Ladies and gentlemen, Billy Graham. Good evening.
I’ve just returned from a three month trip around the world that took me through Asia, various countries in the Middle East and Europe.
I’ve talked with church leaders, political leaders, educators, newspaper editors, military leaders.
I visited with a number of heads of state.
I wish that every American could have been with me on this trip.
It has been an eye opener to me.
For example, someone has said that if you haven’t been in Asia in the last six months, you don’t know Asia, the world is changing so rapidly that I hardly know it anymore.
At midnight, we enter 1976, the year of our 200th birthday with the paradox of moods on the part of the American people.
On the one hand, many are excited, thrilled and optimistic about the next year.
On the other hand, as a news magazine says, Americans are in a bitter and fearful mood.
There’s no doubt that many are confused, discouraged, cynical, afraid and disillusioned with our scientists warning us of an all out atomic war before the end of the century.
Now while we Americans will be glued to our television screens tomorrow watching the football games, the rest of the world is reeling and rocking from crisis to crisis.
Dangerous explosions are almost everywhere. We’re on the edge of a precipice.
One newspaper reports that over 25 wars have been fought this past year or are now being fought.
Most of them don’t make the headlines but people are being wounded and killed.
Nevertheless, when I hear so much talk of peace, I’m reminded of what God said through Jeremiah to the false prophets of his day.

He said they’re shouting peace, peace. When there is no peace.
The psalmist warned about dealing with those whose words are smoother than butter.
Those who say I’m for peace. But when I speak therefore war, let’s face it.
There’s never been so much talk of peace nor such a worldwide preparation for war as there is today here at home, many of our problems are getting worse with every passing day.
The crime rate jumped faster this past year than any year in American history.
Drug addiction continues to soar as stronger drugs arrive daily by the planeload, massive debts threaten some of our major cities with bankruptcy, family life, falters and thousands of Children are made orphans every month from broken homes.
Abortion has brought the population growth to a standstill as I return home, I have a feeling that the American people are almost drugged and are oblivious to the events at home and abroad that caused the atomic clock to move closer to midnight.
Now, what is wrong? It’s almost a paradox that America possessing all the economic influence for enjoying life virtually leads the world in crime, narcotics abuse, pornography, immorality and even debts.
We seem to be naive to what is happening in the real world. So what do we do?
We watch spectator and entertainment events on television and try to forget it all, hoping that it will somehow go away.
Or we take another highball and try to relax the rest of the world.
Watches are self inflicted wounds with amazement. They cannot understand why we washed so much dirty linen in public.
But tonight, before we take a look at the future, We should look at the past and remind ourselves of the roots from which we sprang 200 years ago.
I do not see how anyone could study the history of America without recognizing religious influences that have helped mold this nation from the very beginning In 1835.
An astute French visitor to the United States reported upon my arrival in the United States.
The religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention in no other nation’s founding documents.
Can we find so many declarations of allegiance to God?
Time after time in our history, there have been appeals to the supreme judge in seeking to build a new nation, this idea of freedom as a right of all men everywhere is absolutely unique among nations.
But where did it come from? Any search for its origin?
Takes us back to our Father’s God, author of liberty.
It takes us to the creation of man whom God made in his own likeness, free to roam and replenish the earth, free to decide how or even whether he would serve his creator and man, of course, chose rebellion.
And today because of that choice by our first parents, we are alienated from God.
And because of this alienation, we are a suffering planet with the ultimate result of death for every generation.
But this idea of freedom also takes us back to the Old Testament.
Prophets proclaiming in the face of kings and shouting from dungeons. Man’s God endowed right to freedom under God.
It takes us back to an angry moses daring Pharaoh’s wrath to demand.
Let my people go and later leading a great army of the enslaved into a new country where they could at God’s behest proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof.
These words from Leviticus 25-10 are inscribed on America’s Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.
It also takes us back to Jesus Christ who’s standing in Nazareth boldly declared his destiny to preach deliverance to the captives, to set at liberty, them that are bruised, liberty and freedom.
These were the flaming revolutionary words, the early followers of Christ cast again and again into the tinderbox of men’s hearts and hopes.
Now that the thing that tyrants feared was that this ideal of the free man in God.
That ideal has always been terrifying to tyrants.
And that is why religious liberty is being curtailed in so many parts of the world. Today.
You see, if you give men the Bible and freedom to proclaim its message, they’ll soon be free.
And it was in pursuit of this ideal that those 102 brave men and women clamored aboard a tiny vessel called the Mayflower One Chill Day in 16 20.
And with prayers on their lips and visions of a new nation under God.
They set sail for a far unknown land.
The night before the historic dawn when the pilgrims landed, they had crowded into her tiny hold to sign their famous Mayflower compact based on biblical principles as they saw them later to be called the birth certificate of American democracy.
And the Puritans who followed during the Great Migration of 1630 through 1640 also laid it on the line.
Their reasons for coming to Massachusetts Bay.
The opening sentence of their New England Confederation says we all came into these parts of America with one in the same end, namely to advance the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Not all of course were dedicated Christians after the puritans that crowded a diverse lot of adventurers, slave traders, ex prisoners and unbelievers.
But it is the mark of the puritans vitality that their ideals largely prevailed in those early days of America.
Americans who scoff at their straight laced redness and earlier intolerance should never forget that it was the puritans religious faith and his passion for self rule that gave us much of our political and social democracy that has lasted these 200 years.
But both patriotism and puritanism tended to wane and weaken in the third generation.
By the middle of the 18th century, problems for the young country began to mount.
Many of them are the problems we face today. For example, inflation is nothing new in American history.
In the late 1700s, during the days of the American Revolution, they two faced inflation.
In 1779 Ducks and chickens were sold for a few pennies each in just two years time, they were costing $250 each.
There came a time that money was hardly worth the paper it was printed on.
That’s where the saying came not worth a continental.
It meant that the money issued by the Continental Congress had become valueless.
We should remember that as we face inflation today, that it’s not nearly so bad as was faced by forebearers and they licked it.
How did they do it by sheer courage, discipline, hard work, prayer and faith in the future of America.
Remember the people that found that America did not have telephones, radio, television, electricity, automobiles, airplanes inside plumbing or refrigerators.
They had no tractors or bulldozers to help them with their farming or road building.
They had no supermarkets to go and shop in. They had no social security, no guaranteed welfare.
The fastest they could travel was by horseback. Yet they succeeded where we seem to be failing.
They scratched doug, worked sweated and prayed to build a nation from New York to San Francisco.
Many times. During American history, there have been great spiritual awakenings that have affected the nation and strengthened its moral and spiritual fabric.
One of those was called the Great Awakening of the 1740s.
It strengthened the nation for the bitter days of the revolution that was yet to come.
Great evangelists like George Whitfield from England and Jonathan Edwards proclaimed judgment and grace.
Calling on the people to turn to God.
This great awakening say historians cradled and paved the way for the revolution.
Under such eloquent preaching, set those young people who would soon be called the founding fathers of America.
And from under such preaching came men like John Adams who wrote Statesman May plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone upon which freedom can securely stand.
And John Adams continued a patriot must be a religious man.
You know, the declaration of Independence reflects the feelings of men to whom religious faith was all important.
There was not an atheist or an agnostic among the 56 who signed that declaration.
Some of them were discussed. Some of them believed only in a supreme being.
They did not believe in Jesus Christ.
But before they strode forward to append their signatures, each bowed his head in prayer, the declarations giant step was being taken.
They affirmed with a firm reliance upon the protection of divine Providence in declaring themselves free.
They said they were assuming the separate and equal station to which the laws of God entitled them.
The self evident truth they voiced was that men were endowed by their creator with an inalienable rights.
And before the world, they appealed to the supreme judge of the world for the source of their intentions, such expressions were no mere polite gestures to God.
They were a firm commitment to the principle that God must be central to any form of government.
And because they signed that document, some of those men were captured and hanged, some were stripped of their possessions, some were jailed.
And I have to ask myself tonight at another hour of American crisis, do we have that kind of courage?
Would you be willing to sign?
Would I be willing to sign how many people today would be willing to put their life on the line for freedom as those men did 200 years ago.
11 years later after the revolution was one there assembled in Philadelphia men from 13 colonies charged with creating one of the most revolutionary political documents of all time.
Yet there were flaws. They were men who had never known the concept of democratic liberty and freedom.
For example, slavery was a part of the social structure.
Both North and South Catholics could vote in only three of the 13 states.
Jews were not permitted to vote in New Jersey or in New Hampshire women could not vote anywhere in America.
In the hindsight of 200 years, they made many mistakes.
But what they produced was nothing short of a miracle of God.
When the constitution was submitted for ratification, the people demanded a bill of rights that would settle certain fundamental freedoms once and for all they were implied in the constitution, but the people wanted them in black and white and in the amendments making up the bill of rights.
Where was religion? It was first in top place.
Speech Assembly and petition followed religion in the first amendment and those were quickly approved.
But for 3.5 months, the House and the Senate debated the phrasing of religious freedom, changing the words around adding, deleting clarifying at no time in the history of the world has so much care and attention been lavished on one sentence of legislation.
The final wording was this Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
It was not government renouncing religious faith.
It was government protecting our religious faith by forever removing religious rights from tampering by any public authority or self seeking hierarchy.
Here, we have a guarantee that America would never have a civil religion, but we would have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.
As some have mistakenly interpreted that amendment in every area of American life.
The faith of our fathers has left its indelible imprint and nowhere more than in our educational system.
When our forefathers stepped ashore in the new world, their first act was to establish a home.
Next, they erected a church, then they started a school.
The puritans and the pilgrims came to the new world.
Determined to provide education for their young in the lands they had left. Education was the privilege of the few.
Therefore, those early Americans flung up their rude school houses all across the advancing frontier.
You know what their first textbook was. It was the Bible.
Their first task to teach Children to read came from the Bible founded also by the churches were America’s first institutions of higher learning.
A few years after the pilgrims landed Harvard College came into being its motto for Christ in the church, its main purpose, a training center for clergy In 1701 Yale College was founded by a group of Evangelical Clergyman for the same purpose.
Princeton was brought into being by the Presbyterian Revivalist IQ Party.
The University of Pennsylvania stemmed directly from George Whitfield’s electrifying preaching during the great awakening.
It was in the American churches too that women first came into their own.
The Pilgrim woman was a new breed along with her man.
She stepped onto these free shore’s with freedom, shining in her eyes at home, in her community and in her church, she began her God given fulfillment as a woman derived from the teachings of the Bible.
We’re a vastly different people today than we were 200 years ago.
Our society is far more complex, more pluralistic, but of this one thing, we can be sure God has not changed.
His laws have not changed. He is still a God of love and mercy, but he is also a God of righteousness and judgment and any individual or nation which ignores his moral and spiritual laws will ultimately face God’s judgment.
I believe that every problem facing us tonight as Americans is basically a spiritual problem.
Crime is a spiritual problem. Inflation is a spiritual problem. Corruption is a spiritual problem.
Social injustice is a spiritual problem. The lack of a will even to defend our freedoms is a spiritual problem.
The Lord speaking through his servant, the prophet Isaiah said quote, I was ready to be sought by those who did not ask for me.
I was ready to be found by those who did not seek me.
I said here am I to a nation that did not call on my name?
I spread out my hands to all the rebellious people, but they followed their own devices.
Are people who provoked me to my face continually.
When I spoke, you did not listen but you did that which was evil in my eyes and judgment came the great question before us tonight on the eve about 2/100 birthday and on the eve of 1976, a crucial election year is, will this nation survive this century as a free society or even the next five years as a free society?
As I come home from my three month world tour, this is how crucial and how critical the problems of the present.
Our seem to me, I do not believe that we will be a free democracy 24 years from now in the year 2000, unless, unless a dramatic change takes place within the hearts of the people of this nation.
It was James Russell Lowell American poet of the last century who put the challenge to us.
When asked by a French historian, how long do you think the American Republic will endure?
Laura replied so long as the ideas of its founding fathers continue to be dominant.
One of those ideas was that the Bible was true and that our entire social and political structure was to be built upon its laws and its teachings.
Another idea that our founding fathers had was that God was supreme.
That is why they put on our coins in God.
We trust another early idea, certainly not shared by everybody was that every person needed Jesus Christ in his heart.
As tonight, we enter a historic year. America’s troubled.
Our people are filled with frustration, fear and confusion.
According to a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times in October, thousands of radicals are highly organized from coast to coast with the determination to overthrow this country.
We’ve heard testimony before Congress recently that highly trained terrorists have arrived in the United States to begin terror tactics during the bicentennial year.
Will they succeed? It will depend on the patriotism, courage and faith like those early Americans had when they landed first on these shore’s.
Is God going to allow a cataclysmic judgment to fall upon this nation As has fallen upon nations of the past who have turned from God and forgotten him or will God send to us another great spiritual awakening that has saved us in the past.
During the last 12 months, thousands of Americans have been turning to God.
We’ve seen it in our own crusades from coast to coast and throughout the world.
Wherever we’ve been prayer groups and Bible study groups have been springing up all over the nation, churches and other religious organizations are reporting that millions are living a more disciplined Christian life.
This is encouraging even though it only involves a minority of Americans in a similar time.
Two hours when only a minority with true believers, Isaiah, the great Hebrew prophet said, except the Lord of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant.
We should have been like sodom and we should have been like under Gomorrah.
But God is warning us tonight, that judgment is going to fall upon us in a very short time unless we as a nation repent of our sins and turn to God in pleading with ancient Israel.
God said, come now and let us reason together saith the Lord.
Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
If you’d be willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land.
But if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured with the sword for the mouth of the Lord have spoken.
It. Will America turn to God at this late hour or will America continue on the broad road that leads to destruction.
It will soon be too late to decide already. The storm clouds are gathering.
I’m calling upon Christians everywhere to a time of humiliation, prayer and fasting.
During this 200th anniversary, there’s no possible solution to the problems we face apart from a change in the spiritual atmosphere.
You are listening to me tonight by asking the question, what can I as an individual? Do?
I feel so helpless in the midst of the present crisis? I want to do something.
But what, what did those early pastors and teachers and evangelists proclaim the heart of the message of Whitfield Edwards, Wesley Tennant and hundreds of other clergy along the frontier was basically the same message I offer to you tonight.
First recognize that God loves you.
The Bible says that He is not willing, that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
Secondly, be honest before God admit that you’ve broken His laws and chosen to go your own way instead of his way, be willing to let him change your life.
Third, receive Jesus Christ into your heart as Savior and Lord fourth be a living example by your good works.
The Apostle James said faith without works is dead. This proves that you mean business with God.
Pray for those in authority. Be a good citizen, help the poor, help, the distressed and help the oppressed of the world.
Fifth, get involved in the political process. This coming year is an election year.
I would like to challenge every deeply committed American who is qualified to think about running for political office.
I do not believe that we as Americans and Christians should withdraw.
We need men and women of integrity and Christian commitment who will run for political office this coming year, no matter to which political party you belong on this New Year’s Eve.
If you will do these things, you could have a part in helping America to be the kind of country you want your Children and grandchildren to grow up in America is too young to die.