First Things RSS Feed - John D. Woodbridge https://www.firstthings.com/author/john-d-woodbridge en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:51:38 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/john-d-woodbridge 60 A Good and Faithful Servant https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/02/a-good-and-faithful-servant https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/02/a-good-and-faithful-servant Fri, 23 Feb 2018 12:25:00 -0500 During his last “crusade,” held in New York City in 2005, Billy Graham, America’s great pastor-evangelist, declared: “I have one message: that Jesus Christ came, he died on a cross, he rose again, and he asked us to repent of our sins and receive Christ by faith as Lord and Savior, and if we do we have forgiveness of all our sin.”

On February 21, 2018, Billy Graham passed away. He was 99 years old. In his autobiography, he had written that “the first question I am going to ask when I get to heaven is this: Why me, Lord, why did you choose me, a farm boy from North Carolina, to preach to so many people, . . . and to have a part in what You were doing in the latter half of the twentieth century?” He believed that “only God” knew the answer to that question.

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]]> Harold O.J. Brown (1933–2007) https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2007/07/harold-oj-brown https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2007/07/harold-oj-brown Tue, 10 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400 Whether in foul weather or fair, a bicyclist would sometimes suddenly emerge from an opening in the neighboring woods. The bicyclist would then ride pell-mell on a dirt path across a meadow toward a divinity school, located in the northern suburbs of Chicago. If the weather were foul, mud could be seen splattering the bicyclist’s brownish-green Swiss pantaloons. His old bicycle had no mud guard.

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