Billy Graham on Indwelling of the Holy Spirit

At the moment of saving faith

THE POSITION

The Spirit comes to live in the believer "the moment that we receive Christ as Savior." In his preaching the order is faith then new birth: "by faith receive Christ and experience the new birth." In The Holy Spirit (1978), read in an unofficial excerpt, he holds that the believer is baptized into the body of Christ by the Spirit at conversion, that this is the only Spirit baptism, and that there are many fillings after it. He says there he had at times wondered whether a second experience was needed and became more convinced, the longer he studied, that it was not.

4 OTHERS HOLD THIS

ABOUT THIS FIGURE

Evangelist of the citywide crusades from 1947 to 2005, ordained a Southern Baptist minister, founder, with L. Nelson Bell, of Christianity Today (1956) and convener of the 1974 Lausanne Congress. He is generally reckoned to have preached in person to more people than anyone before him and was the public face of postwar evangelicalism. This entry rests on sermon texts dated 1951 to 2005 that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association republishes on the Decision magazine website, his recorded Billy Graham Minutes, his daily devotions, interviews he gave to Time, Christianity Today, Newsweek and Robert Schuller, and the My Answer column that ran under his name. By the standard account the column was written with staff, so cells that rest on it say so.