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

Luther was God's laugh at ecclesiasticism.

While the brains and aristocracy and professional statesmanship of America struggled in vain with the nation's greatest crisis, God reached down close to the soil of the raw and ignored Middle West, and picked up a gaunt and untutored specimen of the common people--a man who reeked of the earth until the earth closed over him--and so saved the Union and freed a race, through ungainly Abraham Lincoln. Thus again Heaven laughed at exalted procedure and conventionality.

In our own day, with its blatant worldly wisdom, with its flaunting prosperity, with its fashionable churchliness, with its flood of "advanced" theology overwhelming the pulpit, God needed a prophet, to call his people back to simple faith and righteousness. A nation imperiled by luxury, greed, love of pleasure and unbelief cried aloud for a deliverer. Surely this crisis required a great man, learned in all the ways of the world, equipped with the best preparation of American and foreign universities and theological seminaries, a man trained in ecclesiastical leadership, and approved and honored by the courts of the Church? So worldly wisdom decreed. But God laughed--and produced, to the scandal of the correct and conventional, Billy Sunday, a common man from the common people, who, like Lincoln, so wears the signs and savor of the soil that fastidious folk, to whom sweat is vulgar and to whom calloused hands are "bad form," quite lose their suavity and poise in calling him "unrefined."

That he is God's tool is the first and last word about Billy Sunday. He is a "phenomenon" only as God is forever doing phenomenal things, and upsetting men's best-laid plans. He is simply a tool of God. For a special work he is the special instrument. God called, and he answered. All the many owlish attempts to "explain" Billy Sunday on psychological and sociological grounds fall flat when they ignore the fact that he is merely a handy man for the Lord's present use.

God is still, as ever, confounding all human wisdom by snatching the condemned baby of a Hebrew slave out of Egypt's river to become a nation's deliverer; by calling a shepherd boy from his sheep to be Israel's greatest warrior and king; and by sending his only-begotten Son to earth by way of a manger, and training him in a workingman's home and a village carpenter shop. "My ways are not your ways," is a remark of God, which he seems fond of repeating and illustrating.

There is no other explanation of Billy Sunday needed, or possible, than that he is God's man sent in God's time. And if God chooses the weak and foolish things of earth to confound the mighty, is not that but another one of his inscrutable ways of showing that he is God?

Why are we so confident that Billy Sunday is the Lord's own man, when so many learned critics have declared the contrary? Simply because he has led more persons to make a public confession of discipleship to Jesus Christ than any other man for a century past. Making Christians is, from all angles, the greatest work in the world. Approximately two hundred and fifty thousand persons, in the past twenty-five years, have taken Sunday's hand, in token that henceforth their lives belong to the Saviour.

That amazing statement is too big to be grasped at once. It requires thinking over. The huge total of dry figures needs to be broken up into its component parts of living human beings. Tens of thousands of those men were husbands--hundreds of whom had been separated from their wives and children by sin. Now, in reunited homes, whole families bless the memory of the man of God who gave them back husbands and fathers. Other tens of thousands were sons, over many of whom parents had long prayed and agonized. It would be hard to convince these mothers, whose sons have been given back to clean living and to Christian service, that there is anything seriously wrong with Mr. Sunday's language, methods or theology. Business men who find that a Sunday revival means the paying up of the bad bills of old customers are ready to approve on this evidence a man whose work restores integrity in commercial relations.