Their challenge gives you a chance to find out if you really believe it.
Sometimes you've believed it for so long, you've forgotten why. So you get a chance to go back and remind yourself, or re-prove it -- and oops, you find out you really don't believe it. That was Chuck.
Or you go back and review and re-prove and remind yourself and you end up believing it more and stronger than ever. That was Billy.
Either way the challenge is a crossroad.
If you ignore it, then a teeny bit of wondering sits down in the back of your mind: Could I be wrong? What would I find out if I started looking? You may never think it out loud, but you can end up like the unstable, double-minded guy in James, immature and incomplete, with no right to any answer to prayer.
You can also end up appearing defensive and insecure to people when you're challenged and don't have an answer right away. Faith has a peace and security to it even in the face of appearing to lose the arguement.
Anyway, Chuck decided he didn't really believe what he'd said he'd believed all those years. And he challenged his friend Billy who had been believing along with him. Chuck said Billy was throwing away his brain, committing intellectual suicide, that obviously in the end a thinking person couldn't think all this was true.
Billy respected Chuck and knew this was a crossroad. And he had a big deal scheduled where he was going to have to speak to crowds of people about believing this thing he believed. How was he going to do that if he had doubts himself?
He took his Bible into the woods and set it on a stump and had it out with himself and God. And he decided that he had enough evidence even without 100% proof and he was going to trust that what God said in the Bible was true.
Then he went back and did this:
Billy: The Early Years is a movie filmed this spring that tells the story of the young Billy Graham from the point of view of the dying Chuck, Charles Templeton. It will be out this fall. You can read about it HERE.
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