A story that should humble every generation (1), By Ayo Akerele

In July 1986, Dr Billy Graham made a remarkable and costly investment, committing millions of dollars to host a landmark international conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The gathering brought together eight thousand pastors and evangelists drawn from remote villages across Central Africa and from virtually every inhabited corner of the earth. Delegates from more than 180 nations were in attendance, representing one of the most diverse gatherings of gospel ministers the world had ever witnessed. In an extraordinary act of personal generosity, Dr Graham personally sponsored the flights and hotel accommodations of every delegate, ensuring that no one who was called to be there would be prevented from attending by the weight of financial hardship. It was not merely a conference, it was a statement of how seriously one man took the advance of the gospel to the ends of the earth.

Among those who made the journey was an evangelist from a small, obscure village in Central Africa, a man named Joseph. Throughout the conference sessions, Joseph sat in complete and rapt attention, absorbing every word that Dr Graham shared from the platform. Before the conference drew to a close, Joseph made a quiet but earnest request: a private audience with Dr Graham himself. That request was graciously and humbly granted.

When the two men finally sat together, Joseph began to share his story. What Dr Graham heard in that room that day would remain with him for the rest of his life.

In Joseph’s own words: “As a young man, I heard the gospel on a dusty African road, and I responded immediately, trusting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour. The moment I believed, an overwhelming longing took hold of me, a burning desire to return to my native village and share the good news of the Kingdom of Heaven with my own people. I went from door to door, telling everyone I encountered what had happened to me, fully expecting their faces to light up with the same joy that had flooded my own heart. Instead, I was met with fury and rage.

The men of the village seized me and pinned me to the ground, while the women flogged me mercilessly with barbed wire. When it was over, I was dragged into the surrounding bush and abandoned there to die. I crawled on my hands and knees to a nearby watering hole, and over the course of several days I slowly began to recover. In those long, painful hours of solitude and reflection, I convinced myself that I must have left something essential out of the message, or perhaps I had communicated it poorly. So I rehearsed my testimony carefully, prayed with every ounce of fervour I could gather, and eventually limped back to the village to try again.

I received another flogging. When I had recovered sufficiently to stand once more, I returned a third time, and was whipped a third time. The barbed wire found the same wounds that had barely begun to heal, tearing them open afresh. But something was unmistakably different on that third visit. As I began to lose consciousness and the world around me faded, I noticed something I had not seen before: one of the women who had been beating me had suddenly stopped. She was weeping openly. And then I saw others beginning to weep alongside her. I awoke in my own bed, being tenderly cared for by the very hands that had previously sought to destroy me.

By the grace of Almighty God, and through that patient and suffering witness, the entire village turned to Christ.”

It is recorded by Dr David Jeremiah that at this precise point in the conversation, Joseph quietly lifted his shirt to reveal the scars permanently etched across his chest and back, a living testimony written not in ink, but in flesh and blood. Dr. Graham was visibly shaken and deeply moved. Later, speaking privately to members of his own staff, the great evangelist uttered words that deserve to reverberate in the ears of every minister of the gospel alive today:

“I am not fit to untie his shoes, and he wanted to meet me?”

This story places before us a piercing and deeply uncomfortable challenge: we must stop cheapening the gospel.

A man endured unimaginable and repeated suffering, returning not once, not twice, but three times to the source of his torment, to proclaim the very same gospel that many preachers and church leaders today dilute, negotiate away, or quietly set aside in pursuit of fame, financial security, and institutional influence. Dr Erwin Lutzer once issued a devastating indictment to the contemporary Church:

“Many of us are not even willing to live for Jesus, much less die for Him.”

Those words carry crushing weight when placed alongside the image of Joseph’s scars. The fire of genuine, heaven-sent revival must fall upon the Church once more. The gospel has never been without cost, it cost Jesus Christ His precious blood, and it has cost countless faithful believers throughout the centuries their livelihoods, their families, their freedom, and their very lives.

I am personally drawn to stories of unwavering, costly faith, testimonies of men and women who planted their feet and refused to move regardless of what it cost them. These testimonies do not merely inspire us. They leave our generation without excuse. If Billy Graham, one of the most widely recognised and celebrated evangelists of the twentieth century, could be brought to a posture of profound humility before the sacrifice of one unknown African pastor, then so should every one of us who dares to call ourselves a minister of Christ.

But let us press this question even further. Pastor Joseph was a young man when these events took place. Do we still have young men and women in the Church today who carry that same rare and burning commitment to the cause of the gospel? Is the current generation of Christian youth genuinely equipped, willing, and spiritually capable of carrying forward and sustaining the fire of the truth of the gospel?

“And there arose another generation after them, which knew not the Lord.” (Judges 2:10)

This passage haunts me. It reminds me of a story I encountered not long ago, the children of an elderly man of God who were weeping bitterly as they watched their father suffer at the hands of the very church he had faithfully served for decades. These children openly expressed their regrets, confessing that they wished the hands of time could be pulled back so they might reconsider their decision to follow Jesus, and particularly to follow the local church their father had led them into. But it was too late.

Their lives had been deeply wounded by the very leader they had so dearly cherished, damaged in ways that would require nothing short of a unique and extraordinary dimension of God’s mercy to heal. They had been shown a distorted and false version of the true God of the Bible. They had been sold a counterfeit Jesus, another Jesus altogether, not the love-embodying, self-sacrificing Son of God, the true and living Jesus of the Scriptures.

The tragic reality is that those children may never serve the God of their father, much less contemplate dying for Him in the manner of Pastor Joseph.

Such is the heartbreaking condition of tens of thousands of young people in churches today who stand on the very precipice of apostasy and, in some cases, outright atheism. Some totter at the edge of a complete rejection of Jesus and the Christian faith, having been disillusioned and embittered by the rank hypocrisy they have witnessed among those who claimed to represent Him. Others who still call themselves Christians lead lives that bear little meaningful resemblance to what authentic, New Testament Christianity actually looks like. The majority of our young people are spiritually fireless and entirely passionless.

They are in church but are rarely in Christ. They can organise grand programmes but can rarely agonise in genuine prayer. They can pay for anything but can rarely pray about anything. They can feast lavishly but can rarely fast sincerely. They can sow seed offerings into anything but can rarely grow spiritually into anything. If the fathers of this generation do not urgently congregate a solemn assembly to repair the broken walls of the gospel, the youths of today, already standing at the precipice, will tumble headlong into brazen apostasy, and the influence of the Church will be obliterated with reckless speed. Dr Erwin Lutzer once said, “the fall of Turkey into the hands of radical islamists proves that there is no guarantee that the church will always survive in every nation.”

“Now the sons of Eli were corrupt; they did not know the Lord.” (1 Samuel 2:12).

The fathers are ageing. The children are aching. The world is growing hotter in its hostility to truth. God’s devoted lovers are thinning out. Culture seems increasingly to be prevailing over Scripture rather than being shaped by it. Post-modernism and relativism are now aggressively displacing absolute truth in the public square. Society is rapidly losing its tolerance for authentic, Bible-believing Christians, a trajectory that mirrors John J Murray’s sober observation: “We have now gone back to the era of the early apostles. The Roman empire under which many Christians were martyred was pluralistic and supremely tolerant of religion. The only people they could not tolerate were the Christians.”

Persecution of faithful Christians has more than doubled around the world and will yet multiply in the years ahead. The future of the Church in Africa, and indeed globally, now rests to a significant degree in the hands of the Christian young people of today. But the question that must keep every spiritual leader awake at night is this: will the youths of today, who are drinking from the wells dug by the fathers, take up their own swords and sharpen them for the battle ahead? To be continued.

Ayo Akerele is the senior pastor of Rhema Assembly and the founder of the Voice of the Watchmen Ministries in Ontario, Canada. He can be reached through [email protected]. You can connect with him on: YouTube: @VoiceoftheWatchmen, TikTok: @drayoakerele, Instagram: @drayoakerele, Facebook: @Ayo Akerele