Will Graham Shares Message His Late Grandfather Would Have Told Values Voters at FRC Summit

WASHINGTON — Billy Graham's grandson Will Graham spoke to one of the nation's leading evangelical conservative political conferences on Friday and rather than offering a political message like many of the gathering's other speakers, he offered up what he thinks his late grandfather would have shared.

"I am here today, not as a Republican. I am not here as a Democrat. To be honest, I am not even here as a citizen of this wonderful country," Graham told the hundreds gathered for the Family Research Council's annual Values Voters Summit at the Omni Shoreham Hotel. "I stand before you as ambassador of the Lord Jesus Christ."

The 43-year-old Graham, vice president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and son of the politically outspoken Franklin Graham, warned in his sermon-like 15-minute speech that there are many problems facing society today and none bigger than the "spiritual problem" that no politician on either side of the political aisle can fix.

"I am going to talk to you about what my grandaddy would want to talk about if he was here today," Graham said. "Today, we are talking about a lot of different things in our society, a lot of problems we are going to face no matter who is the politician or who's in government. Our country has a lot of problems to be dealt with."

"The problem is that a lot of the stuff that we are talking about, even at this conference here, are really just symptoms of a greater problem," the evangelist who has preached on six continents added. "And no one wants to address it. Everybody wants to put band-aids on the symptoms. But the problem is even greater."

Graham stressed that the "human race's greatest problem is that of the human heart."

"The problem is there is no legislation or no government that can fix this. It is a spiritual problem. The human race's greatest problem is that of the heart — its heart disease," Graham stressed.

While over 610,000 people die from heart disease in the United States each year, Graham assured that he was not speaking of heart disease in the medical sense but rather in the "spiritual sense."

"What is the heart? What does the Bible say is the heart?" Graham asked. "The heart represents the entirety of a person, it deals with the intellect. In other words, when you see the word 'heart' in the Bible, it talks about your thoughts."

Graham quoted Genesis 6:5: "Then the Lord saw the wickedness of man was great on the Earth and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually."

"The heart thinks. It represents your thinking in this world. The heart also represents not only our intellect and our ability to think but it also deals with our emotions," he remarked. "As a matter of fact, in high school, I had a few girlfriends but none of them liked me though. At Valentines [Day], I would give them all a valentine. What do you do? 'I heart you.' The heart represents emotion. It is what we feel with. It's our heart."

In addition to emotion and intellect, Graham added, the heart represents a person's volition or "will power and ability to do something."

"I love watching basketball games. Sometimes someone will upset [University of] North Carolina and the other team will be all happy. Often times, they will [ask] 'Coach, how did you do it? How did you beat North Carolina? How did you beat the big gorilla? How do you beat them?" the North Carolina native explained. "They'll say, 'I guess we had more heart tonight.' 'We played with more heart tonight.'"

Graham said that the coaches were not talking about having a physically bigger heart than the other team but the fact that their teams played with more will power and "determination to see the game through."

"My friends, this is what [the Bible] is talking about," Graham contended. "The heart represents our mind, it represents our emotions and represents our will power to see things through, it talks about our motives. The heart is not just a part of you but an entirety of you."

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