shucks” kind of modesty but a sense of being “a brand plucked
from the fire by a holy God”—who calls him his beloved.
In a David Frost interview, Billy said that when he preached,
“the Holy Spirit is the communicating agent.... People are really
not listening to me.... They’re listening to another voice inside,
the voice of the Holy Spirit.” Billy went on to say to Frost that
even when he may preach the message poorly and leave out
things he wanted to say, “God knows my motive and he knows
my heart, and God uses even that simple presentation that might
have been poorly done, and he applies it to the human heart.”
Frost then asked, “So there can never be a feeling that ‘I’ve
done badly, I’ve failed tonight’?”
Billy responded, “Oh, I have that feeling quite often. In fact,
most of the time I feel I wish I could have represented the gospel
better tonight. Really, that’s a sincere feeling. Almost every night
I say, ‘I wish I had done better,’ because I’m a representative,
really, of Christ. That’s a tremendous responsibility.”
So we see here his self-perception of being a simple workman
with a huge mandate, like an ambassador in wartime carrying
gold bullion to people desperately needing it. He’s the conveyer of
the most important goods in the world, and he believes all is lost
or won depending on how he carries the message and how he
responds to God’s initiatives.
With this perspective, he’s not remotely “triumphalistic,” a
term sometimes used by academics to describe evangelicals who
seem so certain of their stance and importance that they come off
as arrogant. Yet the perspective drives him to do his very best in
the eternal war between good and evil, heaven and hell. He
openly admits to struggles with his inadequacy for such a task that
is loaded on him as a mere mortal. That’s one reason it’s painful
for him to hear long, adulatory introductions. He feels humble
laboring under the magnificence of God. In fact, his feelings can
be quite intense. In the groundbreaking ceremonies for his new
headquarters, Billy said, “Jesus must increase, and I must
decrease. I cringe when I hear my name called in something that
has been the work of God through these years.”
Redeeming the Ego