W.A. Criswell, the long time pastor of Dallas\u2019 First Baptist Church, was one of the greatest preachers of all time. Dr. Criswell will always be remembered as a great expositor of the Word. I heard him in person several times and used to listen to him on the radio every Sunday morning. He lived to be 92 and served that great church for 58 years, 48 of them as senior pastor. In 1994, Dr. Criswell gave his last interview to the Dallas Morning News. At one point the interviewer asks, \u201cDo you have any doubts?\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Criswell replied, \u201cOh boy. Along this pilgrim way, sometimes I think I am an infidel.\u201d<\/p>\n
The interviewer asked, \u201cHow can that be?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d he answered, \u201cI just have, sometimes, I have a hard time believing. I just do. The things that happen in life, the things that I see and the things that I watch. Ah, I just struggle with it. I struggle with evil in this world. Why doesn\u2019t God do something? And I struggle with that. And I struggle with the presence of death. Just you and I talking here and we face that inevitable day. Oh, sometimes I struggle. I\u2019ve just battled through those times.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe reason is very obvious. One is that I have no place to go. If I turn aside I don\u2019t have anything to turn to. It\u2019s just ultimate despair. And second, I don\u2019t care what, it is a blessing to love the Lord and trust in the Lord and even when we don\u2019t understand, we believe that he\u2019ll make it plain in the by and by. So we\u2019ll just trust him for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Criswell learned to trust the Lord even when he did not understand. He clung to a faith that said God would make it plain some day. So must we.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
W.A. Criswell, the long time pastor of Dallas\u2019 First Baptist Church, was one of the greatest preachers of all time. Dr. Criswell will always be remembered as a great expositor of the Word. I heard him in person several times and used to listen to him on the radio every Sunday morning. He lived to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4710,123,128,4669,456,1153,4618,493],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5417"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}