Anne Graham Lotz Is Creating Her Own Legacy

Anne Graham Lotz is one of the daughters of Dr. Billy Graham. For over 30 years, she has taught the Word of God around the world in settings from arenas to prison cells. She has spoken before the United Nations and other international assemblies, but in personal conversation, you sense that her heart is to know God as Father and make Him known to others. She has written ten books, including The Magnificent Obsession, which was released this August. I had the privilege to speak with this elegant, soft-spoken woman about her parents, her work, and her study of the life of Abraham.

Abraham's Personal God         Authentic Relationship with God    Mother's Example

His Magnificent Obsession

You taught Abraham in Bible Study Fellowship a few times, so you've studied his life for several years. I'm curious why you decided to write the book now?

Anne: I don't know. I taught it 33 years ago, then I taught it twice since then while teaching Genesis in BSF. Then every fall, at the Billy Graham Training Center, the Cove, I have an intensive seminar. I give six messages and direct nine workshops and that material is Abraham also. In the meantime, the Lord has directed me what books to read. I've always had a confirmation from the Lord what to write. I don't just decide I'd love to write on Abraham and do it. I wait for the Lord to lead.

One reason it's on my heart now is that after 9/11, other religions seemed to inject themselves into our culture, or they were injected because we want to be united and want to include everybody. I feel that I'm not against multi-culturalism or pluralism or whatever, but I am when it denies the uniqueness of who God is and who Jesus is.

The thing about Abraham is that he wasn't religious. He's considered the patriarch of three religions, but he forsook his religion when he left Ur. He left his religion in order to pursue a personal relationship with God. I set that as my goal when I first taught Abraham 33 years ago. But as you get older, things come into clearer focus. I feel like I'm more clearly focused in my life, and what's going on in the world has helped to more clearly sharpen that focus. It's not just for myself, but I believe it's a message that needs to be magnified within the church so we would know who our God is. How many Christians are confused about who our God is? We know that the Allah of Islam is not our God.

There are Christian Arabs who worship Allah who is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Father of Jesus Christ. But the Allah of Islam, in whose name they ram their planes into buildings, is not God. Yet there are Christians who will be confused on that issue and not think that there needs to be a clear understanding of Who He is. We must strive to know Him because we're being deceived by some of these other things because we're ignorant.

We don't know the uniqueness of who He is, but He's more wonderful and more awesome than we could imagine. Abraham makes Him so personal. We get so caught up in Abraham's life sort of like a soap opera. We can't wait to see what happens next. And yet the whole thing is a journey in his relationship with God to the point that in the end, He's willing to give God his Isaac and give back to God the blessings he's received. It's a powerful story and I feel God has timed it for now. I write because I feel He leads me at the particular time to write a book, but I can look at the world situation and see that the time is just right.

As you've spoken and as you teach, have you seen any opposition to what you're teaching?

Anne: The blessing of what I do is that I go where I'm invited. So if people invite me I assume people want to hear what I have to say. So I don't have that kind of opposition.  You can get contradicted in media interviews or when I'm out in a setting like that, but I'm not trying to force what I think on somebody else. I'm just trying to lift up what God says and what the Bible says.

In the new book, I asked for endorsements. I've never done that before. But I wanted to get such a variety from so many different walks of life to get across the idea that this isn't just a message for white, evangelical Christians living in America. This is for the whole world. God loves the whole world, every background, every kind of person.

It’s the idea that God is a God who so loved the world. He's our Creator, therefore, in a sense, He owns us. We belong to Him. But if we don't acknowledge that and claim it by faith, then when we step into eternity, we're separated from Him. But until that moment we can have a relationship with Him that He longs for us to develop and enter into and experience in its fullness. He offers it to everybody

You wrote about Abraham leaving Ur and his family behind to follow God. What are some things you've left behind to follow Him?

Anne: I live in the southeastern part of the United States and it's part of our culture to go to church, live a good moral life, quote the Bible, sing hymns, and say prayers. That's wonderful and good and I wish everybody would do that. There's something wonderful about the Southeast part of the United States and I love it.

But if that's all we have and never break out of that and pursue an authentic, vibrant relationship with God, then we're missing it. So I had to break out of that. And sometimes I think it's harder to break out of that because it's so beautiful and so close to the real thing.  My mother used to say you could have just enough religion to inoculate you against a relationship. It's like a smallpox vaccine. When you have a smallpox vaccine, you get just enough of the disease so when the disease comes into contact with you, you have resistance to it.

So she said you could get just enough religion to inoculate you so that you have resistance to a relationship. I think sometimes that’s true within the church. I had to leave that, and had to break out and decide I didn't want to know Him like the average church member does. I don't want to be critical of average church members, but there are people who are coming and just sitting on pews on Sunday mornings. But they don't integrate Him into their lives. It's like adding Him to your life, but He's not your life.

I wanted more than that, so I had to leave that. When I stepped into ministry, the traditional role of women in my family had been that women stayed home and took care of children. The husband and father would go out and serve the Lord. Although my grandmother, my mother's mother, was a nurse and ran a women's hospital in China, but she was there to support my granddaddy, who was a surgeon and ran a big hospital. I had to step out and answer God's call on my life, and they resisted that because it was so different than the traditional role in our family. But as soon as they saw what I was doing, they experienced a complete about-face and they've been completely supportive and encouraging since. But it was something I had to take a break from. They came along, but if I had waited for them to give their approval, I might still be waiting. So I had to take a break from that. I think there are other things women in ministry face, but you just have to answer God's call on your life and go for it.

I thought it was very transparent of you to share about that aspect of your life and ministry. You made a statement early in the book that you were homesick for God as you had known Him as a child. Can you talk more about that?

Anne: When I was a child, I asked Jesus to come into my heart. I don't remember the year. I was 7,8 or 9. For whatever reason, I immediately fell in love with him and that first year, I read the Bible all the way through from cover to cover and loved His Word. I loved Him.

Then I went through some things as a child, hard things, that I think God used. My mother was so wise to tell me to look through the hard things and find Jesus right there. She encouraged me to let him have my life when things were happening that I didn't like and that hurt, unhappy things, and find that He was greater than that.

My mother was in love with Jesus, and I saw that in her. It was contagious. Just like Agnes Wetherill Johnson (of BSF), who was in love with Jesus too. You could just see it and feel it. I had that relationship with him and it was everything to me. I never intended or looked to get married. I didn't want to go to college, I just wanted to model. It was very superficial.

But then I met Danny Lotz, and I believe to this day that God brought him into my life at that time. I never doubted for a moment that he was God's choice for me. We've been married for 43 years this fall. When we got married, he filled my life for a while. Then you have children, and in the busyness, Jesus, whom you used to love, winds up on the periphery. I almost had a sense that He was there, asking, "Anne, what happened?" It's like in a close friendship when other things have crowded Him out.

I remember lying awake at night and crying in my spirit for that relationship. My sweet husband, he could feel it and asked, "Anne, why can't I make you happy?" He was so good to me and did so many things for me. But I couldn't explain it. It wasn't anything anybody could do, because I had a heart's cry for God, a longing. Then God was so good and He brought to my attention my mother, who was so in love with Jesus. She would say she could look back and see times of depression in her life, but I never saw it.

What I saw was somebody that was in the Bible every day. She had this flattop desk with several Bible translations on it, and every moment she could, she read from the Bible. At night if I went down to her room, she was on her knees, and you might as well not talk to her because she was in prayer. I knew that her relationship was developed through prayer and Bible reading, but I didn't have the discipline to do it. I had three small children and I was tired.

Then somebody told me about Bible Study Fellowship and I saw that it was broken up into days. That was what I needed so I could stay in the Word and have Mother's discipline to get into the Word and have that love relationship with Jesus. Nobody would start or teach the class and I was so desperate for that relationship in my life that I said, "I'll do it." I had no idea that it would be like taking on a full-time job. It was very successful from the get-go because I'm convinced that so very many people in church have that longing for God. We immediately had 500 women with a waiting list.

In the 12 years I taught, I never missed the class because I wanted everything He had for me. The women came and the class turned over three or four times. We'd fill up a class with 500 women and have another waiting list. We spun off classes and they were all at capacity. We have other classes, not just BSF, but class of 800 – 1000 people who want to know God.

Then He called me to leave, to go out into the world, because my goal is to know Him. It wasn't to teach the Bible class. That was a means to an end. I used that to keep myself in His word and to develop that love relationship. So when He called me out, I left the class. I left the class to go into the world and do ministry because I wanted to be where He was.

Very quickly I got so busy that I came very close to losing that love for Him in all the busyness. But He quickly brought me up short and said, "Anne, you need to repent." It's no good in serving and doing as much as I was doing if I lost the love relationship. So I repented and go back into His word. There have been times I've come close to losing it again in the busyness and the hecticness and the wild chaos, but I never do, because if it was ever lost I think I would wither up and blow away. It's so interwoven into who I am that if I didn't have that, I just would be nothing.

It's not just knowing I'm saved, serving Him and going to heaven, but it's an intimate relationship of knowing Him in the hard places. That's what makes life worth living, and it's what it's about. The Bible says that if we draw near to Him, and He will draw near to us. If you have a longing for God, it's just a shadow of His longing for you. That's the punch line at the end of the book: you're His magnificent obsession. He's left everything, heaven's throne and heaven's glory, because He was pursuing you.

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