Instead of posting a long obituary following the death of its founder, In Touch Ministries (founded by Baptist preacher Charles Stanley) instead pointed readers to Stanley’s personal website, which gave them his final sermon:
Obey God and leave all the consequences to Him.
Life goes by quickly – very quickly.
And many people today who are in heaven or hell intended to live a lot longer than they did.
They didn’t make any plans to die. They only had plans to live and enjoy themselves.
So I want to ask you: What are you living for? What’s your goal in life? Do you have any real purpose for living?
God says we ought to be living to worship and to serve Him.
Because that, my friend, is life at its best.
Stanley found his “real purpose for living” at age 14 when he accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior and Lord at a Pentecostal church. After being mentored by his grandfather (also a pastor), Stanley earned degrees in theology and preached at several churches in several states before landing, finally and permanently, at the First Baptist Church of Atlanta in 1969 at age 37.
His preaching drove the church membership from 5,000 to 15,000. Its winsome simplicity led him to found In Touch Ministries, which now broadcasts his messages on 500 radio stations, 200 television stations, and several satellite networks. Together that media allowed Stanley’s simple message of salvation through Christ to reach an astonishing 115 million homes every week, in more than 120 countries, in over 127 different languages.
The impact of his ministry is being compared to that of Billy Graham.
Conservatives remember him for helping found both the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition in the 1980s, and especially for taking on liberals at the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) who were seeking to dilute the message of Christ.
When he was first elected president of the SBC in 1985, he noted in his autobiography:
My election infuriated the opposition and ultimately revealed many of the underlying problems that had existed in the convention for a long time but had either been ignored or denied.
All the liberal and moderate political forces of the Southern Baptist Convention were against me, which included seminary presidents and state convention newspapers.
He succeeded in stopping congregations from ordaining women. He was elected for a second one-year term the following year after appointing numerous conservatives to various positions in the convention.
As Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, noted: “After Stanley’s election[s], the battle subsided and … the moderates moved away from the fight or away from the denomination.”
One of those involved in the fight between liberalism and Christianity was Stanley’s son, Andy. He left his father’s church to found his own based on his own liberal interpretation of the Scriptures, and now pastors a megachurch called Northpoint Ministries, with eight locations in Atlanta and its suburbs.
Said Stanley when he announced his retirement as senior pastor at First Baptist in 2020:
I’ll continue to preach the gospel as long as God allows, and my goal remains the same: to get the truth of the gospel to as many people as possible as quickly as possible in the power of the Holy Spirit to the glory of God.
When he was asked if he feared death as he approached age 82, he answered:
No, I don’t, for the simple reason that God makes it clear in his Word: “Absent from the body, present with the Lord,” for those of us who know Christ as Savior.
And the fact that Jesus died at Calvary, and His blood shed for us paid our sin debt in full, there is no reason to fear death.
So, I don’t.
When asked what advice he would give to his six surviving grandchildren, he repeated once again the advice he so often gave in his sermons: “Obey God and leave all the consequences to Him.”
