Billy Graham Sermon Notes: Where to Find Them (+ How to Make Your Own)
Billy Graham (1918–2018) preached in person to more people than anyone in history — an estimated 215 million across some 185 countries, alongside decades of radio and television. He held crusades from 1947 until his final one in 2005, and served as a counsellor to a long line of American presidents.
For a note-taker, the striking thing about a Graham sermon is how little there is to write down, and how deliberate that was. The vocabulary is plain, the structure is simple, the illustrations are ordinary, and the phrase 'the Bible says' recurs constantly — by some counts more than a hundred times in a single message. He was not preaching to be studied. He was preaching to be decided about, usually by people hearing a sermon for the first time in a stadium.
That makes his sermons unusually valuable to study for a different reason than most preachers: not for depth of exposition, but as a masterclass in clarity under pressure. This guide covers where the archive lives, and how to take notes on preaching whose whole design is to be un-note-worthy.
Where to find official Billy Graham sermon notes
Graham's material is held and published by the ministry he founded and by an academic archive:
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association
The BGEA hosts an extensive archive of crusade messages in audio and video, along with written articles and devotional material. This is the primary official source and much of it is free.
The Billy Graham Library and Archive
The Charlotte library and the associated archival collections hold crusade records, correspondence, and message material — the right destination for serious historical research rather than casual listening.
His published books
'Peace with God' (1953) is the closest thing to his crusade sermon in book form, and 'Just As I Am' is his autobiography. Both are more accessible than hunting individual sermon manuscripts.
A note on copyright: Billy Graham's sermons and any official notes remain the intellectual property of Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Everything below is about making notes for your own study — not about republishing the ministry's content.
How to create your own sermon notes from any Billy Graham sermon
For any individual Graham message, here is the workflow — and note that the goal here is different from most preachers on this site:
Get the audio
Pull a crusade message from the BGEA archive. Prefer a full crusade recording over a broadcast excerpt if you want to see the whole structure, including the invitation, which is where the sermon is actually going.
Transcribe it
Upload the audio and get the full text in minutes. Older crusade recordings vary in quality — mono, stadium reverb, and 1950s equipment all show up — so expect to correct a few proper nouns afterwards.
Transcribe the sermonCount the scripture citations
Run the transcript through the scripture reference extractor. The density and repetition of 'the Bible says' is the single most distinctive feature of his method, and seeing it counted is more instructive than reading about it.
Extract every referenceMap it against the invitation
Work backwards from the appeal at the end. Every element in a Graham sermon is aimed at that moment, and the structure only makes sense read in reverse.
The Reverse-Engineer Method
Start at the invitation and work backwards
Standard note formats do not serve this preaching well, because the content is intentionally thin. Take notes on the mechanics instead — one page, four bands:
Write the invitation down first, in his words. Everything before it exists to make that request reasonable, so it is the key to the whole outline.
List every objection or hesitation he anticipates and answers on the way. Graham is constantly clearing obstacles between the hearer and a decision.
Note the sentence he returns to — often a scripture tag or 'the Bible says'. Count the repetitions. Repetition is doing the work that complexity does elsewhere.
State the sermon in a single sentence a child could repeat. If you cannot, you have missed it, because he was making sure a stadium could.
Tip: Do this with three different crusade sermons from three different decades and the template becomes obvious. That is the point of the exercise — you are learning a method, not collecting content.
Study tips for Billy Graham's preaching
Study the simplicity as a discipline, not a limitation
It is easy to mistake plainness for shallowness. Preaching to a mixed stadium audience in language everyone can follow, without condescending, is considerably harder than preaching complexity to the committed — and worth analysing on those terms.
Notice what he leaves out
There is very little on secondary doctrine, denominational distinctives, or politics from the pulpit. Tracking the omissions tells you as much about his method as the content does.
Compare an early crusade with a late one
The 1950s and the 1990s messages differ noticeably in tone and cultural reference while keeping the same skeleton. Reading them side by side is a good lesson in what to update and what to leave alone.
Frequently asked questions
Are Billy Graham's sermon notes or manuscripts available?+
Where can I listen to Billy Graham sermons?+
What made Billy Graham's preaching effective?+
How many people heard Billy Graham preach?+
Transcribe any sermon free
Studying a preacher's method starts with having the text. Transcribe any message and see the structure on the page. Your first full sermon is free — no credit card to start, then $19/month for unlimited sermons.
Start Transcribing FreeThen turn the transcript into notes with the free sermon outline generator.
Want the bigger picture on Billy Graham's ministry and most notable messages? See our Billy Graham sermon archive guide in the Famous Sermons library.
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