John Himes: My name is John Himes—John Rice Himes. I’ll mention that a little later. I’m a professor at Baptist College of Ministry.
Before that, my wife and I were missionaries to Japan for thirty-three years. Before that, I was a single guy who met my wife on deputation. But when I was eighteen, I learned something very unusual: I had a grandpa.
His name was John R. Rice, and I was named after him, John Rice Himes. He was Grandpa.
That’s all he was to me. I knew he’d written a few books and preached around the country, but at age eighteen, I went off to college and learned that my grandfather was pretty famous—a lot more famous than I had thought. I remember one guy came to my room and saw a picture of my grandfather on my dresser in my college room.
He said, “I hear that John Rice is your grandfather.” I said, “Yes, that’s true.” And he said, “Can you prove it? You’ve got to prove who your grandfather is.” So I said, “Well, yeah, I can prove it.” I got out a New Testament that he had given me, which said, “To our beloved grandson on his fourteenth birthday,” from my grandmother and grandfather.
“Oh, well, I guess that’s true.” So I was plunged into this world where all of a sudden my grandfather was famous. I remember another guy used to introduce me to everyone: “This is John Rice’s grandson.” He never said what my name was. Of course, that’s a little bit discouraging.
You know, I’m here too. As I went on in college, my grandfather came to speak there, and I heard more about him and learned more about him. John Rice was an evangelist, born in 1896 and died in 1980.
In the meantime, he wrote over two hundred books. Some of those were bestsellers, such as his book Prayer—Asking and Receiving, which has sold somewhere around six hundred thousand, I believe. His bestseller was A Little Book on Heaven, which has sold over seven hundred thousand volumes.
The main thing about John Rice was that he thought soul winning was the main thing, and he believed revival was something we lived every day. To John Rice, revival was not something you called up; it’s something you carried with you. You lived every day walking with Jesus Christ.
I had the privilege after college to go and live with him for a year while I prepared to go to Japan, while I applied to the mission board and so forth. I have many good memories of that time. He was a horseman from way back.
He was actually a Texas cowboy before he became famous, before he went off to college, and he rode a Texas cow pony to college. That’s how he got to college. Well, he loved horses, and in my year with him, he had a bunch of horses on the ranch, on the farm.
He had a farm and six or eight horses. I remember going riding horses with him. What a wonderful time.
We’d ride all around the forty-six acres of that farm. I remember on the way back, my horse was particularly eager to get back to the barn and the oats that he had waiting for him. So he started to trot, and Grandpa said, “Now, Johnny, slow down.
Let’s not get ahead of things.” He had a great big horse, General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur III, named after General MacArthur, and we called him Mac for short. It was a beautiful Tennessee walking horse. Again, he was just Grandpa to me.
But he also had a paper called The Sword of the Lord that went out at that time to something like two hundred thousand preachers and believers all around the country. He had influence in many different areas—not just fundamentalism, but influence among the Southern Baptists, and he still had influence among evangelicals. A lot of people bought his books still.
My brother was down in Alabama during the 1970s doing work to gain equality of the races, and he stayed with a Black preacher down there. He looked and saw on the shelves of that Black preacher’s library in his church books by John R. Rice.
He said to the man, “That’s my grandfather.” The man said, “Oh, he’s been such a blessing to me. I thank God for your grandfather.” So he had such a wide area of influence, yet I never knew that until I went off to college. I remember living with him in that year and actually living on his property after that for a couple more years—three more years, actually—till I went to Japan.
I remember sitting on the couch one day as he came in from my left side, from the carport. He always had a Pontiac, got out of his Pontiac, came into the house, and didn’t even notice me. There I am, his grandson, sitting there.
But he was talking to someone, and as he walked by me, I heard him say, “Now, dear Jesus, you know I need help in this thing.” He was praying all the time. He was a prayer warrior. He was an evangelist, always seeing people saved, always longing to see people saved.
Towards the end of his life, he said in a message he still preached right up until shortly before he died, “I still imagine preaching to thousands and seeing hundreds saved in my memory.” And he did have times like that. He was so greatly used of God, and things I never knew before until I grew up showed me how greatly he was used of God.
To this day, people come up to me and are thrilled to know that I’m the grandson of John Rice. I long ago got used to that. I decided if it blesses people, all right, then let them know.
In fact, sometimes I tell people ahead of time so they don’t embarrass themselves if they didn’t like him. And I have met a few people that didn’t like him, because when you follow Jesus, not everyone’s going to like you. But that’s okay.
If Jesus likes me and likes what I’m doing, if I have the love of Jesus towards me and in my heart for others, what more is there? I said he was an evangelist. He was what we call a revivalist, meaning he promoted revival all over America and indeed all over the world.
By that I mean he taught people what revival meant. He taught people to win souls. He taught people to walk in prayer.
Let me just close by saying, recently I was looking in one of his books, and I read about a special meeting. He had a citywide campaign with a bunch of churches cooperating. He said they began to pray and ended up, without realizing it, praying all night.
The next day and throughout that week, hundreds were brought to Jesus Christ. Do you have revival in your heart? Take it with you like John Rice did.
