Elaboración de personajes, animales y accesorios

It was the morning of his seventeenth birthday, and Lester Sumrall was dying. After months of lying in a sickbed with tuberculosis, he had reached his end. Everyone agreed that his life was ending. The coughing that racked his lungs was out of control. His pillow, splattered with blood from his spasms throughout the long night, was a witness to his shattered life.

This fateful day, February 15, 1930, was a day of days. The ninety-three-pound, emaciated young man began to cough up blobs of tissue that the doctor declared were part of his lungs. Shaking his head in defeat, the doctor entered Lester’s room for the last time.

“In two hours, your boy will be dead,” he said gravely to George and Betty Sumrall. “That’s the death rattle in his throat right now, and that bluishness in his face means he’s not getting enough blood to his brain for his body to live. He’s going to die tonight.”88

The doctor left the Sumrall house and went back to his office to write out Lester’s death

certificate. He left the exact time of death blank, knowing it was just an administrative detail easy to attend to. George Sumrall would need to pick up the death certificate first thing in the morning so that he could go and buy a burial plot for his son.

George Sumrall was a rough man who hardly believed in God and definitely didn’t believe in the power of prayer. He left his son’s deathbed with a mixture of grief and anger. Betty Sumrall was the opposite. A firm believer in the power of Jesus Christ to save and heal, she was not ready to give up her son. She stayed by Lester’s bedside, crying and praying for God to intervene and save her boy’s life.

As the night grew darker, Lester became more frightened. Was this the end of his life at just

seventeen years of age? O God, he didn’t want to die. Lying in pain on the bed, Lester turned to face the wall. Suddenly, he blinked his eyes and found himself staring at a vision of a coffin suspended in midair, open, and leaning toward him. The inside walls were lined with a white, silky material prepared for a body just his size. He knew that the coffin was meant for him.

Turning his head the other way in fear, Lester saw another vision, this one of practically the biggest Bible imaginable. It stretched from the ceiling to the floor with huge letters on its pages. As Lester stared in amazement, he heard God speak to his heart, “Tonight, you will choose that coffin or that book. I want you to preach My Word or tonight you will die.”89

Lester had run from the thought of being a preacher his entire young life, but there was no way that he wanted to die. So, he took God at His word and agreed, saying, “God, if the only way in the world for me to live is to preach, then I’ll preach.” After Lester spoke his willingness to submit, something opened up inside of his heart. He turned to God, cried for the forgiveness of his sins, and asked Jesus Christ to save him.

creation in Christ. He was still a boy full of questions and quarrels, but he now belonged to the King of Kings. He fell asleep a terminally sick teenager and woke up the next morning completely healed!

“Mama, please get me some breakfast,” were Lester’s first words the next morning. His mother could hardly believe her ears and tried to talk him out of eating. Then, thinking she was giving him his last meal, Mama Sumrall went and filled a breakfast plate for Lester. He cleaned his plate with no problem and startled his mother with his next statement: “Mama, you don’t need that doctor no more. I’m healed, and I’m going to be a preacher.”90 With eyes full of tears and a heart full of joy, Lester’s mother praised the living God. Her heart’s desires had been answered. Her boy was saved,

miraculously healed, and called to preach!

God’s Missionary Giant

For this poor, Southern boy growing up near the beaches of Pensacola, Florida, the dramatic summons to preach would become a resounding call that would reach around the world with the message of Jesus Christ. Lester Sumrall’s ministry would span almost the entire twentieth century. He became a missionary who was sold out to Jesus and the salvation message alone, and his

compassionate journeys took him to 110 countries and a thousand cities to spread the life-changing gospel of salvation through Jesus Christ.

Through his years of ministry, Lester saw the Lord move in powerful ways and touch the world with His Holy Spirit.

He wrote,

I have been in every move of God throughout the entire twentieth century. I grew up in the

aftermath of the Pentecostal move of God [beginning with the Azusa Street revival]. After World War II, I saw the Latter Rain movement….After that the Healing revival [with the huge tent ministries] of which I was very much a part. Then I saw the Charismatic revival and the Word of Faith movement that followed. I endorsed it and became a part of that flow of the Spirit of God. I am now ready for the last outpouring of God on the face of the earth!91

More than a voice to the multitudes, Lester Sumrall was a genuine father of the faith to many young preachers of the gospel—including this author when I was a young pastor. I first saw Lester Sumrall in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at one of Billy Joe Daugherty’s Word Explosion conferences. Years later, I finally met him face-to-face while traveling in Europe. At that meeting, he gruffly said, “I’m eating breakfast at 7:30; you should be there.” The next morning, after breakfast, he blurted out, “I live in South Bend. You should come visit me.” I really didn’t know if this was a serious invitation or merely polite conversation. Six weeks later, however, I received a call from Sumrall’s secretary, who said, “We were wondering where you were. Dr. Sumrall had said you would be visiting.” I told her of my impression that Dr. Sumrall was only being polite. She replied, “Dr. Sumrall doesn’t say polite things.” Thus began my relationship with this great hero of the faith. He was my spiritual father and mentor for many years, always providing bold words of encouragement and strength as I grew in service to the Lord. His story and life stand as a shining example of Christian leadership, sacrifice, and devotion.

As a boy, Lester Sumrall was the last kid on the block whom you would have expected to become a preacher. His father was a rough, fighting man, brawny and blustery, and Lester wanted to be just like him. Betty Sumrall was a courageous Christian woman who had been saved and filled with the Holy Spirit long before she married her husband. She abandoned the call to be a missionary to marry George Sumrall, her sister’s widowed husband, and take care of his four children. She spent her days praying that her children would pick up the gauntlet and take the gospel to the lost.

Lester Frank Sumrall was born on February 15, 1913, the sixth child in a home that already seemed to have too many children. His father told him on more than one occasion that he really wasn’t wanted. Still, there were three more children born to his parents after he was.

In spite of his father’s cold attitude, Lester longed to be strong and mean, just like he was. If there was a brawl in the school yard, Lester was in the middle of it. If there was a financial need in the family, Lester would find something to sell or someone to bully in order to get the money. If there was a pastor’s kid who needed to be “taught a lesson,” Lester was happy to oblige with all the scorn he felt for preachers and their families. And throughout each reckless activity, Mama Sumrall prayed faithfully for God to use her hardheaded son to preach His message of salvation to the ends of the earth.

Prayer Warriors

When he walked into the living room every morning, Lester would find the Ladies’ Prayer Group that met in his home each day. These long-skirted women with modest hairstyles and no makeup were firebrands of the faith. They called down the blessings of heaven as they prayed for the needs of the church, their families, their neighbors, and the world. It was through their faith and prayers that Lester Sumrall first saw the power of the Holy Spirit to heal.

As a boy, Lester had a vitamin deficiency disease called pellagra. Once thought to be a kind of leprosy, the condition caused burning lesions, first on his skin and then throughout his digestive system, making it nearly impossible for him to eat. His skin was excruciatingly painful to the touch. The doctor declared the disease fatal, but the Ladies’ Prayer Group had something to say about that! After they laid hands on Lester and lifted their cries to heaven daily, Lester was completely healed.92

A couple of years later, Mama Sumrall was diagnosed with an open, bleeding cancer in her breast. Medical help was very limited, and the doctors were unsure what to do, but nothing limited the hand of God. Mama knew the answer—she was an “unrelenting prayer warrior,” and so she prayed to a powerful God who answers the cries of His children.

One night, as she was praying, she had a vision of Jesus entering her bedroom and touching her. At the breakfast table the next morning, she announced, “Jesus came into my room last night, and I am healed.”93 Lester’s father grunted in disapproval, but, just three days later, Mama came out of her bedroom with a glob of human tissue sitting on her bandages. Lester never forgot what it looked like. It had a round center and tendrils extending from it. It was the cancerous tumor, and it was out of her body!

Mama Sumrall had gone to the Lord with her childlike faith, and He had answered her with a tremendous healing. She served the Lord for forty-five more years before joining Him in heaven!

A Dropout with an Attitude

In spite of his mother’s prayers and the miraculous deliverances he saw around him, Lester determined to avoid God. Even though he attended church services with his mother, he shared his father’s opinion that all preachers were parasites who lived off of others.

Lester dropped out of high school at age sixteen and spent his days fishing and looking for ways to make easy money. It was then that the tuberculosis struck with a vengeance. After months of trying to fight the disease, Lester neared his untimely end. At the brink of death and discovery, he experienced the visions of the coffin and the huge Bible and made the choice that would change his life forever. Lester’s instantaneous and complete healing from tuberculosis firmly established his belief in a God who heals today.

George Sumrall was happy that his son was healed but not certain how it had come about. He was excited about Lester’s natural ability to do well in business and assumed that he would resume

earning money for the family’s needs. Yet, three weeks after his miraculous healing, Lester heard the Lord say once again, “You need to preach My Word!”

With determination, Lester went to his strong-willed father and explained that he would be leaving home to preach the gospel. He believed that obeying God was the only thing that would keep him alive! Furious, his father roared at his “stupidity,” forbade him to leave, and stomped out of the house. With tears in his eyes, Lester ran up to his room and pleaded with the Lord for an answer to this

conflict. Should he obey his earthly father or follow the call from God? The Lord answered Lester’s prayer with a Scripture. It would be the first of hundreds of times throughout his life that the Lord would use His direct Word to give Lester Sumrall guidance and direction.

Isaiah 41:10 made a lasting impression on Lester’s heart. It reads, “Fear thou not; for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.” “Okay, Lord,” Lester replied. “If You’re with me, I’m ready to go.”94 With God’s clear assurance, Lester packed a small bag of his belongings and

prepared to leave.

Kissing his tearful mother good-bye was difficult, but he knew that he had to go. “You prayed for years that I’d be a preacher. Now that I’m going to do it, you’re still crying,” he told her.95 He let his mother know with grim determination that he would not return to his home. He was going out to

preach for God and would stay out there, doing God’s will, for the rest of his life.

Nothing could have prepared that skinny, seventeen-year-old boy for the adventures that God had in store for him over the next sixty-six years of his life!

Indifferent toward the Lost

Remember how Jonah refused to go to Nineveh because he didn’t want the people of that city to be saved? Even though Lester was moving out in God’s call, he didn’t really care about the lost people of the world. He was willing to preach the Word, as he had heard men of God do since he was a small boy, but whether the people responded or not hardly meant a thing to him.

come along for the adventure. This young man would also help to lead the praise services before Lester preached. Where should we go? they wondered.

After their first day of driving along northern Florida’s rural roads, they saw an old, empty schoolhouse in a field. Searching the fields nearby for anyone who knew something about the

building, Lester found the farmer who owned it. He asked the man for the use of the schoolhouse to preach. Reluctantly, the farmer reached into his dirty overalls and pulled out a set of keys. With a grin, Lester informed the man that he would be preaching there that evening, and he invited him to come.

Lester was on a mission to satisfy God’s commission to him. Exactly eight farmers arrived at the schoolhouse that first night to hear the skinny, teenaged boy preach the gospel. But the farmers came for sport and ridicule; they laughed at the testimony of his healing and thought he was making up the stories!96 What am I doing here? Lester asked himself.

Surprisingly, the second night, forty people arrived early at the schoolhouse and waited outside the door. They wanted to hear the entertaining, storytelling preacher. So, for several nights, Lester kept telling his story of salvation and healing, and, each night, more people came to hear it. Soon, they stopped laughing at his message and started listening to the gospel of salvation from the Word of God.

Although Lester still cared very little about them, people were coming to the altar each night to receive Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. In his indifference toward the lost, Lester would give the altar call and then walk out the door, not waiting to pray with any person or even to see who had come to the altar to repent. He was preaching to stay alive—it was merely part of his agreement with God. And, as far as he was concerned, the consequences of his preaching were totally up to God.

After Lester had conducted six weeks of revival services, the newly saved began asking for water baptism. More than sixty people walked to the local creek and were baptized by the skinny “Little Preacher,” as they called him.97 Recalling what he had seen other ministers do in the past, Lester baptized these people in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and they began to walk in the newness of life. Still, for this now eighteen-year-old preacher, it was as though he performed on a stage, somehow separated from the reality of the hearts and lives changing around him. He just watched as God took care of the people who were drawn to the gospel.

Traveling throughout Florida, Louisiana, and Tennessee, Lester continued to preach with ferocious zeal in every church that invited him but felt no compassion for those who came to hear. He was angry and disgusted with them more often than he was friendly and warm.

The Roadway to Hell Then, one night, all of that changed.

A full-scale revival was going on in a small schoolhouse in rural Tennessee, where Lester was preaching. The service began, and joyful praises were rising to the Lord in swinging harmony. Suddenly, the scene in front of Lester dramatically changed. He was no longer sitting in the schoolroom or aware of anyone or anything around him.

was a vision that he would share with millions of people around the globe for the rest of his life. With his eyes wide open, Lester saw a great highway filled with the peoples of the world. Every nation was represented. He saw them dressed in the colorful, native costumes of their individual countries, walking in one stream of humanity. Japanese, Chinese, Africans, Europeans, Americans, and others all were walking quickly along the road together. Lester realized that he was seeing the highway of life.

In the vision, he rose with the Holy Spirit above the crowded highway and traveled to the end of it. What he saw next was fearful and life changing. Before him was a “raging, bottomless inferno that looked like a blazing volcano. This vast procession of people marched to the edge and then fell screaming into the eternal flames. As they neared the pit and saw their fate, they struggled in vain, trying to push back against the unrelenting march of those behind them. The great surging river of