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4.5 Experimental study
My way of preaching now is not much different from that of the years of my tent ministry. My guidance was that after I got the facts and themes of the sermon together, I was to make it into story form as much as possible. It wasn't just a story I told. It was a story I lived in my spirit so that as I preached in story form, I would take the listeners with me and they could see and feel what I was talking about.
I was never a preacher who used many adjectives. I laced my messages with verbs and adverbs. I think I did that because as I paid attention to the Bible and read and studied it, I saw that it's not so much a description as it is taking the reader on a trip with God. You can see and feel and touch and be touched by the supernatural power of God. The Bible puts you there. I know that it got hold of me, filling my senses, making me come alive spiritually, and causing my inner man to stand up inside. The Bible account had a powerful effect on me.
That may be why when my healing ministry began at age twenty-nine, I developed sermons such as "The Fourth Man," "Samson and Delilah—Battle of Champions," "You Can't Go Under for Going Over," "Deliverance from Demon Possession," "A Man's Life," "Holding the Rope," "The Point of Contact," "Expect a Miracle," "The Miracle of Seed-Faith," "Running Faster than You Can Run,"
"David and Bathsheba," "The Drama of the End Time," and many others.
In my healing crusades, many people came for more than the healing lines or the prospect of getting healed. I'd been able to build my sermons so that each one was almost a drama in itself. A crowd of ten thousand or twenty thousand immediately got with me because I had no lead-ins to tell to relax the people.
From the first word out of my mouth, it was "go"—and the people knew we were going to take a journey that night until we reached the climax that often had the people on the edge of their seats.
For example, one night in 1951 during my first Los Angeles crusade, my sermon was "Samson and Delilah—Battle of Champions." I came to the place where the blinded Samson, now repentant and restored from his backsliding, had been led by his enemies from prison into the heathen temple of Dagon where they set him between two pillars. With three thousand lords and ladies of the Philistines there, mocking and jeering at Samson and his God, they dared him to pull the temple down. They were not aware that after Samson's repentance, God had restored his supernatural strength. But Samson knew. He could feel it surging through every fiber of his being.
At that point in the service, I became Samson, and I placed my arms around one of the tent quarter poles that was on the platform to help support the big tent. I told of Samson praying these words in the midst of the mocking crowd: "0 Lord God, remember me. Remember me just this once. Let me pull the temple of my enemies down."
I told of how the jeering stopped, and a hush came over that great gathering of the Philistine leaders. They heard the desperate cry of Samson and felt something sweeping toward them. The mighty power of God had entered the sightless Samson, now God's champion again. Putting his arms around the two columns that supported the weight of the huge temple of Dagon, the false god, Samson made a move of his shoulders and the columns began to move. With my arms wrapped around the tent pole, I shook it. A pastor seated nearby cried out,
"Look out everybody, he's going to pull this tent down!"
It snapped the people's attention from the temple of Dagon to the tent of Oral Roberts, and suddenly, a nervous laugh broke out. It took me several minutes to refocus the attention of the people on the point I was trying to make: Can a human being who has fallen come back to God again?
People later said they could almost feel the tent being pulled down as Samson was pulling the temple down three thousand years before. In the final minutes of the sermon, I told of Samson Pulling the temple down. The roof sagged, the columns crumpled, and down came the huge building on the screaming lords and ladies. I acted out pulling the stones off Samson, and I leaned down with my microphone close enough to carry a whisper. I had Samson saying, "My soul has seen the glory of the Lord," and then I recited the words in the Bible account: "So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life" (Judg. 16:50).
That sermon, with the anointing all over me, never failed to cause hundreds of the unsaved to leap up from their chairs and rush forward for me to lead them to repeat the sinner's prayer and to believe on the Lord Jesus and be restored to God and the right path of life.
In those beginning years, I was laying the groundwork to make every service, no matter what area of the Bible I covered, become a living story, one that took the listeners there so they would come face-to-face with the God of the "now."
And only the anointing of the Holy Spirit upon me could enable that to occur.
Can the ordinary Christian experience God's anointing? Yes! No one is more ordinary than I am. I believe every one of us can experience the special portion of His anointing that God has for us if we understand it is for us, if we want it and believe for it, and if we always remember it is God who anoints. God does the mighty work, and He will not share His glory with any person.
It would scare me spitless if I thought for one moment that any miracle of healing or any other miraculous deed came because I have something in myself. I know that I do not. I must do my part and always trust God, but He alone does the miracle deed. And what mighty miracles He does! There are so many that I would like to share—enough to fill this book many times. God showed His mighty power again and again in our healing tent and auditorium crusades, and He still does today through this ministry. Let me share with you one of the greatest
miracles that happened in the midst of the greatest unbelief, and one of the most unlikely miracles ever to happen.
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