Preliminaries

REMEMBER THIS miracle as if it happened yesterday. The setting for it could not have been more difficult. The faith of a little boy, Douglass Sutton

—in the midst of the heaviest unbelief I'd ever encountered in a large audience—shone through like a sunrise.

I

We had rented the biggest facility in the area, a B-29 hangar, in which we could seat nearly ten thousand and have room for several thousand more to stand. A healing crusade had never come to Goldsboro, a tobacco city in eastern North Carolina. When the newspapers announced I was coming for a sixteen-day crusade, the news spread like wildfire.

News stories planted doubt about healing being possible today as it was reported occurring in the days of Jesus and the early Christians. They say ignorance is bliss. Fortunately, I was ignorant of those reports before I arrived. I had been informed, however, that fewer than ten local and area pastors dared to sponsor the crusade and risk their reputation with the public.

In spite of all those happenings, when the doors opened the first night and I was driven up to the building, thousands of cars were parked around the hangar and at least a half mile down the runways.

I've always loved a full house. I never saw an empty seat converted or healed.

I was excited when I walked in and saw every seat filled. There was a balconylike platform behind and high above the Platform from where I preached, and I saw that it was jammed.

"This is going to be a great crusade," I whispered to the chairman of the crusade, Pastor W. W. Thomas of the Assemblies of God. "Yes," he said,

"excitement has been building. I've never known such interest in healing or a crowd this size coming together like this."

The sponsoring committee and I met behind stage, joined hands, and prayed.

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Then I heard myself being introduced, and I rushed up the steps to greet the people.

I did the greeting; they did the staring. "What is Oral Roberts like?" had been the talk of the area.

I knew instinctively I was in hostile territory. It was instantly clear to my spirit the battle lines had been drawn. There were thousands of them, but only one of me along with my crusade team of seven and a few local pastors who dared to stand up for what Jesus was and what He did while He was on earth and what He would do again today if He could find faith in enough people.

When I hit the stage and stood before the microphone, I felt those thousands become as one powerful doubting person. I knew it would take a miracle of undeniable reality that all could see to have even a chance of turning the tide.

Much of the hope for that miracle, and others, depended solely on my preaching the Word of God. The Word of God flowing through the words of my mouth had to take the people out of their present spiritual setting, that of hostility and unbelief, into the very heart of the living Christ. Whatever I read to them from the Bible had to be made familiar to them, so they could feel it was meant for their time, for the "now" of their existence on this earth.

I couldn't just tell stories out of the Bible I held in my hands. I had to paint a picture from it that they could see and feel and smell. There in the Bible Belt of the South I knew God had given every one of them "the measure of faith" (Rom.

12:3). But their faith had to be ignited by the Word of God: "How shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? ... Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God" (Rom.

10:14, 17).

At that moment before them, all I had to stand on was the Word of God, the call of God upon my life, and the anointing. I knew, however, in the deepest part of me that if I had the courage to preach to them, my Savior would work through me to win souls and heal the sick as Mark said, "And they went forth, and preached every where, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following" (Mark 16:20). The Word would be confirmed if I preached it that first evening, no matter the present attitude of that great audience.

Usually when a preacher preaches, he can feel a response or a reaction from the people. On that night, I saw people sitting with their arms crossed and a look of "show me" on their faces.

The fact of facts is that faith comes by hearing, and hearing comes as the gospel is preached by one anointed by the Holy Spirit, who expects the Word of God he preaches to be confirmed with signs following—miracles of healing and other acts of human deliverance from sin, disease, demons, fear, financial need, frustrations, and inner conflicts.

The promise in the Bible is that when the Word, that is, the full Word, is preached, God will confirm or reveal it with signs that follow. A miracle, or a healing by faith, is one of these confirma-tional signs.

I believed the Word of God implicitly. I had no doubt of it whatsoever. Already

during the first two and a half years of my healing ministry I had seen thousands of those miraculous signs of confirmation of His Word preached by me. His presence coming in my hand, as He had spoken to me, was as real as my very being.

At Goldsboro, I did not give up. I sincerely and boldly preached with everything I had in me, praying that something would break, one way or another, before long.

Nothing broke until the fifth night. As the people in the heal-ing line moved slowly toward me while I sat in a chair on the platform, I was praying with all my compassion and faith for each one. The sweat was pouring off me, even though it was December and very little heat was in the building other than that of the bodies of several thousand people. Over and over it came to me that my Savior knew about sweat, even to the point that His sweat became mixed with His blood in the Garden of Gethsemane.

I looked to my left to the people coming in the healing line. About ten people away were a mother and her son, who looked to e eleven or twelve years old. He was on crutches, with one leg lifted and supported in a brace that w a s strapped to his shoulder.

As Luke said of the Virgin Mary when her cousin Elizabeth's "baby leaped in her womb," faith leaped in my spirit that the confirmation of the Word I had preached was about to happen. I could scarcely wait to pray for the little fellow. I didn't know what was wrong, but my faith was saying Jesus of Nazareth was about to make it right. A mighty healing was about to happen.

When they stood before me, I noticed both were beaming, an expectation in them that bonded with me. When I looked at the prayer card, giving the name of the boy, the address, the church connection, and a description of what was wrong, I saw by the number on the card the mother had been there with him since the third night.

They were totally unaffected by the seeming hostility of the crowd, the wait-and-see attitude. Nor did they pay any attention to the sweat rolling off me. They had heard the Word preached, and their faith had come up inside them. Nothing else mattered.

Since that night, I've seen thousands of situations where the faith of a person was not negatively affected by any kind of circumstances or attitude of others.

There's something about faith that comes up through the Word of God being preached—the hearing of it in the inner self—that is the master key to deliverance.

Real faith is not timid.

Real faith is not intimidated.

Real faith doesn't take no for an answer.

Real faith breaks through all barriers and touches the heart of the Savior Himself.

The little boy was named Douglass Sutton. His mother told me he had had Perthes' disease since he was quite young. (This is a flattening of the hip bone.)

The doctors hoped that by having the leg supported in a brace so that it would not touch the ground, the leg would have a chance to grow out over enough time.

I had seen one other case like this healed in an earlier crusade. I knew it could be done.

I also know that God is a good God; however, He doesn't run around healing everybody indiscriminately. With God, healing is not an end in itself. It is a divine means to a greater end. It really means "to be continued." It is to show God's original desire that people be as He created them—whole. God wants to heal the whole person.

"Jesus, heal!" I prayed as I touched the little boy. Something was in my voice that had not been there before in that crusade. I had been swimming against the current. Every sermon I delivered seemed to hit a wall and fly back in my face. By faith, obedience, and dogged determination, I had been preaching as if each message was my last and the last that crowd would ever hear. I felt so many lives hanging in the balance. If only one visible miracle of healing could happen as a confirmation of the preaching, everything could change.

Newspaper people were everywhere in the building. They seemed to sense something was about to happen.

When I prayed, "Jesus, heal!" I felt the presence of God run down my arm into my right hand and flow into that little boy's flat hip bone. Inwardly, I knew God was working His healing power in the boy's entire body.

I looked up at the mother. "Do you believe God has touched your son?"

Without any hesitation she said, "Oral Roberts, I know He has!"

I said, "You mean right now?"

She said, "Oh, yes, right now."

Looking at her son, I said, "How about you, Douglass? Do you feel any of God's healing power going through you?"

"Yes, sir!"

"What do you want him to do?" I asked the mother.

For an answer she leaned down, unstrapped her boy's leg, and took his crutches. He put his foot to the floor.

That was the fateful moment.

I heard a sound from the crowd. People were getting up to see, great wonderment filling their hearts.

"What do you want to do, son?" I asked.

"I want to run!"

He looked at his mother. She nodded, and he took off from the lower platform on which he stood in front of me. In a split second he was racing down one of the long aisles.

Like a cloudburst, the voices of the people roared. I felt something pulling me to my feet, and as I looked, men and women were jumping, running down the

aisles, shouting at the tops of their voices, and crying. Oh, how the tears were flowing, including mine!

The boy ran back to his mother and me, and he began jumping up and down.

She grabbed him and hugged him. When she put her hand on his previously flat hip bone and saw that a miraculous recovery had happened, she took off down an aisle praising God, with Douglass right after her.

The explosion of the audience could not be stopped. When I said, "Will you be seated, please," it was like a voice into the wind. For a full fifteen minutes, there were rejoicing and praising God as I had never seen them before.

Later, my friend, Lee Braxton, said, "Oral, that's the first time I've ever seen you lose control over your crowd."

I said, "Lee, God was in that, and a hurricane couldn't have stopped those people as long as they knew they had witnessed a miracle of God's healing power."

Finally, and I mean finally, people had praised God until they were finished of their own accord and sat down. If you've ever been in a hot, sweltering place and a strong cool breeze suddenly blew in, and you sighed and said, "Ah, that feels so good!" you know what I felt about the sudden change in the attitude of that huge crowd.

God had confirmed His Word by the faith of the mother and son that came up in them and they released back to Him. I felt it was also because I wouldn't give up, I wouldn't quit. I was willing to obey God and do what He had called me to do, no matter what.

The rest of the crusade was totally unlike its beginning. Extra crowds broke through the lines the fire marshal had erected. Joy swept over the people and over eastern North Carolina. The boy's healing and the healings that came so often every night until the end of the crusade were the talk on radio, on television, in newspapers, in factories, in warehouses, on the streets—

everywhere. People discovered which hotel room was mine, and a squadron of volunteer men had to be put around it at night after the services so I could sleep.

The final Sunday afternoon, the crowd had filled and overflowed the B-29 hangar. They stood on the runway completely around the building. I was told over twenty-five thousand had gathered for the final service. By some miraculous touch of God on my being, I was able to personally touch and pray for approximately ten thousand sick people that afternoon after I preached and gave an invitation to the unsaved.

Ellis Roberts, Oral's father, with the Bible and folding organ he used in revival services

Evelyn, just before going to Texas to become a schoolteacher in 1936

Oral as a baby, 2 months

Oral and his brother, Vaden (l)

Oral, Evelyn, and Oral's mother, Claudius, in Rio Grande Valley, Texas in 1938

Oral and Evelyn during their first weekend of courting, at the Gulf of Mexico in 1938

Oral and Evelyn on their wedding

day, December 25, 1938 Oral and Evelyn at a TV taping in the ORU studio

The church at Enid, Oklahoma, where Oral pastored just before entering the healing ministry in 1947

Oral and Evelyn's first home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, purchased for

$6,000

Bob DeWeese, Oral's co-evangelist and right-hand man for thirty-eight years

A Florence, South Carolina, tent crusade

Oral preaching the gospel in a tent crusade

The big tent (220' x 470'), which seated 12,000

Prominent North Carolina businessman Lee Braxton, who joined Oral's team in 1949 and remained for 33 years as a-dollar-a-year man

The big tent after the storm hit in Amarillo, Texas in September 1950

Breaking new ground by bringing TV cameras into the tent meeting in 1954

The healing line in Oral's tent preaching days

Oral praying for healing

Cameras shooting the healing line in the tent days

Ruth Rooks, Oral's one and only secretary since 1947

Workers typing Oral's answers to Partners of the ministry

Oral doing a radio program in 1948

Oral Roberts Evangelistic

Association trustees breaking ground for Oral Roberts University in 1962

Oral and Billy Graham at ORU dedication, April 1967

Oral's response to news of accreditation in 1971

ORU students going from chapel to class

The controversial ORU Prayer Tower, which receives one million telephone calls a year

Oral and James Winslow, M.D., who was in charge of all ORU medical activities

The City of Faith medical complex—2,200,000 square feet

The Learning Resources Center at ORU

—over 600,000 square feet

Pat Robertson and Oral, just after the ORU Board of Regents voted to transfer the ORU Law School to CBN University, now Regent University

An aerial view of ORU

The miracles confirming the preaching of the Word on that fifth night had broken the souls of the people open to a sense of their own unbelief and need of God. Several thousand came to Christ.

Pastors who had held back at first were heard saying they wished they had been official sponsors to begin with. Every financial need of the crusade was met with a balance to be given to the sponsoring pastors.

The miracle at Goldsboro lives in me today.

One thing for sure, a miracle settles the issue. I suppose that's one reason I keep saying, "Expect a miracle!" I have truly had to live by those words. I've seen God take great disasters that should have made me quit the ministry altogether and turn them into a great miracle by the touch of His mighty hand.

In document TITULO: DISTRIBUTED MULTI-LABEL LEARNING ON APACHE SPARK (página 138-145)