Oral Roberts' Life Story

Oral Roberts

• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781787204973
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

First published in 1952, this is the autobiography of Oral Roberts, founder and chancellor of the Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and recognized as one of the outstanding personalities of his generation. He was the author of more than one hundred books and founder of the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association, which sponsors weekly and daily television programs."This story will touch the heart strings of every reader. Once you have begun it you will have to finish it. It won't let you alone. It will tug at your heart for many days to come. I envy you for I would like to have again the chance of reading it for the first time."—Lee Braxton, Mayor, Whiteville, North Carolina

CHAPTER 1 — THE LAST MILE OF THE WAY

I REACHED the end of the way when I was seventeen. I faced life with a stammering, stuttering tongue and with tuberculosis in both lungs. I had fought a desperate battle and had lost.

When I was sixteen I ran away from home. If I could only get away, I thought, everything would be all right. The end came in less than twelve months. While I was playing in the final game of the Southern Oklahoma basketball tournament, I collapsed and was carried off the gymnasium floor. Blood was spurting from my mouth and I was coughing with every breath. My coach, Mr. Herman Hamilton, picked me up and laid me in the back seat of his car. “You’re going home, Oral,” he said.

When we got to Ada, Mr. Hamilton knocked on the door. Papa came to the door. “Is this where Oral Roberts’ parents live?” he said.

“Yes. Is something wrong?” Papa asked.

“Reverend Roberts, your son has played his last game. I’ve got him out here in my car,” Mr. Hamilton said. “I’ll need your help to get him in the house.”

They carried me in and I fell across the bed. Looking up at Papa, I said, “Papa, I’ve gone the last mile of the way.”

I lay bedfast one hundred sixty-three days. A thousand times I cursed the day I was born. My oldest sister, Velma, had died when she was nineteen, an epileptic and with pneumonia. Now the devil was striking at me, the youngest child of Papa’s family.

I do not know where people get the idea that sickness is a blessing and is one of the gifts of God to humanity. While I had tuberculosis I was the most miserable person in the world. I coughed and spit up blood and tossed on the bed day and night, not able to sleep more than a few hours at a time. I went as much as forty-eight hours without a wink of sleep. Food lost its taste and I became a pile of skin and bones. My weight dropped from one hundred sixty to one hundred twenty pounds. I was six feet one inch tall, yet weighed only one hundred and twenty pounds.

My friends no longer recognized me, and when they came to see me they said they couldn’t stand to look at me. I was put on a diet of sweet milk and raw eggs. For weeks I tried to live on it, but there came a time when I could not even take that.

One day Papa came over to my bed and looked down at me. His chin was quivering. Since the doctor had just been there and given me another examination, I knew Papa knew the verdict. I said, “Papa, what did the doctor say?”

He said, “Son, you are going to be all right.”

Something went all over me. I knew by the way he said it that I was not going to be all right.

“If I am going to be all right,” I said, “why are you crying?”

“Oh, son, you are going to be all right.”

“Papa, something is wrong. You are upset. Papa, tell me the truth.”

“Son, don’t worry yourself. You will get to coughing again. Lie back down now.”

“Papa, you’ve got to tell me. What does this awful pain in my lungs mean? Why do I keep spitting up blood and coughing all the time?”

If I live to be a million years old I will never forget his answer.

“Oral, you have tuberculosis in both lungs.”

They had called my brother Vaden, and about that time he ran up on the porch and into the house. I heard him say, “Papa, where is he?”

In a moment he fell across my bed, screaming, “God, put the t.b. on me. I’ve always been stronger than Oral has. Put it on me, Lord.”

I pushed Vaden off my body and told him to stand back. Mama and my sister Jewel came in the room and I saw they were crying. I looked over to the window sill where Papa had my medicine. I reached over, gathered it up in my arms, and said, “Here, Papa, take it.”

He said, “What’s the matter, Son?”

I said, “Papa, when people take t.b., they don’t get well. This medicine isn’t going to help me now. If I am going to die, then I will just die.”

Papa said, “Son, you’ve got to take this medicine.”

I said, “No, I won’t do it.”

Mama came over to my bed and held my hand. I looked up at her and remembered that her father had died as a young man and it had been whispered that it was tuberculosis.

“Mama, what did your father die with?”

She shook her head.

“I want you to tell me. Don’t put me off now. I want to know.”

She said, “Oral, he died with tuberculosis.”

I said, “Mama, didn’t you say once that one of your sisters died with the same thing that your father died with?”

She said, “Yes, one of my sisters died with tuberculosis too.”

I said, “Well, it’s in your side of the family then, isn’t it?”

She nodded.

It seemed that the whole world came crashing down upon my head. The sun slowly fell from the sky as I faced the end of my dreams. Black despair settled over my soul, and I began to cry. Turning my face to the wall, I let go. I cried so hard I screamed with pain. Papa came over and tried to pull me back across the bed, but I fought him off. I cried until there were no more tears left. My eyes became dry. My lips hard and set. A relative was in the house at this time. When she heard me screaming and crying, she turned and said, “I can’t stand it,” and ran out of the house.

Every ambition I ever had was crushed in a moment. I felt lost and miserable.

Within a few days I felt death on my body. I wished to die. I didn’t want to live. I wanted to die because I didn’t want to have t.b. the rest of my life.

During the days that followed, I began to learn some of the queer ideas that people have about God, about religion, about sickness. Nearly everybody who came to see me had a remedy, a philosophy, and a theology. I remember one day when one of the leading pastors of the city came to visit me. He stayed a few moments and then came over to my bed. He reached down and took my hand in his and said, “Son, be patient. You will just have to be patient with this thing.” Then he said a few words of prayer, asking God to make me patient, and went on his way.

He didn’t offer prayer to God for the healing of my body. He never gave me any hope that a miracle could save me. He never mentioned the power of faith. He never encouraged me to believe. He left me with his little prayer in which he asked God to make me patient in my afflictions.

I remember how bitter I became. I said to myself, “Be patient. And what will that get me? What will patience do for tuberculosis?”

Had I remained patient with tuberculosis, I would either have been in a sanatorium or in my grave today. Patience does not heal tuberculosis.

Some of the religious people who came to see me told me that the Lord had tracked me down and had put this awful disease upon me for a purpose. One Sunday afternoon the house was full of such people. As usual they were discussing my case. They all agreed that God had put it upon me. Then one of them spoke up and said that if somebody had faith and would pray, the Lord could heal me. Another one said, “How do you know it is God’s will to heal him?”

Then they fell into a discussion about its not being God’s will to heal my body. I had to lie there and listen to all this. Practically every Sunday I went through the same thing. People discussed my case pro and con. Some believed that God could heal me and some believed that God could not. Practically all of them believed that God had afflicted me.

Yet every time, somebody would speak up and tell me I should get saved. I listened to their conversations with great bitterness in my soul. One Sunday afternoon I got mad. The room was crowded with people and they were all trying to get me saved while in the same breath they were telling me that God had afflicted me. I raised up off the bed and said, “Papa, I am sick and tired of all this. These people say God put tuberculosis upon me and in the same breath they say that God loves me and wants to save me. Papa, I don’t believe it. I don’t want to hear any more of it. I don’t want to get saved, and these people might as well leave me and let me alone.”

These pious people exchanged glances, raised their eye-brows a few times, whispered something to one another, and in a few minutes they were all gone.

The following week I lay in bed thinking about the whole thing. I finally decided that the religion these people had was not deliverance at all. To them, religion was a mental acceptance of life’s inequalities. Instead of inspiring me to have faith in God for my deliverance, their religious belief was that I should be calm and patient while disease and other life-destroying forces slowly killed me. They talked out of both sides of their mouth. On the one hand they talked of the great love of God for me and on the other they talked of God’s putting sickness upon me. According to them, both sickness and salvation came from the Lord and there was nothing I could do about it.

They had come to accept the afflictions of life as the will of God, and they didn’t expect the Lord to change things and bring deliverance. If one had enough religion, he could endure. If he didn’t, he should get more religion.

I revolted against this wicked idea and cried out, “If God put this on me, I don’t want to serve Him.”

God always has someone He can trust and someone H...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• WHY I URGED ORAL ROBERTS TO WRITE THIS BOOK
• CHAPTER 1 - THE LAST MILE OF THE WAY
• CHAPTER 2 - VADEN AND I
• CHAPTER 3 - THE KING AND THE STUTTERER
• CHAPTER 4 - THE BOY NOBODY BELIEVED IN
• CHAPTER 5 - RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME
• CHAPTER 6 - THE THIRTY-FIVE CENTS THAT CHANGED MY LIFE
• CHAPTER 7 - YOUNG PREACHER
• CHAPTER 8 - THE DISSATISFACTION THAT DROVE ME TO GOD
• CHAPTER 9 - THE GREATEST DISCOVERY I EVER MADE
• CHAPTER 10 - HOW I REACHED THE CLIMAX OF MY SEARCH
• CHAPTER 11 - HOW THE DEVIL ALMOST STOPPED ME
• CHAPTER 12 - THE POINT OF NO RETURN
• CHAPTER 13 - THE TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS THAT SAVED THE DAY
• CHAPTER 14 - HOW I HEARD THE VOICE OF GOD
• CHAPTER 15 - THE BIG TENT
• CHAPTER 16 - THE STORM AT AMARILLO
• CHAPTER 17 - LIFE MAGAZINE REPORTS OUR MEETINGS
• CHAPTER 18 - PUTTING FIRST THINGS FIRST
• CHAPTER 19 - GOD’S LAW OF AVERAGES
• CHAPTER 20 - WHAT HEALING HAS DONE FOR ME
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER