Success without a successor is failure by Richard Roberts
SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS He’s watching this morning. He’ll remember that B-29 hangar, I know–
SPKM ARLIE WHITLOW Well, I was 7 years old and I remember so well my sister being, she couldn’t walk at all. She couldn’t control her faculties. So the four of us went, mother took her back to the invalid section and daddy and myself stayed out in the congregation. Brother Roberts came by and he looked at mother and he said, “Mother, don’t worry, your daughter is going to be all right.” And mother said it was just like the eyes of Jesus reassured her that her little, 10 years old, her little 10 year old daughter was going to be well. The miracle didn’t happen then. I remember them coming out from the section and I thought my sister would really be walking, and she didn’t. But several weeks later they had put her in the back yard in the sunshine and mother looked out the back window and there was Patty. She was walking across that back yard.
SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS Hallelujah Completely made whole
SPKM ARLIE WHITLOW Made well. And now she’s 50 years old and still well.
SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS And that was in 1948.
SPKM ARLIE WHITLOW 1948.
SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS That was the year I was born. My dad began this healing ministry in 1947. And, Arlie, you may not know this, but this is his anniversary month. Forty years ago this month, the month of May, this ministry began. And, you know, you hear a lot about accountability SU05 today. You know, you read newspaper articles and, you know, you don’t know which one to, which one to believe and which one not to believe because the media has a tendency to distort and to sensationalize. And you talk a lot about accountability, but you bring to my mind the accountability of this ministry is the healing power of God. I cannot remember a time, now of course I’m 38, the ministry is 40 years old. So I cannot remember a time when the healing power of God was not flowing through the Oral Roberts Ministry. The countless hundreds of thousands of testimonies like your sister, who have been healed, who have been touched. There was one period of time during my father’s tent crusades–you talked about a tent earlier–where more than five million people in a few years’ time received Christ as their Lord and Savior through his crusades around the world and throughout the United States.
The accountability is the healing power of God. And success without a successor is failure. Oral Roberts University, of course, came and you see, well right now you can’t see the students here because school was concluded a week ago and, or a week and a half ago, I guess, and now they’re literally all over America and all over the world. They’re in healing teams. They’re in mission teams. They’re in music teams. They’re in businesses. They’re on jobs. (Applause) They’re going to the nations of the earth with God’s healing power because God said, “Build Me a university. Build it on My authority. Build it on the Holy Spirit. Raise up your students to hear My voice,” Arlie, “and to go.” Now we started with 300 freshmen. Now 4,600 students strong. And we look over at the City of Faith and you see prayer and medicine being joined together. You see people by the thousands coming to the City of Faith to get their, to get help, to get doctors and prayer joined together. And you see the credibility of the ministry. You see what God’s doing.
SPKM ARLIE WHITLOW And credibility and accountability takes two or three different turns. I came in a day early because we’re getting ready to build a three million dollar church. And I’ve got to raise a million and a half dollars this weekend for my congregation for our first deposit in our first beginning on the building. So I came a day early to get away from office and get away from telephones, and I got across the street. I’m in that motel and I told my wife, I said, “I’m just going to go there and I’m going to soak up the spirit of faith, because if I need anything right now I need faith.” And so I got in the bed that night and the next morning the sunlight, you know, was peeping through the curtain. And I opened that big curtain and here’s this university looking at me that faith built. I grabbed the phone up and I said, “Honey, we can do it.” If this man can do that, I can do it.