Make Your Day Count

We’re in the top, ranked in the top 30^th in baseball right now.  We’re in the middle of our Midwestern City’s Conference right now.  We’re expecting to get a bid for the NCAA Tournament in baseball to be a witness for Jesus Christ through athletics.  You’re looking at the roof on top of the Learning Resources Center where most of the classes are held at ORU.  We need some repair work there.  That’s the chapel building where our lay seminar is beginning tonight.  We have about 1,200 to 1,500 people who will be coming in town today for our lay seminar which begins tonight and continues Friday, Saturday and closes on Sunday with my dad and me laying hands on all of our partners.  And there is Mabee Center there. We’re inside that building right now.

And we have some serious roof repair work to do on Mabee Center and some painting.  And we have some lights that we showed yesterday.  We have a lot that has to be done this summer.  And we need your help.  Will you pray about sowing a special Seed-Faith gift above and beyond your normal giving this month to help us with this repair work?  Would you pray about sowing a seed of $1,000 to help us toward the restoration, the restoring of ORU this summer, getting it back into the kind of shape that it needs to be in when the students come back?

Will you pray about sowing a seed of $500?  Will you pray about sowing a seed of maybe $100 or maybe $50 or $25?  Will you be a part of helping us here at ORU?  You know, Arlie, in your home if something breaks down in your home, you know, you’ve got to fix it.  You’ve got to take care of it.  And sometimes there’s a better time of the year to put it all together and get it fixed. Well, summertime is our time here at ORU.  We’ve got to do something and we’re doing it now.  We’ve ordered equipment. We’ve ordered materials and now all we’ve got to do is pay for it, Arlie.

SPKM ARLIE WHITLOW Well, I think everybody wants to help you too, Brother Richard.  We have four teenagers in our home and I want you to take care of Oral Roberts University real well and I want the folks to respond because I want them to come out here.  And I’ve never been here before, but we’re out scouting around looking for a place for our children to go to college.

SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS Well, you’re looking at a good place.  Last year we remodeled the dormitories during the summer and the partners helped me to remodel the dormitories.  And now we’ve gota lot more that we need to do. You know, it’s an ongoing thing. It’s like your family, your family, you know, you’ve got things, you know, a child grows out of a pair of shoes and you’ve got to get a new pair of shoes, Lindsay.  You’ve got to keep going, got to keep things moving.

SPLR LINDSAY ROBERTS That’s exactly right.  But, you know, the other day–I take Jordan for a walk all around here because she loves to walk around the campus. We have a duck pond and she likes to visit the ducks and all the things.

SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS And the swans.

SPLR LINDSAY ROBERTS And coming down to see it, we were driving it this time and we came down and there was an enormous gush of water.  And we looked up and I said, “Richard, what in the world is that?”  And the entire cooling tower for the dormitories had–I don’t know if you’d say sprung a leak or it had just started flooding water out.

SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS That’s just two or three nights ago.

SPLR LINDSAY ROBERTS And there’s nothing you can do but fix it. I mean, you cannot let the thing do the damage that it was doing to the rest of the campus when all this water came pouring out. And at the same time, there’s no air conditioning unless the cooling tower works right.  And I’ll tell you, when things break down you have no choice but to repair it.  And I praise God that we were able to repair the inside of the dorms last year.  But now we’ve got to do the outside work.  It seems like it’s never ending.  But God has a miracle.

SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS You remind me, one of the largest furniture dealers in this part of the country lives right here in Tulsa. And he said to my dad and me, “Whenever I get discouraged, I drive my car out onto the ORU campus and I get over in this Mabee Center parking lot just outside this building and I park my car and I just look around and I say, “Look at what faith did.  My business can go.  Look at what faith did.”  That’s what you’re saying.

SPKM ARLIE WHITLOW That’s accountability.

SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS Yeah.

SPKM ARLIE WHITLOW That works.  And when a pastor can come here from Washington, D. C. and come out here–yesterday I walked all these grounds.  I went up in the City of Faith and I walked over here in the Mabee Center, went through all this, through the campus, and I could feel faith enter my bones.  And that’s what God’s using in this hour.  He’s using Oral Roberts University and Richard Roberts to inspire a whole lot of folks.

SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS Well, Arlie, we need some special help this summer.  I want to  SU03 take you out on the campus in just a moment and show you some of the things that we’re doing.  You know, when the students are gone we do the maintenance and repair work at ORU during the summer because you can’t do a lot of things when school is on because you have students everywhere and faculty, and I guess when you get us all together there’s more than 5,000, maybe 5,500 of us.  And you can’t do the type of work that you can do when the summertime comes.  We only have from now until August to get this work done.  And I’ve been sharing with the people about some maintenance work and things that we’re doing.

And right now I want to take you out on the campus and show you some of the cooling towers and some of the things that are going wrong that’s got to be fixed.  In fact, right now you’re looking at one of the cooling towers that has a pretty good size leak in it, due to normal wear, rust, normal–you know, the normal, normal things happen.  There you can see one of the leaks.  It’s going to cost about $1,500 to $2,000 in repairs on this chiller, I guess they call it, air conditioning unit.  I’m not sure what building that’s for.  Oh, that’s for the aerobics center.  And then we go over to the main cooling towers for the campus buildings.  The insides of it are wearing out after years, and it’s going to cost us a great deal of money to do the reworking of the guts of this building.  You can see some of the leaks and things that have to be done and we go over to some of the chillers and cooling towers outside of the dormitories.

There’s one out there behind the four twin tower, quad tower dormitories, as we call them.  There are some major leaks and problems, going to cost thousands of dollars to do this work this summer.  We have, we have buildings that we have to put some new roofs on.  We’ve been doing some painting.  We’re getting ready to pain the Classroom Building.  You’re looking at it right now. We’ve got to paint this building.  And we have students that are working this summer.  We need some money.  We’ve got the paint coming, but we’ve got to pay for it all.  And this is the Johnston Baseball Stadium, and we need to patch the roof, repair the roof, going to take $27,000 to do the work on this roof in our baseball stadium.

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.

SPLR LINDSAY ROBERTS It doesn’t matter what people say.  I learned a very, very valuable lesson that I don’t know if I could ever even explain it to people about 6 or 8 weeks ago.  I had had someone that came to me that ripped me up one side and down the other and it really, honestly, was something I didn’t deserve.

You know when you deserve it and you know when you don’t, and I didn’t deserve it.  And I cried and I cried and I cried until there was nothing left inside me to cry about.  I couldn’t cry any more.  And about 5 o’clock in the morning. I was still wide awake and still crying and I sat looking out the window in the bedroom, still crying, and the Lord said to me:  Lindsay, you are never responsible for somebody else but you are totally responsible for you.  And he said:  Now you forget what other people say, but don’t you ever forget what you say and everything that you say better glorify me.  And I just learned right then.

I dropped it all.  I cannot make somebody else be different, but I sure can make me be different.  And I learned very, very clearly that God has ordained me to do something and it doesn’t matter what people say, it doesn’t matter what they think, it doesn’t matter how they print, what they say, what they talk. You are responsible unto God and if you will follow God, he will take care of all the rest of the details.

SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS Well, I honor you, I honor you, Barbara, for your testimony, for your life.  I pray God will continue to bless your cosmetics company.  It’s going around the world and you very well put it today.  As you put your life into God, God will take care of your business.  God will cause new accounts to come to you.  In fact, you’re going to receive some new accounts from this program.  People are going to say, “Well, I’ve never heard of the Barbara Walden Cosmetic Company but I’m going to look it up.”  As you honor God and give your witness, your business is going to continue to grow.  God is giving me that word right now so I receive it with you.  Let’s give the Lord and Barbara a great handclap.

And as we close our program today I want to remind you can have your copy of this, really, once in a lifetime offer of “Venture Into Faith.”  This great, whole, feature-length motion picture about a tremendous miracle healing with a certificate of authenticity, signed, numbered, dated by my father, Oral Roberts, during this month, our anniversary month, our 40-year anniversary month.  Sow your seed of $100 on your credit card or certified check or cashier’s check and we can begin to do the restoration work immediately here at ORU.  Just call the Abundant Life Prayer Group at 918-495-7777.

Yes, Lindsay, and this is Barbara’s book.  Is it available in bookstores?

SPKM BARBARA WALDEN Yes. SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS “Easy Glamor, The Black Woman’s Definite Guide to Beauty and Style,” by Barbara Walden with Vicky Linder. You can get it in your bookstore.  Barbara, God bless you. Tanya, thank you for being our guest today.  Till we see you tomorrow, remember, no matter what it looks like, God can turn it around for you.  (APPLAUSE)   AD03 PROMO FOR AMERICAN AIRLINES AD02 PROMO FOR “Venture Into Faith” for $100 SPKM ORU SINGERS  SONG Turn_it_around

SPKM STEVE VICKERS It’s a joy to be here.

SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS  SU04 It’s a joy for us to get to meet you personally and for you to share this story.  It  began, Denise, with you when the doctors told you that you had rheumatoid arthritis and it looked like you might very well end up in a wheelchair the rest of your life.  Can you just share the story.

SPKM DENISE VICKERS I’d be glad to.  I tell you, I’m going to pay the devil back for the rest of my life for what he did to me for 2| years.  I’ll tell you what happened.  In the middle of the night my body was electrified with rheumatoid arthritis.  I was put in the hospital and they diagnosed it and I was healed…. God healed me after two months but then I let the medical field, which I praise God for the medical field, but I let men’s words convince me I was in remission because of being pregnant.  They said rheumatoid arthritis goes into remission while you’re pregnant and I let those words take root in me.  Then as soon as I gave birth, while I was in the hospital it came back on my body because I allowed those words…. see, the power of men’s words…. to take root.

SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS Did you give up your faith at that point?

SPKM DENISE VICKERS I kept telling myself, “No, God healed me,”

but I let those words take root without realizing what I was doing because when I gave birth to my baby, when I was in the hospital the first thought I had was:  How soon will it come back?  And while I was in the hospital, it came back on me.  And I went home and I was standing in the shower and I cried out to God because my body was hurting.  I had pain in every joint in my body.  There wasn’t a joint that wasn’t affected and I was standing in the shower and I screamed out, “God, heal me.”  And when I did, Richard, it was like God slapped those words back in my face and he said:  I did heal you.  And I got out of the shower and I turned to Steve and I said, “Steve, how can you be healed and still be in pain?” And I went down a road, I went to hell and back for 2| years in severe pain, and I was on medication morning and night to keep my body walking.  I tried to miss my medication one time and I had to go get shots in my hips to release my hip joints.  And I mean, even though I knew what the Word of God says…. my husband is a pastor that preaches the Word of God, preaches healing, and yet the devil would torment my mind and say:  Where is your God?  Where is that healer?

SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS What was happening in your mind while all this was going on?

SPKM STEVE VICKERS  SU05 Well, you know, Richard, at night I would lay beside her in the bed and she would be crying.  She would be saying, “Pray for me, Steve. I’m hurting.”  And as soon as I would touch her she’d say, “Don’t touch me,” cause she hurt all over her body.  I would start to pray for her but, Richard, it was like there were ten thousand demons around me saying:  And you call yourself a man of God.  Where is your God?  Where is this Jesus you preach about?  Where are the signs and wonders and miracles?  You preach about them and you see them happening in other people’s lives, but you can’t even produce it in your own wife’s life.  And he was trying to steal from me that boldness to stand firm on what I knew to be the truth.

SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS Now you had already joined the Charismatic Bible Ministries Fellowship at that time, you had attended several of the conferences…..

SPKM STEVE VICKERS Every one of them.

SPRR RICHARD ROBERTS …. and you were making plans to attend another one.