FOR TODAY
Lester Sumrall · 3 min read
After his own miraculous healing, Lester Sumrall spent decades planting churches, training missionaries, and launching broadcast ministries in over ninety countries, all built on the same faith that once lifted him from a deathbed. He taught that the faith that heals a single life is the same faith that can reach an entire nation.
Start today's readingOral Roberts
Oral Roberts built his entire ministry around four simple words: expect a miracle. He taught that faith was not a feeling but an active posture, a decision to lean forward toward God's promises rather than settle back into fear.
Oral Roberts
Oral Roberts taught what he called seed faith, the conviction that giving to God in a time of need is itself an act of faith that God multiplies. He encouraged believers to sow into their need rather than simply pray about it from a distance.
Lester Sumrall
Dying of tuberculosis with no medical hope remaining, a teenage Lester Sumrall heard a single voice tell him to rise and go preach the Gospel to the world. He obeyed that voice by faith before his body showed any sign of change, and the healing followed his obedience.
Lester Sumrall
When called to the Manila jail cell of Clarita Villanueva, Lester Sumrall did not pray a hopeful, uncertain prayer. He spoke directly and with full authority to what could not be seen, demonstrating a faith rooted in the finished authority of Jesus rather than in visible proof.
Oral Roberts
Dying of tuberculosis and crippled by a stutter, a teenage Oral Roberts made a decision before he was ever prayed for: he would not accept his diagnosis as final. That settled resolve, planted before the healing came, became the seedbed for everything God later did in his body.
Oral Roberts
Through the 1940s and 1950s, Oral Roberts filled tents seating thousands across America, praying individually for the sick night after night. Cancers vanished, crippled limbs straightened, and blind eyes opened as he preached his signature message: expect a miracle.
Lester Sumrall
In 1953, a young woman named Clarita Villanueva began showing bite marks on her body inside a Manila jail cell, wounds doctors and reporters witnessed appear before their eyes with no visible attacker. Missionary Lester Sumrall was called in, and through prayer in the name of Jesus, the tormenting attacks stopped instantly.
Lester Sumrall
Dying of tuberculosis as a teenager with doctors giving him only months to live, Lester Sumrall heard a voice speak clearly in his room, commanding him to rise and preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth. He stood up instantly healed and went on to minister in over ninety nations.
Oral Roberts
As a teenager, Oral Roberts battled a crippling stutter and advanced tuberculosis that left him bedridden. Carried into a tent revival by his older brother, he was prayed for and rose from his cot completely healed, speech and lungs restored in an instant.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Bonhoeffer spent his life arguing that cheap grace, grace without cost or change, is one of the most dangerous ideas in the modern church. Real grace, he wrote, is the kind that demands everything and gives back more than it asks. It does not excuse a life. It transforms one.
Oswald Chambers
Chambers wrote that most people wait for a dramatic moment of calling that never comes. His argument was quieter: calling emerges through faithfulness in ordinary things. The question is not what God has destined you to do. It is whether you are paying attention to what is already in front of you.
C.S. Lewis
Lewis argued that the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty sought on the wrong terms. Doubt, handled honestly, can sharpen belief rather than destroy it. In his own life, the questions he refused to avoid were the same ones that eventually brought him to faith.
A.W. Tozer
Tozer was direct: the version of holiness that exhausts people is not biblical holiness. It is the management of appearances. Real holiness, he argued, is the quiet result of a life oriented toward God rather than toward the approval of other people. The difference shows, but not always in the ways we expect.
Church History
Every generation has been convinced it is living through the worst moment in the history of the church. The Arian controversy nearly split the faith in the 4th century. The Reformation fractured it in the 16th. The church absorbed both and kept moving. History is not a reason for complacency but it is a reason against despair.
C.S. Lewis
Lewis spent years as a committed atheist, and he was honest about it. His conversion was not an emotional experience. It was the slow collapse of every argument he had constructed against belief. He described arriving at faith reluctantly, as the most surprised convert in England. That honesty is what makes his writing still matter.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian who had every reason to stay safe. He had contacts abroad, a reputation, and options. He returned to Germany anyway, joined the resistance against Hitler, and was executed at 39. He wrote The Cost of Discipleship in 1937. The title was autobiographical.
Corrie ten Boom
Corrie ten Boom survived Ravensbrück concentration camp after her family was arrested for hiding Jewish people in their home. Years later she came face to face with one of her former guards at a speaking event. He asked for forgiveness. Her account of that moment, in The Hiding Place, is one of the most honest descriptions of what forgiveness actually costs.
Oswald Chambers
Oswald Chambers never published My Utmost for His Highest. He died in 1917 from a burst appendix while serving as a chaplain in Egypt. His wife Biddy had spent years transcribing his lectures in shorthand. She compiled and published them after his death. The book has not gone out of print since 1927.
William Wilberforce
Wilberforce introduced his first bill to abolish the British slave trade in 1791. It was defeated. He introduced it again. Defeated again. For two decades he kept returning. The Slave Trade Act finally passed in 1807. He spent the rest of his life working toward full emancipation, which came three days before he died in 1833. His faith was not the reason he felt good about the cause. It was the reason he did not stop.
Fanny Crosby
Fanny Crosby lost her sight at six weeks old due to a medical error. She lived to 94 and wrote more hymns than any other person in Christian history, including Blessed Assurance and To God Be the Glory. She reportedly said she was grateful for her blindness because the first face she would ever see would be Jesus. Whether or not that quote is perfectly recorded, her life made it credible.
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine wrote the first memoir in Western literature. Confessions is the account of a man who knew what he should do and kept choosing otherwise for years. His conversion came not through argument but through a child's voice, a page of scripture, and a moment in a garden. He became one of the most influential theologians in Christian history. The prayer "make me holy, but not yet" is from his own account of where he was before that day.
Charles Spurgeon
Spurgeon preached his first sermon at 16. By 19 he was the most popular preacher in London. By the end of his life his sermons had been translated into more languages than any other Christian writing outside the Bible. He also suffered severe depression and wrote about it openly at a time when no one in ministry did. His honesty about the darkness makes his faith in the light more credible, not less.
C.S. Lewis · 1952
Lewis originally delivered these ideas as BBC radio talks during World War II, to a country exhausted by destruction and short on reasons for hope. The argument he makes for the reasonableness of Christian belief has not dated. Christianity Today called it the best case for orthodox Christianity in print. It was voted the most influential Christian book of the 20th century.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer · 1937
Written in 1937 while Bonhoeffer was running an illegal seminary in Nazi Germany, this book makes the case that a Christianity that costs nothing is worth nothing. The chapter on cheap grace has been cited by readers across every denomination as the thing that changed how they understood their faith. One reviewer wrote: it leaves you wondering why you ever thought compromise was an option.
A.W. Tozer · 1948
Tozer wrote this book in one sitting on an overnight train. It shows: it reads with a focus and directness that most books take years to achieve. The central argument is that the Christian life is not a set of beliefs to hold but a relationship to pursue, and that most Christians have settled for far less than what is available to them. It is short, dense, and has never gone out of print.
Augustine of Hippo · ~400 AD
Written around 400 AD, Confessions is not a theology textbook. It is a prayer. Augustine is talking directly to God about his own life, his failures, his restlessness, and the moment everything changed. It is the first autobiography in Western literature and one of the most quoted books in Christian history. The opening line, "our heart is restless until it rests in you," has been cited for 1,600 years because it keeps being true.
Oswald Chambers · 1927
Published in 1927, ten years after Chambers died, this is the best-selling Christian devotional of all time. Each entry is short, direct, and frequently uncomfortable. Chambers does not write to make you feel better. He writes to make you think more clearly about what you actually believe and whether you are living accordingly. The book was compiled from his lecture notes by his wife. He never saw it published.
Church History · 325 AD
In 325 AD, Emperor Constantine called 300 bishops to Nicaea to settle one question: was Jesus fully God or a created being? The Arian position argued the latter. Athanasius, still a deacon at the time, argued the former with a ferocity that got him exiled five times. The council ruled in his favor. The Nicene Creed, still recited in churches today, is the result of that argument.
Martin Luther · 1517
On October 31 1517, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. He was not trying to start a revolution. He was inviting a debate about the sale of indulgences, pieces of paper the church sold as reduction of punishment for sin. The debate got out of hand. Within three years Luther had been excommunicated and half of Europe was reconsidering what the church had the authority to say and sell.
Smith Wigglesworth
Wigglesworth was an illiterate plumber from Bradford who taught himself to read using only the Bible. His central teaching was that faith is not a feeling you wait for but a decision you act on before the evidence arrives. Accounts of his ministry are among the most widely circulated from the 20th century healing revival, though their documentation varies. Love him or question him, the directness of his teaching has not softened with time.
Kenneth E. Hagin
According to Kenneth Hagin's autobiographical account, he was bedridden as a teenager with a deformed heart and paralyzed body. He wrote that studying Mark 11:23-24 led him to step out of bed healed, and he spent sixty years teaching that God's healing power is available today.
Andrew Wommack
Andrew Wommack transformed modern Christian thinking by showing that healing is not something God decides on a whim. Through Christ's finished work at the cross, healing has already been provided, and biblical faith simply reaches out to receive what grace has already supplied.
Derek Prince
Derek Prince argued that healing is not something God randomly grants to some and withholds from others. In his reading of scripture, it is a covenant provision connected to forgiveness. Prince spent decades teaching believers to approach healing the way they approach salvation: not with performance or pleading but with knowledge of what he believed had already been secured.
Reinhard Bonnke
Reinhard Bonnke preached across Africa for decades to crowds of hundreds of thousands, and the consistent centre of his message was not technique or formula but the person and fire of the Holy Spirit. He argued that a church without the Holy Spirit's fire is a church that has lost its irreplaceable engine, and that the solution is never organizational but personal: surrender, invitation, and willingness to be changed.
Myles Munroe
Myles Munroe spent his career making one argument: that the gospel of the kingdom is not primarily about getting people to heaven. It is about restoring God's original mandate for humanity to govern the earth. That reframe changes everything: what prayer is, what work means, what leadership requires, and why purpose matters more than success.
E.W. Kenyon
E.W. Kenyon spent decades arguing that the church had systematically underread 2 Corinthians 5:17. When Paul says the one who is in Christ is a new creation, he does not mean a reformed character or an improved version of the old person. He means something has been replaced. The identity crisis at the centre of most Christian defeat, Kenyon argued, comes from living out of the old description rather than the new one.
Joyce Meyer
Joyce Meyer built one of the most practically influential teaching ministries of the last thirty years around a single Pauline instruction: be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Her argument is not self-help dressed as theology. It is that the battleground where most spiritual victories are won or lost is not circumstantial but mental, and that scripture gives specific tools to fight there.
Derek Prince
Derek Prince taught spiritual warfare with the same precision he applied to every other area of scripture: carefully, with primary text as the foundation, and without the sensationalism that the subject tends to attract. His argument was not that warfare is the centre of the Christian life. It is that ignoring it is not neutrality. Ignorance does not exempt a person from a battle that is already in progress.
Heidi Baker
Heidi Baker has worked in some of the most broken environments on earth and her testimony consistently points to the same thing: the force that breaks through in those places is not spiritual aggression but love. Not sentiment, not program, not strategy. Costly, present, inconvenient love. She argues that this is not softness. It is the most confrontational thing you can bring into a place of darkness.
Enoch Adeboye
Enoch Adeboye has led one of the world's largest church networks for over forty years, and the single practice he has pointed to most consistently as the foundation of everything else is prayer. Not prayer as a warm-up to ministry activity, but prayer as the primary work itself. He argues that what looks like organizational growth from the outside is the visible result of an invisible prayer infrastructure that most observers never account for.
Charles and Frances Hunter
Known affectionately as "The Happy Hunters", Charles and Frances traveled the world holding massive Healing Explosions. They demonstrated that healing was never intended to be the exclusive gift of superstar preachers, but the normal birthright of every ordinary believer who dares to lay hands on the sick in faith.
