Get Up, I Have Called You

As a young man growing up in Louisiana, Lester Sumrall contracted tuberculosis so severe that physicians told his family he would not survive. Confined to bed and wasting away, he spent long nights alone with his condition worsening, with little medical hope offered to him or his parents.

During one of those nights, lying near death, Sumrall heard a voice speak into the stillness of his room. It told him plainly to rise from his bed, that he was healed, and that he had been called to carry the Gospel to the ends of the earth. He described the voice as unmistakably real, not a dream or a passing thought.

Sumrall got up. The strength that had drained from his body over months of illness returned immediately, and the disease that had been declared terminal was simply gone. He walked out of the room that had nearly become his deathbed and began preparing for a life of ministry he had not expected to live to see.

That healing became the foundation of a ministry that eventually spanned more than ninety countries. Sumrall preached across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, founded LeSea Broadcasting to carry the Gospel through radio and television, and established Bible training centers to raise up the next generation of missionaries.

He often recounted the moment not as a dramatic public healing crusade but as a quiet, personal encounter, proof that God speaks directly into the darkest circumstances of an ordinary life and calls the healed to go and do the same for others.