Rising From a Deathbed on One Voice

As a young man in Louisiana, Lester Sumrall was diagnosed with tuberculosis so advanced that his doctors gave him only a short time to live. Confined to his bed for months, he grew weaker by the week, and the disease showed no sign of relenting under conventional treatment.

One night, alone in his room and near the end of his strength, Sumrall heard a voice speak clearly, instructing him to rise from the bed and go preach the Gospel to every nation. He later insisted the voice was not imagined, it was distinct, commanding, and impossible to mistake for his own thoughts.

What followed was an act of pure faith. Sumrall did not wait to feel stronger or to see improvement first, he got up immediately, obeying the instruction while his body still bore every symptom of the disease that was supposedly killing him.

It was in that act of obedience, moving before there was any physical evidence to support it, that Sumrall found his strength fully restored. The tuberculosis that doctors had called terminal was simply gone, and he never suffered a relapse.

Sumrall carried that lesson into every nation he later ministered in: faith is often proven not by waiting for confirmation, but by obeying the word God has spoken while the circumstances still look unchanged.