05/24/2026
LOOOOVE ME SOME BROTHER SUMMERALL !!! He has come to my church a few times to PREACH, teach, instruct, warm, correct, reprove .... Whatever God gave him to give - he gave us & we were Always GREATFUL !!!!!
FEARLESS FAITH.
As a seventeen-year-old boy, I lay on my deathbed in our home in Panama City, Florida, slowly succumbing to the ravages of tuberculosis. The doctor’s visits had been frequent but futile. One fateful afternoon, I started to choke and turn blue in the face. I’d been spitting blood every day for weeks,but now I was hemorrhaging. “The boy is as good as dead now,” I heard the doctor tell my mother. “Call your husband. This boy is dying.”
It’s an awful feeling to know you are dying and you aren’t ready to die. I wanted to live. I wanted to be a businessman. I had goals of making a lot of money and being very successful.
Death was the furthest thing from my mind.
For months mother had been bringing in her “Prayer Meeting Group” to pray over me. They were persistent, standing around the bed, pleading with the Lord to spare my life. I begged my mother to call off her prayer partners. “Don’t bring that bunch of old women back here any more,” I kept saying. But the next
week they’d be back. Under the covers I cussed at them.
But this day was different. I was hovering between life and death, yet I knew what was going on. My parents were crying,even my six-foot-three Irish father. Then it happened. At that moment God gave me a vision. (It was the first of two visions I’ve had in my life).
On one side of my bed I saw a coffin—just my size, open and tilted, very pretty inside, but empty, waiting for me todie. There was no mistaking it, this coffin was meant for me. I
turned my head the other way. I didn’t want to look at that casket. But on the other side of my bed I saw a Bible. It reached from the floor to the ceiling. It was the biggest Bible in the world. Then I heard God say, “That’s My Word. You have a choice.
Lester, which of these will you choose tonight?”
It wasn’t an audible voice, yet it was as distinct and as firm a voice as any I’d ever heard. But I didn’t want to be a preacher.
Many times I’d heard my mother sob, “Lord, save Lester and make him a preacher.” I hated evangelists and called them names. I had determined I wasn’t going to be one of them.
There was a struggle. While my family stood around crying,wringing their hands and waiting for me to die, I was fighting it out with God. I wanted to live, so I pleaded with God. “Lord,
I’m afraid to die. I’m not ready to die. God, if the only way in the world for me to live is to preach—I’ll preach.” I asked God to give me a long life of preaching and promised Him that I’d
never stop preaching as long as there was a breath in me.
It was settled. Just that quickly the vision vanished. I recall drifting into a deep sleep. I’d made a commitment to God, and I’d surrendered my heart to Jesus Christ. The covenant was sealed. My destiny had been determined.
Morning was like resurrection. No blood stained my pillow. No pain racked my chest. No fever chilled my skin and burned my brain. When I opened my eyes, the first person I saw was my blurry-eyed mother.I asked for food and told her about the vision and my promise
to God. Mother cried out, “Oh, God, can it be? Can it be?”
Three days later I was walking all over the house, and three weeks later I walked out of the house with all my earthly belongings.
God has always spoken to me from His Word. I don’t just close my eyes, open the Bible, and say,
“What do You have for me, Lord?” His Word to me is always specific. That day I knew I
was to turn to Isaiah 41:10-11.
When I told my father I was going to preach, he reacted with rage. He snorted, raved, and threatened. Obviously, my father wasn’t a Christian. But God had started something in me, and He has kept it up through all these years. I knew I had to be obedient to His Word. I spread my Bible open before me on the floor and there I read:
Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not
dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen
thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold
thee with the right hand of my righteousness.
Behold, all they that were incensed against
thee shall be ashamed and confounded: they
shall be as nothing; and they that strive with
thee shall perish.
Moments before fear had gripped me with paralyzing force.
Then suddenly, it was as if I had felt a hand go down through my mouth and into that region that was the source of my fear. It was as if a turnip had been pulled up out of a patch with little tendrils hanging down. As I read “Fear thou not . . . the fearwas gone.
The Bible says, “God hath not given us the
spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of
a sound mind” (2 Tim. 1:7).
Fear is a spirit. I felt its presence leave. For years I’ve been preaching and telling people they don’t have to be under bo***ge to this spirit of fear. I can preach that because I’ve
experienced what it is to be released from fear.
When fear is relinquished, in its place can come fearless faith.
Up until that time my one great fear was my father. Physically, I’m not a big man; but my father was. He had muscles that stood up like an arch. He prided himself in the way he could
flex those muscles. It terrified me. More than once I’d felt the brute power of his physical strength.
My father had shouted at me that if I left home I’d starve to death. As I read over those verses in Isaiah, I began to laugh.
It was a kind of holy hilarity. It was exciting. I reread those promises in Isaiah 41:10—11. And those two verses have been a cornerstone, an anchorage in my life from that moment until
now. In every crisis in my life, they have risen up to help and encourage me. “Fear thou not ... I am with thee.”
After packing my little, old, fiberboard suitcase, I came marching down the steps and was met by my mother. She’d heard me sobbing upstairs, and then she’d sensed that God
was doing something. “Where are you going, Lester?” she asked.“I’m leaving to preach.”
She started to cry, and I said, “Mother, you cried for years because I wasn’t saved; you cried when I got saved.
You prayed for years that I’d be a preacher; now I’m going to do it and you’re crying again.”
“Oh, Lester,” she said through her sobs, “these are tears of joy.
I know God will take care of you.”
I never returned to that little home. I cut my roots and walked away with only sixty-five cents in my pocket.
I was walking into the Great Depression of the thirties as far as the world was concerned, but I didn’t realize it. I left home believing that God
was God and that everything would be all right. It was my first real act of faith.
I had a lot to learn in those early days of brush-arbor preaching in the back country of Florida and Tennessee. I began to learn that when you feed your faith, you starve your doubts. I couldn’t have put it into words at that point, but later I would look back and be able to articulate what I’d gone through earlier. I pray that my story of God’s faithfulness will help to
ignite your faith. But know this for a fact—all lack of faith is due to not feeding on God’s Word.
How can you enter into the abundant life of faith? It will come as you feed on the living
Christ.
“Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the
word of God” (Rom. 10:17).
- Dr Lester Sumrall (My Story To His Glory)
- Spiritual Notes
