Honoring Mothers in the Faith

This Sunday is Mother’s Day in America. Twenty-five years ago, on this
very same day, standing beside a hospital bed in Lakeland, Florida, I
held my mother’s hand as she stepped into heaven to see the face of her
beloved Savior. What a special Mother’s Day it was!

At Mom’s funeral a few days later, I remember saying a brief tribute
that included, “She was a good mother,” and “She taught me about
Jesus.” Besides staying true to Dad and successfully raising four boys
and one girl through some difficult times, Mom was a woman of
passionate prayer. I have one of her old Bibles, showing hand-written
dates where she had finished reading it through eleven times. Mom
founded the intercessory prayer team at Carpenter’s Home Church. At an
anniversary service thirty years later for pastor Karl Strader, they
strung up 25,000 cards listing answered prayers. Mom was also a seer, a
prophetess of the Lord. She often saw things by the Spirit in order to
pray effectively for her kids. We never doubted that we were wanted and
we were loved by our Mom.

The Bible says that mothers are to be honored and that’s partly why I
am writing this today. There’s a danger that we might over-focus on
“fathers in the faith” and forget the great company of anointed women
whom God has used in our lives. The Body of Christ wasn’t intended to
be a single-parent family. As I said in my book, Women on the Team, the
Holy Spirit is an equal opportunity Baptizer!

Mom had many visions of Jesus. Some of the promises the Lord made to
her are yet to be fulfilled in her children. I know its true that part
of the reason I know the Lord like I do today is due to her example and
her prayers. Prayers never fade away but are woven into the tapestry of
heaven and constantly remind the Lord of His faithfulness and of our
petitions made in His name.

This past week another “Mother in the Faith” departed to her eternal
reward. Evelyn Roberts, 88, beloved wife of evangelist Oral Roberts,
died not long after falling and hitting her head. Oral will miss her
dearly and he will need our prayers.

I was saddened by the news of the passing of Evelyn Roberts. I grew up
watching Oral Roberts on TV. He was the first preacher to broadcast
divine healings over the airwaves. In many ways, he was a great
innovative pioneer if the faith. My mother was an ardent intercessor
for him. Like Oral, my mother was also healed by Jesus of tuberculosis.
This happened when I was a boy and I remember it well. Even as young
children, my brother and I helped pray it through.

Later, Mom’s devotion to Oral’s ministry paid off when my brother Don
was healed of a heart valve defect in one of his last public healing
crusades in Tampa, Florida, just before he began building his
university. Don said when he walked through the prayer-line in front of
the stage and Oral laid his hand on his chest, it felt like hot oil
poured out and his heart was (and forty years later, still is) healed.

Oral is an icon of the healing revivalists from the 1950’s, a man who
kept his integrity in the midst of fame and glory. He took a stand for
racial integration in the south in his crusades. He kept himself free
of financial and moral scandal and kept himself accountable to his
board members and team, and kept his doctrine true to God’s word. He
modeled humility and holiness as he again and again laid his hands on
over a million people streaming past him in a long line of suffering
humanity, demonstrating and testifying that Jesus is the Healer, not
Oral Roberts. When Australian opponents in the media mocked him in his
first crusade in that nation, asking him, “What’s the source of your
authority to do this?” He answered, “The anointing of the Holy Spirit.”

During the last 500 years, the Lord has been wonderfully restoring the
Church, the Body of Christ, to its original glory and power as seen in
the Book of Acts. From the Reformation on, many wonderful truths have
been restored by men and women of God. Their legacy and labor is often
captured for us by some great denomination, some university, or some
movement named in their honor. I grew up among Pentecostals. We owe
much of our appreciation for and experience of God’s power to those
preachers who paved the way for our enjoyment of the charismatic gifts
of the Holy Spirit.

Whenever I prophesy publicly or speak revelation to a person, revealing
the mind of the Lord by the Holy Spirit’s help, I know I owe a great
deal to men who carried that anointing out of one era and into another.
For me, the key man who impacted me most was Leon Price, a prophet who
came through the Latter Rain Movement which was at its peak in America
in the forties and fifties. Whenever I lay my hands on someone and
sense the surge of divine power to heal their disease, I know I owe a
debt to the late Richard Vinyard, a preacher of faith who walked in a
miracle anointing, having been given that gift by Jesus in the 1950’s.
Whenever I walk and pray and quote verses from the Bible, I owe a debt
to Karl Strader, who was my pastor at the time God called me to preach.
And whenever I see things in the Spirit after spending time in my
prayer closet, I owe that habit of simple trust and sanctified time to
my mother, Myrtle Christenberry Wood.

God has progressively given back to the Church what was lost due to
man’s religious traditions, disbelief, or willful ignorance. In our
lifetimes, the Lord first restored the revelation of the office gifts
in a definite sequence: first, pastor, then the teacher, and then the
evangelist. In the eighties, the Lord began giving us back the
prophets. In the nineties, the apostle’s ministry was highlighted.
We’re still working out those explosive changes! Our wineskins are
being renewed!

Now, the season has turned again. The new season is the Season of the
Saints.

While the famous “Lead Man” was used by God to be a model, the new era
is of “faceless heroes,” multiplied millions of members of the Body of
Christ who don’t have any celebrity but they do have the anointing. It
is time for all of the restored Five-Fold Ministries of the Church to
do the work of equipping the saints for the work of the ministry.
Listen, church leaders: It isn’t anymore about you running your race;
it is now about them being enabled to run theirs! Give it away,
de-centralize, turn loose, diversify, spread out, mentor, train, send,
stir up, distribute, and empower the people under your influence to
minister Jesus to a lost world. Multiply the ministry by giving it
away. One of the saddest things in the world is for a pioneer to pass
on without any one in line to receive his inheritance. Jesus’ desire
was to “bring many sons to glory.”

Oral’s ministry has run its course as far as pioneering or restoring a
neglected dimension of God’s grace, goodness, and glory. He was a
visible model of Jesus’ healing ministry. He and his wife are beloved
by all who call themselves Spirit-filled Christians. Oral always called
his wife, “My Darling Evelyn,” and you knew he meant it. Her passing is
a reminder that even the giants of the faith will eventually all pass
off the scene. Patriarchs pass on, but their spiritual offspring and
living testimony remains. Oral and Evelyn Roberts have left us a legacy
for which I am grateful. We are indebted to Jesus who healed Oral of TB
when he was a teenager, and indebted to Oral for faithfully carrying
and distributing that grace package—with all of its burden—in behalf of
Jesus and the modern church.

Christianity is a marathon, not a sprint. God is a multi-generational,
covenant-keeping God. And, like Oral used to say, “God is a good God.”
That is still true, even at times of death. Now, another generation has
arisen. The restoration of gifts and offices from Christ has continued
into this century, even into this modern era today.

Will we take up the mantle of the pioneers who fasted and prayed, laid
hold of great gifts from God, and displayed Jesus’ power? Or will we
rest on the achievements of giants and just coast on their faded glory,
recalling the past with affection but no longer walking in its
anointing?

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Ron Wood
ron@touchedbygrace.org