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About the Book
"Responding to Spontaneous Burden" by Philip Cephas explores the concept of spontaneous burden and how individuals can effectively respond to unexpected challenges and opportunities in their lives. The book offers practical strategies and insights to help readers navigate moments of spontaneity in a purposeful and proactive manner.
Oral Roberts
Granville Oral Roberts was born January 24, 1918 in Pontotoc County, near Ada, in Oklahoma. His parents were deeply religious. His father was a farmer who also preached the gospel and established Pentecostal Holiness churches. His mother regularly prayed for the sick and led people to Christ. While she was still pregnant, Robert's mother committed Oral to God's service. Even though Oral had a very strong stutter his mother would tell him that one day God would heal his tongue and he would speak to multitudes.
The Roberts family was desperately poor. When Roberts was 16 he moved away from home, hoping for a better life. He rejected God and his upbringing. He started living a wild life and his health collapsed. Roberts had contracted tuberculosis. He returned home and eventually dropped to 120 pounds. He was a walking skeleton. God spoke to his older sister, Jewel, and told her that He was going to heal Oral. During this same time Oral turned his heart back to God and gave his life to Christ. A traveling healing evangelist named George Moncey came to Ada and held meetings in a tent. Oral's elder brother was touched when he saw friends of his healed in the meeting. He decided that he should get Oral and bring him to be healed. On the way to the meeting God spoke to Oral and said "Son, I'm going to heal you and you are to take my healing power to your generation. You are to build me a University and build it on My authority and the Holy Spirit." Once at the meeting Oral waited until the very end. He was too sick to get up and receive prayer, and so had to wait for Moncey to come to him. At 11:00 at night his parents lifted him so he could stand. When Moncey prayed for him the power of God hit him and he was instantly healed. Not only that but every bit of his stutter was gone!
After Roberts was healed he began to travel the evangelistic circuit. He met and married Evelyn Lutman, a school teacher from the same Holiness Pentecostal background as Roberts. They had their first child Rebecca and then the entire family began traveling as ministers. In 1942 they left the evangelistic field for a while and Roberts became a pastor. He also returned to college to further his education. While a pastor he prayed for a church member whose foot was crushed. The foot was instantly healed. God continued to speak to Roberts about his call to the multitudes. God called him to an unusual fast. Roberts was to read the four gospels and the book of Acts three times consecutively, while on his knees, for thirty days. God began to reveal Jesus as the healer in a new way. God also began to give Roberts dreams where he would see people's needs as God saw them. God called him to hold a healing meeting in his town. A woman was dramatically healed, several people were saved and Roberts' ministry changed overnight.
Roberts resigned his church in 1947 and began an itinerant ministry. Notable healings began to occur. One man tried to shoot Roberts. God used the story to bring him media attention, which expanded his ministry very quickly. Roberts felt called to purchase a tent and take his evangelistic ministry to larger cities. His first tent held 3,000 but he quickly exchanged it for a tent that held 12,000. In July 1948 The Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association was established. Oral began traveling continuously throughout the United States. Like many of his Pentecostal brethren Roberts held inter-racial meetings. This brought him a lot of negative attention from groups who didn't like his stand. He even received death threats for not holding segregated meetings. In 1956 Roberts was invited to Australia. He held meetings in Sydney and Melbourne. In Melbourne there were outright physical attacks and destructive gangs. He was literally driven out of the city for praying for the sick. Often when people discuss the healing revival of the 1950s Oral Roberts and William Branham are listed as the most widely recognized leaders of the movement. Others came along side and many emulated them, but they were the most widely recognized personalities.
Roberts was a man who understood and used the media for his benefit. Roberts began publishing a magazine almost immediately upon starting his ministry. He grasped the power of radio and television. In 1954 Roberts began filming his crusades. He began playing his sermons on radio and then airing the crusade tapes during evening television prime time. Unfortunately there is some evidence that healing meetings were scripted ahead of time, and not all healings were genuine. People began writing to the Ministry headquarters by the thousands. They were accepting Christ as their savior after seeing a person healed on TV. By 1957 the ministry was receiving 1,000 letters a day and he was getting thousands of phone calls. He established a round the clock prayer team to answer calls and pray for people who contacted the ministry. In 1957 Roberts claimed 1,000,000 salvations. Between 1947 and 1968 Roberts conducted over 300 major Crusades. Money was flowing into the organization at an unprecedented rate.
In the late 1950s the healing movement was waning and ministries were under attack for their lack of financial accountability. Roberts began to move on the vision God gave him to build a University. It was chartered in 1963 and became open to students in 1965. Roberts was having a significant national impact in the late 1950s and early 1960s. For several years his named appeared in the Top 100 list of the nation's most respected people. Although Roberts continued to hold healing meetings his focus shifted to the University and the television programs.
The 1970s and 80s brought many crises to the Roberts family. Their daughter Rebecca and son-in-law Marshall were killed in a plane crash. Their son Ronnie struggled with depression after serving in Vietnam and also declaring himself gay. He grew despondent after losing his job and committed suicide. Richard Roberts got a divorce. After Richard remarried he and his wife lost a new born son within two days. Roberts began teaching a doctrine of "seed faith" where he claimed that if you gave to his ministry then God would pay you back in multiplied ways. The television ministry received heavy criticism for the constant requests for money. The Roberts were living an extravagance lifestyle while many of their supporters were not wealthy. Financial questions were raised in how Roberts used University endowment funds to purchase personal homes and cars.
In 1977 Roberts had a vision to build a hospital where people not only received care but received healing prayer. It was to be called City of Faith. Roberts put his heart and soul into the project, believing that God would build it as He had the University. The hospital struggled along and Roberts called his followers to give to the project, believing he had a vision from God to raise the money. Roberts even claimed twice that if money didn't come in that Jesus would "take him home." The hospital was built, but never succeeded financially, and finally closed in 1989. Financial giving was plummeting for both the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association and Oral Roberts University.
Roberts retired in 1993, at the age of 75. Roberts, with his wife Evelyn, moved to California to live near the coast. Evelyn died in May 2005. Although Roberts influence waned after the problems of the 1970s and 1980s, he was still recognized for his pioneering work on the "sawdust trail", television evangelism, and building a Christian University. He often appeared on religious broadcasting networks as a recognized leader in the healing movement of the last half century. He died December 15, 2009 at the age of 91.
Oral Roberts' legacy is a mixed one. Roberts brought the truth of God's healing to the public in a way that few others accomplished in his lifetime. His financial and personal issues and increasingly extravagant claims eventually brought his ministry into disrepute. The University he established continued to have financial crises under the leadership of his son Richard Roberts. It was only after Richard stepped down in 2009 and new leadership took over the University that it stabilized financially. The University is no longer connected to the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association.
take time to be unproductive - how busyness can waste a life
Søren Kierkegaard, a nineteenth-century Danish theologian and social critic, once wrote in his journal, “The result of busyness is that an individual is very seldom permitted to form a heart.” We sense in our souls he is right. Unrelenting busyness — running here and there, late and in haste, always with more to do than we have time for — stifles the life of the heart. Yet I fear that many in the church, especially those of us in various forms of leadership, often pursue that very busyness. We occasionally warn others about burnout and stress, but we are constantly in motion, endlessly feeling harassed by all that clamors to be done and feeling guilty for projects we haven’t completed. And we frequently pass that stress on to others, in subtle but destructive ways — we are busy, so we can act like everyone else should be busy. If they are not, we can treat them as lazy or negligent. But is our problem primarily that we are not more productive, or is it that we have allowed unrealistic expectations to distort our vision of faithfulness? While it’s very likely that we could become better organized and more efficient, pursuing those efforts may feed and hide the true problem rather than helping it. What if the heart of our trouble is not time management, but something else? What if the goal of Christian life isn’t merely to get more done? And if that’s true, why do many of us feel a need to fill every moment either with items we can check off a to-do list or with mindless distraction? Binge-watching television and hours spent on social media may be more symptoms than causes of our problems, signs of a deeper malady. What if God doesn’t expect us to be productive every moment? What if growing comfortable with slowness, with quiet, with not filling every moment can help reconnect us to God, others, and even with our own humanity? That’s at least worth thinking about. Unexamined Expectations While it was Ben Franklin, and not the apostle Paul, who observed that “time is money,” we Americans have baptized that sentiment — not to derive financial benefit from every moment, but because somehow we have the idea that every minute should yield positive measurable results. Don’t just sit around; do something! Of course, diligence, a good work ethic, and innovation typically do make life better for ourselves and others. Sometimes, however, a genuine good can become a horrible master, and when productivity and efficiency become our highest goals, our world and our lives suffer. That’s because God’s highest value is not productivity and efficiency, but love (Matthew 22:37–39; 1 Corinthians 16:14). This sounds too abstract, so let’s turn to more direct questions about our own lives. What do you think God  expects of you in any given day? If you are like me, this question can reveal some painful disconnects in our perception of God and the faithful life. I recently spoke with a pastor in the Midwest who told me that, when he was in college, he got so excited about the idea that he should “make every minute count” and “redeem the time” that he and his friends mapped out how they could live on four hours of sleep a night; this way, they could “do so much more for Christ.” Twenty years later, this once strong and zealous servant of Christ was physically, emotionally, psychologically, and relationally broken. His faith, his family, and his ministry were all on the brink of collapse. He certainly wouldn’t trace all of his problems to his early zeal and oversized projects, but he does see how that pattern distorted his life, increasing his expectations not just for how much he should do in a day, but for how much he should accomplish in his life. We may easily dismiss his crazy idea of four hours of sleep per night, but my guess is many of us are living with similar assumptions, and it is hurting us. One sign that unhealthy expectations are running our lives is a constant background frustration in our souls, hiding behind our smiling faces. We are exhausted by the kids, by the church, by the spouse, by the endless demands. We have no margin in life, so when someone says the wrong thing, or a child doesn’t move fast enough, or a neighbor needs help, this anger tries to burst through our kindness. People are keeping us from doing what we need to do! Efficiency and productivity have replaced love as our highest value. Gift of Slow Maybe in order not to waste our lives, you and I need to learn the benefit of “wasting” some time. Let me explain. What we think of as boredom or unproductive time can be a great gift. In the spaces opened by moments of slowness, if we don’t immediately fill them with more tasks or distractions, surprising things often happen: our bodies breathe and relax a bit, our imaginations open up, and our hearts can consider all manner of ideas. We have space to evaluate how we spoke to a colleague that morning or notice a young parent struggling with a child. Only by slowing down, and not immediately filling the space, do we start to sense God’s presence and the complexities of the world — including both its beauties and problems, our wonder and fears. We miss the world when we are constantly busy. Thus Kierkegaard’s insight: the result of busyness is that we are seldom able to form a heart. Compassion, thoughtfulness, repentance, hope, and love all grow in the soil of reflection. And healthy reflection rarely occurs when we don’t slow down. “Compassion, thoughtfulness, repentance, hope, and love all grow in the soil of reflection.” Busyness also stunts our growth. Creativity and wisdom require our internal freedom to reflect, wrestle, and sit with challenges. There is a reason that walks and showers are often places of great insight: the distractions are minimal, so the mind and heart can wonder. Such periods of slowness also enrich our communion with God if we take time for mental, emotional, and even physical engagement that the overly busy life excludes. Life improves if we carve out extended times for solitude and silence. These practices have historically been used and recommended by Christians who saw that busyness made it harder to be present with God and with others. These times of silence and solitude can be difficult, especially at first. But until we grow in our ability to be alone with God — and alone with ourselves — we will have difficulty recognizing the Spirit’s presence in our day. Forming Our Hearts Another reason we like to be busy is that we often don’t like ourselves. Slowing down and creating space for quiet often faces us with matters we prefer to ignore, whether painful memories from our past, undesirable traits in our personality, or actions we wish we hadn’t taken. Busyness can be a way to avoid confronting our sin. It can also be our way of avoiding the wish that we were someone else, or had a different set of abilities or background or temperament. Busyness that enables avoidance can stunt our growth. Busyness makes self-knowledge very difficult. “We miss the world when we are constantly busy.” Rather than being honest with God and ourselves about our hurts, sins, motivations, and disappointments, we dull our sensitivity with busyness. It takes courage to let moments remain unoccupied, but when we are willing to enter open spaces with an open heart, God can bring serious healing and growth. We also gain more courage to enter such spaces when we live in a community of faith that is safe and loving, where others don’t panic or shut down in the face of our pain and shortcomings. When others are comfortable with quiet, mystery, and unfinished work, secure enough in Christ to endure messy situations, that also frees us to face this season in which God is still bringing to completion that which he began (Philippians 1:6): God is comfortable with process, too. We learn to avoid endless busyness when embracing slowness becomes not merely a personal value, but that of our community. Learning to go slower and maybe even “waste” more time together opens up fresh spaces to grow in our awareness of God’s presence and work. We start to become people who can, in the slowness, pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17), often without realizing that is what’s happening. Slowing down — not filling every moment with distractions, dropping the compulsion to squeeze productivity out of every moment — allows us to hear God and others. It gives our imagination and creativity oxygen to breathe, and we start to develop a heart. It opens up the path of love. So go ahead, “waste” some time, because this may keep you from wasting your life.
