Evangelist Oral Roberts Preaches Faith and Finances to 600 in Ventura

Internationally known evangelist Oral Roberts, preaching a message of financial prosperity Sunday to hundreds of believers, said he hasn’t always lived in a land of milk and honey.

Making his first speaking appearance in Ventura, Roberts, who has a vacation home in Newport Beach, told those gathered at Solid Rock Christian Center that life was very tough for a young minister starting out in Tulsa, Okla., after World War II.

But just as the Lord has blessed him and his ministry over the years, Roberts told the ethnically diverse audience, such financial blessings are destined for believers who have faith and follow the biblical principles of tithing and giving.

“You are to have a car. You are to have money. You are to have things that people need to possess the land, do you hear me?” Roberts asked the enthusiastic crowd of nearly 600. “You must have faith in your heart right now that you are going to possess something.”

So many people attended the 10:30 a.m. service to listen to Roberts that about 100 of them had to catch the sermon on a large-screen television set up in an overflow room.

“You are a book that God is now writing,” Roberts told them. “You are a poem that God is now composing. You are a dream that God is now dreaming. You are a miracle about to explode.”

During his hourlong sermon, Roberts prophesied that three people in the audience would become millionaires within the next six months.

Wearing a brown suit, accessorized with a gold bracelet and turquoise pinky ring, Roberts looked much younger than his 80 years as he recalled his days of poverty before going on to establish a worldwide healing ministry and university in Tulsa that bears his name.

He and his wife, Evelyn, who accompanied him Sunday, were virtually penniless when they arrived in Tulsa in 1947, he said.

“When we got to Tulsa, we had a car, $300 worth of furniture and $25--and children,” he said. “There was nothing to rent for $25 and nothing to buy.”

When they arrived, Roberts said, the pastor of the church he would work for invited him to stay in a small, two-bedroom house he wanted to sell.

Roberts said God told him: “This is your house.” But then the pastor told Roberts that he had just arranged to sell the house to someone else.

“God, my pastor just sold my house,” he recalled saying in prayer. Roberts said he drove to a park, stopped the car and cried.

“I was wailing on the steering wheel,” he said. “I said, ‘God. He just sold my house. Where are we going to live?’ I poured my soul out until I felt that peace come into my spirit, that knowing in my heart.”

Sure enough, Roberts said, the buyer backed out of the deal and the pastor offered him the home for $6,000, if he paid half the purchase price up front.

“I said, ‘I’ll take it,’ ” Roberts recounted, although he knew he didn’t have the $3,000.

Praying for a miracle, he and the seller went to the bank to sign papers.

“I had the pen in my hand waiting to sign, and my pastor said, ‘Wait,’ ” Roberts said. “ ‘We don’t need the money right now; is it OK if you wait a year to pay the loan?’ I said, ‘Just as you say, just as you say.’ He did not know until 20 years later that I had only $25 in my pocket.”

But Roberts said his family’s finances really didn’t multiply until the day he had the faith to contribute $55, his entire weekly salary at the time, during a church service.

“Get the faith in your heart right now that you are going to possess something important,” Roberts said. “Give to your church, and he’ll give you a thousand times more.

“Don’t think of it as money, think of it as seeds,” he added. “You’re planting seeds that will bring you a harvest. The preacher needs to prosper before the people can prosper.”

Lonnie McCowan, pastor of Solid Rock, said he had been trying for three years to persuade the famous televangelist to visit his growing congregation, which meets in an industrial park building off the Ventura Freeway.

“I’ve always been impressed by his ability to expect the unexpected,” McCowan said before Roberts’ sermon. “He has an incredible ability to create miracles. . . . He’s gone through storms and challenges with his health, and he still has a passion to go on.”

As they filed out of the church Sunday, several people said they were moved by Roberts’ sermon.

Carita Boshoff of Camarillo, an Oral Roberts University alumna, said money wasn’t the only thing people could give in order to receive blessings.

“It could be love,” said Boshoff, 48. “If you give love, you’ll get it in return.”

Doug Perry, 43, of Santa Barbara, agreed. For him, the seed-planting metaphor has many meanings.

“You could ‘plant’ your time doing good things for somebody,” he said. “It’s not always giving money because not everyone has the money to give.”

Perry liked Roberts’ prediction that three people in the congregation soon would become millionaires.

“I might be one of them,” he said.

Boshoff, a mother of six, said she admired Roberts’ staying power.

Roberts weathered a storm of controversy over an $8-million fund-raising campaign for his university in 1987. Roberts told viewers that God would strike him dead if he failed to come up with the money. He warned that the devil had already tried to choke him to death. Five years later, Roberts suffered a severe heart attack.

“He’s been on the top and he’s been at the bottom,” she said. “And he’s still hanging in there.”