Messages given at various Camps Farthest Out by Thelma Lee
Home » The Library » Speaker » Thelma Lee
Thelma Lee leads a healing and faith service, recalling how a stranger’s word of knowledge once called out her name before she was willing to accept a healing ministry. She testifies that a man’s emphysema and another man’s twenty-year siege of chills both ended after she prayed for them. The service came at the Tennessee CFO in 1972.
Thelma Lee likens the Holy Spirit to the trusted servant in Genesis 24, sent to find a bride for his master’s son, whose whole mission was to introduce her to that son rather than draw attention to himself. She teaches that the Spirit works differently through each personality. The talk closes a week of teaching at the Montana CFO in 1972.
Thelma Lee prayed that her newly drafted son would be kept stateside, then learned he had been sent to Germany alone, and the jolt reshaped how she prayed. At the 1972 Montana CFO she teaches campers to add “that the Father may be glorified” to every request. She illustrates it with a courtroom scare that followed a car accident in Mexico.
Thelma Lee opens with her son’s story of honking at a car’s “honk if you love Jesus” bumper sticker and getting an angry reply. She then walks the group at the 1972 Montana CFO through promises of Jesus, among them Christ standing and knocking in Revelation 3:20 and the rest promised in Matthew 11:28.
Working through the prayer of Moses in Exodus 33, Thelma Lee presses for a present encounter with God rather than a remembered one. A bush genuinely afire, she warns, will stop traffic. She retells the Red Sea as a boy in her class heard it.
Thelma Lee tells campers that truly seeing Jesus, not merely serving him, is what lets his life flow through them. She recalls the plea in John 12, “we would see Jesus,” and compares that seeing to how two people slowly fall in love by studying each other’s ways. The talk was given at the New Hampshire Winni CFO in 1967.
Thelma Lee reflects on a visit to the garden of the tomb in Jerusalem. She then turns to Song of Solomon 4, which pictures the soul as “a garden enclosed” that God alone tends and prunes. She tells the movement that the pomegranate and the humble cinnamon bark both have their place in his planting.
Speaking to the camps, Thelma Lee preaches from Matthew 7 and Isaiah 32 on building a life on Jesus the rock. She recalls her father’s work sinking bridge footings through West Texas sandstorms and floods. She warns against building on any person’s advice, however sincere, and urges campers to test guidance against God’s word alone.
Thelma Lee again uses clay pots – a dusty one, a cracked one, an artificial flower in a pretty one – to teach that no one can manufacture goodness but can only contain what God pours in. At the camps she tells a legend of a marred vase that a potter later used to water his roses. She closes by describing a door chain that held when someone tried to force her hotel room, evidence she offers of “divine protection.”
Thelma Lee uses a set of ordinary clay pots to teach Jeremiah’s vision of the potter and the marred vessel, admitting a recent burst of temper as proof that even seasoned believers can still be marred in the potter’s hand. A toy soldier found in a cereal box recalls raising her sons. She teaches that God gives good gifts only as we grow ready for them, in this talk to the Kentucky CFO in 1964.