Messages by Tommy Lewis

Tommy Lewis started out mended bicycles in Kinston, North Carolina, and ended up preaching at Camps Farthest Out for the better part of thirty years. He had almost no formal education and little interest in theological methods. What he wanted was Jesus Christ himself. He once said that he had been converted for ten years before he really met Him. “I have one calling, that’s all,” he said. “I’m called to love you.” That was the message he brought to CFO. He preached about Calvary, healing, the Holy Spirit, and the life of Christ, but he kept bringing everything back to the same thing: knowing Jesus and loving people.

His own story began with a little boy who was ragged and hungry, crossing the railroad tracks at night to beg for food.

A Bicycle Mechanic in Kinston

Lewis grew up on the wrong side of the tracks during the Depression. His father was out of work, and Tommy remembered himself as “a little tiny boy, ragged and hungry.” At night he would cross the tracks to beg for food. Then he would eat it in shame. The hunger eventually ended. The shame did not. “And that shame stayed with me. Until Jesus was with me.” What finally settled the matter was a sentence someone gave him: “I knew you from your mother’s womb. You were mine then.” After he came to faith, Lewis got a job at DuPont.

Tommy Tyson lived about twenty-five miles away in Goldsboro and knew him from those early years. Tyson told a camp that Lewis had perhaps a third- or fourth-grade education, worked in a bicycle shop, then answered a call to preach and started a small Baptist church on the edge of town. Earl Tyson put it another way. Tommy Lewis was a bicycle mechanic—and a profound theologian in the things of God. Lewis himself was much less impressed with his beginnings. “I met the Lord, or the Lord came in.” He did not know then what he had been saved from. He could not have explained justification or the new birth.

And his temper had not disappeared. “I got mad with a person right after I met the Lord and hit him with a pipe wrench and like to kill him.” He would tell that story without trying to make himself look better.

“Get Off the Bed”

Lewis’s son was born with asthma, and the doctor said the boy could not be cured. One Saturday night, Lewis became furious with his wife over the situation. Eventually he took the boy to bed with him and lay there in the dark. Then he heard the words: “Get off the bed.” Lewis got off the bed. The Lord dealt with him right where he stood. There was no long rebuke. “That’s the reason He didn’t say, Tommy, you’ve sinned, but I forgive you. In His presence, folks, He didn’t have to say it.” Something changed in him immediately. “I was no longer an angry man. One second.”

Lewis had never asked another human being’s forgiveness. Now he wanted to ask forgiveness from everyone he had ever hurt. He woke his wife. “I want you to forgive me for every hurt I’ve ever caused you.” She fainted. Then the Lord told Lewis to listen to his son. The boy was breathing normally. The asthma was gone. It never came back. Years later, Lewis repeated what the Lord had told him about that night: “He told me years later, I had no problem healing your son. You were the problem.” Lewis never forgot it. Neither did his son.

Ten Years In—and Still Not Acquainted

About ten years after his conversion, Lewis became convinced that he had lung cancer. By then he had been baptized in the Holy Spirit for about five years. He tried everything he knew. Oil. Laying on of hands. Tongues. Commanding the sickness to leave. Nothing seemed to work. Then, one day in the bicycle shop, another word came: “Be still and know that I am God.” Lewis stopped. “Jesus, don’t I know you? After 10 years … don’t I know you?” The answer came: “You know a lot about me.” Then: “Now let’s get acquainted.” Lewis gave up everything else and began seeking Jesus himself.

Three days later, he described Christ as introducing Himself within him. The phrase he used from then on was simple: “Jesus himself is my peace.” The symptom stopped. Something else stopped, too. Lewis stopped hunting for methods. “I don’t look for them anymore. I thank God when they come.” He wanted the Master, not merely His methods. In his early years, he had once bought a can of Three-In-One oil because the name sounded right—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He would anoint people with three squirts at a time. He told that story on himself for years. “The way to get delivered from this foolishness is to be able to laugh at yourself in it.”

What Calvary Did

Lewis would not leave the cross two thousand years in the past. “I would not be interested in what Jesus done 2,000 years ago,” he told a camp, “but I am interested if he’s doing it today.” His complaint about the church was not that it had failed to preach Calvary. “We’ve preached the cross loud and strong but nobody’s ever seen it as a victorious thing yet.” Lewis preached the cross as victory. He talked about the Lamb on the throne. He was also careful about what a Christian’s own cross meant.

“You don’t have the cross that Jesus had. You are not dying on a dead tree. You are grafted on a living vine.” He would not turn Calvary into coercion. “Calvary is God’s love assuming the right to redeem the world, but giving the world a right to go to hell.” He put healing in its proper place by his own reckoning. “Compassion is not the highest level of love, but it is a healing level of love.” Calvary love was redeeming love, and that was higher.

So Lewis could stand at a camp and say that “there’s something better than being healed,” while also insisting that “health is part of the witness of the church of Jesus Christ.” His granddaughter was two weeks old and suffering from double pneumonia when his son—the same boy whose asthma had disappeared—gave him another sentence he would never forget. The child, his son told him, had been healed two thousand years ago.

Love Was His Calling

The Lord had dealt with Lewis about something even deeper than anger. He had to learn the difference between being loved and being loving. “I haven’t sent you here to be loved. I’ve sent you to be loving.” He took that literally. He did not believe agreement was required before love could be given. “I’m not required to believe everything that you believe,” he told a camp, “but I am commanded to love you.” He would not move from that. He prayed for the sick, but he also taught that prevention was better than healing. Staying well was better than having to be healed.

And he believed that one of the things that crippled people most was a lie they had come to believe about themselves. “Believe a lie and you’ll be damned.” Then he explained what he meant. “That don’t mean go to hell. You’ll be tormented.” Lewis knew something about that kind of torment. He had spent years so buried in his own sense of inferiority that he could not have told you the color of his wife’s eyes. His favorite answer was the woman at the well. He saw her story not simply as a lesson about morality, but as the healing of shame.

“When she got into town, she didn’t say, I’ve met the Lord. She said, I’ve met a man.” Lewis loved that sentence. “I have met a man.” He preached it at camp after camp.

What He Brought to CFO

Lewis came to Camps Farthest Out on a scholarship. Then he spent the rest of his life bringing other people. Wayne West came to his first camp at Capon Springs in 1974 because Lewis talked him into going. Later he steered the Wests toward Keystone. Evelyn Carter Spencer met Lewis on the porch at her first camp. She had come as a scholarship camper too, and the two became friends for life. Lewis also credited Starr Daily, whose book reached him at exactly the right time.

He repeatedly told the story of Estelle Carver’s healing, recounting it at three different camps. Christ asked her about the tree on which He died and then told her that by His stripes she would heal. Lewis and his wife, Ina, raised two daughters and a son. He once preached in an Episcopal church for Al Durrance and teased him about the vestments. That was Tommy Lewis. He could stand on a platform talking about Calvary, healing, the Holy Spirit, or the deepest things of the Christian life, and then turn around and make fun of himself.

“I’m Called to Love You”

Tommy Tyson had watched Lewis from the beginning. He said what Lewis carried was the power of Calvary love flowing out of the heart. Lewis himself put his calling more simply. “I’m not commanded to be a good preacher, but I’m commanded to love you.” That was enough for him. He had started as a little boy crossing the railroad tracks hungry and ashamed. He became a bicycle mechanic, a Baptist preacher, and a familiar voice at Camps Farthest Out. But he never seemed particularly interested in becoming impressive. He wanted people to meet the same Jesus he had finally met—not merely know about Him.

And if there was one thing he believed he had been sent to do, he had already said it plainly: “I’m called to love you.”