World Challenge Sermons

In a season of fear, when Newsweek reported that most Americans could no longer sleep and New York braced for the next attack, David Wilkerson stood before a congregation of weary, faithful believers and spoke to those who had done everything right and still found themselves face down in the dust. Drawing from Isaiah 51 and 52, he describes God looking at his people, the ones who seek him and love him, and asking in loving disbelief why they have let the enemy walk over them. This is a message for the afflicted who are "drunken, but not with wine," the ones staggering under a crisis they did not cause. God has already spoken the word of deliverance. He is taking the cup of trembling out of their hands. Now it is time to shake off the dust, put the beautiful garments back on, and rise up in faith.
Preached: June 9, 2002
Some believers have laid their bodies down like a street while the enemy walks over them, and God says plainly, it's enough.
"The hardest part of faith is the last half hour." Just when God has already spoken the word, we feel the most burdened, and that is exactly when we must not give up.
One of David Wilkerson's kids called asking, "What do you do when you've done everything right but nothing seems to turn out right?" It's a cry that echoes from pastors' studies to living rooms everywhere.
After more than fifty years of ministry and fifty years of marriage, through fires, floods, and distress, David Wilkerson declares, "My God has never once failed me. Never once!"
The root of our fear is forgetting the Lord our maker, who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth. We rush to be set free instead of asking to see his majesty inside the trial.
Not his wife, his family, his books, or the ministries he built could satisfy the deepest hunger of David Wilkerson's soul. Only a fresh revelation of Christ can do that.
Even after an angel strengthened him in the garden, Jesus was still in agony and prayed more earnestly. The strength didn't take the cup away. It carried him all the way to victory.
A young woman with a severe facial disfigurement had prayed for years for a husband and a child. She handed her pastor a bar of soap and a baby rattle, the symbols of that dream, and said she had laid it down because Jesus had become her husband and children now flock to her.

https://wcmin.us/SS261011c

David Wilkerson traces the manna that bred worms overnight to expose a deception sweeping the modern church: that Christ can be had while his commandments are ignored, warning that any gospel offering only bread and miracles without the convicting word of judgment produces nothing but stench and self-deception.
Preached: April 8, 2001
Main Points:
God fed Israel manna daily as a test of obedience, not merely provision. It came with restrictions: gather only what you need, keep nothing overnight. Those who disobeyed and stored it woke to worms and a stench that filled the camp, a picture of what happens when people want the miracle without the Word.
The crowds who wanted to make Jesus king after he fed the 5,000 wanted his bread, not his word. Jesus told them plainly he is the true manna, but that same manna, divorced from obedience, still turns to worms today, no matter how much someone claims Christ lives in their heart.
Antinomianism, meaning anti-law, nearly destroyed the church two centuries ago through preachers like Dr. Tobias Crisp, who taught that believers could commit adultery or even murder and remain fully pardoned, with sin reduced to nothing more than a scarecrow meant to frighten children.
A 1906 prophecy from the Azusa Street revival predicted three dangers for the last days: an overemphasis on power rather than righteousness, praise to a God people no longer actually pray to, and a fixation on spiritual gifts rather than the lordship of Christ. All three are fulfilled in modern crusades where crowds wait impatiently through the preaching for the "good stuff" of signs and manifestations.
David Wilkerson recounts a well-known evangelist heard on tape cursing anyone who opposed his ministry, and warns of thousands who defend such men against clear evidence of sin, unable to be persuaded because, as 2 Thessalonians says, God sends strong delusion to those who take pleasure in unrighteousness rather than loving the truth.
When Satan tempted Jesus to turn stones to bread, he was quoting Scripture accurately but divorcing it from obedience, the same trick this whole message is built around. Jesus refused because he came to do only what his Father commanded, every word, not merely the comfortable parts.
David Wilkerson confesses he has had to shut off books and even sermons mid-read when he sensed a spirit minimizing sin creeping over him, and closes by saying he recently went through the entire New Testament studying every command of Jesus, praying not for excuse but for power to obey every word that proceeds from God's mouth.

https://wcmin.us/SS261004c

Evan Wilkerson opens with Corie ten Boom's stunning encounter with a former SS guard to show that only the agape love of God can dissolve real hostility, then traces Paul's picture of the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles torn down by the cross. Christ himself is the peace that makes former enemies into one new family.
Main Points:
Corrie ten Boom, who watched her father and sister die after hiding Jews from the Nazis, later faced one of her former camp guards reaching out his hand after a sermon on forgiveness. She felt nothing but rage until she prayed, "Jesus, I cannot forgive him, give me your forgiveness," and love flooded through her at his touch. Reconciliation was never her own doing.
Circumcision marked the Jews as God's covenant people, but Moses and the prophets repeatedly called Israel "uncircumcised in heart," showing that the outward sign could never change an unresponsive heart. Paul says a true Jew is one inwardly, circumcised in heart by the Spirit, not by the letter.
Paul lists four ways the Gentiles were hopeless before Christ: separated from Christ, alienated from Israel, strangers to the covenant promises, and without God in the world. Evan connects this to a Harvard study showing 58% of young adults report lacking meaning and purpose, and to a business student who told him through tears he wasn't sure his life had meaning.
At Herod's temple, an inscribed wall warned Gentiles that trespassing into the sanctuary meant death. Jesus tore down that literal and spiritual dividing wall of hostility in his own body, abolishing the ceremonial law and creating one new humanity out of two hostile groups.
No human effort has ever permanently solved war or division because the real problem, sin, can't be legislated away. Every peace treaty in history eventually gave way to renewed conflict, because only Christ himself, having paid sin's penalty, can actually be the peace between people.
Forgiveness is rarely a one-time event. It's often a lifelong process of returning to God again and again for help to forgive, and that process, however long, leads to real freedom. The love required to forgive someone like an SS guard was never Corrie's own; it was the Spirit's love flowing through her.
Believers from every background are no longer strangers but fellow citizens and members of God's household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ as the cornerstone. Evan imagines a future family table in heaven where Peter, Deborah, and Esther are simply brothers and sisters.

https://wcmin.us/WS260930c

David Wilkerson confesses that even sincere counselors and desperate parents secretly doubt the miracles they urge others to believe for, then shows through the demon-possessed boy, Jairus's daughter, and a coin found in a fish's mouth that nothing, not a dying marriage, a wandering child, or a perverted heart, has ever been too far gone for God to fix.
Preached: September 19, 1999
Main Points:
• God asked Abraham why Sarah laughed at the impossible promise of a child: "Is anything too hard for the Lord?" That same question is aimed at every believer today, and the answer changes everything about how we face our own impossible situations.
• It's easy to tell someone else to hold on and trust God, but the real test is whether you believe it for your own crisis. David Wilkerson refused to counsel anyone unless they first admit they genuinely believe God can fix it, because without that belief, all counseling is in vain.
• The disciples failed to heal a demon-possessed boy that the whole neighborhood had already given up on. Jesus simply told the father, "If you can believe, all things are possible," and one word from him raised the boy up, healed. That story exists in Scripture specifically for parents who feel they've lost a child to addiction or the streets.
• He describes fathers who walked into drug houses pleading with sons who wouldn't even look at them, and mothers riding buses upstate to visit children in prison. To every one of them he says plainly: your child is not too far gone from God.
• Jairus's daughter had already died by the time Jesus arrived, and the mourners' unspoken assumption was the same one many Christians carry: God can handle anything with a little life left in it, but once it's completely dead, don't bother calling on Jesus anymore. Jesus raised her with a single word.
• Desperate for $5,000 to pay off a debt as a young pastor, David Wilkerson believed he heard God promise an angel would deliver the exact amount on a specific street corner. No angel came. Days later, ordinary human means, a bank loan through a church member's connection, supplied the exact need, teaching him that God fixes things his way, not the way we script it.
• A prisoner wrote confessing decades of sexual perversion and addiction, hating what he did while somehow loving it, desperate to escape but unable to find the door. David Wilkerson told him directly that no habit, no lust, no clutch of the devil is beyond what God can break and restore.
https://wcmin.us/SS260927c

David Wilkerson confronts a church culture obsessed with counseling everyone else's marriage while nobody prays the one prayer that actually works. Paul's teaching on the veil reveals that real change never comes from waiting for someone else to shift, but only from crying out, "Change me, O Lord," and letting the Holy Spirit do what no counselor alone ever could.
Preached: August 15, 1999
Main Points:
• David Wilkerson confesses deep discouragement with modern Christian counseling, not because it's wrong but because so many troubled believers sit through months of biblical counsel and simply don't get it, treating God's commands as suggestions instead of commandments.
• In every marriage feud he's mediated, both spouses say the same thing about the other: they're stubborn, they don't get it, why won't they change? Everybody is waiting for somebody else to change, which is precisely why nothing ever does.
• Paul describes a veil over the heart that blinds people to Scripture even while they study it diligently. That same veil sits over sincere Christians today who read commands about forgiveness and reconciliation and still can't apply them to their own lives.
• No amount of unforgiveness, however justified it feels, escapes the judgment seat of Christ. A thousand sympathetic counselors telling you that you have the right to leave your marriage means nothing if it contradicts Scripture. God hates divorce, not because he's harsh, but because he's already promised all the grace needed to make any marriage work.
• The Greek word for "turn" means to change course entirely, not merely feel sorry. You cannot wait for your spouse to change first. God changes you, and then your circumstances stop having the same power over you because you've been changed above them.
• Change requires an "open face," an honest, intense desire to reverse course and let the Holy Spirit expose everything hidden, even things you didn't know were there. Wilkerson admits the digging never really stops until the day Jesus returns.
• When real change begins, God commends the changed person to everyone's conscience, meaning a spouse, boss, or child will know without a single word being said that something genuine has shifted. That quiet, undeniable witness is what Wilkerson calls the real power to change people.
https://wcmin.us/SS260920c