World Challenge Sermons

David Wilkerson preaches just weeks after 9/11 to a city still trembling with fear, revealing that God's hedge of thorns around every believer was never just for their own survival but to produce a Joseph company of tested, proven people who carry exactly what a terrified world now desperately needs.
Preached: October 21, 2001
Main Points:
• The Hebrew word for preserve means to put a hedge of thorns around someone, to guard every coming and every going. Wilkerson stood before his congregation six weeks after 9/11 and said he had no gas mask and didn't intend to buy one, because God's covering is better than anything man can produce.
• God did not preserve Israel through ten plagues, the Red Sea, snakes, and forty years of wilderness just so they could sit around a campfire telling their grandchildren stories. He brought them out so he could bring them in, and every trial had a destination attached to it.
• Joseph is the clearest picture: sold by his brothers, falsely accused, laid in irons, forgotten in prison, his greatest test was not the suffering but the word of the Lord that seemed to contradict everything he was going through.
• At 70, David Wilkerson looked back over decades of cancer in his family, loneliness before multitudes, and terror of the enemy's attacks, and said exactly what Joseph said: God sent me. The devil meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.
• God is not looking for another televangelist or a star when the nation is reeling. He is looking for the hidden Joseph company, individuals he has been working on for years, who can go one-by-one to a neighbor, a coworker, a family member, and say God has what you need.
• Gwen Wilkerson went through cancer after cancer and finally said she didn't feel she was being used. The clue to your ministry is the battles God brought you through. She began quietly writing letters to women with cancer all over the world, and they wrote back saying she had put faith in their hearts.
• Everything begins not with a platform but with hunger. Wilkerson spent a year in a small Pennsylvania town weeping before the Lord with no vision, no plan, no destination, just desperate for God. Out of that year came one step, one page in Life magazine, and a call to New York that ended at Times Square Church.
https://wcmin.us/SS260614c

David Wilkerson asks why believers are satisfied hearing what God does elsewhere, warning that unbelief turns any heart into Nazareth — the one place Jesus stood ready to work miracles but walked away marveling that he could do almost none because of their lack of faith.
Preached: June 17, 2007
Main Points:
•Jesus stood in Nazareth among sincere, Scripture-loving people who knew his reputation, had heard of his miracles, and still would not believe he was God. He marveled at their unbelief and could do almost nothing there. That is the tragedy of many churches today.
•There is no such thing as a dead place, only dead Christians who have stopped expecting God to move where they are. Uruguay sat right next door to Argentina while spiritual fire swept the continent, never catching the flame because nobody rose up and said why not here, why not us.
•Wilkerson slept in his car on the streets of New York with no money, no plan, and no evidence that drug addicts could be saved, just a simple word from God. That faith produced Nicky Cruz, Sonny Arganzoni, and 520 Teen Challenge centers around the world.
•The devil cannot read your mind, but he hears your voice, and the moment murmuring and complaining begin to flow out of your mouth, he moves in with his most venomous lies targeted specifically at those who have set their heart to trust God fully.
•The first lie is that you are too weak and too weary for spiritual warfare. Absalom's strategy against David was to attack him while he was tired, and the enemy uses the same tactic, magnifying your weariness until you hear the voice saying you cannot go on.
•The second lie is that you are not making spiritual progress, that others are passing you by, that after all the sermons and all the goodness of God, you are still not where you should be. God is not asking you to measure your spirituality against anyone else.
•At 76, David Wilkerson looked back over valleys of despair and heights of faith and said the one thing he could give God until his dying day was his confidence, the quiet, settled trust that he had believed and God had been faithful, and that nothing the devil whispered could take that away.
https://wcmin.us/SS260607c

David Wilkerson reveals that the one consuming passion of his ministry was never building a megachurch or a personal following, but seeing every believer become so rooted, so unshakable, so wholly given to Jesus that the devil could throw his worst and find nothing to grab hold of.
Preached: September 17, 1995
Main Points:
• Paul's single burning desire was not to impress, not to build a following, not to become a voice. It was to impart whatever spiritual gift God had given him so that the people he ministered to would become established, unmovable, and unshakable in Christ.
• What brings real joy to a true shepherd's heart is not a $20 bill slipped in the hand or a pat on the back. It is seeing a convert stand firm years later, the way Wilkerson could look across a stage at Nicky Cruz and Sonny Arganzoni and feel every doubt the devil ever threw at him collapse.
• The first path to being established is laying down all anxiety about tomorrow. God told Wilkerson plainly that worrying about the future is an accusation against him, because tomorrow is the very arena where God most wants to prove his faithfulness.
• The second path is believing that God's blessing does not have to end. Revivals come and go, churches split and go cold, but Caleb at 85 was just as strong as the day Moses sent him out and was still asking for mountains to conquer. God is a God of continuance.
• The third path is getting your eyes completely off men. The charismatic itch that sends people cruising from convention to convention, idolizing evangelists and chasing emotional highs, is the very thing that keeps a person perpetually rootless and unable to grow.
• When you idolize a teacher, you're eating meat sacrificed to an idol. The only credential worth trusting is a life, not a platform or a reputation. Paul said, " If you want a word from me, look at my life. That is the word."
• You don't need someone constantly propping you up on the left and the right. Build yourself up in your most holy faith, pray in the Holy Ghost, keep yourself in the love of God, and let your own life become the word that establishes the people around you.
https://wcmin.us/SS260531c

David Wilkerson steps off the battlefield of global spiritual warfare and into the one nobody talks about—the private war—where affliction piles on affliction, lust attacks the holiest saints, and the only voices left are lying spirits sent on assignment by the devil himself.
Preached: July 29, 2007
Main Points:
• Every believer has a private war that nobody else can reach, not a pastor, not a spouse, not a counselor. David Wilkerson watched his son Greg endure two and a half years of unbearable pain and could not touch it. His wife Gwen, who battled cancer, would look at him with pain etched in her face and say, "This is my silent war; I can't explain it."
• God does not want you putting on a brave face in the pew, singing along when your soul is shattered. He has sympathy for where you are, but what needs to happen can only happen between you and him, and no amount of pumped-up meetings will substitute for that.
• The lust that wars in your members is not reserved for the carnal and the backslidden. David was godly, righteous, and admired by his enemies before his world came crashing down. Sleepless nights, unbearable guilt, bones aching, God seemingly silent—that was the private war of a saint.
• God cannot take you out of your battle because people around you are depending on your strength without knowing it. The intensity of your private war is often proportional to how many weak believers are sheltering in your shadow.
• The way through is not escape but magnification. Made a decision: live or die, I am going to praise God in the middle of this. Not after deliverance. Not on the other side of the Red Sea. Right here, right now, in the fire.
• Deliverance is not God's final goal. Israel was delivered ten times and still complained. God wants to know whether the trial made you more Christlike, more compassionate, more dependent on him, more ready for the next battle that is already coming.
• The devil sends lying spirits on assignment to those who walk closest to God, whispering night and day that you're a hypocrite and your anointing is gone. The answer is not to argue with the voice but to open your Bible and read promise after promise until the liar has nothing left to stand on.
https://wcmin.us/SS260524c

Gary Wilkerson walks straight into the hardest question first — why is the world like it is, and why am I like I am — then reveals that the same one-man problem that unleashed sin, death, and condemnation on the human race has been more than answered by one man whose grace, righteousness, and abundant life far outweigh everything Adam lost.
Preached: May 1, 2026
Main Points:
One man's sin in a garden released a virus more contagious and more deadly than anything that ever came out of a laboratory, spreading condemnation, judgment, death, and the wrath of God to every person born since. The mortality rate from the fall of man is exactly 100 percent.
The more important question is not why the world is as it is, but why I am as I am, because that is the one arena where the Holy Spirit will actually allow us to change something. Paul confessed it plainly: I do the very thing I hate and cannot do the thing I want.
We are sin deniers. We call it a moral failure, a disorder, a syndrome, a hangup, a struggle. God calls it sin, and until we call it what he calls it, we cannot receive what he has already done about it.
Jesus did not just come to forgive the sins you committed. He came to absorb the very sinner that you are. In the garden, he held a cup containing every war, every aborted child, every knocked-down door, every broken promise, every addiction, and he drank it.
The cross is not the complete story on its own. Jesus had to live a perfect life first, because only a spotless priest can sacrifice for others. His obedience was the prerequisite for his atoning death to be sufficient for the sins of the world.
The gospel is not just subtraction. Jesus did not simply take your sin and leave you empty. He imputed his own perfect righteousness, holiness, and obedience into you. That is the exchange that sets captives free.
You may have come looking for a breakthrough. Gary said it plainly: "You don't need a breakthrough; you need Jesus." One mercy outweighs a billion afflictions, and that one mercy is this: when you were dead in your sin, the King of kings came from heaven and washed you clean.

https://wcmin.us/SS260517c