World Challenge Sermons

With fear spreading across the world after 9/11, David Wilkerson turns to Isaiah’s warning that gladness is taken from a proud nation under judgment. But the same prophets also saw a holy remnant who would “obtain joy and gladness.” This sermon calls believers to the mountain of prayer to feast on Christ, who was anointed with the oil of gladness. There they can lose their fear of death and stand at peace while the world reels.
Preached: July 28, 2002
Main Points:
• When a nation becomes proud and forgets God, one of the first things lost is its gladness. Fear moves in, the singing stops, and even prosperity can’t buy back the joy.
• People reach for distractions, pills, parties, and screens to numb their fear, but when morning comes, the emptiness is still there. Lasting gladness can’t be manufactured. It has to be received.
• In the same days the world loses its joy, God promises a holy remnant who will “obtain joy and gladness,” a joy no headline, crisis, or judgment can steal.
• Jesus was anointed with the oil of gladness, and he has enough for all of us. Walking in the Spirit means walking in that oil.
• The strongest witness in a fearful world isn’t a forced smile or a quick Bible verse. It’s quiet peace in the middle of real suffering, the kind that makes people ask what’s different about you.
• Many believers talk fear instead of casting their cares on the Lord. Our homes and marriages need a baptism of joy, so the people we love come home to gladness, not gloom.
• God lovingly asks why we fear a man who will die and forget the one who parted the sea for his people. He is still the deliverer, and his people are safe in his hand.
• The only way to keep this joy is to go up to the mountain of prayer and feast on Christ daily. When you lose your fear of death and live for the day you’ll see him face to face, nothing can move you.
https://wcmin.us/SS261018c

Jesus is not a distant priest who stands apart from human pain. He is the great high priest who has felt every weakness we carry, and he is praying for us right now. Walking through Hebrews 4:14–16, Evan Wilkerson speaks to anyone tired, distracted, or tempted to let go when life gets hard. Like the pressured believers to whom Ephesians was first written, we can drift away, telling God we’ll come back once we’ve figured things out. Evan answers with the gospel. Because the veil was torn, the throne of judgment has become a throne of grace, and we are invited to come boldly, speak frankly, and receive mercy and grace in our time of need.
Preached: August 23, 2026
Main Points:
Picture walking a bridge 150 feet up and gripping your phone tight. Now picture a car coming toward your daughter in the street, and the grip you’d use to pull her to safety. That’s how tightly we’re called to hold fast to Jesus.
Play a note on one piano and the same note hums in another piano across the room, with no one touching it. Jesus put on our human body and carried it into heaven, so when the chord of our fear is struck, it resonates with him.
He was hungry, thirsty, and sorrowful to the point of death, so stressed that he sweat drops of blood. Whatever you’re facing, he knows what it’s like.
C.S. Lewis said that only those who resist temptation know how strong it is. Because Jesus never gave in, he alone knows temptation to the full.
Once a year, a high priest stepped into the holy of holies with a rope tied to his foot. If the bells stopped ringing, they pulled him out. Now, because of Jesus’ blood, every prayer brings us into that same holy place with confidence.
To “come boldly” means freedom of speech: frank, honest prayer. You don’t need polished words or a cleaned-up life, just your heart, told to a God who wants to hear it.
Evan shares how a confusing season about his work exposed that he’d placed his identity in his job. His distracted prayers ended up stirring a deeper hunger for God’s presence, until he could say, “God, I want only you.”
Like a dad who loves it when his little girls run up to show him their drawings, God delights when his children come near and tell him what’s on their hearts.

https://wcmin.us/WS261014c

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