World Challenge Sermons

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

Evan Wilkerson opens Ephesians 2 by tracing his own decade-long addiction, showing what it actually means to be dead in trespasses. Then walks through the drastic contrast Paul describes: not just forgiveness, but resurrection life, seated with Christ in the heavenly places, all by grace and not by works.
Main Points:
Evan grew up in a long line of pastors, then spent ten years as a drug addict, cycling through rehab and relapse with no way to get free on his own. One day, simply saying, "Lord, I'm sorry," he felt heaven open and God's love pour over him in a way he had never experienced.
Before Christ, our spirit is genuinely dead, not merely damaged. That doesn't mean people without Jesus have no value or can't do good. Jonas Salk cured polio and never knew Christ, but no amount of good works can raise a spiritually dead person from the dead.
Everyone marches by nature toward the wrath of God, not because of some external threat but because sin already produces spiritual death in every human being. This warning becomes, for the believer, not a threat but a precious reminder of exactly what they were rescued from.
The contrast in Ephesians 2 is drastic: God didn't just forgive us; he made us alive together with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly places. Our bodies remain on earth, but our spirit is already seated in glory, given the identity of royalty as a chosen race and royal priesthood.
Salvation cannot be earned, illustrated by a construction worker being handed his paycheck: nobody calls a paycheck they worked for "a gift." Grace only remains grace if none of it is owed to us. Even our good works look like filthy rags compared to what actually saves us.
Many believers know intellectually that salvation is by grace, yet still feel, after sinning, they must earn their way back into good standing with God. That's not the gospel. God's grace saved you, and God's grace sustains you; the correct response to failure is to run to his mercy, not to a new performance plan.
Good works don't save anyone, but they inevitably follow genuine faith. If someone claims faith in Christ but shows no change over time, that raises a legitimate question about whether saving faith is actually present.

https://wcmin.us/WS260916c

David Wilkerson confronts the churches who worship with hands raised while secretly clinging to sin, revealing through Jeremiah 8 that God's people have lost all understanding of his judgment. Unconfessed sin doesn't just wait for eternity; it destroys marriages, ministries, and character right here on earth.
Preached: December 29, 1996
Main Points:
• God's questions in Jeremiah 8 aren't aimed at the heathen but at his own beloved people. Why do you cling so stubbornly to secret sin? Why don't you blush anymore when you sin openly? Why won't you go to God for full deliverance?• People can weep, search the scriptures, and study the law with genuine devotion while still refusing to let go of their idols. That mixture of worship and hidden sin, not outright rebellion, is what sickens the heart of God.
• The reason God's people race toward destruction like wild horses charging into battle is stated plainly in verse 7: my people know not my judgments. They've mistaken endless patience for the absence of consequence.
• A pastor caught in slander waved off David Wilkerson's warning and said, "Then I face the judgment of God," not understanding what he was actually saying. A man leaving his wife said, "I guess I'll just have to face the consequences." Neither man had the slightest concept of what that judgment costs.
• God names two present-day judgments directly from Jeremiah 8: I will give your wives to others (divorce, broken homes, generational fallout even into grandchildren) and I will give your fields to others (loss of ministry, career, everything built over a lifetime).
• A third judgment: serpents that bite and cannot be charmed, meaning the poison of bitterness, rejection, and unforgiveness that seeps into unsurrendered sin until godly people, especially those who should be gentlest with age, become mean, hardened, and full of venom.
• Judgment is never vindictive; it's redemptive. God has never once turned his back on someone who genuinely hates their sin and cries out for deliverance, even when they haven't yet found victory. The one thing he asks is that people stop making peace with what should be surrendered.
https://wcmin.us/SS260913c

David Wilkerson confesses he spent years as a self-described pessimist looking at life through dark glasses. He then reveals, through the story of the valley of dry bones, that God never resurrects his people just so they can keep talking as if they're still dead, but so that they can walk in the abounding hope that the Holy Ghost was always meant to produce.
Preached: June 30, 1996
Main Points:
The eye is the light of the body, and a clouded eye fills the whole body with darkness. Many believers are living out every situation, marriage, job, and trial through spiritually dark glasses. They see nothing but hopelessness even though the light inside them was never meant to be clouded.
A man told David Wilkerson he had given up on his marriage as hopeless until something shifted: he decided to change himself first, and God used that change to soften his wife's heart. The dark glasses came off, not because circumstances changed first, but because hope came.
Isaiah 57 warns that when God's people say "it is hopeless," they stop revering the Lord, turn to the flesh for help, and step entirely outside his will. Hopelessness isn't innocent. Jeremiah calls it a horrible thing, because it leads people to abandon obedience and follow the stubbornness of their own hearts instead.
In Ezekiel 37, God raises the dry bones, covers them with flesh, and breathes life into them, yet they still say "our bones are dried, our hope is lost, we are cut off." God never resurrects people to produce a testimony of ongoing death. That's no testimony for the world to see.
Fifteen years earlier, David Wilkerson admits he only talked about collapse, ruin, and coming judgment among fellow preachers until a friend asked him plainly, "David, do you have any joy? Let's speak it." From that point on, he made it a rule never to close a hard message without also bringing hope.
Believers have been given authority to trample on the power of the enemy according to Luke 10:19, yet many live subjectively, bowing to every circumstance rather than reigning in life as Romans 5:17 promises. That authority isn't hyperbole. It's meant to be walked in daily.
God spoke to David Wilkerson in prayer: "If you will continue to seek me with all your heart, your best days are still ahead, and you can't conceive the good that I want to do for you." That promise belongs to every one of God's children, no matter how ordinary or stuck their life currently looks.

https://wcmin.us/SS260906c

Evan Wilkerson closes out Ephesians 1 by tracing Paul's prayer for spiritual eyes, showing through a story of unexpected obedience in a parking lot how believers can know God not just intellectually but intimately, which enables us to grasp the hope, the inheritance, and the resurrection power that already belong to us.
Main Points:
In October 2017, Evan sensed the Holy Spirit directing him to a specific neighbor's car window. When a startled couple rolled it down, the wife broke into tears because their son had just been arrested for heroin possession. Faith lets us see beyond the natural into what the Spirit is already doing.
Paul thanks God for the Ephesians' faith and love, not just saving faith but practical, everyday trust that God will provide, protect, and lead. He also praises their agape love for one another, the same love Jesus modeled by washing his disciples' feet before commanding them to do likewise.
The word "knowledge" Paul uses is not mere information about God. As Martin Lloyd-Jones explains, it's an immediate, personal, relational knowing, the way a husband and wife know each other, not a theological fact sheet.
Evan describes a night when his air conditioner broke in summer heat. His kids were cranky, and a fan he bought didn't even work, yet simply remembering God's loving presence kept him calm instead of losing his temper, showing how conscious awareness of God changes daily reactions.
Paul prays believers would grasp three realities: the hope they've been called to (both a present reality and a future glory), the riches of God's inheritance in the saints (meaning believers themselves are God's treasured possession, not the other way around), and the immeasurable power available to those who believe.
That power is demonstrated by nothing less than Christ's resurrection and his sitting at the Father's right hand above every rule and authority. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is the power now at work in and through every believer.
The church is called "the fullness of him who fills all in all" because while Christ fills all creation, only the church fully acknowledges and submits to him. Believers are meant to reflect Christ's kingdom now, while awaiting his return to establish the new heavens and new earth.

https://wcmin.us/WS260902c