World Challenge Sermons

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, 1999Main 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, 1999Main 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, 1996Main 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