World Challenge Sermons

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

David Wilkerson redefines passion for Christ as far more than tears, emotion, or private devotion. A genuine passion for Jesus can never remain a personal pursuit but must burn with the same intensity for the whole body of Christ. It is proven not by feeling but by humility and total dependence on God.Preached: November 25, 2001Main Points:• Under the Old Covenant, God raised up individuals like Abraham, Noah, and Enoch to pursue him personally because the body of Christ didn't yet exist. Under the New Covenant, a purely private passion is not enough, because we are members of one body, and what happens to one member happens to all.• Pursuing Christ only so your own family stays blessed, saying "I got mine" while the rest of the church compromises around you, is a trap. That's not biblical passion no matter how sincere it feels, because your sin and your pursuit both ripple through the whole body.• True passion has almost nothing to do with emotion or forceful preaching. It's impossible to have real passion for Jesus without a walk of obedience. Every tear shed in the secret closet of prayer cannot produce one iota of passion if you refuse to obey what's revealed.• Jesus rebukes the self-exalted religious leader in Matthew 23 who preaches holiness he doesn't practice himself. David Wilkerson confesses his own struggle with this, admitting his wife has had to catch him inflating numbers about his books and church attendance to impress people.• Humility is not meekness, self-deprecation, or a long face. It is total dependence on the Lord. Jesus himself modeled this: "I can do nothing of my own self" was not weakness but the very definition of passion, complete reliance on the Father for everything.• Just as one Christian's bitterness can defile many in the body according to Hebrews 12:15, one obedient, fully dependent Christian can bless and affect many in the body. Passion for Christ pursued rightly becomes contagious rather than isolating.• This sermon closes by describing what pursuing this kind of passion actually costs: your life becomes a laboratory where God lets you feel pains and burdens that have nothing to do with your own walk, because he's drawing you into ministry to the whole body, not just personal blessing.https://wcmin.us/SS260823c

David Wilkerson takes the call of Abraham, a man told to leave everything and go to a land he didn't know, and shows that God is asking every believer for the same total surrender of tomorrow. Through Paul's chains and his own granddaughter's death, he reveals that suffering isn't the question; our reaction to it is.Preached: April 2, 2006Main Points:• Abraham had no map, no timeline, no idea how he'd be financed, only a command to leave his country and kindred. God is asking the same total dependence of every believer today: give me your tomorrows, not just your past.• Two little words disturb us more than anything else: what if. What if the economy fails, what if I get sick, what if my insurance runs out? Jesus turns us from our anxiety with a simple redirection: your Father knows what you need.• Paul sat chained between two hardened Roman guards, watching his own protégés like Apollos and Timothy thrive in ministry while his own hands were tied. He had every reason to spiral into why me, but chose instead to ask a different question: How will I react?• An elderly woman told David Wilkerson her husband spent his final years bitter that his stroke had robbed him of his future, never once considering that she too had lost her future as his full-time caretaker. Suffering steals from everyone in the room, not just the one visibly afflicted.• Two weeks before his granddaughter Tiffany died of cancer, the Holy Spirit told David Wilkerson to put her in his hands and trust that nothing he does is contrary to his will. His wife and daughters still wear a small chain with her picture, and it opens gospel conversations in stores everywhere they go.• Paul wrote from prison that his chains had actually furthered the gospel, because the guards chained to him for hours at a time went home and told their families about this strange preacher who wouldn't stop praising God. Paul made his affliction a defense of Christ's faithfulness.• The real question every believer faces isn't, "Why did this happen to me?" but, "Is Christ being preached through my reaction?" Wilkerson pointed to an elder named Sam who has years of raging, sleepless pain yet quietly prays for the pastors backstage, never once preaching a sermon but preaching Christ with his life.https://wcmin.us/SS260816c

Evan Wilkerson continues his Ephesians series by tracing what redemption actually costs, showing through John Bunyan's imprisonment, C.S. Lewis's Edmund, and a haunting World War II story, that Christ has already won the war against sin, death, and the devil. The only question left is whether we're proclaiming the news that the war over. Main Points:• Redemption means a price paid for someone's freedom, the way a kinsman could buy back a captured relative or a master could purchase a slave's liberty. Jesus didn't pay with gold or silver, which could never be enough, but with his own blood, because the wages of sin is death and life is in the blood. • Edmund in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" shows the trajectory of sin: it starts as teasing, grows through temptation, and ends in betrayal for a plate of Turkish delight. When the witch ties him up to kill him, Aslan takes his place, and Edmund walks away permanently changed, humble, wise, and grateful. • Grace is not given in careful portions. God didn't hold anything back. He lavishly poured out his grace. God's ultimate plan is not just personal salvation but cosmic reunification: everything in heaven and earth united under Christ. We don't see that fully yet, and that's not a contradiction; it's a gap between victory declared and victory fully realized. • A Japanese lieutenant kept fighting a war on a remote Pacific island for 29 years after Japan formally surrendered, refusing to believe the leaflets dropped from planes telling him the war was over. Christ defeated sin, death, and the devil at the cross. The war is over. Yet many refuse to submit to the rightful King. • Being a bond servant of Christ is not a part-time arrangement where you hand over Sunday mornings and 10% of your income while keeping the rest for yourself. It's handing over everything, not because everything has to look outwardly spiritual, but because nothing is held back as off-limits to him. • If you've accepted Jesus, live boldly as someone already free, and carry that same news to everyone still in rebellion, that Christ's gracious pardon is available, offering eternal life.https://wcmin.us/WS260805c

David Wilkerson reveals that the godliest people, those who pray, fast, and pursue God with everything in them, can still be seized by sin they never chose and never wanted, and shows through Psalm 116 that the way out is not gritted-teeth willpower but lifting up the cup of every promise God has already sworn to keep.Preached: November 18, 2001Main Points:• A praying, fasting, God-seeking man cries out that the sorrows of death compassed him, that the snares of hell seized his heart without warning. This is not a description of a backslidden person. It is the honest confession of someone who never went looking for sin and got trapped anyway.• David Wilkerson names it directly: godly husbands, godly pastors, godly wives are being ensnared by pornography, by bitterness, by adultery they never intended, and it is happening all over the world, in mailbags from thousands of ministers who all say the same thing, "I don't know how this got hold of me."• The word translated "simple" in Psalm 116:6 comes from a Hebrew root meaning seducible. The man isn't claiming innocence of desire; he's confessing he was drawn away by his own lust or the enemy or both, and it brings him nothing but tears, yet God did not cast him away.• Multitudes in the church today are exactly here: not God-hating, not running to bars, just utterly unable to break free despite fasting, praying, pleading, and hearing tape after tape from one evangelist after another. Their real problem isn't lust. It's unbelief, a loss of confidence that God's Word actually works.• Old Covenant religion demands gritted teeth, willpower, and a list of do's and don'ts, and it cannot free anyone. When it fails, people conclude in their haste that all men are liars, that the gospel doesn't work for them specifically, when the real issue is that they were never taught the New Covenant secret in the first place.• The bronze serpent in Numbers 21 asked nothing of the dying Israelites but to look and believe. That serpent represented the sin and venom itself, and Jesus drank the same cup at Gethsemane, not fearing physical pain but absorbing the full wrath against every sin ever committed. That first drop of blood cleansed and refilled the cup with pure promise.• The godly man in Psalm 116 finds the secret: not one more day of trying harder, but lifting the cup of salvation and drinking every "I will" promise God has sworn—I will put my fear in your heart, I will take away your heart of stone, I will cause you to walk in my ways—until the sorrow breaks and he walks again in the land of the living.https://wcmin.us/SS260726c