God Omnipotent Reigns in Our Lives — David Wilkerson

I ask you for it. Touch me and move us all. Amen. God has called me back to the streets where I started 23 years ago. We've already conducted two major outreaches, one in San Francisco and just recently in New York City.

And we plan other outreaches next summer in Los Angeles, Washington, D .C., New York City, and others. Now, we're not trying to win any city for Christ. Not even Jesus accomplished that. In fact, we didn't even try to make an impact in San Francisco and New York.

Taking the Gospel to Troubled Streets

We were simply obeying a mandate to go to the streets with the gospel. We distributed truckloads of books written especially for troubled people. We conducted street rallies, open-air campaigns. We set up hotlines.

We put workers on the street to do personal work. And to follow up, every individual came to Christ. In San Francisco, we hit a nerve in the homosexual community. There are an estimated 300 ,000 homosexuals in San Francisco.

Dozens of them are police officers. I saw police officers carrying purses for the first time in my life. We discovered a divided house among the homosexuals. The macho, leather homosexuals have taken over Castro Street.

Now, they don't like the fluffies. That's their term, the fluffy homosexuals on Polk Street who dress in drag. Their very words, these, those limp-wristed fluffies parading around in drag or giving a bad name to the homosexual community.

Now, neither the machos nor the fluffies like the S &Ms, the sadomasochists on Folsom Street. It was a frightening sight to see 10 or 12 S &Ms coming at you, carrying their nail-studded belts, their chains, and their weapons, marching down the street, daring you to stand in their way, going into their S &M bars for the sadistic perversions.

Perhaps you heard recently a whole row of those Folsom Street S &M bars burned to the ground recently. The very bottom of the homosexual community is the tenderloin, and that's where we set up business for Jesus, right next door to the Ram's Head Bar, one of the worst bars in San Francisco for homosexuals.

It's a human cesspool. Homosexual alcoholics, homosexual drug addicts, not every alcoholic's a homosexual, but every homosexual eventually becomes an alcoholic. They wind up finally in this flesh market called the tenderloin.

This coffeehouse was filled night and day, many of them receiving Christ. Over 200 homosexuals received Christ the Savior. An 18-year-old boy, the disinvoted drag queen of San Francisco, 18 years old, broken and weeping, said, Mr. Wilkerson, I was never gay.

I went into this looking for love. I've been on the street since I was 10 years old. But this isn't love. Recently, five S &Ms nearly killed me. They beat me and abused me and left me to die. And I'm here now because God must have had His hand in my life.

And I prayed with them to receive Christ. The gay leaders of San Francisco got angry. They trailed our workers. They threatened them, cursing and telling the homosexuals not to listen to us. And a week after the outreach, I received a letter from the president of the Gay Rights Coalition.

And his letter read, Mr. Wilkerson, get ready to be sued. You and your people have upset the mental health of San Francisco. You have caused untold anxiety, guilt. You've created traumas and fear. Many of us are unable to sleep because of your distorted literature.

If you come back to San Francisco, if you come back to San Francisco, it will be at your own risk. We won't allow it. We plan to sue you. Really, the only people you healed anyhow were unstable from the beginning.

New York City as a Mission Field

We've just concluded our New York City outreach last week. And what I saw and experienced has changed my life and I'll never be the same. It had an unusual, unbelievable impact on my life. We took 150 workers, along with our staff and these musicians, SEPTA.

We distributed over one million books, saturating the city from Wall Street to Times Square. We conducted rallies in the parks. We blocked off whole city streets and the troubled areas, Lower East Side, Brooklyn, Harlem.

And we ministered to the New York that the tourists never see. The visitors usually stay at the Hilton Hotel. They see the sights. They ride in open carriage. They ride the subway for five minutes. They do some shopping.

They see a Broadway show and they go home and tell everybody how exciting New York is. But we ministered to the other side of New York. And believe me, folks, New York City has become a habitation of devils.

Satan is trying to turn New York into a miniature hell. And Isaiah must have been talking about New York when he said, Hell hath enlarged herself and opened her mouth without measure. Now, folks, I started on the streets of New York 23 years ago.

And I've had a heart for that city ever since. And I believe it's one of the neediest mission fields in the world. And I say honestly that New York has always been a crime city. Teen gangs have terrorized that city, those streets, for 50 years.

There's always been an overcrowding. There's been poverty and violence. But what is happening this past year is beyond comprehension. And I don't think very many people in America realize what is happening to the largest city in America.

You ask Pastor Berg of Glad Tidings, he can tell you. Brother Don of Teen Challenge. You ask the pastors who minister there and the Christians who live there, and they can tell you that New York City has gone mad.

I met young youth pastors down in Washington Park where I was doing personal work, bombed out, intimidated by it all, giving up, overwhelmed by the hopelessness and the sin. One of the pastors told me, David, I feel like I'm passing in an ensale asylum.

It's a zoo, a human zoo. Child beating is pandemic now. Thousands of children are beaten and abused and abandoned. 110 children died of child beating last year. Hundreds of babies are born as drug addicts through the bloodstream of their mothers.

The babies cry all night long, and it unnerves the addicted mother so she beats the child often to death. This past year, mental hospitals started dumping psychotics on the street. They have a case overload and budget cutbacks, so the nonviolent cases are just dumped on the streets.

Never in my life have I seen so many insane people walking the streets. On 8th Street, I saw a man every day standing on the corner wearing a green ladies coat, barefooted, long toenails, long fingernails, waving incoherently at the crowd, walking up and down the streets, eating off garbage cans, completely insane.

You go to Washington Park, I worked there for eight days just this past two weeks, and I couldn't believe my eyes. In the city park, in the middle of the park, every day, a 15-year-old boy comes in.

He's got a little jug of whiskey, and he's got a microphone, no loudspeaker, takes a drink, and for hours stands there singing into that dead mic, fantasizing that he's a rock star. 5 .30 every day, here came a lunatic pushing a piano into the park and under the arch, stood there, turned to the crowd, cursed the crowd, and sat down and played the piano, the same tune for hours, snapping his finger, totally insane, just cursing violently at the crowd.

Every day at 8 o 'clock, here comes another lunatic, 16-year-old Puerto Rican boy who had blown his mind on heroin, and he jumps from bench to bench, cursing, making obscene remarks and gestures at all the women, people running because they know he's demon-possessed.

Encounters With the Homeless and Addicted

I saw a teenage boy reading my book, Rock Bottom. I went over to him and said, son, where'd you get the book? He said, I stole it from a junky up on 4th Street. I said, well, I wrote the book. He said, what are you doing here?

I said, I'm talking to you. He said, I sleep on a roof. He'd been sleeping on a rooftop four blocks away for two years, lives off garbage, intelligent, college dropout. He said, Mr. Wilson, I don't want your gospel.

I don't want your Jesus. He said, I'm accustomed to it. I know every brick. I know where it's at. When it gets cold, I sleep in the stairwell. And that boy is sitting there tonight going insane, and he's lost touch with reality.

He thinks it's just normal to eat garbage and sleep on a rooftop. There are an estimated 20 ,000 to 30 ,000 bag women in New York City. 20 ,000 to 30 ,000 bag women. They sleep on park benches. They carry little shopping bags.

They go into the alleys when the restaurants close and fill their little bags with leftover garbage. They're in their 50s and 60s. They've been given up by their family. Can you imagine, folks? They sleep in a park, tie the bags around their feet so that if anybody steals them, they'd be awakened.

I met Charlotte in Washington Park in the village, a bag woman for 12 years. She said, Mr. Wilson, I've been sleeping for 12 years on the park benches. And last month I passed out. The welfare department put me in a little four-by-eight room with a bed.

She said, Mr. Wilson, I have to sit up on the floor. I can't sleep on a bed. I'm used to sleeping sitting up for 12 years. She said, you're the first person that's talked to me in 12 years. The first person.

She gave her life to Christ. One of 20 ,000 to 30 ,000 bag women walking the streets living in garbage. The Rastafarians are in the park recruiting people for their religion. They're into reggae music.

They put dung in their hair, animal and human dung in their hair and beards. They have a temple in the Caribbean. And their message is, you don't have to lay down your drugs. We worship Christ through pot.

They get high and worship Christ. They sing the song Hallelujah just like we do under the influence of pot and acid and speed. And here I am saying, Christ is the cure. They're saying, Christ and drugs, all this in Jesus too.

And it's a very appealing message to those who don't want to leave their drugs. They're building a temple in New York right now and thousands of kids are turning to the Rastafarians. 42nd Street and Times Square.

The theaters have been turned over exclusively to blood and violence and homosexuality. Triple X rated movies. They feature live sex acts on stage now. There are theaters for sadomasochists. Movies that glorify murder, rape, bloodshed, beatings.

From 11 o 'clock at night till 3 o 'clock in the morning, they come in out of the subways and the underground takes over Times Square. You walk from 42nd Street and 8th Avenue up to 42nd to 48th, six blocks of hell.

The homosexuals have taken over and they're probably in that eighth block, 300 pushers or more bumping into each other, selling drugs while they're talking to police officers. There are not enough narcotic agents.

The narcotic agents are down at the shipyard and they're at the airports and they're not even busting them anymore. I used to see a lonely kid on the street and I'd go to talk to him and I'd say, hey, I'm trying to make a living, move on, I'm selling stuff.

And everywhere you go now from 42nd to 48th, pot, speed, acid, angel dust, I've got it, here it is. They are yelling at some of them at the top of their voices. Blood, violence. Sunday morning coming down, you see them stoned laying out on top of the cars and in the stairwells.

Sunday morning is the worst, most hideous day for these stoned out creatures coming down Sunday morning blues. The rooftops belong to the junkies. If you took a helicopter ride over New York City, look down on those flat rooftops, you would see a whole world, thousands, literally thousands of junkies huddled over a needle.

The whole world. If you pulled within 15 feet and hovered over them, they wouldn't even look up because every vein in their neck sticking out. They're living nothing more than for that next fix. You see some of them dead from overdoses.

Someone reported a stench recently in the Bronx. A boy had been laying in his son for five days before they found him dead of overdose. You walk down the stairs, and I saw a six-year-old girl sticking a toothpick in her vein pretending to be a junkie like her big brother on the rooftop.

Gunshots in every neighborhood like an armed warfare. During our outreach the past few weeks, right outside the door just a block from Teen Challenge, our workers stopped because they're gunshot, and a boy comes out, dies right in front of them, gunshot wound in his stomach.

They wait. They come, zip him in a leather bag and carry him away, and the people didn't even blink an eye hardly. Our workers were setting up down in Coney Island. Suddenly three squad cars pulled up, an empty lot.

Someone had reported a stench from an abandoned car. Our workers watched in horror as they opened, pried the car open. A man had been in there two weeks, his head riddled with bullets. People were vomiting.

Our workers walked off. Mothers in the street meetings coming up and saying, Sir, lay your hands on my kids. I don't want them to die on the streets. I don't want my kids to be junkies and alcoholics.

And, folks, those mothers in the ghetto worry about their kids just like you and I do, and they love them, except for those addicted in practice. The saddest sight in New York I saw were the drug-addicted mothers who came to our meetings, Union Square.

I'll never forget talking to two expecting drug-addicted mothers, and one woman looked at me in the eye and she said, Mr. Wilkson, I read your book across in Switzerland. I know you, and I know you're capable of giving me help.

She said, I don't want to get saved. I want $200. I've got this baby in me three months now, and I'm taking methadone, and this kid in me is sucking all my drugs, and I hate it. She said, I want to abort this baby because it's sucking all my drugs, and these drug-addicted mothers hate the fetus.

They hate the child because the child does suck the drugs, leaving them down, empty. That's why the babies are born as drug addicts through the bloodstream. The young people are becoming pagans. I spent most of my time talking to students in San Francisco and New York, and folks, I'm still in shock at what I'm hearing.

They simply do not believe in God at all now. They're becoming as pagan as the un-evangelized in Africa. One student said, I don't even know of a single teenager in my circle of friends who believes in God anymore.

God doesn't relate to our world now. Prayer is useless. The churches are dead. Religion is a relic of the past. Another student said, We believe in the 80-year theory. The 80-year theory. Life expectancy is now up to 80, so that means you've got just 80 years to live it up, party, get stoned, stay high, forget God, forget hell and the Bible.

Life is all pleasure, period. There's no life after death. It's all pleasure. It's all party now. One student said, Sir, no one has faith anymore. Nobody believes anymore. The church has codified its message.

All it is now is a dead creed. There's no feeling in the churches anymore. So you get your experiences out on the street. Alcohol is an experience. Drug is an experience. Sex is an experience. The church offers no experience, no feeling anymore.

It's dead. And folks, that's stuck in my mind because I've been saying, Take it by faith. But our kids don't want that anymore. They want to experience. I've had hundreds of drug addicts say, If I could feel God, experience Him, I'd give Him my life.

And we began to ask God to come down and touch them, let them feel His presence. And God did it. I talked to students from Germany, London, Scandinavia. Folks, I was appalled. One student from Germany said, God doesn't mean a thing to any of the young people in Germany.

We simply don't care anymore. It's money. It's fun. It's pleasure. It's sex. That's what it's all about. It's one big worldwide party. Reminds me of what Carl Jung, the psychiatrist, said, The opposite of love is not hate.

It's apathy. The opposite of love is not hate. It's apathy. They're not mad at God. They're simply ignoring Him. They don't hate God. But apathy leads to paganism. Folks, after four days it got to me.

The Gospel for a Spiritually Dead Society

I stood on 42nd Street watching this parade of madness. And you feel the breath of hell down your neck. And it seems almost hopeless. You think to yourself, look at those people. They're blind. They're spiritually dead.

They're drunk. They're stoned. Homosexuals on the prowl. Eyes are full of lust and hatred. They're like sheep having no shepherd. And almost every one of them are going to hell. And then you say, what do I preach to these hardened, blaspheming pagans?

How do you get through to a pleasure-mad crowd out on these streets? And begin to think about it. And I thought, well, I can't preach a prosperity message to them. I can't preach a welfare Christ in the ghetto.

I can't kill these poor lost souls that a certain quality or quantity of faith is going to put cash in their pockets and put them in a new housing project, provide them a new car. They're already suspicious that religion is only for the rich and successful.

They see Brother Ike coming through their neighborhood in his Rolls Royce, and I saw kids standing around in his Rolls Royce and say, what a racket. Religion to them is a racket. One kid said to me, well, I've tried everything and I can't make it.

I'm going to try Jesus to make it. Folks, the gospel that I read in the Scriptures includes a doctrine of suffering. The Bible said, for I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. Now, that doesn't have anything to do with boldness.

That doesn't mean I'm not ashamed to stand out and take the stigma of the gospel. It has nothing to do with boldness. Paul said, let our Lord grant mercy to the house of Onesiphorus, for he has often refreshed me, and he was not ashamed of the change of my imprisonment.

He said, God bless Onesiphorus. He wasn't ashamed that my gospel included change. He wasn't ashamed that his teacher was hurting. We have so-called faith teachers today who are ashamed of Paul's gospel.

They're ashamed that he didn't have enough faith or revelation knowledge to stay out of jail, to avoid shipwreck, to rid himself of a thorn in the flesh. I've heard a preacher say, if Paul had the revelation we had today, he would have not had to suffer.

And, folks, I consider that blasphemy. I'm not ashamed of a gospel that makes me wait for God's sovereignty to act in His time and His way. I'm not ashamed of a gospel that allowed my wife and daughter to go through cancer.

The Bible said, hope maketh not ashamed. And where do you get your hope? From experience with the Lord. And where do you get your experience? You get it from enduring hardship and tribulation. And without tribulation, you have no experience.

Consequently, you have no hope. And hope causeth no one to be ashamed. Daniel's faith got him a lion's den. The Hebrew children's faith got them a fiery furnace. The faith of our fathers got them death through torture, mocking, beating, stoning, sawn apart, destitute, afflicted, tormented.

You say they didn't have faith? They had no revelation, knowledge? The Bible said they all died in faith, and the world was not worthy of them. As for me, folks, I want to wake up to one truth in these last days.

It's this. A church that is rich and increased with goods is often in need of nothing, but it's also blind, wretched, naked, and can be an abomination in the eyes of God. And I thought, well, maybe I'll moralize.

The Failure of Moralizing Against Sinners

But you can't moralize against sinners. Crusades against immorality are becoming very popular today. And it's an outgrowth of the inner rage that we Christians feel against the sinners who are flaunting their wickedness.

We're all angry at the boldness of sinners today. So what do we do? We curse their darkness. We declare war on them. We try to vote the homosexuals out of the classroom. We raise millions to run newspaper ads to prod the straight people to organize against sin.

And others want political clout to try to outlaw perversion and sin. My Bible said, he that's without sin, let him cast the first vote. Now, listen, folks, my blood boils, too, when I see the brazen sinfulness and the blasphemy all around me.

I attended the homosexual church in San Francisco with my wife, the Metropolitan Community Church. The place was jammed with homosexuals. I read to you, I copied down the announcements of this evangelical homosexual church, Metropolitan Community.

Monday night, wine-tasting party in the church basement. Tuesday, all-night drag party, bring your lover. Wednesday, prayer meeting followed by disco and a beer bash. Thursday, gay rights caucus. Friday, a gay cruise, moonlight dancing and drinking.

Saturday, a great gay pride dinner dance fundraising for gay rights. They had a party sponsored by the church every night. Now, that didn't bother me. I'd seen and heard that before. But what did bother me, at the conclusion of the service, the pastor made the sign of the cross and he said, I hereby absolve you of all your sins.

He was forgiving their sins. I got so mad, I ran out and kicked this cornerstone of the church. I almost broke my toe. It was dumb, but I felt the rage, the blasphemy. Now, standing there, my wife said, What's wrong?

I said, Honey, it's such blasphemy. And then I remembered that Saul was a blasphemer. Christ loved him. The Saved Committee became the Apostle Paul. Now, I'm standing on 42nd Street, so I can't preach the prosperity message.

I can't preach the moralizing message. What do I do? And, folks, I've come to one simple, singular conclusion. The only message that's going to reach this glazier mad society is the message of grace, God's grace.

Grace as God’s Free Reconciliation

What is this grace? It's God's favor and forgiveness to undeserving sinners, freely given, undeserved, unmerited, unearnable, unrepayable. It is a forgiveness for sins offered to hostile, alienated sinners.

While they're still in their sins, He offers reconciliation. He said to reconcile everything to Himself through His blood, even to you who in times past were alienated and hostile in your minds because of your evil works.

Peace is now offered to you. God has manifested His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. If when we were sinners, we were reconciled to God by His Son, much more being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.

At that time, you were without Christ, alienated, strangers to the covenant, without hope, without God in the world. But now, through Jesus Christ, you who were sometimes far off or brought near by the blood of Christ, listen to the language of grace.

You who are hostile, alienated, strangers to the gospel, without hope, without God, still in your wickedness. God still loves you. He's not mad at you. He begs you to come back to His favor. He came to save you, not to condemn you.

That's the language of grace. Stand at Times Square, and I feel resentment against the sin. It gets to you. It intimidates you. But God's not mad at them, and that's the thought that has to hit you. Here I am, mourning against sin, but He is not.

Mourning against the sinner. God was in Christ, reconciling them all. Even the sadomasochist and the murderer. Yes, and even the rapist. We can't understand that. We don't comprehend that. I hear Paul saying, Take heed, lest any man among you be found short of the grace of God.

And I've been looking over some of my old sermons, and every one of them comes short of the grace. They're short on grace. How can God love these people? We're incapable of loving these unlovable because we don't think God loves them.

For God was in Christ, reconciling the world, not counting their sins against them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Can you believe that? Not counting their sins against them. If they come and repent and receive them, they are wiped clean.

We don't preach grace because we don't understand it. Who among us has really accepted this blessedness that Romans is talking about? Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are wiped away.

Blessed is the man whose sins God will not hold against him. Romans 4 .8. For the heart that believes in him shall be declared righteous. Romans 10 .10. How many of us in this building, how many even ministers, have entered into that blessedness of forgiveness?

Oh, we come into the kingdom by grace. We sense by faith alone. Then we move on to a subtle mixture of works and faith. We still live in guilt. That's what God showed me, David. You can't preach it until you understand it and you accept it for yourself.

It's one thing to look at a crowd of sinners and say, I want you to know God forgives you. I want you to understand God's not mad at you. I want you to understand you can be holy and free and acquitted, that there's grace for you.

It's one thing to stand before a crowd of sinners and say that. It's another thing to look in your own heart and admit that I myself am still under law at times. I'm still bound by feelings of divine disapproval.

I'm still guilt-ridden. I'm rigid. I worry about my temptations. Joseph Cook, a brilliant PhD, in a book called Free for the Taking, said something I'll never forget. Would you listen to this? Try to hear him well.

He said, I invented an impossible God. And I had a nervous breakdown. I believed in grace. I taught it. But I still thought God was frowning on me. All day long, He nagged me, Why don't you pray more?

Why don't you witness more? When will you ever learn self-discipline? How could you allow yourself to indulge in such wicked thoughts? Do this. Don't do that. Yield. Confess. Work. Work harder. Why aren't you a better believer?

Get busy and live holy. And when I got down to it, there was not a word or feeling or thought that God really liked about me. So I thought, God didn't like anything about me. And you know, there are a lot of us caught in this religious perfectionism.

See, we've programmed ourselves for impossible self-effort. We preach against works, yet we make constant trips to the altar to try to get rid of a nagging feeling that God is mad at us, that we're not pleasing Him, that we lack discipline, we're not praying enough, we're not reading our Bible enough, and we're hardly ever at rest.

We've not entered into that rest that remains to the children of God, constantly troubled by a fear that we're not living up to some standard that we set for our lives. And it becomes a subtle mixture of works and faith.

It can include a regimen of fasting and praying and working and witnessing superhuman efforts to burn out the sin, self-denial, asceticism, beat down the flesh, burn out the passions. We plead with God for holiness.

Make me clean, make me righteous. Oh, how we yearn and hunger for holiness. But oh, how many times I've allowed guilt, condemnation and fear to shut out the message of the grace of God. I worried when I couldn't weep like I thought I should.

I had dry spells hit me that worried me. And when I was weary and downcast and I couldn't read the Bible like I wanted to, and when my temptations made me feel dirty and unworthy, like Dr. Cook, I felt I was getting spiritually lazy and I was undisciplined.

I'd never become holy. I'd never be pure. I've failed so many times to live up to my standard. I can't tell you how many times I sat in my office looking in my library and wondering, God, when will I ever be disciplined?

When will I ever be what you want me to be? When will I ever have this desire in my heart for holiness? When will you make me righteous? But folks, righteousness is not something you pray for or fast for or work for.

It's an undeserved gift of God. That's what the Bible says. Romans 3, 24,. For we are freely given righteousness by the grace of God through the salvation which is in Jesus Christ. Therefore we conclude that it is by faith a man is justified, not by the works of the law.

And to him who works not, but only believes in Him, who justifies sinners, his faith is counted to him for righteousness. His faith is touted to him as righteousness. For they know not the righteousness of God, but they seek to establish their own righteousness.

And because of this, they have not submitted to the righteousness of God. Oh, that takes the burden off your back and mine and puts it to Calvary. And folks, we think that happened at the atonement. But you've got to go even beyond the atonement to the very heart of God that made the atonement possible.

It was all started in the heart of a loving God who loves sinners. The atonement was just an expression of the love of God's heart for the lost. God is not egocentric. He has to love. He has to spend it to be gone.

Goodness That Leads to Repentance

Now it sounds, it sounds unreal to preach such good news to bad sinners. I thought if I go out and preach that, God's not mad at you. I can't do it. I'm mad at him. I wanted to send him to hell. I had some red-hot hellfire and brimstone sermons.

Now there's a place for that. But listen to the Scripture. Do you stand against the riches of His goodness and forbearance and the opportunity which He has given you? Do you not know that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?

The goodness of God, this message of grace, is meant to bring you to repentance. Jesus said, I didn't come to judge you. I didn't come to condemn you. So I started my street rallies preaching grace. And I tell you, my theology was tested.

And I looked at drug addicts and alcoholics. Take, for example, Union Square Park. It's in the heart of Manhattan. The park is divided by a gentleman's agreement among the pushers and the drug addicts.

The main entrance is no man's land. The center of the park belongs to the West Indians. The west side of the park belongs to the Puerto Ricans. The north side to the Rastafarians. And the northwest belongs to the blacks.

And when we're setting up our sound equipment, drug addicts laying stone all over the grass. Police officers walking through. Nobody noticed them. Pushers, pimps, drug addicts, alcoholics. The police laughed when we set up our speakers.

I had a minister of another denomination. He said, are you Mr. Wooks? And I said, yeah. He said, you're not going to get anybody saved here. This park is hopeless. We've been here 14 years. Not one of them's been saved.

These fellas sang for about an hour. And I stood before those people and said, Jesus, let me feel the love for sinners that you feel. Let me understand just a little bit of this grace. That you could pick a boy laying down there stoned out of his mind and put the power of Christ in him and save him and maybe even call him to preach the gospel.

Help me not to hate him. Help me to have compassion like you did. And folks, I told him, it's not your drugs alone that send you to hell. It's not your alcoholism, not your pushing, not your laying around with women.

The sin that damns your soul is that a man can come in this park and tell you Jesus loves you in spite of it, and you reject the love of Christ. That's the damning sin, rejecting the love of Jesus Christ.

That'll send you to hell. The first man that came was a police officer. And then a demon-possessed drug addict. Then 25 more. Then 15 more. And to see him there, you could hear him in the microphone.

Help me, help me, help me. Lay hands on me. And to see drug-addicted, demon-possessed drug addict instantly heeled into the right mic, going around hugging people and praising the Lord. And that minister is saying, I don't understand it, I don't understand it.

It's the grace of God. One of the worst streets in Lower East Side. And when we set up the block, we didn't know it was a drug runner street. Cadillacs pulled up this end of the street, the drug pushers on this.

They had runners going back and forth all during the time. We were setting up our speakers, and they said, What are you people doing here? You get killed down here. The enforcer is a big black man with a baseball bat.

He enforces. He's paid by the drug pushers to make sure everybody gets paid. He stood there walking back and forth doing the street rally. The drug runners running back and forth. Half the crowd stoned out of their mind.

And to see the Holy Ghost just fill that place, just the whole area, telling them, Hey, Jesus knows what you go through. He cares, He loves, He's reaching to you. The first one to come was the drug enforcer to get saved.

Resting in Righteousness by Faith

Folks, you know what it's done for me? It's given me relief, a release in my heart. I don't even analyze my faith anymore. I'm really sick and tired of hearing people analyze the quality and the quantity of their faith.

As if God says, Now you have it, now you don't. You haven't figured it out. He said, He remains faithful even when we don't believe. I don't even worry if my confession is right. The number one negative confession in the world, Job's wife cursed God and died, but she still got the blessing that Job got.

I don't worry about my confession. I don't worry about my faith. Because since I've walked the streets, my theology has come to this, that I have a Father who loves me and He loves sinners, that I am righteous by faith, by what He did at Calvary.