Gary Wilkerson takes us through Romans 8, showing that the exhausting in-and-out, up-and-down Christian life is not what God intended, revealing that the moment Christ came in, he changed not just our behavior but our entire operating system, and the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is the same power now living in us.

Preached: May 21, 2026

Main Points:

• The word condemnation is "con" plus "damnation," and before you met Jesus, that was exactly your destination.

• There are two laws at war, and the law of the Spirit of life is to the law of sin and death what the First Amendment is to a university policy. One simply outweighs the other, and no policy Satan tries to enforce can stand against the higher law.

• The flesh cannot keep the law, and the law actually makes sin worse because telling someone not to touch the cookie jar is practically an invitation. God is not asking you to try harder in your own strength because he already declared in Romans 8:3 that it cannot be done.

• Prayer groups, Bible reading, fasting, and accountability partners are good for growth, but they are not what sets you free. Trying to do in your flesh what only the Spirit can do is the shortest road to burning out and failing again.

• The most important word in Romans 8 may be "however" in verse 9. After all the in-and-out battle of chapter 7, God steps in and says: You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit. That is not a goal to reach. It is a declaration of what is already true.

• Jesus changes your operating system. A PC does PC things, and a Mac does Mac things, not because of effort but because of what's built into the software. When Christ came in, he didn't just change your behavior; he changed your cravings. Now you crave righteousness, holiness, and the presence of God.

• The Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you. The solution to up-and-down living is not found in self-effort but in understanding and resting in that reality until the life he promises flows naturally from the inside out.

https://wcmin.us/SS260629c

Gary Wilkerson opens with Samuel Rutherford's breathtaking attempt to describe Jesus as fairer than sun, moon, stars, and roses, then pulls back and says even that comparison wrongs him, before turning to Romans 5 to show that what Adam unleashed on the whole world, one perfect man has irreversibly reversed in them.

Preached: May 20, 2026

Main Points:

• Samuel Rutherford tried to honor Christ by saying he is fairer than the sun, the moon, the stars, and the roses, then stopped himself and said he had wronged Christ by the comparison. Nothing fair exists beside him. Everything else goes dark.

• One man in a garden unleashed condemnation, judgment, wrath, and death on every human being born since. You are not a sinner because of what you did. You were made a sinner by what Adam did, the same way an eight-year-old gets pulled over not for breaking the law but for being too young to drive.

• Jesus did not just forgive the sins you committed. He absorbed into himself every shameful thing you would be embarrassed to name, drank the full cup of wrath in the garden, and then on the cross made the exchange permanent.

• What Adam did can be reversed. What Jesus did cannot. You did not just get saved; you got grafted into a righteousness that neither the Son nor the Father will allow anyone to snatch away.

• Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. The more that went into the cup, the greater the sufficiency of what Christ drank. There is no sin so heavy that grace does not outweigh it.

• Stop calling what God has made clean unclean. When you read scripture, you are the David, not the Goliath. You are Peter, not Judas. You are the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus, and it is time to start talking and living like it.

https://wcmin.us/SS260621c

David Wilkerson preaches just weeks after 9/11 to a city still trembling with fear, revealing that God's hedge of thorns around every believer was never just for their own survival but to produce a Joseph company of tested, proven people who carry exactly what a terrified world now desperately needs.

Preached: October 21, 2001

Main Points:

• The Hebrew word for preserve means to put a hedge of thorns around someone, to guard every coming and every going. Wilkerson stood before his congregation six weeks after 9/11 and said he had no gas mask and didn't intend to buy one, because God's covering is better than anything man can produce.

• God did not preserve Israel through ten plagues, the Red Sea, snakes, and forty years of wilderness just so they could sit around a campfire telling their grandchildren stories. He brought them out so he could bring them in, and every trial had a destination attached to it.

• Joseph is the clearest picture: sold by his brothers, falsely accused, laid in irons, forgotten in prison, his greatest test was not the suffering but the word of the Lord that seemed to contradict everything he was going through.

• At 70, David Wilkerson looked back over decades of cancer in his family, loneliness before multitudes, and terror of the enemy's attacks, and said exactly what Joseph said: God sent me. The devil meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.

• God is not looking for another televangelist or a star when the nation is reeling. He is looking for the hidden Joseph company, individuals he has been working on for years, who can go one-by-one to a neighbor, a coworker, a family member, and say God has what you need.

• Gwen Wilkerson went through cancer after cancer and finally said she didn't feel she was being used. The clue to your ministry is the battles God brought you through. She began quietly writing letters to women with cancer all over the world, and they wrote back saying she had put faith in their hearts.

• Everything begins not with a platform but with hunger. Wilkerson spent a year in a small Pennsylvania town weeping before the Lord with no vision, no plan, no destination, just desperate for God. Out of that year came one step, one page in Life magazine, and a call to New York that ended at Times Square Church.

https://wcmin.us/SS260614c