We were streaming our worship service this morning....singing Psalms along with the congregation....and there was some kind of glitch with the streaming....where we could no longer hear anything from the pulpit. The other folks streaming along with us....unmuted....just talked for a while. This had happened before....where my wife and I just listened to silence for an hour....hoping that the service would be restored....but today I asked her if she would mind if I booted up another sermon from the Internet for us to listen to.
Let me segue here for a little bit. David Wilkerson....born in 1931....was a Pentecostal preacher whose ministry led him from Pennsylvania to New York City....in compassion for what was happening to young people who were joining gangs. That led to the book and eventually to the movie....The Cross And The Switchblade....which then led to the wonderful ministry of....Teen Challenge....and then a pastorate in a former Broadway theater....a church that still exists today.....Times Square Church. David went to be with his Lord in 2011.
You could read in my profile....in a little more detail if you want....how my mother and I....in 1963 it was....moved from Buffalo....to a small boro just outside the Pittsburgh city limits. As I learned much later....David Wilkerson's future wife was raised a few hundred yards from the apartment where my mother and I lived. I would spend summers at a cousin's home only a few miles away....(the apartment...and the care from my cousin's large family being great blessings)....anyway....David Wilkerson....a decade earlier....had lived a few hundred yards from my cousin's home....and his future wife's....father's ministry....(he was a pastor)....his church was only about a hundred yards away....small world in God's providence.
Let's move on up about twenty-five years....I am now....and I will praise God forever for this....a fairly new Christian....and Pentecostal.....Assemblies of God....and I walked into a Christian bookstore....and a bright orange book cover caught my eye. It was written centuries ago by a Puritan.....William Gurnall....and titled....The Christian In Complete Armour. I had no idea what this was....and little knowledge of the Puritans. So I looked at the blurbs on the back cover....which is still my habit today. There was one from a....Charles Spurgeon.....hmm....yeah I think that I heard that name....and there was another blurb by....David Wilkerson! Well....as a Pentecostal I knew and loved David Wilkerson....so I bought the book.....and it was an important part in my transformation to the Reformed Faith. Are you curious about this....David Wilkerson....and Puritans? Well. David Wilkerson was a Puritan more than many Reformed pastors today....although he may not have even realized it.
I have 100 of David Wilkerson's sermons on cassette in our basement....still today....thirty years or so after I first listened to them. So....today....the Lord's Day....after the glitch in our streaming of our church worship service,,,.and having already listened to a half dozen or so sermons this week by Spurgeon and Martyn Lloyd-Jones....(my wife listened in to couple of them also)....I....for whatever reason....typed into Google....David Wilkerson sermon....and what is below is what was on the top. I'm sure I have this sermon in the basement....but would not have listened to it in at least thirty years.
