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“Get what Daniel got—the touch of God!”
DAVID WILKERSON WAS SO MUCH MORE THAN JUST A GODLY EXAMPLE to be encouraged by. He was also a forerunner, way ahead of his time. Like Jeremiah the prophet, he saw calamity coming during times of ease, and he saw blessings coming during times of calamity! He preached in the 1980s about a dangerous “Christless Pentecost” coming to the Church, one in which the manifestations of the Holy Spirit would eclipse the person of Christ. And then, during his later days, he saw glimpses of what I would call a Christ-filled Pentecost, where believers would be so genuinely consumed by the Holy Spirit that He would share God’s very heart and soul with them. On the Day of Pentecost, to explain what was happening, Peter quoted Joel’s famous prophecy:
It shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams (Acts 2:17).
I believe there’s more here than we’ve ever seen, ever appropriated, or ever personally experienced. The Holy Spirit gives us more than the ability to prophesy. If interpreted by Numbers 12:6, the experience of dreams and visions given to the young and old refers to God giving New Testament believers a prophet’s revelation of the personhood and heart of God Himself.
…If there is a prophet among you, I the Lord make Myself known to him in a vision; I speak with him in a dream” (Numbers 12:6 ESV).
What made a prophet’s ministry in the Scriptures so amazing was not that they could accurately prophesy, but that they would shed the very tears of God, experiencing the pain and heartache the Lord felt over His wayward people. Yes, a Christ-filled Pentecost is coming, when Moses’s heart-cry will be fulfilled: “…I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put His Spirit on them!” (Num. 11:29 NIV) Pastor Dave’s sermon titled “The Touch of God” was a message he preached often and one he felt very passionate about for various reasons:
He knew it was the supernatural touch of God upon him that enabled him to slay giants, conquering what others considered unconquerable.
He knew that the same God who used his life desires to use you and me beyond our imagination, beyond our dreams, and way beyond our own natural abilities.
He had a hope that in these last days, God would raise up an army of believers who would experience the touch of God upon their lives, setting them on fire for the Lord, enabling them to reach a mighty harvest of souls.
The touch of God first came upon David Wilkerson when he was eight years old and he received Christ as his Savior. The second time was when he received the call to New York City:
The Holy Spirit came on me and said, “David, I’m calling you to prayer.” I said, “Yes, God”—and I began to weep like I never wept. After three days, I felt the burden of the Lord in a way I’d never felt before. Then one day, I went home, picked up LIFE Magazine, and saw the faces of seven young men who’d committed murder. And God said, “Go to New York. This is what it’s all about.”35
Years later, the touch of God came upon him again when the Lord called him to return to New York City to raise up a church in one of the most famous and busiest crossroads in the world, Times Square.
While walking down 42nd Street at midnight, Pastor David Wilkerson’s heart broke over what he saw. At that time, Times Square was populated mainly by prostitutes and pimps, runaways, drug addicts and hustlers, along with live peep shows and X-rated movie houses. Pastor David cried out for God to do something—anything—to help the physically destitute and spiritually dead people he saw. Recalling that life-changing night, Pastor David says, “I saw 9-, 10- and 11-year-old kids bombed on crack cocaine. I walked down 42nd Street and they were selling crack. Len Bias, the famous basketball player, had just died of a crack overdose, and the pusher was yelling, ‘Hey, I’ve got the stuff that killed Len.’ I wept and prayed, ‘God, You’ve got to raise up a testimony in this hellish place….’ The answer was not what I wanted to hear: ‘Well, you know the city. You’ve been here. You do it.’” Pastor David obeyed God. He opened Times Square Church in 1987.36
In “The Touch of God,” Pastor Dave uses the example of Daniel, a man of prayer who became, at the urgings of the Lord, a man of intense prayer:
The reason many Christians today are confused is because they have not pursued the Lord in prayer. They have not given time or sought His face. I tell you, if you will set your heart like Daniel and get the burden for God’s glory—not giving up, and going on until you can go no further—you will get what Daniel got: the touch of God! …If you want only to be saved—only to have daily devotions and to do what is right—then this message is not for you. But if you hunger for more of God, if you want Him to lay hold of your life, there is a price! Consider the price Daniel paid: Daniel “set his face to seek the Lord with all his strength and will” (9:3).37
The supernatural touch of God is initiated with the Lord calling us to a place of extraordinary prayer. Jonathan Edwards, the revivalist who spearheaded the First Great Awakening in America in the 1700s, taught that when God has something extraordinary to accomplish through His Church, He first calls His people to extraordinary prayer. In Zechariah 12:10, when God is about to accomplish great things, He begins by a remarkable outpouring of “the Spirit of grace and supplication” upon His people, producing deep and desperate prayer. If I were to summarize David Wilkerson’s walk with God in one biblical verse, it would be from the words of another David: “When You said, ‘Seek My face,’ my heart said to You, ‘Your face, Lord, I will seek’” (Ps. 27:8). David Wilkerson’s life is an example of someone seeking the face of God until the Holy Spirit came and distinctly touched his heart and spoke to his soul, giving him a divine burden and divine instructions over and over throughout his life.
To say there’s a price to pay for the touch of God can be misleading if we misinterpret it as saying we earn something. We certainly don’t earn God’s blessings. And yet, millions of believers are living non-supernatural lives because we never stir ourselves up to “take hold of God” (see Isa. 64:7). Or perhaps we’ve never been told there is a supernatural walk awaiting all those who desire to be mightily used of the Lord. David Wilkerson’s example declares that a scrawny country preacher with the touch of God can effectively minister in New York City to gang members and drug addicts, as well as to Wall Street executives. As his brother Don said, “David’s life can be summarized by saying, ‘God can use anyone to save anyone,’” meaning even a country preacher can be used by God to reach hardened gang leaders like Nicky Cruz.
It’s one thing to be used in the charismatic gifts of the Spirit such as prophecy, and it’s quite another to become someone with the heart of a prophet. Pastor Dave, while pastoring a small church in Pennsylvania, began to move in the supernatural giftings of prophesying and words of knowledge, and the crowds came to marvel. But that was just the beginning. Gary Wilkerson wrote in his father’s biography that Pastor Dave would walk into Teen Challenge in Brooklyn and give accurate prophetic words to some very surprised students! I personally received many prophetic words from him over the years, things that only God could know.
But then God began to share His heart with him, and he got a prophet’s perspective on the Personhood of God. He understood and felt God’s broken heart over our sins against Him, and especially our idolatry. For instance, God wept through Jeremiah the prophet as He suffered the pain caused by the spiritual adultery of Israel. Commenting on Jeremiah 2:32, David Wilkerson wrote:
The Lord asks: Can a maid forget her ornaments or a bride her attire? Yet My people have forgotten Me days without number…The Lord has put His pain in Scripture for all the world to see! Every generation has read about it. Yet, why would the Lord tell the whole world about such neglect? Shouldn’t lovers’ differences be kept quiet? No—He wants us to know how hurt He is! He tells the whole world because He is so heartbroken by our behavior! Jeremiah was weeping
with holy tears that weren’t his own. Indeed, this prophet actually heard God speak of His own weeping, broken heart.38
Right before starting Times Square Church, David Wilkerson and Bob Phillips (who would soon join him as an amazing Bible teacher) met together in Texas. Here’s what Gary wrote about that insightful meeting:
[Bob says,] “We spent three days together…going through the Scriptures. There’s a passage in Ezekiel 44 that’s a pretty hard one. It talks about God’s people breaking covenant with Him. I’d been preaching from that chapter in a lot of my messages, and David wanted me to share my insights with him.” In the passage, God allows his priests to preach the wrong message, so the people would be fed the unholy things they clamored for.
As Bob spoke about the passage, my dad grew quiet. They were sitting at a small table in Dad’s hotel room. Suddenly, my father slid out of his chair and onto the floor. “He just fell over,” Bob says. “He curled up in a fetal position and began to weep and weep and weep. He was feeling the consequences of that passage of Scripture, and he was crying for the nation.”
Bob was dumbstruck. “As I looked at David, I was still upright. All I could think was, I’ve been preaching this message for a while, but it has never affected me the way it’s affecting this man right now. I remember having this thought: ‘He’s feeling what God feels—and I want that.’ I saw a man who not only carried the burden of God, but was deeply impacted by it. That was David’s tenderness. He was thinking and feeling with God’s heart.”39
No wonder the Times Square Church pulpit became a platform from which a genuine prophet ministered to the entire nation!
David Wilkerson knew that the touch of God is available to every hungry believer, and he longed for the day when an outpouring of God’s Spirit would cause a whole generation of giant-killing believers to be raised up. Who will reach the unsaved Nicky Cruzes of our generation? Who will rise up and slay the cultural and spiritual giants that society has deemed unconquerable? Who is hungry for an outpouring that turns us into people carrying a prophet’s revelation of the majesty, heart, and pain of God?
Are we truly willing to follow in David Wilkerson’s footsteps, or are we content to be barren believers? In the Old Testament, it was a disgrace for women, such as Hannah, to be barren, to be unable to bear children (see 1 Sam. 1:11). And under the New Covenant, it’s a disgrace (in my opinion) for Spirit-filled believers to be barren, to spend our entire lives without receiving and developing a heavenly burden from the Lord. Paul likened carrying these divine burdens to being a woman in labor:
My little children, for whom I labor [travail] in birth again until Christ is formed in you (Galatians 4:19).
It appears that Paul first travailed in prayer for their salvation, and then again for their maturity in Christ. Travailing in prayer is a holy thing, a supernatural work of God as He imparts to His praying men and women a particular burden with a built-in anointing to pray it through to victory. The burdens of the world (and our flesh and the enemy) weigh us down, but burdens birthed from Heaven energize us and empower us to pray until we know the victory has been won. Teen Challenge was birthed in that type of prayer, and so was Times Square Church. All true ministry is birthed in prayer. Don Wilkerson, in a recent sermon entitled “Going into Labor,” said:
When I grew up, there were days during the week we were not allowed to play inside, because those were the days my father, a pastor, prepared for his messages. One day, I forgot and ran into the house with my friend to get a ball glove. Inside the house, my friend suddenly stopped and had a look of fright on his face. He nervously asked, “What’s that noise?” There were groaning sounds coming from upstairs. It was my father praying. I said to my buddy, “Oh, it’s just my dad praying.” That sound was as familiar and common to me as any other sound in the house. When my brother David spent time in prayer rather than watch TV, something was being birthed in the spirit realm. He didn’t know what it was, but in due time it was revealed. He happened to pick up a magazine and read the story of a street gang in Manhattan who killed a crippled boy named Michael Farmer. The Holy Spirit put a burden on him that he could not let go. And as they say—the rest is history.40
What does God want to birth into the world through the womb of our prayer lives? Let’s learn to sit at the feet of the Lord and offer Him our hearts and lives, just like David Wilkerson did over and over. And then we will be amazed by what God does through us. Then we can be sure that we have followed in the footsteps of David Wilkerson. More importantly, we can be confident that we are pleasing the Lord. For the entire length of my Christian walk (over thirty-nine years), David Wilkerson’s example has always been set before me. On many occasions, I made the immature mistake of trying to follow in his exact steps, which I am not called or equipped to do. For instance, in my first church plant in the Bronx, I tried to copy Times Square Church instead of developing our own identity as a daughter church.
When I began working at Brooklyn Teen Challenge, Pastor Don taught me to “look for patterns” when dealing with students. In other words, we all make mistakes, but it’s continuous, negative patterns that need to be addressed. On the positive side, it’s the godly patterns of David Wilkerson’s walk with God from which we all can learn. I saw a positive and continuous cycle in Pastor Dave. He diligently sought God until the Lord stirred him deeply and brought him into “birthing prayer.” As in the natural, so in the spiritual: intimacy produces conception. Once a burden from Heaven was prayed through and a ministry was birthed, Pastor Dave would then ride the wave of the Holy Spirit as that ministry developed and produced much fruit. Listen to Pastor Dave’s passionate prayer for that type of outpouring:
When the Lord touches someone, that person is driven to his knees. He then becomes intimate with Christ. And out of that intimacy, he receives fresh revelation from Heaven. [But] we do not want the discipline of being shut in with God. We don’t want to lose sleep, we don’t want to fast. We want to settle for the status quo. God, wake us up! Let some of us get so hungry to be touched by Your hand, so set on fire and burdened for Your will and purpose, that You will come forth and pour out Your Spirit mightily!41
From his sermon “A Call to Anguish”:
If you set your heart to pray, God’s going to come and start sharing His heart with you. When God determined to recover a ruined situation (as in the days of Nehemiah), He would seek out a praying man, and He’d take him down into the waters of anguish and literally baptize him in anguish.… If He gives you His burden, He’s going to give you His peace to accompany it. He’ll never let your heart be broken without all the oil you need for total healing.42
Let’s follow in David Wilkerson’s footsteps by claiming for ourselves the scriptural promise the Lord gave him when Teen Challenge was first birthed:
Those who sow in tears shall reap in joy. He who continually goes forth weeping, bearing seed for sowing, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him (Psalms 126:5-6).
David Wilkerson’s incredible gift of faith wasn’t focused mainly on his own needs. The DNA of his faith (and of Teen Challenge) was “faith for souls,” that is, the belief that God can and will save people, no matter how hard their hearts had become or how deep their bondages were. “With God all things are possible,” Jesus said (Matt. 19:26; Mark 10:27). And He also said, “If you have faith…nothing will be impossible for you” (Matt. 17:20).
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“Something takes your life, and suddenly you’re in glory!”
ON APRIL 27, 2011, I HEARD THE NEWS THAT PASTOR DAVE WAS SUDdenly gone, having died in a car wreck somewhere in rural Texas. Times Square Church soon posted information on their website regarding a memorial service they were planning. Since people from all over the world were expected to come, they offered courtesy seating for those who knew Pastor Dave personally. I was instructed to arrive an hour early and find one of the ushers in a light blue jacket, who would then inform my wife and me about which entrance to use t
o enter the building for the service. I found an usher and told him that I had courtesy seating, and he told us to go to the entrance on the side of the building, the same door I once used to go to my dressing room apartment when I lived in the back of the church many years ago.
As we stood in line, I noticed Pastor Dave’s secretary, Barbara, was at the door with a clipboard in hand, always the quintessential secretary. Suddenly, I turned around to see who had joined the line behind us, and there was Pastor Don with his wife Cindy and their kids: Julie, Todd, and Kristy, and their spouses.
“Pastor Don,” I exclaimed, “it’s so good to see you after so many years!”
“And who are you?” he replied.
“Charles! Charles Simpson.”
“Charles! How are you and Lynn?”
“We’re doing fine.” Lynn and I said hi to Cindy and their kids, and then it was our time to enter the building. I turned and greeted Barbara.
“Hi there, Charles. It’s great to see you and Lynn, but this line is for family members only.”
“I’m so sorry, Barbara. The usher told us to come here.”
“No problem. The courtesy seating line is over there at the front entrance, on the left.”
As we got on the correct line, my wife said, “That was embarrassing. I’m glad you explained to Barbara that we were just following the usher’s directions.”
“He didn’t even recognize me,” I quietly lamented.
Walking in the Footsteps of David Wilkerson Page 15