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For our first reflection day, I wanted to share a video someone shared with me a few years ago. This is Reverend David Wilkerson’s soul-stirring sermon on the necessity of anguish – to bear God’s heart, passion, and burden within our lives. It is lest than 8 minutes long and is one of the more powerful messages I have heard in a while. I’d love to hear your comments on it.
Daily Devotion 
WOW, I really don’t know how to respond to that. I needed that at this exact moment. I need to chew on that a few more times. Thanks Dino.
Glad you liked it! I need to hear that on a regular basis.
“All true passion is born out of anguish. All true passion for Christ comes out of a baptism of anguish.”
“True joy comes out of anguish”
Yes.
I cried through much of this. The past 6 years has been full of anguish in my own life. The loss of my brother and the anguish I felt not just over his death but also over his broken heart that led him to take his own life. And then personal revelation of the darkness of my own soul and the barricades I’d put around my heart. I never knew I could feel such anguish over my brokeness. Out of that has sprung a passion for the hearts of people around me. Of my entire life with the Lord, it has only be the last 18 months that my heart has truly broken for the hearts of those around me. Hearts that are seeking. Hearts that are wounded, and scarred, and hardened. I weep for some of my friends. Anytime the grace of God is mentioned or the freedom that is the Good News, I weep. I cry during most Christmas Carols that proclaim the Good News. I cry just thinking about Christmas. Reverend Wilkerson is right on. I’ve been “concerned” about many things in my life. We all feel concern when we see starving children, or women who are being trafficked, but where is the righteous outrage? Where is our weeping over the brokeness of their hearts? I didn’t have that anguish before. I had to experience it in my own life. I had to be on me knees, broken before my loving father, begging and pleading to him for healing. I had to experience the anguish that lived within me before I could even begin to see it and truly experience it in those around me. The church has been preoccupied with programs and serving it’s own, that it has forgotten the reason we even exist. I’m not saying those things are bad, but for many, it has become a substitution for living the life we’ve actually been called to live. God has shown us his undeserved grace and love. He has poured out his healing on us…not so we hold onto it ourselves, but that we share that lifeblood with those around us. It’s not about Bible beating or preaching on the street corner. It’s about becoming involved with those around us. It’s about getting to know their story. It’s about building and actual relationship for the sole purpose of building a relationship. Not with some ulterior motive of “leading them to the Lord.” God’s very well versed in how to turn hearts towards him and “save them”. That’s one thing that actually is his job. We are to be loving, caring vessels to those around us solely because it is an outpouring of what we continually experience with God. I was raised baptist with the whole visiting your neighbors who aren’t Christians with the sole purpose of converting them and the bringing your unsaved friends to church just so they would convert during the 20th repeat of “just as I am”. That is not what we have been called to. We have not been called to sell a commodity. We have not been called to be used car sales people. We have been called to love the Lord and love others. We have been called to be vessels of healing for the brokeness around us. And Wilkerson is right. The way to be earnestly passionate about that is to have it born in anguish. I’d never thought of it that way.
Thank you for sharing, Dino.
Glad you enjoyed it! Thank you for sharing you comment! Always love reading your thoughts.
I listened to the whole sermon. While I’m not with him on everything, I’m with him on the over arching theme. But this stood out to me, and I had to write it down:
“The servant who willingly takes on the mantle of God’s pain is the only servant who has the authority and right to hold God to his covenant promises.”
Something to chew on.
Definitely something to chew on!