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.

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