One year, we had an Easter outreach. We had three services, and lines were around the building; it was a long day. Afterward, I’m sitting on the edge of the platform by the pulpit, and people are being ministered to at the altar. I look up, and I see this dude with his cap in his hands, looking bad. He looked 50; he was actually 32. He gives me a sheepish look like ‘Can I get close to you?’
Now at that time, in that building, we had everyone coming in off the streets to mooch money. People were coming in with incredible scams they were running, and they would go to church members and collect ‘subway fare’ from 25 different people.
I thought to myself, “Man, this is a downer, but maybe he wants lunch. I’ll give him some money.”
This guy started walking up to me, and then the smell hit me. Feces, urine, sweat, hot street — stir gently for about an hour. It was the worst smell I ever smelled, and I worked on a dairy farm during the summer as a kid. He told me he was an alcoholic, did drugs too, slept in his truck the night before. He didn’t dare go to a shelter because people got killed in there.
So I pulled out my wallet. He pushed my hand down, and I’ll never forget what he said. “I don’t want your money. I’m going to die out there. I want this Jesus you were talking about.”
I raised my hands and wept like a child, praying, “Jesus, forgive me.” He felt what the Spirit was doing, and he started weeping too and threw his arms around me. We cried together, him for his sins and me for my sins. He went to detox for a few days and then spent Thanksgiving and Christmas at the table with my family. He joined the prayer group; he married a beautiful woman, and a couple years later, he got ordained into the ministry.
This is what Paul meant when he wrote, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing…. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:1-2,7, ESV).
Jim Cymbala began the Brooklyn Tabernacle with less than twenty members in a small, rundown building in a difficult part of the city. A native of Brooklyn, he is a longtime friend of both David and Gary Wilkerson.