The Tent comes down tomorrow morning. The fire it lit doesn’t go anywhere.

That’s the only way to say it after a night like this. For 52 days a tent sat on a property in Stockton, a city a lot of people had written off, and on the final night the crowd was the largest of the extended run. Not a farewell crowd. A sending crowd. Because the thing that happened under that canvas was never about the canvas. It was never even about Mario. The Tent and the man were the catalyst. The reaction is the people of this city, and a catalyst doesn’t leave a hole when you take it out. The reaction keeps going.

Mario said it plainly before he was done: 20 years from now, if Jesus tarries, people are going to remember the 52 days this Tent sat here. Not because of the Tent. Because of what got ignited in the people who came.

The Worship

Catherine Mullins and the band were on the platform, and the presence of God was in the room the way it’s been in it all week. Nothing about the set demanded its own headline. It didn’t need to. The anointing was simply there, heavy and unforced, carrying the room into worship before a word was preached.

For what it’s worth, and this just my personal observation, “Is He Worthy?” is my favorite song they do, and there’s always a shift when they sing it. It happened again tonight. The room changes. You can feel the weight settle differently when that one starts. Some songs you sing. That one does something to the air.

They moved through declaration after declaration. “My shout is a weapon.” “Strongholds are coming down and Jesus is lifted high.” “Give up your captains, they don’t belong to you, there is a strong man, the strongest in the room.” Catherine stopped at one point to say what she felt the night actually was: “We are literally here, I believe, to partner with the will of heaven tonight to see hell shaken by the sound of a generation on fire with the presence of Jesus.” That wasn’t a song intro. That was a thesis statement, and the night proved it out.

The Healing That Opened the Night: Josie Pineda

Before the sermon, Mario brought up a woman he called not just a friend but family, Josie Pineda. Her late husband, Pastor Steve Pineda of Hayward Victory Outreach, had helped Mario fill the 16,000-seat Cow Palace back in 1999. After Steve went to heaven, Josie took the church. Then came the diagnosis.

Neuroblastoma. A cancer they usually find in children one to five years old. One in 10 million in an adult. It had spread across the inside of her brain and skull and face, all the way down to her throat. She told those in the Tent what the treatment was like: chemotherapy and radiation at the same time, third-degree burns on her neck, skin peeling, surgery to remove the lymph nodes in her neck, hundreds of them, the doctor stunned by how many were full of cancer.

When they wanted to put her on immunotherapy, she was done. She told Mario it was one of the hardest conversations of her life. “Lord, this is my life. It’s in your hands. You do with it what you want.” 54 years of serving God, she said, and she wasn’t about to let go now.

She went back in for a PET scan last Wednesday. One week ago. The doctor looked at the results and told her, “I don’t know what to tell you. There’s nothing there. There’s nothing there.” When he got up to leave and said he’d see her in three months, she stopped him. “Wait, wait, wait. You forgot to tell me I’m healed.” He looked at her and said, “You’re cancer-free. Congratulations.”

Mario turned to the audience and asked the only question that fit: “Is he worthy?”

Then he named what he said almost nobody thinks about. The most dangerous thing that could have happened, did happen. “Young people seeing miracles.” A generation watching cancer disappear and learning early what God actually does. “Now you know why we call our meetings Living Proof.”

The Salvation Call Came First

Mario does it on purpose. He went after souls before he preached, because, in his words, if someone is going to hell, you help them immediately. “The hell question needs to be answered right away.”

He didn’t sell it. He described the miracle he was offering, and he was specific about it. Forgiving someone you’ve hated your whole life. Waking up one morning not needing the drink or the dope. Love put back into a marriage that both people had already declared dead. “The before and after of the Christian experience is not matched in any other religion in the world. Nobody can successfully completely explain the transformation that takes place when someone says yes to Jesus.”

Then he told them this was their D-Day. “This is the last time I’ll be able to make this offer while I’m in Stockton for a long period of time.” He had them stand, find an aisle, and come. And they came. Several hundred of them, pouring toward the front while Mario kept saying it: “Look at what God is doing. They’re still coming.”

He prayed the sinner’s prayer over them, line by line, and then sent them outside to the prayer workers the way he always does. “If I had a coffin up here and a dead body got up and danced, that would be a great miracle. But it’s not near the miracle that you just got from Jesus. So start marching.”

The worship that came after the altar was pure victory. Excitement, celebration, the whole room running on the testimony of what God had just done. The front filled up with young people jumping and shouting. Not watching. Not waiting. The next generation packed against the platform, fully in it.

They sang the old ones, and Mario laughed that the young people think these are new songs. “Look What the Lord Has Done.” “Something Happens When I Call Your Name.” And then they hit “Lace Up Your Boots,” and that militant marching sound came back into the Tent. Lace up your boots, put on your backpack, it’s time to ride. The youth at the front weren’t celebrating anymore. They were being commissioned. To war. You could hear it turn from a party into a marching order in real time, the whole sermon made audible in a single song, the army Mario had been preaching about forming up at the front of the Tent before the night was over.

The Sermon: You Are the Miracle America Needs Now

Mario said it might be the most important sermon he’s ever preached. He’s preached over a thousand of them in Northern California across 55 years. As someone who’s heard Mario preach hundreds of times, it was definitely one of the best I’ve heard, and that’s no easy feat. 

He said he’s never felt one mattered more than this one. The title was the thesis, and he pointed it at the faces in the Tent over and over: You are the miracle America needs now.

God Was Astonished

He started in Isaiah 59 and Ezekiel, with a phrase he said was hard for him to accept: God was astonished. “I looked, but there was no one to help.” Two things stunned Mario about it. That you could astonish God at all, and that what astonished Him was that He looked for help and couldn’t find any.

He didn’t soften where he took it. Any Christian who thinks America is going to come out of this unscathed is deceived. If you have a child, he said, listen, because one day they’ll be here without you, in a world that’s being built right now brick by brick. There is a political elite, he said, forget Republican and Democrat, that is constructing a world that doesn’t like America. “None of the good news that’s waiting for you will be good news unless you embrace that fact.”

Church Was Never Supposed to Be Safe

This is where Mario went after the model. He named Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, not the men so much as the idea: build a church on people feeling safe. “I, for one, believe that church is a lot better when it’s dangerous.”

He told it through pictures. The subwoofer in a kid’s car on Whittier Boulevard scrambling his molecules, because that’s an American, that’s American youth, and nobody at a real concert raises their hand to ask if it’s too loud. The modern church growth model applied to roller coasters: get rid of the drops, because they’re scary, and get people to ride the whole thing without ever knowing they rode a roller coaster. “Americans don’t want safety.” Gen Z least of all. They don’t want Sesame Street. They want Azusa Street.

Fight Fire With Fire

Then he reached back into American history for the illustration that anchored the whole message. Before there were fire departments, there were volunteers. When a fire broke out in a village, every man ran to put it out, because they knew an unchecked fire eventually burns down the whole town. They had that mentality.

The smartphone killed that mentality, Mario said. The new rule is: if it doesn’t affect me directly, it isn’t real. “If you wait until a crisis affects you, I promise you it’s too late.”

And then the line the whole illustration was built to land: “I’m going to take this Tent to every single desperate place in America because I want to put out the fire that the Devil started and replace it with the fire of the Holy Ghost.”

Fight fire with fire. The Devil sets a blaze to burn the town down. The answer isn’t water. The answer is a stronger fire. And here’s what makes it the right frame for a closing night: the bucket brigade was never the fire department. It was ordinary townspeople who showed up because they understood the fire was coming for all of them. That’s the whole point. Mario brings the Tent to start the blaze. Whether the town survives depends on whether the people themselves grab a bucket. The old illustration is literally about residents defending their own community. It’s been the Stockton story all along.

The Counterfeit Church

Mario was careful, and he said it more times than I can count, that there are many good churches, many on-fire churches, many thousands of faithful pastors. He said he was speaking only to the counterfeit and the lukewarm.

To those, he was merciless. He studied the charismatic scandals, he said, looking for the one common denominator. Not false doctrine, not immorality, not materialism, though all of those showed up. The one universal thread in every collapse: “They had stopped winning souls.”

He pictured the lukewarm church as the Titanic. Water on the floor, ship going down, and somebody in a stateroom throwing a party with an expensive band and the best food, refusing to stop because the party’s too good and they don’t really believe the ship can sink. “That same spirit is in the nominal, lukewarm church.” Full, funded, influential, and sinking.

He read Jeremiah 5:30-31. An astonishing and horrible thing has been committed in the land: the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule by their own power; and My people love to have it so. But what will you do in the end? (NKJV). A church that exalts its pastor to superstar status, he said, as long as that pastor keeps the rightful demands of God off the people’s lives. A codependency lulling people into an alternate reality where there’s no addiction, no gang violence, none of what’s actually in the headlines.

Don’t tell him how ‘groovy’ God is, Mario said. Tell him how a son gets off drugs in Jesus’ name. Tell him how a destroyed marriage gets put back together. “I want something that casts out devils.”

God Builds Armies Overnight

The back half turned prophetic and didn’t come back down. Mario said God knows how to build an army overnight, and he walked through 1 Samuel 11 to prove it.

Nahash the Ammonite, a terrorist in Mario’s reading, surrounded the isolated village of Jabesh Gilead. The townspeople offered to surrender, to become slaves, and Nahash said that wasn’t enough: he’d make the covenant only if he could put out every man’s right eye and bring reproach on Israel. He didn’t care about the village. He was spoiling for a fight with Israel. Mario stopped the story cold and pointed it straight at the Tent: “What’s going on in America is a terrorist attack on Christianity.” The Devil wants America destroyed because he can’t get the Antichrist in as long as there’s a firewall of Christian America. Missionaries in Africa and India, Mario said, are praying one prayer: wake up the American church.

Jabesh Gilead got seven days to find help. The messengers reached Saul coming in behind his herd, and when he heard the news, the Spirit of the Lord came on him and his anger was greatly aroused. Mario lingered on what Saul did next. He took his prized oxen, a thousand-pound animal, the best in Israel, and cut it into pieces, and sent the pieces through every territory with a message: come fight, or this happens to your oxen. Overnight, an army was born. 330,000 strong.

“I’m trying for that same miracle,” Mario said. He drew the modern picture: a televangelist taking a chainsaw to his Rolls Royce and mailing the pieces to his partners with a confession. “I am not a limousine evangelist. Not anymore. I’m on fire. I’ve got to have an army now.”

He pointed to the Jesus Movement, to Chuck Smith with no model and no reference point baptizing people in the ocean 10,000 at a time. He said he knows something about Gen Z that the room doesn’t: “There’s a movement in the ground. There’s a trembling.” He read Psalm 110:3 in the Amplified (Classic), the verse about a willing army arising in the splendor of holiness, young men like the dew from the womb of the dawn. A young man who only cares about girls and big wheels on his car, Mario said, can in a single moment have every value turned upside down, and find he can’t stop praying and doesn’t know why.

The Eleventh Hour

He closed the teaching on the parable of the laborers in Matthew 20. The landowner who kept hiring, all the way to the eleventh hour, when he found workers still standing idle and sent them in too, and paid them the same as the ones who’d worked all day.

Mario asked the question the parable opened up for him: “What if there’s a generation of evangelists coming that are going to do in one hour what the church did all day?” What if an army arrives that wins as many souls in one hour as all of church history?

He tied it to the end itself. The only time Jesus definitively said what would end the world, Mario noted, was Matthew 24:14. This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world, and then the end will come. “The world’s not going to end until this army appears.”

Then he stopped preaching and started commissioning. “This is no longer a tent meeting. This is an upper room where God is commissioning a new generation.” He had the room pray out loud, called for the baptism in the Holy Spirit, prayed for fire to fall. “How long we’ve waited for this. How many of you believe a movement is being born right now?”

The Healing

With the room already at full height, Mario kept healing simple and direct. No long line, no drawn-out process. He had people with their hand raised lay a hand on the shoulder of whoever was raised near them, and he told them to believe and receive. He had Josie, healed of incurable cancer one week ago, lay hands on a woman in the front row who’s in a battle of her own, and told her the miracle she’d received was transferring right now.

He called out a woman on the front row in black, said he felt how deeply she was loved by people whose hearts were breaking for her healing, and declared the power of God going through her body. The whole audience spoke it together: “By His stripes I am healed.”

What the 52 Days Were

A walker got pushed away and a cane tossed aside, one walked off unaided and the other began to dance. That is the night in two pictures.

You could feel that the atmosphere was different from the jump. The last few nights have carried a militancy, worship as a war cry, the Tent going to battle. Tonight came in lighter. More joyful. Almost like the fight was already won and the room had shown up to celebrate it rather than wage it. The worship was every bit as strong, but it wasn’t contending. It was declaring.

The Worship

Elijah Garcia opened it, told the tent that tonight would be the most explosive night in the history of Mario’s tent ministry, and handed it to Catherine Mullins and the band. From the first song the room was already up. “Washed in the Water.” “I Thank the Master.” “Something Comes Out of the Grave.” Song after song about being clean, being free, being raised, running out of the grave. The recurring line all night was victory already in hand: I’m dancing in your victory.

The young people were up front again, the way they’ve been the entire run. A hungry young crowd, drawn in night after night, regardless of anything else going on in the room. That has been one of the steady facts of these meetings, and it held tonight.

Catherine moved into “Something Comes Out of the Grave” and the room leaned in. Every time I call your name, chains break, dry bones wake. Every time I call your name, the gates of hell shake. Then she did what she does, she stopped singing the song and started just lifting the name. “We call the name, the Name that is above every Name.” Jesus, over and over, the band underneath her, the room answering.

In the middle of worship she stopped to speak over a few people directly. She told a man his praise in the middle of frustration had become a shield around his family, and that God was going to war over his situation. A blonde girl, she said the Lord was breaking off disappointment and asking her to trust Him again with the hard things. A man in a ‘Yahweh shirt’, she spoke the line from Philippians right over him: “He who began a good work in you is just getting started.” None of these got their own moment. They lived inside the worship, words spoken between songs while the band held.

Then it built to the Name again. “Shout Jesus from the mountain, and Jesus in the street. Shout Jesus in the darkness over every enemy.” And right at the peak, as Catherine was lifting the name of Jesus one more time, Mario came up and the Tent erupted in a long, loud shout. I’ll be honest about what it called to mind. The last day around Jericho. After a long silence, the shout brought down the walls. That’s what the sound was. Not a reaction. A weapon.

The World Thinks We’re Out of Our Minds

Mario took the platform off the back of that shout. “The world looks at praise like this as if we were out of our minds,” he said. “But one day the sky is going to split and the whole world will know why we made so much noise under that Tent.” He let the band step down, but he was clear it wasn’t to slow anything: “I do believe that God is going to start healing the sick long before we know it.”

He told the room the title before he preached it. “You’re Healing, God’s Way.” Then the refrain that would run through the rest of the night. “Many of you have tried to get healed your way. How about if tonight we do it God’s way?” He had them say it back to him. I want my healing God’s way.

But before the sermon he went after souls, and he did it through a test. Not an invitation first. A test.

He set it up with a warning. “An army is marching into Stockton, an army is marching into LA, an army is marching into every major city. And it’s not an army of God. It’s an army of demons, because Satan knows his time is short.” Then he asked which demon is strongest under Satan himself, and answered it: the demon of religion. “It’s the only demon that is strong enough to go to church.”

That opened into a hard passage, and Mario didn’t soften it. He said a true church is built on the rock, but a counterfeit church can be built too. He named Mormonism as a counterfeit, a false additional testament. He said a church that ordains homosexuals and performs same-sex weddings “has failed the test,” and answered the common objection head on: Jesus did speak to it, when He said God made them male and female and a man would leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife. He went further, to churches blending Islam and Christianity into something new: “That is the synagogue of Satan.” He listed what he’s watched, a half-naked man on a stripper pole in a service, a church kicking Bibles through goalposts, a megachurch pastor pouring chocolate syrup over a Bible. “Can Satan build a big church? Yes, he can.” His point wasn’t to rank sins. It was that size and crowds prove nothing.

Then the actual test, 2 Corinthians 13:5. Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Paul’s critics were examining him, Mario said, and Paul’s answer was to turn the mirror around. “Examine yourselves, not me.” He pressed it onto the room. A Christian is someone who has Christ in them, governing their choices. “He cannot save anything that he’s not Lord of.” He said the worst thing Satan can do is convince you you’re on your way to heaven when you’re not, and he was careful to say it twice: he wasn’t trying to make anyone who knows Jesus doubt it. “I’m trying to get the unsaved to feel unsaved.”

He brought it to the prayer through Matthew 18:19, two agreeing in prayer. “Say, Mario, my prayers feel weak. What about you and I teaming up? What’s going to happen then? Power.” He called for hands, then called them out of their seats and down the aisles. They came. He had the room jump up and welcome them as new brothers and sisters, and he told them their seats were reserved, nobody was leaving without them, their friends would wait. Then he sent them outside for five minutes with the workers and told them the truth about what was coming next: “You are going to get the greatest healing of anybody.”

The First Wave

Mario said the Lord had told him there would be two waves of healing. He didn’t run the usual camp-meeting praise break this time. He kept the room in their seats. “We’re not trying to dampen the mood. We’re trying to accelerate the anointing.” He had those in the whole Tent pray out loud in the Spirit while Catherine led “House of Miracles,” and the room became, in his words, a sanctified choir. I’ve seen cancer disappear. I’ve seen metal blades dissolve. Don’t you tell me He can’t do it.

Then the first wave broke. He pointed to a section and described pain in the arms and legs, not an injury, something deteriorating in the nerves and muscles, constant pain. He told them they’d feel a sudden need to stand and move with no pain. People got up. He called them to the front to walk fast, to walk like they never could. “This man is healed by the power of Jesus Christ. And there’s a second one.”

This is where the two pictures from the top of the night happened. He asked a person about the walker. “Do you need the walker? Do you need it right now? You don’t need it.” The man immediately pushed it away and walked off without it, and without any difficulty. A woman, he said, had gotten out of the hospital that day and had come straight over. Then a man with the cane. “Do you need the cane? Hold up that cane, brother.” The man held it up, threw it down, and was, in Mario’s words, “down here dancing.” Mario sent him back to his seat to march on his own. “He couldn’t walk without that cane before.”

He called five people healed of pain before he was halfway through. Then he moved to growths and tumors, and called anyone wanting a growth to leave their body to stand. A young woman in green, he said God had shown him before she ever stood, told her to put her hand on her stomach because the fire of Jesus was burning it out. He had everyone standing lay a hand on someone with cancer near them, one to a person. “You are the great surgeon. You are the great miracle worker.” Lungs, throat, a growth in the throat that he said just vanished. “There are going to be reports of miracles out of this tent.”

Two Waves, and the Word in Between

Between the waves, Mario did something deliberate. He stopped the healing line to teach, because he said the second wave needed a hungry audience. “A large body of teaching on healing today is making people sick. Why? Because they don’t seek their healing God’s way.” He called it a threshold conversation, the way the most meaningful talk of an evening happens at the front door as a guest is leaving. He wanted the room to receive, not just watch.

Then the second wave, and it was bigger and more specific than the first. He worked the Tent section by section, and the conditions came in clusters, people with the same affliction seated near each other, which he kept remarking on. “I don’t know if he thinks this is like a clinic or something.”

Heads and necks. A man in red whose condition came from an injury, leaving him. A young woman in black with blonde hair, not just headaches but seizures, a form of epilepsy he said was being removed. Breathing: respiratory illness, sinus, throat, lungs, asthma, restriction, a whole standing section of it.

Then the one that stopped the room. A woman in the fourth row, white hair, left hand up. Mario told her the lungs were only the start. “There are seven other things in your body that are being healed.” He went down the list without her saying a word. Ears. Eyes. Numbness and pain down the right side. Pain in her feet that kept her up at night. A heart condition. Hearing loss. Eyesight loss. “And if you don’t start shouting, I’m going to think you are nuts.” The room came apart.

He kept going. High blood pressure, diabetes, AFib, clustered through the heart and circulatory and pancreas. A woman in red he called the catalyst for that whole section. Then stomach and throat, acid reflux, abdominal pain doctors couldn’t explain, bacteria in the digestive tract, food allergies severe enough to kill. Section by section, cluster by cluster. At one point he said the quiet part out loud about his own posture in it. “It doesn’t matter what I call out. What matters is that their disease goes away. The issue here isn’t to put on a show that you know things.” And later, plainly: “It’s not me. You know that. It’s only Christ.”

By his own count, hundreds were touched.

Tomorrow

Mario turned the room toward tomorrow before closing, and he made it big on purpose. Tomorrow is the final night. He called it the grand finale, the way a fireworks show saves the biggest for last. He said he’s going to preach what he believes is the most important sermon of his life, a prophetic word to the United States of America. He pointed at the moment the nation’s in Iran, the Middle East, California, danger coming from directions you can’t count, and said God has given him a word to speak to America like he never has before. He had a camera brought up so he could send the invitation out on social media that night. And he said there’ll be an announcement tomorrow that’s “truly epic,” with possibly a million people watching online.

“You’re going to be a part of history,” he said. “Let’s believe for a national revival.”

Frank came up to close. He thanked God for the healings, for the lives surrendered, prayed they’d find a church and a family to grow in, and said the thing that’s become the heartbeat of this whole run.

The best is yet to come.

Where We Go From Here

Tomorrow is the final night of the Stockton run. A prophetic word to America, an epic announcement, and Mario believes the grand finale.

Living Proof Tent Crusade — Lifesong Church campus, Stockton, CA

6:30 PM West Coast time. Bring someone.

The worship tonight was the best and most anointed I’ve ever heard it. I don’t say that lightly. I’ve sat through a lot of nights under this Tent, and tonight the sound coming off that stage was something else entirely. It wasn’t sweet. It wasn’t easy. It was an army being charged and sent out to fight. And what I had written in my notes, Mario also said by the end of the night: “they literally created the greatest atmosphere of worship we have ever seen in this Tent, ever.”

The Worship

Elijah Garcia opened the night and handed it to Catherine Mullins and her band. From the first song it was clear this was a different kind of worship. Not contemplative. Not a slow build into the presence of God. A battle cry from the opening note.

The set moved through “Praise Like This,” “Bless the Lord,” “Praise Is a Weapon,” “Jesus Is Lifted High,” and on into “Freedom for the Captives.” That last one became the spine of the whole worship block. Catherine kept the room on it, declaring freedom over wayward sons and daughters, and the Tent answered her line for line. There was an underlying drumbeat through it that felt like marching. That’s the only way I can describe it. Not a backbeat. A cadence. The sound of an army moving.

Catherine stopped at one point and named what was happening in the room. She said, “Very rarely have I felt in a room or tent such a clash between light and darkness. We are in a war tonight in a really good way.” Then she made sure nobody mistook it for theater. “We’re not just saying this because we’re charismatic. We believe that there is a battle being waged over the generations. Tonight is not a night of hype. Tonight is a night where the generations truly get set free.” She told the room to get their warrior on. The room did.

She prophesied freedom over captive children using the picture of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the furnace, and the fourth man in the fire with them. Whatever fire someone’s son or daughter has found themselves in, she said, Jesus is in it, protecting them, pulling them out. Then she told a story she said she’d never told over a microphone before. A close friend of hers ended up in jail because of drug abuse, opened a Bible in her cell, and prayed that God would take the taste of drugs away from her. She fell asleep and woke up with the craving gone. Catherine decreed that testimony over the wayward kids in the Tent. “Maybe not the jail part. But they’re going to wake up no longer desiring drugs.”

The remarkable thing is what happened at the end of the set, when the songs softened. Even there, when the worship found a sweeter note, the battle cry never left it. The tenderness didn’t break the war. It served it. “Worthy,” “Way Maker,” “Even When I Don’t See It,” “House of Miracles.” Catherine told the story behind that line in “Even When I Don’t See It,” that it was written by a friend whose husband was going blind and not getting his healing, who lifted her voice in desperation and sang it anyway. The whole set held that same charge from the first note to the last. An army that can fight loud and fight quiet is still an army.

Mario Inverts the Night

When Mario came out, he made a purposeful move. He ran the altar call before the sermon.

He explained: “I’ve never understood why we ask people to get saved at the end of a meeting and then hope they come back to church for a follow-up. I like them to get saved at the beginning of the meeting so that that meeting becomes their first follow-up.” So the order of the night flipped. Souls first. Teaching second. Healings last.

The Altar Call

And he went on the manhunt. His word, not mine. “I’m going to go after souls in this room. I’m on a manhunt.”

He told the room that nobody was there by accident. “You were positioned by God to come in this Tent, and where you’re seated is where God knew you would sit down.” He told the young people that the number one reason they were in the Tent was that somebody prayed them in, and “the number one suspect is grandma.”

Then he drew the line he always draws between believing and surrendering. “Not believe in him, not accept him, not want him, not worship him, but surrender.” He defined the word plainly. “You’re right. I’m wrong. My life hurts because of my choices.” He named this as the loneliest generation in American history, the most medicated generation in American history, and said no culture can brag it’s smart while setting records for pills.

He had them close their eyes, prayed the prayer of surrender with them, and called them forward. A few hundred came. Then he released them out to be ministered to by the workers waiting in the back. Every soul that walked that aisle is worth every dollar and every man hour that built this Tent. That’s not a number to weigh. That’s a few hundred names written down somewhere they weren’t written this morning.

Mario put words to it: “We just saw hundreds of people give their life to Jesus. Even if a dead person was raised to life, the salvation we saw is a greater miracle.”

Camp Meeting

What came next is worth getting in the record, because it’s where the worship’s military character paid off. With the new believers being prayed for in the back, Mario brought Catherine back to lead some camp meeting songs. “Look What the Lord Has Done.” “Goodness of God.” And finally “I Went to the Enemy’s Camp,” and the Tent sang Satan under their feet.

It was different songs, but it was the same increased anointing. The same battle cry. That marching drumbeat underneath it. 

Mario gave the room thirty seconds to lose their minds in praise, twice. He invoked David dancing out of his clothes. “I dare you to become even more undignified than this. We’re about to praise him like our family’s been saved. We’re about to praise him like our prodigals are coming back.”

Here’s something worth observing honestly, because these meetings are a record and a record should be straight. The anointing in this room is climbing. You could feel it in the worship and you saw it last night in the miracles. The response, though, hasn’t climbed with it. The altar tonight drew a few hundred, real and precious, but not the many hundreds the early weeks were seeing. I’m not measuring the people who came as a shortfall. They came, and what was available to them in that room was worth more than the crowd around them knew. But the gap between what’s being poured out and what’s being received is the thing to watch. The lost don’t bring themselves into a tent. Believers carry them in. 

Mario said it himself later in a different frame: when this crusade started “there were a lot of people here,” and “the people that are here now are the core that have the power to do what we couldn’t have imagined.” He ran the upper room math from Acts. Five hundred saw the resurrected Christ. Only 120 made it to the upper room. “The most embarrassed Christians in history were the 380 that left.” A smaller, committed core is not the problem. But somebody has to go get the harvest, and the question of who is the one worth sitting with.

The Sermon: Satanic Attacks, the Breakfast of Champions

Mario said he asked the Lord for a fresh word and got an unusual title. “Satanic attacks, the breakfast of champions.” The thesis is simple and it runs through every story he told. “The Devil is stupid to attack you because every time he attacks you, you’re going to get stronger.”

He opened with Romans 1:11, Paul wanting to impart a spiritual gift so the believers would be established, and Ephesians 6:10, “be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might.” Then he fired the opening shot. “The era of the blessed Christian must give way to the era of the strong Christian.” He said spiritual warfare is one of the most abused terms of our day, that people think they know what they’re talking about and don’t, and that the not-knowing produces casualties. He refused to let one of them be in the room. “I’m going to claim all of you to be warriors in God.”

Joseph, and the Risk the Devil Takes

The first text was Genesis 50:20. But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good (NKJV). Mario built it around the principle he kept returning to all night: “Every single time Satan attacks you, he risks promoting you, advancing you, strengthening you, and making you powerful in God.” Satanic attacks backfire. God takes the enemy’s strategy and turns it into the believer’s promotion.

The Marine on the Boulevard

Then he confessed a sin, and it’s the story that carried the room. Years ago, climbing a long boulevard with seventeen lights, a Camaro nearly ran him off the road into a cement wall. Mario, by his own admission, lost it. He said the German and Latino sides of him reached a rare agreement: the Latino side said go after him, the German side said, ‘watch the lights’. He chased the man down and ran him off the road into a Safeway loading dock.

And then it shifted. Mario got out, climbed into the man’s passenger seat, and demanded to know what was wrong with him. The man told him. Just back from Iraq, a Marine, his girlfriend had left him the day he got home, his parents had told him he couldn’t live with them, and he was driving up the road to kill himself. The Holy Spirit came over Mario in that loading dock. He led the man to Christ, rebuked a spirit of death off him, and gave him his phone number. A week later the Marine called him, walking with God, his family going to church with him. What the Devil meant for evil. The whole point of Genesis 50:20, lived out in a Safeway parking lot.

Philippians, Written From a Jail Cell

Next text, Philippians 1:12-14. Paul, writing from prison, reporting that his imprisonment had “the opposite of its intended effect.” The gospel spread because of the chains, not in spite of them. The whole palace guard heard why he was locked up, and the believers grew bolder. Mario’s read: “When Satan attacks you, God will turn that attack into having the opposite result that it is designed to have.”

Pauley Ballroom

Then the long one, and it’s worth the room he gave it. Years ago at UC Berkeley, with 44,000 students on campus, Mario was winning students to Christ when Jane Fonda took over the most visible hall on campus, packed it with 1,200 students, and had them shout every curse they could think of at America and at Jesus. Mario stood outside in a light rain, pointed his Bible at the building, and declared he’d rent that hall and fill it with a louder shout of “God bless America and Jesus is Lord.”

He went to rent it the next morning and found the application banned religious groups, banned prayer, banned conversions. He tore it up and gave away the dream. Then at 3 a.m. God woke him and told him to rent it anyway. He had a vision of a library divided into reality and superstition, with a Bible on the floor, and God told him to place the Bible where it belonged. He put it in the science section. “Because the resurrection is real. The Trinity is real. The Bible is real.”

He went back, registered the event as “Resurrection City,” told the clerk he was against religion, and got the biggest night of the week. 700 students showed up. He told them, “Be careful how far away you back from religion because you will back into the arms of Jesus.” When he asked who felt God converting them, 70 university students raised their hands and got saved. The hall manager, watching from a third-floor window, summoned him and told him she knew exactly what he’d done. Then she pulled back the curtain. “Look at the floor. There’s no broken glass. There’s no blood. There’s no hypodermic needles.” She told him she usually had to call parents about overdoses. Nobody got hurt that night. “So here’s your punishment. I want you to use this hall every Saturday.”

Three years later Mario held a rally in that same hall and had the students shout it out the open windows over Sproul Plaza. “God bless America. Jesus is Lord.” The thing Jane Fonda used to curse God became the thing Mario used to win souls. What the Devil meant for evil.

Esther, and the Gallows

Quick text, sharp point. Esther 7:9. Haman built a 75-foot gallows for Mordecai and was hanged on it himself. “God will turn the Devil’s weapon into your weapon.”

Paul’s Thorn

Then the turn toward the healing service. Mario read 2 Corinthians 12, Paul’s thorn in the flesh, and walked carefully around the old debate about whether it was sickness. He named what sickness does to a person, how nothing changes your outlook like a bad prognosis, how a cancer diagnosis can break your will, and he was honest about where he leans without forcing the argument. Paul begged God three times to remove it. God said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.” Mario’s application landed on the young person who thinks they can’t, the person stuck in a situation they say they can’t get past. God’s answer is the same. “Yes, you can.”

The Cappuccino

Mario closed the night with a fun story, and the room loved it too. Satan and a senior Devil over cappuccinos, the Devil bragging about each new plan to stop the apostles. Put Peter in jail, an angel let him out and the whole city heard the gospel. Put Paul and Silas in jail, an earthquake let everyone out and the jailer got saved. The senior Devil keeps warning him not to do it again. The last cappuccino: the Devil’s finally got Paul locked up for two years, and the senior Devil asks what he’s been doing in there. Writing. He didn’t have time to write when he was free. The epistles came out of a prison cell. The Devil’s last attack produced over one fourth the New Testament. (https://www.gotquestions.org/who-wrote-most-of-the-New-Testament.html

Then he had the room declare it with a hand over the heart. “I’m not a sheep. I’m a soldier. I don’t give in to moods. I don’t get discouraged by adversity. My God will turn everything for my good.”

The Healings

Mario moved into the mass prayer the way he said he would, calling out specific conditions as they came. A woman down front had already received a remarkable healing during worship. From there he called them across the Tent. Two men and a woman with heart disease in the center section. A respiratory illness in both lungs, years long, near one of the cameras. Asthma. A blood disorder. Sleeplessness. Spine pain. A young woman with migraines by the camera. Two lower-spine injuries on the other side, one from a car accident and one from a fall on stairs. Ringing in the ears and vertigo.

Then he started bringing people up. A woman with burning abdominal pain he read as severe acid reflux, healed as she stood. He named her larger situation plainly and gently, that she was facing multiple sicknesses and, beneath them, that she did not want to live, and he had a worker lay hands on her and declared her will to live restored. A woman in white with a recurring sickness that kept leaving and returning, something in her midsection he said was being burned out of her body. A person God had called who drove themselves into illness through the intensity of their own preparation, healed in the stomach, breathing, back, legs, and head. An entire third row of four women touched at once. A woman in a black sweater whose pain he said had started moving through her body five minutes earlier.

Then the whole Tent. Hands raised, hands laid on the person next to them, a mass prayer in the Spirit. Cancer, arthritis, diabetes, every disease. When he called for those who knew something had happened in their body to stand, they stood. He told them their testimonies would be collected and shared the next night.

Where We Go From Here

Mario closed by pointing hard at the next night, and he was not subtle about the weight he put on it. Tuesday, June 16, he called a turning point. A spiritual point of no return. A night of signs and wonders like the ministry has never seen. He asked the room to do three things: be there, bring someone, and fast one meal during the day and pray in the hour they’d have eaten. He asked specifically for people to bring anyone they know suffering from cancer.

When he called for hands on the commitment, he said he’d never seen a percentage that high in his life. “You are a fiery army.” He framed the whole thing as marching orders, not hype. “I’m giving you your marching orders.”

Frank closed the night in prayer, thanking God for the saved and the healed, and announced a street outreach the next morning. The team meets at 10 a.m. to hit March Lane and Pacific Avenue with flyers, inviting the city in. As Frank put it, an army on the streets.

That’s the picture of the night. Worship that marched. An altar opened before the sermon instead of after. A few hundred new names in the book. A sermon built on the simplest dangerous idea, that the Devil’s worst attack is the believer’s best breakfast. And a tent being told that tomorrow is the turn.

The enemy’s advance ends here. That’s what the worship said from the first note. The rest of the night just agreed with it.

The extended Stockton meetings continue this week at the Living Proof Tent Crusade.

Lifesong Church – 4950 Claremont Ave, Stockton, CA

Tuesday, June 16, 2026. Bring someone. Bring anyone you know who is sick, especially anyone who has cancer.

Mario has been preaching over a span of 50 years. And he said that the message tonight is the one he’d point to as important.

“Twenty years from now, if the Lord tarries, someone’s going to ask me, what do you think was the most important sermon you ever preached in all your ministry. This one tonight I believe is the one that I’ll say.” He dated it from the platform. Sunday night, June 14th, 2026. The title: “Do What the Occasion Demands.” He framed it the way A.W. Tozer told preachers to frame everything, like you’ll stand before the throne of God at the end and give an account for why you said what you said.

That’s the weight he put on it before he read a single verse. The rest of the night earned it.

The Worship

Catherine and her band carried it again, and they came in like Jehoshaphat’s choir sent out ahead of the army. That wasn’t an accident of mood. Catherine stopped mid-set and told the story straight out of 2 Chronicles: a king surrounded by three armies who answered not with weapons but with praisers marched to the front. “So you mean to tell me that they’re facing literal armies. Some of you are facing real life situations.” Then the room sang it back at the problem. Praise will break the chains.

It moved through “Praise” (the one built on the line as long as I’m breathing I’ve got a reason), then into the heavier prophetic material. “Lion of Judah,” with the whole Tent roaring on cue. “Is He Worthy.” “What a God.” A long stretch on the firstborn from the dead coming back on a cloud, every knee bowing, the other gods named as lies. The set wasn’t background. It was warfare with a melody, and by the time they landed on “Holy Ground” the room had gone quiet enough to hear it.

There was also a deliberate altar moment inside the worship, before Mario ever preached. The team had everyone lift their hands as an act of surrender. “Jesus, you’re in charge of our lives, we’re not.” Then a word landed that was for the young people specifically: “There’s a cry inside of a generation, and it’s the sound of wild abandonment for the things of God. He’s setting apart a generation for His glory.” That line is going to matter later in the night. They were calling it out before Mario got to it.

Catherine shared a picture she’d been given: the room seen from above, magnified, and the enemy in it suddenly much smaller than anyone had realized. “I saw the Lord coming and he just did this simple flick and all of a sudden the enemy was out of your life.” Then the decree. “There is a shift in the room tonight. And it’s not because you’re here, it’s not because I’m here, but it’s because the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is in here.”

The Emergency Room

Mario walked up and immediately said he was about to do something out of order. The sermon wasn’t ready to start yet, because there were people in the Tent in a state of emergency and he refused to preach his message while they were still lost.

“Your soul before God is in a state of emergency.” He read 2 Corinthians 4:3, But even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing (NKJV), and went after veiled gospels and the preachers who preach them. “There is nothing lower than a preacher who preaches a half gospel. They are worse than a surgeon who would do an operation with dirty hands.” The God of this age has blinded the minds of those who don’t believe, he said, and the preacher who veils the Gospel is as blind as the sinner listening to it. Blind leaders of the blind.

Then the woman at the well. The line he says rocked his life: if you knew the gift. Mario read it as Jesus diagnosing blindness, not scolding sin. Five husbands and a common-law man because she didn’t know the gift. “You don’t need to be that person.” He named what was in the Tent by zone. Anger over here. Depression over there. Addiction. And in scattered places, a spirit of suicide. “What makes you go back after you promised yourself a hundred times you’d never put another needle in your arm.” He said no religion ever placed value on human life the way Jesus did, drew the contrast with Islam plainly (Allah asks the devoted to kill and die for him, Jesus came and died for us), and pushed people toward the only thing that breaks the power of Satan. “Buddha can’t do it. Oprah can’t do it. No religion can do it. Only Christ.”

Then he had them close their eyes, told them they’d feel a strange pull, the lie that you can keep a life the Bible calls immoral and have God too, and he called for hands. Hands went up. He told them to stand, get to the nearest aisle, run if they had to. And they came. From everywhere. He routed them out to be prayed over, told the room to welcome them into the family, and refused to let the moment pass as anything less than the main event. “This is what we came to Stockton for.”

He set up the rest of the night with one line aimed right at the people he’d just led to Christ: even if a dead body came up out of a coffin under the Tent, that miracle wouldn’t come near the one they’d just received.

The Sermon: Do What the Occasion Demands

Text was 1 Samuel 10:6-7. Then the Spirit of the Lord will come upon you, and you will prophesy with them and be turned into another man. And let it be, when these signs come to you, that you do as the occasion demands; for God is with you (NKJV).

Then he told the truth as he sees it. “California is an unmitigated disaster.” He was born in San Francisco, watched his hometown get destroyed by ideas he can name, and he didn’t soften it. There’s no blindness like woke blindness, he said, because to defend it you have to ignore everything it does. He kept pulling himself back from politics and insisting he was being spiritual, then naming rigged elections and the L.A. ‘clown show’ anyway. The point underneath the heat: California is home to 15 million born-again Christians, more than any state in the country, “but you wouldn’t know it.”

Capernaum, and the Sign They Asked For

Here’s where the sermon found its heart. John 6:30. Jesus is in Capernaum, the place that had seen more mass healing than any city in the history of the planet, predicted 700 years out through Isaiah’s word over Zebulun and Naphtali. The disenfranchised northern region. Second-class citizens whose kids weren’t trained in the law, the corridor every invading army marched straight through. And Jesus made it His home and healed tens of thousands.

And then, right after He fed 5,000 with a couple fish and a loaf, the crowd asked Him for a sign. “He has just eradicated cancer and leprosy from the county, and you need a sign.” They wanted manna from the sky, instead of the bread already in their hands.

Mario turned it on the room. “How many of you saw all the people that were healed during this Tent crusade? How many of you thanked God for those healings?” The danger he was naming is Capernaum’s danger: standing in the middle of the miraculous and asking for something better. He read Matthew 11:23, Capernaum exalted to heaven and brought down to Hades, Sodom would have survived if it had seen what Capernaum saw. Then he aimed it. “God is looking at California, and he’s about to do battlefield promotions.” Generals made privates. Brave unknown privates made generals.

The Rebuke to the Charismatic Movement

He said it into the camera on purpose. “I do not like a lot of what I see in the Charismatic Movement.” Prophecy turned into a game. Miracles turned into a moneymaker. Signs and wonders treated as passé when they’re holy. “I want a revival, not a freak show.” What the occasion demands, he said, is a supernatural Church that can lay hands on the sick, cast out devils, speak with new tongues, and won’t back down or fear man. The non-supernatural church is a dinosaur. “The Church will not be relevant to California after this year unless it can cast out devils.”

The One Who Came Back

Luke 17:11-19. Ten lepers healed, one returns to give glory, and he’s the foreigner. “Are you part of the nine or the one?” The nine were all Jewish. The one was a Samaritan. Mario held the room there, because the whole Capernaum warning had been about exactly this. Gratitude is the difference between a region that keeps the visitation and one that loses it.

The Woman With the Issue of Blood

For the last movement before he prayed for the sick, Mario said his tone changed. The first two demands he could roar. This one he felt gentleness about, because it’s aimed at the people who freeze the second God starts to heal them.

Mark 5:25. A certain woman had a flow of blood for twelve years, and had suffered many things from many physicians (NKJV). He read her desperation, the gift of faith that gave her a specific expectation, the certainty that touching the hem would end twelve years instantly.

Then he described the people in the Tent who hear their own condition called out and freeze anyway, who decide it’s safer to stay sick and in control than to surrender and be healed. “Nothing hurts me more than that.”

And he made the struggle itself the proof. When he calls someone out and they hesitate, that’s not failure. “If I were faking it, they would respond instantaneously. The fact that there is a struggle proves to you that it’s real.”

Then he stopped preaching and the healings began.

The Healings

This is where the room came apart in the best way.

It started with the children and the young in one section. A young woman with a spine condition. A young man with asthma in his lungs. And then a child, and Mario wouldn’t stop at asthma. He had the father stand and hold the boy. “You know that child doesn’t just have asthma. There’s something else going on there.” He named it: the lungs, the heart, something that happened at birth with the heart, and the brain. All three healed at once.

At that the father began to weep. And as Mario kept talking to him, as more got revealed about the boy, the man set his son down and ran. Across the front of the Tent, back again, and again, nothing left in him but glory to God over what had just happened to his son. Mario caught it from the platform. “He’s not just running because of his son. He too has been healed.” The boy and the father both.

A diabetic condition with the heart and pancreas. Headaches and blurred vision, more than one person carrying it, a whole section of the Tent on its feet at once.

Then the man with the white hair and the black coat. They’d told him he couldn’t be cured. Everything tried, nothing worked. Before, he walked in slow, stiff, painful steps, and Mario demonstrated it, the labored shuffle, that’s how you’ve been walking. Then he spoke to him the way Peter spoke to the man at the Beautiful Gate and told him to walk. The man walked. Across the front, faster, arms up. No stiffness. No hesitation. No pain in a body that had been locked up a moment before. Mario named more coming off him as he moved: back, chest, feet, and then no malignancy left anywhere in the body. No cancer.

A woman who’d waited 15 years, excruciating nerve pain, healed and walking, with the gallbladder and liver and dissolving gallstones named on top of it.

A man in the back, green hat, an accident, the rotator cuff and the whole right arm in agony. Told to move it. No pain.

And then the long one. A woman Mario said had suffered at the hands of the medical profession, told by some that she was crazy, who’d asked God to take her life because she couldn’t carry it anymore. He said five parts of her body would be healed but the first was her mind. He traced it back to a brutal attack when she was a little girl, said that’s where the body started shutting down, named an auto-immune disease where the body attacks itself, the wrecked immune system, the antibiotics that made it worse. “This woman is being brought back from the dead. Only Jesus!” Her name was Charlene. He told her she was a healing evangelist, had her stand, and lay hands on another woman. And called cancer out of her body. “I bind cancer in the name of Jesus. And it’s going now.”

There were more than these. These were the ones that filled the front of the Tent.

Where We Go From Here

Mario closed pointing straight at tomorrow. He said if the people do two or three specific things, there will be more miracles tomorrow night than there were tonight. A greater flow than what just happened. He believes it, and after watching a father run laps across the Tent and a stiff man walk free, the room believed it too.

He said good night to the livestream and told the thousands watching across the Central Valley that he loved them. The corridor of glory he saw years ago, Red Bluff down past Bakersfield, he said the livestream turned out to be the answer to how it would ever reach every one of those cities at once. Right now, he said, they’re listening in virtually every city in the valley. “Wake up, church.”

The Living Proof Tent Crusade continues this week in Stockton.

Monday, June15 through Wednesday, June 17. 6:30 PM each night.

Lifesong Church — Stockton, CA

This was supposed to be the final night. It isn’t.

Mario walked up to the microphone tonight and announced that the Stockton crusade isn’t ending. It’s escalating and the Tent stays up. For the next four weeks, 1,000 soul winners will move across Stockton’s streets, schools, and neighborhoods as a deployed evangelistic army. The Tent becomes a prayer mountain, open daily, with church services, outreach gatherings, and continuous intercession.

Then in June, Mario and Catherine return for four more nights. From the 14th through the 17th. What was billed as a closing night turned into a commissioning.

Mario said it himself, watching the altar fill: “How could we take this Tent down?”

\Catherine Mullins and band were back tonight, and they came in swinging. The worship set didn’t drift toward a soft landing. Dancing on the Grave moved into Washed in the Water moved into a flat-out altar call from Catherine herself. She stood at the platform and called a generation to purity. “You’re going to start deleting phone numbers that you were never meant to have. You’re going to start stomping on some cell phones tonight.” She decreed holiness over a generation. She named the lie, the one that says the Church doesn’t need to be radical anymore, and answered it: “There is a man named Jesus, and He healed sickness. He healed diseases. And He’s worthy of radical praise.”

The audience shouted ‘compromise has got to go’ until it sounded like a battle cry, which is what it was.

Then I Speak Jesus. Then Holy Forever. Then Is He Worthy, the whole crowd answering the question back into the Tent like they were the elders themselves. Catherine called specific healings from the platform during worship: sexually transmitted diseases, generational shame, the graves of depression and suicide and pornography. “There’s a change in the atmosphere,” she said. And the worship kept building until Mario walked out.

Mario opened with a confession. “This morning, the Devil told me to leave town. And that’s when I knew. When the Devil wants you out, you stay.” Then he laid out the plan.

A thousand evangelists and four weeks of street ministry. Being trained to go into neighborhoods, schools, the business community, the media. The Tent will remain standing as a prayer mountain. Daily prayer, daily outreach, daily salvations. And then on June 14-17, the four greatest nights this ministry has ever put under canvas.

He told the story of Marysville, California, where he took the Tent down too soon. Drug addicts kept coming to the empty lot for a full month afterward, still feeling the residue of God’s presence on the ground. He said it like a man who learned a lesson once and refused to learn it twice.

Then he called for the war chest. He didn’t dress it up. “These are war bonds.” He commanded the wealthy to be generous, “if you own a business and you’ve complained about the gangs and the drugs and the crime in this city, and you’ve given to a politician, God bless you, but I’ll tell you what we’re going to do with this money. We’re going to turn it into souls and miracles.”

The sermon title was original to Mario tonight, and he knew it, “Why Are All Your Friends Becoming Christians?“. The premise: a trend is happening. Tax collectors and harlots are entering the kingdom before the religious. People who should be the last ones at the altar are showing up first. Why?

Three reasons.

First, they’re reading the signs of the times. Mario walked through Matthew 24. False messiahs, wars and rumors of wars, nation against nation, famines, pestilences, earthquakes. He pointed at Iran, at Israel, at the headlines that keep the world on a string. “Your friends read the Bible, and they came up with this. It’s going by the book. All of it is going by the book. And I read the book. I read the end of the book – and God wins!”

Second, they’ve tried everything else. This is where the sermon broke open. Mario told the story of preaching in Malibu years ago, where the pastor warned him not to give an altar call. The movie stars’ careers couldn’t survive a photograph of repentance. But Mario watched late-night TV in his hotel and saw commercial after commercial: Betty Ford for the alcoholics, Schick Center for the anorexics, Al-Anon, domestic violence hotlines, transcendental meditation. He said to them, “You don’t have a free night,” going from clinic to clinic looking for one piece of healing at a time. He said, “Let me tell you what the cross of Christ is. It’s your one-stop shopping. You walk to the cross and the eating disorder goes away. The marriage is healed. The drugs are gone.”

He quoted C.S. Lewis: “I don’t believe in Jesus because I can see Him. I believe in Jesus because by Him I see everything else.”

He cited Peter in John 6:68, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (NKJV) Where else is there? Buddhism? The church of Oprah? Positive thinking? Drugs? They helped a little, fixed nothing. Then comes Jesus, and everything falls into place!

Third, Christians are witnessing again. Mario announced the disbanding of “the Christian Witness Protection Program.” He pointed to John 1:41 where Andrew finds his brother Simon and brings him to Jesus. “Somebody brought you here because they love you.” Bibles are selling. Pews are filling up. Americans are returning to church in numbers the data is still trying to catch up with. The lukewarm get spit out, he reminded them. The hot draw their friends in.

He told the Godfather III story with the pope and the pebble in the fountain that had soaked for hundreds of years and yet was still bone dry inside. Some people have been around the water of the Spirit their whole lives and never let it in. He stopped and called them.

Mario called them up by section. Over here, over here, over here. The aisles filled. He told the Tent he could see the faces and many of these were first-time decisions, the unmistakable look of someone who had never done this before. He kept calling. The Tent kept emptying out into the front. “How could we take this Tent down?”

He led them through the sinner’s prayer — Jesus on the cross proving love by giving everything, Jesus rising three days later proving power over every evil habit and every destructive emotion. Then he sent them out to the prayer team. And the worship team, and the choir of young voices filled the altar area to worship.

When Mario returned to the platform he set aside his prepared sermon. He’d had a message ready called Moment or Movement, and he told the tent why he wasn’t preaching it. ‘I’m not preaching it because you all put your backpacks on,’ he said, reminding the people of one of the songs the worship team sang during the altar response.

Then he moved straight into the healings. And the healings tonight were specific.

A woman in the audience identified by Mario as a woman in ministry with her pastor present beside her. She received what Mario described as God’s hand reaching in like a scalpel and cutting something malignant out of her body. Multiple growths, he said. They would be gone when she got her next scan. Then her hearing was healed. Her balance. The dizziness, the cancer, the arthritis. Mario kept stacking the conditions as her pastor laid hands on her ears.

Three women in one section, all battling cancer, were called out and stood together while Mario cursed the cancers in the name of Jesus.

A woman with what sounded like an MS-type diagnosis, body-wide nerve disease, debilitating, with a horrible prognosis from her doctors. She was called out for healing of seven symptoms running from her head to her feet.

A woman with migraine headaches and seizure-like episodes. And her sleep healed alongside her head. Mario named “agitation” as the root and commanded it out.

A woman Mario identified as an ‘on-fire signs and wonders missionary’, willing to break into places others couldn’t go, healed of stomach and head conditions.

Multiple healings prayed in Spanish. Mi hermano, vamos a orar (my brother, let’s pray) for heart, knees, lower spine, family. El Señor me dijo todo eso (The Lord told me all that).

Then the corporate healing. Mario told everyone with sickness in their body to raise a hand, told everyone else to touch their shoulder, and led the entire Tent in a declaration of Mark 16: “These signs will follow them that believe. In my name, they will cast out devils. They will speak with new tongues. And they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.” (NKJV)

He called for those healed to stand. They stood.

Before closing, Mario stopped the room and gave it a marker. “You are on the cusp of the greatest spiritual history of Stockton. From the day this city was founded to this day, this will be the greatest spiritual visitation that it has ever seen. You’re on the cusp of it. God has allowed you to be a part of it. And remember this night when we did the impossible by extending this tent crusade for several weeks.”

What comes next?

The Tent stays up for four weeks and the Living Proof Tent Crusade transitions into a deployed army with street ministry, school assemblies, business community outreach, daily prayer under the Tent. More information will be coming for those who want to enlist as one of the 1,000 evangelists. The Stockton churches are invited to host the overflow.

And then Mario Murillo and Catherine Mullins return to the same tent in the same field.

Sunday, June 14 through Wednesday, June 17. 6:30 PM each night.

LifeSong Church, Stockton, California.

Pray. Show up. Bring someone. We’re not waiting for revival. We are the revival!

God’s ways are not our ways. That’s the verse. That’s also the entire story of what happened in Stockton tonight.

The first night of the extended Stockton meetings was never supposed to be inside a church. The tent was up. The seats were ready. And then the wind came. A safety call moved the meeting to the sponsoring church on a few hours’ notice, and as Mario put it from the pulpit, “That wind thing happened before I had time to rebuke it. But now I’m mad.” The tent will be back tomorrow. Tonight, the people came anyway.

And what came with them wasn’t a logistical inconvenience. It was confirmation of the message Mario had been preparing all morning: for My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9, NKJV).

The Worship

Catherine Mullins and her band were back. That fact alone is worth pausing on. Mario said it from the pulpit himself: some of the most gifted Christian musicians in America were on that stage tonight. They are not sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. They have full schedules, full lives, full ministries of their own. For them to drop everything and come back to Stockton on a moment’s notice, Mario said, “Is as big a sign from God as anything else going on here.”

Worship didn’t ease in. It came out swinging. “Out of the Grave,” “Praise Like This,” “Power”. Chains breaking, graves emptying, mountains moving. Catherine called for a sound of faith more than once, and the room answered. At one point she stopped, looked at the room, and said, “Heaven responds to the sound of the people of God.” Then she counted to three and the church lifted a shout that shook the air.

A young woman named Bailey, part of Catherine’s team, sang, “Because He Lives.” Catherine introduced it with a testimony. Bailey had been set free from a spirit of suicide. Catherine looked out at the room and said, “There is no pit too deep that God cannot reach down into your situation.” Then Bailey sang it, and the song landed differently than it does in any other context. This was not a performance. It was a witness.

Catherine also spoke a word during worship that needs to be in the record. She said the enemy had come against this event hard “because God wants to move in this region and in your life.” Then she said, “I get so excited when the enemy starts throwing punches. I’m like, do you realize how much harder we’re gonna punch back?” That was the spirit of the worship section. Contending. Not begging.

The Sermon Mario Came to Preach

When Mario took the pulpit, he didn’t open with the usual setup. He opened with a confession. He said he woke up this morning praying and didn’t stop until he was picked up to come to the service. He said he barely had time to study his message because he felt a war in the heavens. And then he said something that explains the whole night:

“For the first time in decades, Satan felt threatened.”

The sermon title was “My Thoughts Are Not Your Thoughts.” On the LED wall behind him, Moses stood on Sinai while fire poured down the mountain and a field of tents stretched across the valley below. The image did its own work. The tent in Stockton is part of a long line of tents God has met people under.

Mario read Isaiah 55:8 and then walked through a list of moments in scripture when God’s thoughts and human thoughts were not the same. The Egyptians thought the Red Sea was on their side. The Philistines thought five smooth stones were a joke. Herod thought the Messiah would arrive on a white charger. The disciples, even after almost four years with Jesus, still thought Christianity would be a physical kingdom that ousted Rome. “You can be around Him when He calmed the sea. You can watch Lazarus raised from the dead. And yet you cannot separate from the human mind the inability to know His ways versus our ways.”

Then Mario turned the verse on himself. And on the ministry. And on the larger movement he is part of.

The Rebuke

He said he asked the Lord what to preach tonight and the Lord told him to talk about the scandals in the charismatic movement. Mario said he didn’t want to. He said the Lord told him He wasn’t interested in the gory details. He was interested in one thing: what did every pastor who fell, every organization that imploded, have in common?

Mario said he went down the list. It wasn’t sexual immorality. It wasn’t money. There were elements of all kinds of things. But there was one thing universal to every collapse.

“They were not winning souls.”

He named the pattern from the pulpit. Conferences with thousands of people singing and chanting for hours. No altar call. No outreach. No attempt to reach the poor, the lost, or the addicted. “When heaven invades earth, it’s powerful, I love it. But now, unfortunately, earth is invading heaven, and agendas are invading heaven.”

Then he delivered what he called a prophetic warning, and he said it was being delivered through him to the nation and to everyone watching online. “No more Christian conventions without altar calls. No more Christian concerts without soul winning. No more Christian gatherings that are exclusively for us. We are now obligated to preach the gospel and to call people out of darkness in every single Christian event.”

The text was Proverbs 24:11-12. Deliver those who are drawn toward death, and hold back those stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Surely we did not know this,” does not He Who weighs the hearts consider it? He Who keeps your soul, does He not know it? And will He not render to each man according to his deeds? (NKJV).

Mario was not done. He looked out at the young people in the room and asked the church a question that has been building in his preaching for months: “Do you want them to come out of this with a phony revival? You want the legacy we leave when that tent comes down to be an incomplete work?”

Then he widened the frame. “A generation facing wokeness, facing demonic power, facing the onslaught of the antichrist spirit and we want to give them Nephilim? How about if we get out of the X-Files? Let’s get out of creature features and let’s get back in the Bible and start feeding the next generation the everlasting Word of God.”

The Author and Finisher

Mario said something tonight that needs to be pondered. He said the greatest threat to this crusade is not the devil. It is not the drug dealers or the gangsters or the politicians or the LGBT agenda. He said if this miracle stops, the people inside the move will be the author and finisher of it.

He read Luke 19:44. You did not know the time of your visitation. And he said the difference between someone who knows the time of visitation and someone who doesn’t is sobriety. “They’re not just jolly. They’re sober. They’re not just excited. They are very sensitive.”

He laid out the categories of people who derail moves of God. Revival junkies looking for the next spiritual high. Pastors trying to grow their church off it. Local ministers who get jealous because thousands are showing up somewhere else. Celebrity-chasers who treat anointing like a platform strategy. And finally, the most dangerous category of all is the people inside the move who fail to nurture the infant that God has handed them.

“This thing is in our hands. It’s an infant. It’s crying. It needs milk. We need to get up in the middle of the night to feed it.”

God Wants Souls. God Wants a Royal Priesthood. God Wants the Glory.

Mario organized the back half of the sermon around three things God wants from this moment.

First, souls. “Ask not ‘Will I get a word from God.’ Ask ‘Who shall I bring to the tent.'” He told the room that nobody in soul-winning is ever unpaid. That if you go win souls, God will work on your insecurity while you are looking at His heart. “Soul winners are the happiest people in the world.”

Second, a royal priesthood. Mario read 1 Peter 2:9 and then looked at the young people in the room and said that God will undo whatever they came in with. Mothers who wished for abortions. Fathers who weren’t safe. Poverty. Molestation. Anger. “God will undo all of that and turn you into a chosen generation.”

Then he turned the same scripture on the preachers. He said the modern American church has lost the fear of God. He said preachers are afraid to hold their congregations accountable and Christians are arrogant about spiritual authority. “Is this too much to ask for you to act like you’re in an army? For you to act like you’ve been plucked out of darkness?”

Third, the glory. Mario quoted Psalm 103:7, “He made known His ways to Moses, His acts to the children of Israel.” Two categories. The crowd saw the acts. Moses saw the ways. “You can tell the difference between a meeting that has a GPS and one that is flying by the seat of its pants from one stimulating act to another.”

And then he said the line that will probably end up on people’s walls. “Five years from now, none of this will matter. Five years from now, you being here is not going to matter. Unless we dig into God’s plan for Stockton.”

The Altar Call

After all of that, Mario turned. He told the room there was someone there whose life was in danger and he was going to speak to them now. He said he had spent the day praying for the faces he would see tonight. He said he had asked the Lord to make the moment of surrender feel real.

He went back to Isaiah 55, but this time he started at verse 6. Seek the Lord while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, and He will have mercy on him; and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon (NKJV).

Then he said the line that drew the response. “The One who has the most power in the universe also has the most love for you.”

He said it twice. Then he started naming what people had come in carrying. The cloud of hurt. The cloud of fear. The relationships entered out of desperation. The loneliness that feeds on sanity even in a room full of people. The moment in a family when someone first realized they were not safe.

He called for the prayer of repentance, and they came. So many came that the front of the room couldn’t hold them. Mario asked the pastor for guidance and started routing people through the side aisles. He told the room to keep clapping while it happened. The applause didn’t stop. “I don’t know how you can stop clapping. This is it. This is all of it.”

The prayer Mario led was specific. He named the Cross. He named the resurrection. He named the proof of love and the proof of power. He had them repent, surrender, and commit to finding a church, reading a Bible, and telling their friends.

Three Things

Mario gave the room three specific instructions for tomorrow night, and he was clear that he was promising the next level of the meeting if they obeyed.

Fast one meal. He said he would do it too. “This kind does not come forth except by fasting and prayer.” Pray during the time you would normally be eating.

Invite five, bring one. “What is the difference between invite and bring? One is a generous invitation. The other is a kidnapping. You got to let them ride in your car, and you got to be willing to buy them a meal. This is called evangelism.”

Come expecting miracles. Mario said that some of the greatest healings of his ministry are going to break out tomorrow night in the tent. He said it wasn’t hype. He said it was obedience. He preached the message the Lord gave him, called for souls, prayed one mass prayer for healing at the end, and refused the offering. He believes the tent will erupt tomorrow.

When he asked the room to raise their hands if they were committing to all three, the response was so visible that he laughed and said, “We’re going to need a bigger tent.”

The Mass Prayer for Healing

Before closing, Mario had the room stand and lift their hands. The mass prayer was short and direct. Cancer leaving. Diabetes leaving. Spine, skin, stomach, lungs. He prayed in the Spirit. He prayed for the people in the overflow room. He prayed for the people watching the livestream. He prayed that the miracle of Stockton would become an example to America and that the gang violence would be erased, the homelessness erased, the poverty erased.

What Tonight Was

This was not a normal first night. It was the beginning of an extension nobody planned, in a venue nobody chose, with a worship team that rearranged their lives to be there, and a sermon that the evangelist himself did not want to preach. Mario stood in front of his own movement and said the threat to the meeting is not the wind and not the city and not the devil. The threat is us.

And then he called for souls. And they came in a flood.

His thoughts are not our thoughts. That was the message. It was also the explanation for everything that happened tonight.

Where We Go From Here

God willing, we will be back in the Tent tomorrow. But those Mario spoke to tonight have been given an assignment.

The extended Stockton meetings continue this week at the Living Proof Tent Crusade.

Lifesong Church – 4950 Claremont Ave, Stockton, CA

Doors open early. Bring someone.