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.