The wind ceased and we were back in the tent. And Mario Murillo walked to the pulpit and said the moment the church has been praying for has arrived in Stockton, California.
Not because of the thousands packed under the canvas on a Monday night. Not because of the healings. Not because of the salvations. Mario was specific about this. The moment we’ve been waiting for is not what’s happening inside the tent. It’s what God is doing out there in the streets, in the homes, in the schools, and in the living rooms of a city that the rest of America has spent decades writing off.
Catherine Mullins and her band were back at the front for the second night of the extension, and the room knew it. “Praise Like This” came out first, and the lyric, my praise is a weapon, my dance is a weapon, set the tone for everything that followed. Catherine kept calling for the sound. The room kept answering.
“Battle Belongs to the Lord” turned into a contending prayer. “It may look like I’m surrounded, but I’m surrounded by You.” Catherine had the room sing it until you could feel the corporate weight of it. Then she called for breakthrough and the band held the line while she and the team began to release prophetic words from the platform.
A word to a man wearing a necklace and a beard. She said she had seen him in a vision with two scrolls in front of him, two different roads, and he had chosen the right one. She declared boldness over his life. “All of the plans of the enemy, they’re just going to fall off.”
To a woman a few rows over who had been faithfully sowing seeds for years and watching the enemy try to steal her inheritance. The word was that the harvest was coming. Don’t faint. Don’t give up.
Another word landed on a woman holding what was described as a long checklist of things she had been contending for. “God says you have an opportunity in a fresh way to give all of those cares back to the Lord. Don’t you dare give up because I see the things you’re contending for.”
That kind of platform prophecy doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when worship has done its job and the gifts of the Spirit are operating freely. Catherine then led the room into “Is He Worthy,” “Holy Ground,” “Goodness of God,” and “Enemy’s Camp.” The shouting was constant. By the time worship released the room to the preaching, the atmosphere had been prepared.
The mayor of Stockton was in the room. She came to the platform briefly and greeted the crowd. “We need to boldly pursue the Lord in the city of Stockton.” That a sitting mayor of a major California city would stand on a tent platform and say those words is its own sign of what’s shifting here.
Mario didn’t go straight into his main sermon. He stopped, looked at the room, and said the worship had already done so much soul-winning work that he was going after the harvest first. He preached a short, sharp message on Proverbs 24:6 for by wise counsel you will wage your own war (NKJV).
The framing was that every person under the tent, saved or not, is in a private war. An invisible enemy who hates them. A culture that offers no real protection. And a Christ who came specifically because the war was unwinnable without Him.
Mario read Acts 10:38. God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him (NKJV). And then he made the point that gets buried in most evangelism: the devil’s goal is not to get people into hell efficiently. The devil is insane. The devil is sadistic. He tortures because he hates, not because he has a plan. “He doesn’t mind a child being raped. He doesn’t mind the hideous things going on around the world. He is reveling in them.”
Then Mario read 1 Peter 5:8. Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour (NKJV). And he said the line that broke the room open: “Today is the day that you stop being attacked by the devil. Today is the day that you are protected from Satan by Jesus Christ.”
Pictured below are the hundreds who came to Jesus tonight.
He called for hands. Then he called the responders down to the front. They came in a flood. Mario prayed with them and then the crowd cheered as they went out to be ministered to by our great team of workers. And the band led the people in the great old camp meeting songs to celebrate what God had done. The new converts came back to their seats inside a wave of corporate praise that sounded like a Pentecostal camp meeting from another century.
When Mario finally got to his main message, he gave it a title and made the room repeat it. The moment we’ve been waiting for is here.
Mario began by telling the people he had a word that “the Lord told me”. Then told the people how careful he is to use that phrase. That the modern charismatic movement has turned it into a credit card for whatever they want. They use it so casually it has lost its weight. Mario refuses to say it lightly, and said this morning the Lord told him to tell the people of Stockton that the moment had arrived.
And then he made the case.
Mario was specific about what people were going to assume the moment was. They were going to assume it was the crowds. They were going to assume it was the miracles. They were going to assume it was the salvations. He said it isn’t any of those things.
The moment we’ve been waiting for is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Joel 2:28. I will pour out of My Spirit on your sons and your daughters (NKJV). The crowds and the miracles and the salvations are evidence of it. They are not the thing itself.
Then Mario turned to Proverbs 21:1. The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, like the rivers of water; He turns it wherever He wishes (NKJV). And he told the room what he believed God was actually doing in Stockton.
Mario said he went for a long walk earlier in the week. He said he didn’t want to call this a revival because he didn’t trust the word anymore. He said he was tired of the church’s tendency to call every emotional spike a move of God. So he asked the Spirit what was really happening, and the answer he got was not about the tent.
“I’m on the streets influencing people toward godly things in Stockton.” That’s what he said the Lord told him. Mothers being moved to bring their children. Fathers who would not pray with their families suddenly loading them in the car. People agreeing to come the first time you asked, when normally it would take ten conversations. Living rooms being visited by the Holy Spirit. Angels being dispatched to protect the children of the city.
Mario quoted Matthew Henry, the 1700s commentator, on Proverbs 21:1. Henry wrote that God can change men’s minds “by a powerful, insensible operation under their spirits, turn them from that which they seem most intent upon and incline them to that which they seemed most averse to.” Mario translated it. “What they don’t want to do, the last thing they want to do, the thing they could never imagine themselves doing, that under their spirit God is at work, suddenly growing an appetite for holiness, growing an appetite to be faithful to their wife, growing an appetite to go to church.”
That is the moment. Not the tent. The city.
Mario read Acts 2:37. Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” (NKJV). And he said that what he and the room have been watching every night under this tent is exactly that. The word has been cutting straight through people. The altar calls have looked like rivers.
Then he gave the explanation. He went to Numbers 14, where Caleb stood in front of Israel and explained why the giants in the promised land could be defeated. Caleb’s words were that the giants’ protection has departed from them. Mario applied it to Stockton. The drunks, the addicts, the bound, the impossible cases who have been walking into this tent all week have been walking in without their protection. Whatever the enemy had built around them, God has pulled it back. Catherine begins to sing, and they are exposed. Mario begins to preach, and the word goes straight through.
The moment we’ve been waiting for is here.
Mario did not let the room sit in celebration. He pivoted hard.
He told a story about meeting his wife Mechelle. He said the moment he saw her, he knew. He didn’t pick her up on a first date and ask her what she’d like to do. He had a plan. He told her parents over dinner that he was going to marry their daughter. He didn’t ask. He told. He said the thing he was most afraid of was not her rejecting him. The thing he was most afraid of was looking back on a moment he could have asked and didn’t.
That was the bridge.
Then he took the room to the wise men. They saw a star. They did the math from the 70 weeks of Daniel and realized the Messiah had been born. And they rearranged their entire lives, their kingdoms, their families, and spent two years on the road. All to get to a manger. Because they refused to look back at a moment they were invited to and missed.
Mario asked the room the question. “Is it worth changing your schedule? Is it worth giving up your division and coming into unity in Jesus’ name? Are we willing to say something so wonderful has come that we are willing to pay the price to see it through?”
The text he closed on 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).
That phrase, do as the occasion demands, became the load-bearing wall of the rest of the sermon. Mario said the thing that has cost the church America is the doctrine that says, “I don’t have to do anything, it’s all in God’s hands.” He said the Bible doesn’t say if My God. It says if My people. God has put it in our hands. Every raped child is an occasion. Every gang shooting is an occasion. Every mother crying over a child killed at school is an occasion. The occasion demands prayer. The occasion demands fasting. The occasion demands intercession that does not stop until heaven moves.
“Turn me from a Bic lighter into a flamethrower, O God.”
Mario closed by reading Acts 4:29-31, the prayer of the first church after they were threatened. Now, Lord, look on their threats, and grant to Your servants that with all boldness they may speak Your word, by stretching out Your hand to heal, and that signs and wonders may be done through the name of Your holy Servant Jesus. And when they had prayed, the place where they were assembled together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke the word of God with boldness (NKJV).
Then he prayed. And he asked God to do under this tent what God did on Mount Carmel through Elijah, let the fire fall in front of a watching nation. Let every person who has not received the baptism of the Holy Spirit receive it now. Let every person who has received it receive a fresh outpouring.
The room responded. Voices rose. Tongues broke out across the tent. Mario began calling out healings as the Spirit moved on him. Gallstones, throat cancer, spines, heart disease, healings from car accidents. He kept saying it. The fire is falling. The Spirit is rising. He said the American church no longer knows how to sustain something like this, but for a moment the tent was getting a taste of what Azusa Street was like. The intercession turned into a chorus of victory and the room shouted.
Mario said something through the tears at the end that needs to be in the record. “There’s some old-fashioned holiness coming out in this room right now.”
Mario closed by asking the room to use their social media. Show the images. Tell the story. He asked them to bring someone tomorrow night. And he asked them to do what the occasion demands.
The mayor was thanked from the platform. Mario prayed that she would preside over a golden age in Stockton, and that she would give God the glory when it came.
This is what we’ve been praying for. When saints have been crying out over a city for decades, they don’t always recognize the answer when it comes. It rarely comes in the form they expected. Mario looked at the room tonight and told them what the answer looked like.
Reviting!!!! Such a great summary. .thank you. Made me feel like I was there. Giving my encouragement for MY city in Joliet, Il. I can see this IS what The Spirit of the Lord is doing Nation Wide for those churches, preachers, evangelists, prophets, teachers, apostles, WHO HAVE EARS TO HEAR.: The Spirit of the Lord is doing and wants to do in their town. As we who desire A move of God as never Before pray, etc. Be instruments of righteousness for this hour.
To God be the Glory.
Thanks again for this summary. Invigorating and moving my the Spirit within me…Hopeful.
Now unto Him….who Is Able…be all glory power and praise.
Thank you Lord for your Holy Fire coming down!
Amen!
Church historians would call what Mario is describing in Stockton–not a revival, but as an awakening. A revival revives churches, an awakening impacts society. It sounds like Jesus is taking over a city! Ride on Lord Jesus!!!!!!!!!!
Jesus is Lord!!!!!!
Dr. Ken Searle