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.