"I believe in walking in the Spirit"
About this Quote
To say “I believe in walking in the Spirit” is to make faith less a mood than a gait: steady, practiced, public. David Wilkerson wasn’t a cleric of private reverie. He built his reputation in the bruised real world of addiction, street violence, and spiritual burnout, and his ministry (from The Cross and the Switchblade to Times Square Church) treated Christianity as something you do with your nervous system, your calendar, your appetites. “Walking” is the giveaway. It implies repetition, discipline, and the unglamorous middle distance between crisis moments. You don’t levitate in the Spirit; you keep moving.
The line also carries a quiet polemic. “I believe in” signals an argument with adjacent forms of religion: church as performance, doctrine as trivia, charisma as spectacle. Wilkerson came out of Pentecostal culture, where “the Spirit” can be associated with fireworks - ecstatic speech, visible gifts, emotional peaks. His phrasing redirects that energy toward endurance: the Spirit as daily guidance, restraint, and moral clarity when nobody’s watching.
Subtext: this is a claim about authority. Not “I believe in my willpower,” not “I believe in my politics,” but a submission to a different driver. It’s also a warning shot at complacent believers. If you’re “walking,” you’re not parked in nostalgia, not coasting on a conversion story from ten years ago, not outsourcing holiness to Sunday. In Wilkerson’s world, the Spirit is proven in the next step - especially when the streets, or your own mind, are loud.
The line also carries a quiet polemic. “I believe in” signals an argument with adjacent forms of religion: church as performance, doctrine as trivia, charisma as spectacle. Wilkerson came out of Pentecostal culture, where “the Spirit” can be associated with fireworks - ecstatic speech, visible gifts, emotional peaks. His phrasing redirects that energy toward endurance: the Spirit as daily guidance, restraint, and moral clarity when nobody’s watching.
Subtext: this is a claim about authority. Not “I believe in my willpower,” not “I believe in my politics,” but a submission to a different driver. It’s also a warning shot at complacent believers. If you’re “walking,” you’re not parked in nostalgia, not coasting on a conversion story from ten years ago, not outsourcing holiness to Sunday. In Wilkerson’s world, the Spirit is proven in the next step - especially when the streets, or your own mind, are loud.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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