Crazy Faith #4: It Takes Desire to Follow Jesus

Crazy faith, Dr. William P. Hohman teaches, does not rise in a person who is comfortable and content to stay where they are. In this fourth message of the series, he shows that faith of this kind is fueled by desire: a burning, stretched-out longing to follow Jesus and see God’s will come to pass. Desire feeds courage, courage moves us to act, and acting on God’s word feeds desire again. This message continues from Crazy Faith #3: Faith Takes Courage in Your Weakest Areas.

Below you will find the full video, a structured summary of the sermon, the Scripture behind each point (linked to the New King James Version on Bible Gateway), a timestamped outline, and practical steps for growing a desire for God this week.

Sermon at a Glance

This message comes from a Sunday morning service at the New Testament Church in Merrill, Wisconsin, streamed on Facebook Live and posted on April 27, 2020. It opens with worship and an offering in which the worship leader connects giving to the crazy faith teaching, pointing to the call in Malachi 3:10 to bring the whole tithe into the storehouse and the promise of Isaiah 1:19 that the willing and obedient will eat the good of the land.

Dr. Hohman tells the church there will be two more messages after this one, because faith is built in order, like a house: footings first, roof last.

The Foundation So Far: Others, Small Beginnings, Courage

Before adding a new layer, Pastor Hohman reviews the first three. Crazy faith begins by thinking of others. He reads Philippians 2:4 from an easy-to-read version: do not be interested only in your own life, but care about the lives of others too. It means looking every day for ways to help people, even with a smile or an open door.

He illustrates it with a story from the 1980s. On the way to a business meeting in Houston, Texas, he saw a young mother with small children stopped on the freeway with a flat tire in a downpour. He pulled over and changed the tire in rain so heavy that his shoes were ruined.

When she asked what she owed him, he told her about a time when he was caught in a storm of life and Jesus came and pulled him out. “I might have come and changed the tire but he’s going to come and change your life,” he told her. He arrived at the meeting drenched, but says it was worth it because he got to share Jesus.

The second and third building blocks were small beginnings and courage. Zechariah 4:10 tells us not to despise small beginnings, because the Lord rejoices to see the work begin. Courage, he says, means doing something even though you are weak in that area. Joshua faced exactly that when he took over from Moses. In Joshua 1:5–7, God told him to focus on three things.

The table below gathers the four building blocks of crazy faith as Pastor Hohman has laid them out so far.

A Song, a Guitar and a Red Punch Bowl

To show what small beginnings look like, Pastor Hohman tells one of his most memorable early ministry stories. A Lutheran church about a hundred miles away had seen him ministering at county fairs and invited him to dedicate their brand-new building. During the fellowship time before the service, he was shaken by what some of the men were talking about, but he decided to preach what he had planned, from Romans 1:16: he was not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.

He had set up a large bowl of water with red food coloring for an illustration of God casting our sins into the sea of forgetfulness. Then a couple of ladies in the front row asked whether he was going to sing some songs first. He did not lead worship. He knew three chords on the guitar, and some time earlier, alone in a motel room in Houghton, Michigan, he had asked the Lord for a song. The Lord gave him a tune with three chords and three words: born again, I’m born again.

So he picked up the guitar they handed him and led about four hundred people in “born again” for fifteen minutes, then sang it slowly for worship. When he turned to put the guitar away, he hit the table and the bowl of red water spilled across the new sky-blue carpet. He promised it would come out and preached for about three hours, partly because he dreaded facing anyone afterward.

By midnight he had shared the plan of salvation three or four times, and he reports that everyone in the place gave their life to Jesus and was baptized in the Holy Spirit. They probably never had him back, he laughs, but souls are in heaven because of that night. God rejoices in small beginnings, so do not wait until your life is perfect before you give Him a venue to move.

Crazy Faith Takes Desire

Now comes the fourth point: crazy faith takes desire. When we act with courage because of desire, Pastor Hohman says, it feeds the desire, because when you see what God does you want more.

He describes the word desire as a longing, a craving, a burning urge, a yearning ambition to achieve something. It portrays a person so fixed on the object they want that their whole being is stretched out toward it. He compares it to an Olympic runner leaning forward at the line because he wants to be number one. Desire means you will not be satisfied until you reach and obtain the goal.

The main text is Mark 8:34–38: “Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” The disciples already believed in Jesus, yet He told them that if this was truly what they wanted, it would cost them. You can desire to follow Him, or desire to follow your own life plan, your own thinking and your own methods.

Whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for Jesus’ sake and the gospel’s will save it. Pastor Hohman applies it plainly. If you insist on protecting the way you have always done things, you will lose the life God intended. Following Jesus will not be convenient, and you may not know exactly what you are doing, but He loves it when you step out.

God has already painted a picture of the life He destined for you before the foundation of the world. We walk into that picture by following Jesus. He quotes D. L. Moody: “If this world is going to be reached I’m convinced that it must be done by men and women of average talent.”

Paul shows the same posture in Philippians 3:12: not that I have already attained, but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has laid hold of me. As someone once said, “If you really want to do something you’ll find a way; if you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.”

A Growing Desire to See God’s Will

Pastor Hohman shares part of his own story. He gave his life to Jesus publicly at eleven years old but ran from God because of the call on his life. Since committing his life fully to the Lord and being baptized in the Holy Spirit, he cannot stop ministering. He calls himself a man on a mission, consumed with desire to please God.

God gave him a vision years before he came to Merrill, so overwhelming that he never questioned whether it would happen, only where. When he came to Merrill, he knew this was the place and told the people. They clapped while they thought he would do it all. When he told them that being part of the church meant they would be doing it too, some left and called him a liar.

His conclusion is blunt: the entertainment mentality in the church has to stop. “Nothing is here for your entertainment,” he says. Everything is there for inspiration and empowerment to achieve what God has asked. He honors those who stayed through the storms and welcomes back those who left as if they never had.

He reports that about three-fourths of that vision has come to pass: ministry in 34 nations, with churches, ministries, free clinics, radio stations, schools and Bible colleges. Yet he insists it is not about him. Do not applaud the pastor; work with him and applaud Jesus. The point of the story is that it takes a growing desire to see the will of God come to pass. If desire is not growing, people fall by the wayside.

David knew this. In Psalm 27:13–14 he wrote, “I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” Then he added: wait on the Lord, be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart. Pastor Hohman teaches that waiting here means to be intertwined, like pouring one glass of water into another until the two cannot be separated.

That is how desire grows: by spending time with God daily until His heart mixes with yours. In Bible college, when classmates asked him to get them into churches, he told them simply to pray and obey. “Failure doesn’t matter, it’s just an event,” he says. As Proverbs 24:16 teaches, the righteous may fall seven times and rise again.

Two Ways Desire Is Born

To see crazy faith rise up, you need courage, and to have courage you need desire. Pastor Hohman says desire comes in two ways. The first is desperation, when life is so broken that you simply have to do something. Naaman, the Syrian general with leprosy in 2 Kings 5:1–14, had to listen to a little slave girl, go to his enemy’s prophet, and then listen to his own servant before he would dip seven times in the Jordan. Desire made him humble himself, and he was healed.

The second way is a softened heart. A hard heart has no desires; it is self-contained and self-purposed. When we spend unhurried time in God’s presence, away from distractions, our hearts soften, our spiritual eyes open, and desires begin to fill us. He pictures young David singing the words of Psalm 8:3–6: what is man that You are mindful of him? David’s desire to lead and bless came from the presence of God.

It is impossible to live without failing, he adds. After Peter denied Jesus, he went back to fishing with no desire for anything. Jesus found him on the shore of Galilee, cooked breakfast, and asked three times whether Peter loved Him (John 21:15–17). He did not come to condemn. He simply said: if you love Me, do what I ask and feed My sheep.

Pastor Hohman then describes desireless people. They seem not to care, have no driving motivation, are indifferent, and carry a take-it-or-leave-it attitude, singing “whatever will be will be.” Rousing them is like starting a car left out overnight at sixty below. That is why Ephesians 5:14–16 says, “Awake, you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light,” and tells us to redeem the time.

Desire That Reaches Out and Touches Jesus

The clearest picture of desire, for Pastor Hohman, is the woman in Mark 5:25–34. Jairus, a ruler of the synagogue, had asked Jesus to come and lay hands on his dying daughter, and huge crowds pressed around them. In that crowd was a woman who had bled for twelve years, spent everything she had on physicians, and only grown worse.

She said, “If only I may touch His clothes, I shall be made well,” and immediately the bleeding stopped. Desire, he says, caused God to move and fueled her courage. Under the law she was unclean and risked being stoned for going out among the crowd, yet she pressed through and took hold of His garment.

The disciples pointed out that everyone was thronging Him. That is the lesson: many people were touching Jesus, but one person had desire. You do not have to be a rocket scientist to have it. Spend time with God and let His love fill you, and desire will build the courage to do what He asks.

A person with desire will never remain the way they are. Without it, obstacles will knock you off your game, so “your desire needs to be stronger than any obstacle” you meet on the way to fulfillment.

He closes this section with three calls to rise. Isaiah 60:1–3 says to arise and shine, for your light has come, even while darkness covers the earth. James 4:8 promises that when we draw near to God, He draws near to us; God did not even instruct Moses until Moses drew near the burning bush. And Romans 13:11–12 says it is high time to awake out of sleep.

Growing Crazy Faith Desire This Week

How do we wake up and grow desire? Pastor Hohman answers from Psalm 37:3–4: trust in the Lord and do good, feed on His faithfulness, and delight yourself in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 145:18–19 adds that the Lord is near all who call on Him in truth, and He will fulfill the desire of those who fear Him.

Here are practical steps drawn from this crazy faith message:

• Spend unhurried time with God. Wait on Him daily, without distractions, until your heart is intertwined with His and desire starts to rise.
• Delight yourself in the Lord. Turn off what makes you cynical and fill your attention with God’s goodness instead.
• Help someone today. Look for one person whose life you can make easier, even when it costs you comfort.
• Start small, but start. Do the simple thing God has put in front of you, and let Him rejoice in the beginning.
• Treat failure as an event. If you fall, get up again, pray, and obey the next thing He asks.
• Move from spectator to worker. Stop treating church as entertainment and ask where you can serve the vision God has given.

The sermon ends with an invitation to receive Jesus, which Pastor Hohman calls the great exchange: we give Him our filthy rags and He gives us His righteousness. He then prays for healing for listeners with shoulder, back and breathing problems.

Timestamped Outline

• 0:00 Welcome and worship
• 19:33 Offering: Malachi 3 and the willing and obedient
• 23:58 Dr. Hohman introduces a holiness-era devotional
• 27:23 Opening prayer and series review
• 28:34 Part 1: thinking of others, Philippians 2:4
• 29:33 The flat tire in a Houston downpour
• 34:12 Part 2: small beginnings, Zechariah 4:10
• 38:43 A three-chord song: born again
• 40:46 The red punch bowl and a night of revival
• 43:34 Part 3: courage, Joshua 1:5–7
• 45:42 Part 4: crazy faith takes desire
• 46:49 Whoever desires to come after Me, Mark 8:34–38
• 51:22 I press on, Philippians 3:12
• 53:38 A vision years earlier and coming to Merrill
• 55:43 The entertainment mentality has to stop
• 57:49 Psalm 27: waiting on the Lord
• 1:01:14 Pray and obey; failure is just an event
• 1:02:30 Desire through desperation: Naaman
• 1:03:32 Desire through a softened heart: David
• 1:05:33 Jesus restores Peter at Galilee
• 1:07:52 Desireless people and Ephesians 5:14
• 1:10:21 The woman who touched His clothes, Mark 5
• 1:15:07 Arise and shine, and wake out of sleep
• 1:17:27 Delight yourself in the Lord, Psalm 37

Crazy Faith Series

This message is part of a five-part teaching series at NTC Ministries. Start from the beginning or continue where this one leaves off:

• First message: Crazy Faith, Part 1 — Thinking of Others Before Yourself
• Previous: Crazy Faith #3: Faith Takes Courage in Your Weakest Areas
• You are here: Crazy Faith #4: It Takes Desire to Follow Jesus
• Next: Crazy Faith #5

Frequently Asked Questions

What if I do not feel any desire for God right now?

Pastor Hohman says no one should expect a magnificent desire to appear all at once. It takes time with God, and He initiates it. He promises that when you draw near to Him, He draws near to you, and he pictures God fanning the coals of a fire so that desire rises more and more. Start by spending time in His presence without distractions, and let His love fill you before you look for feelings.

Is it wrong to be desperate before I seek God?

No. Pastor Hohman names desperation as one of the two ways desire comes. Naaman only humbled himself because his leprosy left him no other option, and he was healed. He does say the better way is a heart softened by spending time with God, rather than waiting for a predicament, but he adds that God will use both. What matters is that desire moves you to act.

Why does he say church is not for entertainment?

When he first shared his vision in Merrill, people applauded as if watching a performance, then some left once they learned they would have to take part. He teaches that everything in church is meant for inspiration and empowerment, so believers can achieve what God has asked of them. Spectators lose heart when storms come; people with desire stay, work together and share the same reward.

Scripture References

All passages open in the New King James Version on Bible Gateway:

• Mark 8:34–38 — whoever desires to come after Me
• Philippians 3:12 — I press on to lay hold of it
• Psalm 27:13–14 — wait on the Lord
• Mark 5:25–34 — the woman who touched His clothes
• 2 Kings 5:1–14 — Naaman dips in the Jordan
• John 21:15–17 — Peter, do you love Me?
• Ephesians 5:14–16 — awake, you who sleep
• Psalm 37:3–4 — the desires of your heart
• Joshua 1:5–7 — be strong and very courageous

How this summary was made: written with AI assistance from the sermon’s own transcript and checked against the Scriptures listed above.

Watch More Messages

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