How it started

One Sunday morning Wilkin was invited to speak at the church of a pastor friend. This morning something special happened to him. For years he did not talk about it, because he did not know how people would react if he shared this personal experience. That morning the Holy Spirit told him, while he was preaching, to write a book about the seven times Jesus bled. The Holy Spirit gave him even the title: The Seven Wonders of the Cross. At that time, Wilkin did not know at all that Jesus shed his blood seven times for us. Wilkin was so overwhelmed that he stopped preaching. He told the congregation that he believed that God had just commissioned him to write a book about the cross. He didn’t dare to say that it would be about the seven times Jesus bled for us; after all, he didn’t know if that was true. After he finished his sermon, he quickly drove home, where he reread the Gospel the same day to see if it was true that Jesus bled for us seven times. The two years that followed changed his heart, his life, and his ministry. For a year – in addition to his work as a pastor – he studied what doctors, historians and theologians have written about the last 18 hours. Then he took a year to write the book. The rest is history. The book became an unexpected bestseller. By now, one out of every two hundred people in the Netherlands has a copy about The Seven Wonders of the Cross in their home.

The message