Going Out on a Limb | Gary Wilkerson

Gary Wilkerson tells the story of Zacchaeus climbing the sycamore tree to show that holy dissatisfaction, the ache for more of God, even if you've faithfully followed him for years, is not a lack of gratitude but one of the greatest gifts God has ever placed in the human heart.

Preached: August 16, 2026

Main Points:

• John Muir, instead of hiding from a fierce Pacific storm, climbed a Douglas fir to ride it out at the top, becoming a standing rebuke against choosing creature comforts over the Creator's confrontations. Psalm 107 says the same of sailors who go into the deep waters to see the works of the Lord.
• Zacchaeus was rich, powerful, and politically connected, yet excommunicated from his own people as a traitor. All the wealth in Jericho, including a front-row seat at Herod's lavish winter palace, never touched the emptiness inside him.
• Zacchaeus didn't casually wander over out of curiosity. He fought through a crowd that shoved him back, then hiked up his robe and climbed a sycamore tree, refusing to let his dignity or his station in life stop his pursuit of Jesus.
• Gary once accidentally called a pastor for directions from inside a bar, and heard U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" playing over the sound system while watching lonely men nurse drinks. That restless anthem, he says, describes an entire generation, and secretly describes Zacchaeus too.
• After decades in ministry, Gary confesses he spent his first two or three decades trying to get rid of the ache in his own heart, feeling guilty for not being satisfied, until he realized that holy dissatisfaction is itself a gift from God, not evidence of ingratitude.
• Zacchaeus's transformation was instant and costly: half his wealth given to the poor, fourfold restitution to everyone he'd defrauded. Jesus never demanded repentance in the text. It simply exploded out of an encountered heart.
• Jesus is interruptible, disruptive, and subversive. He stopped on his way to his own crucifixion for one desperate man in a tree, and he still topples the towers we've built so something new and better can be planted in their place.

https://wcmin.us/SS260830c