After He Was Shaven

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the sermon's captions — published in summary form; watch the full sermon at the source.

Preached Tuesday night, October 27, 2026, at the Apostolic Pentecostal Church of Panama City, where the host pastor introduced Copeland as a friend of the church whose visits have repeatedly been marked by a move of God. After an opening exhortation — praise is not optional for people God has been good to, and how a church responds in worship tells how it feels about its God — he read his text from Judges 16: the Philistines took Samson, put out his eyes, bound him, and set him grinding in the prison house; but the hair of his head began to grow again after he was shaven. From the last four words of that sentence he took his title and his whole subject: what God does with a man after the fall.

The message is built on one repeated sentence — God can use anybody — and one repeated diagnosis: the devil's best work is not knocking a believer down but keeping him down, convincing him in his own mind that his failure, his family, and his past have disqualified him for good. Copeland insists the breakthrough has to happen in the mind before it happens anywhere else: a man who tells himself all day that he is a loser and a mistake will become his thoughts, and no preaching and no pastor's confidence in him will move him until hope gets back into his spirit. He tells of his own youth in the church, when defeat in his mind stopped him believing God could make anything of him — until the day hope came back at an altar.

Samson carries the argument. He could slay a lion and multitudes of Philistines but could not tell his own flesh no; he drifted into compromise while still feeling the goosebumps of God's presence, mistaking God's mercy for God's approval. Blinded and grinding in circles at the mill, he is the picture of the believer cycling between a touch in church and defeat at home. But his hair grew back — and as it grew, Copeland says, so did his hope and his memory of what God had done through him before. Brought in to be mocked at the Philistine feast, Samson prayed, put his hands on the pillars, and accomplished more after he was shaven than in all the moments of his life before it: God not only used him again, He used him greater, and a broken man's God gets the credit a whole man might have taken for himself.

He closes by pressing the congregation to believe the word for themselves — not only can God use you, God wants to use you — and opens the altars for those who will stop rehearsing their disqualifications and let God restore their confidence, as the service moves into extended altar prayer and song.