Fishers and Hunters

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the transcript below — the preacher’s words follow in full.

Preached at First Pentecostal Church North Little Rock on Tuesday night, September 30, 2025. The sermon is built on Jeremiah's word that God would send for fishers, and after them hunters. Copeland begins with the gentleness of God's approach: there is a call that comes into every believer's life — he watches children come to the altar and feel something, and notes how the call that begins as a gentle appeal, given time, becomes an appointment. God made human beings in his image and gave them the astonishing power to look the Creator in the face and say no.

Fishing is the first method. God lures: through preaching — every man in a pulpit is fishing for somebody who needs help — through the felt presence in a house where people have been praying, through a daily call to spend time with him. Six hundred years after Jeremiah, Jesus took up the same figure and promised to make his followers fishers of men. The blessings of the house are on offer every day to anyone who will take advantage of them.

Then the turn the sermon exists for: there comes a day when the fisher stops fishing and hunting season begins. The hunters of Jeremiah's prophecy hunt them out of every mountain and every hill and the holes of the rocks. You have the ability to say no to the fisher, he says, but you do not have the ability to ignore the hunter. The close becomes a direct, urgent altar call — a warning not to harden the neck against God's ruling, not to miss the day of visitation, not to let time run out while the fisher is still fishing — and the service moves into intercessory altar prayer.

Scripture index: Jeremiah 16:16.