In Between an Angry God and a Sinful People

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 23, 2025. Copeland reads three texts that frame the whole message: Exodus 32:7–14, where God threatens to consume Israel over the golden calf and Moses talks him out of it; Ezekiel 22:30, where God looks for a man to stand in the gap and finds none; and Psalm 7:11, God angry with the wicked every day. Between an angry God and a sinful people, somebody has to stand.

The early movement is about the church's reflexes. It is easy, he says, to look at sin and grow angry and frustrated — but the fight is not against flesh and blood; behind the addicted and the bound are demonic forces, and Jesus had the ability to look past an action and an attitude to what was really happening in a heart. One of the worst failures in the church is receiving grace and refusing to give it: snubbing the person who was delivered, fell again, and came back a month later bound. Your own son or daughter will one day need the grace you are withholding. Being grafted into the church means discovering you can make a difference not only in your own life but in your brother's.

Then the text itself. While Moses was on the mountain receiving the law, the people he led out of Egypt forgot everything God had done and turned to a calf. Their sin was worthy of death, and God's anger was just — and his offer to Moses was personally generous: he would destroy them and make Moses' seed a great nation. Moses, though frustrated himself, refused the advantage and stepped into the role of intercessor, pleading God's reputation among the Egyptians and his promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel — and the Lord turned. That selfless act is the sermon's picture of what the church is for.

The close turns the congregation into the intercessors: the altar appeal is not mainly for personal needs but for praying with and for others — men reaching over to pray with young men, parents and fathers urged to weep and persist, because there are people depending on somebody's prayer. The service continues in that intercessory altar ministry and music to the end of the upload.

Scripture index: Exodus 32:7-14; Ezekiel 22:30; Psalm 7:11.