Launch Into the Deep

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 Wednesday night, March 2, 2022, in a revival at the church carried by the Apostolic Messages channel (pastor, Brother Epley) — a week in which Copeland's grandmother had died and the funeral trip still lay ahead of the family. He read one verse, Luke 5:4 — Jesus to Simon: "Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught" — and took his subject from the command: "Launch into the deep."

God, he begins, does not call his people to easy paths. If we understood everything God does and why, we would never need the critical element called faith — and without faith it is impossible to please him. Faith will, sooner or later, ask every Holy-Ghost-filled person to do something uncomfortable and unfamiliar: speak a word, rise an hour earlier to pray, undertake an extended fast. God has not called his people to be comfortable, complacent, or spiritually satisfied in the same place for months and years; he is calling this church out of Goshen. Goshen was shelter and provision, and God protected Israel there through the plagues, but it was never his will that they learn to live in Egypt — a deliverer was always coming, and the road to a land flowing with milk and honey ran through an uncomfortable wilderness. Too much of Pentecost is satisfied with the shallows — shallow moves of God, shallow preaching, shallow altar calls — but the deep is more than a measurement: it is the unknown, the unfamiliar, the step out of the comfort zone. And the deep is where the fish were. The disciples' net-breaking harvest came only when they went to the uncomfortable place; God did not send the fish to them but sent them to the fish, and it remains his will that the house be filled — with the broken, the addicted, the written-off, compelled in from the highways and hedges — until more pews are needed.

The faith chapter carries the argument home. Abraham was promised a child in old age, an impossibility; Sarah laughed at her own promise, and somewhere something shifted — Hebrews 11 says she judged him faithful who had promised and received strength to conceive, and that Abraham, called to go out not knowing where he went, obeyed and sojourned in the land of promise looking for a city whose builder and maker is God. Copeland quotes the chapter's climax nearly whole: the catalogue of those who subdued kingdoms, stopped the mouths of lions, were tortured and sawn asunder and wandered destitute, "of whom the world was not worthy" — and its verdict, that these all received not the promise, God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect. Think of it: Abraham, Moses, David are not made perfect without this Wednesday-night congregation; what is happening here is a continuation of what they saw, built on the apostles and prophets with Christ the chief cornerstone. He is simply not satisfied to live below that calling.

The appeal is for bigger faith, not louder claims: he knows the sound of evangelists promising revival to rooms that do not believe it, and asks instead for the prayer, "God, just for a moment, let me see what you see" — the fields really are white, but harvest takes workers willing to go where the harvest is. They have been in a season of sowing, digging, ploughing, and watering; he believes a season of reaping is at hand if people will stir the hunger, dream bigger (you cannot out-dream "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard"), and launch — uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and deeper than they have ever been.