Replacing God

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 in a morning session of Revolution AYC 2021 in Baton Rouge, carried live on Holy Ghost Radio, to a youth conference crowd the host had already exhorted for the better part of an hour. Copeland — twenty-two years old, in full-time evangelism for close to a year — greeted his family in the house, including his oldest brother, his pastor, whose birthday it was, and took a single text, Ecclesiastes 7:29: God made man upright, but man has sought out many inventions — or, in the rendering he preached from, many replacements. His subject: we need God, and there is no replacement for God.

His first movement is the church itself. Replacing God is not mainly what atheists do, he says; it is what Christians learn to do — gathering, giving, singing, even reading the Bible, with a form of godliness and no power, until once-powerful churches settle into ritual. Churches make up in programs and entertainment what they lack in prayer, in talent what they lack in anointing. Worship is good and shouting belongs to Pentecost, but worship is no substitute for a prayer life: praise not founded on prayer is weak, and what will keep a believer is getting alone on his face and digging out a relationship with God. Even the Pharisees, satisfied with their religion, did not recognize God manifest in the flesh standing in their midst.

His second movement is Cain, the Bible's first man to try life without the presence of God. Cain had been in God's presence, offered sacrifices, heard God's own warning that sin was lying at his door with mercy still extended — and chose his own way, murdered his brother, lied to God without feeling conviction, and went out from the presence of the Lord into the land of Nod, the land of wandering. Everything after that is replacement: a city to build, children raised to do it on their own, a line of descendants filling the void with marriages, tents, and instruments. Copeland lingers on the machinery of it — the conscience that stops hurting when sin goes unrepented, the backslider who stays frantically busy because slowing down means hearing the voice he is avoiding, and loneliness, which he calls one of God's greatest gifts when it is carried into a prayer closet instead of onto a phone.

He closes with a story Pentecost has told for years: a young anointed preacher who would not take his pastor's counsel, slid through compromise into drugs and a robbery that ended in murder and a life sentence — a man now told when to wake, eat, and go outside, who traced it all back not to the drugs or the parties but to a spirit of rebellion, a refusal to be told what to do. Then the appeal to the young crowd: Lot never walked with God, only with Abraham; you cannot borrow someone else's relationship. Don't replace God — and the service moves into an extended altar call, parents and older saints called to pray with the young people.