Spiritual Neuropathy

Summary

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

Preached at Higher Praise Tabernacle on Friday night, August 15, 2025, to a youth-heavy congregation — his first time on that platform, though his father and brother had preached there. His text is Ephesians 4:17–19, and the sermon hangs on its description of people who are "past feeling": having lost all sensitivity, become callous. He tells the young people plainly that they have become professionals at the motions of church — knowing when to lift a hand, say amen, and jump — while going home wondering whether there is anything to it.

The message grows out of his own body. At thirteen, on a family trip in November 2011, he fell ill with an unquenchable thirst and was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. In the hospital, alongside insulin training, he was taught what happens to diabetics who refuse to take the disease seriously: blindness, organ failure, and the complication that frightened him most — diabetic neuropathy, which begins as tingling and ends in a complete loss of feeling, costing toes, then feet, then legs. One disease, unmanaged, always leads to another. A diabetic mentor from his home church embodied the warning: a man full of counsel about how to live with the disease while visibly not living by it himself.

That becomes the spiritual diagnosis. God has not changed and his power has not diminished; what changes is our sensitivity to him. He tells of preaching elsewhere and inviting everyone who no longer felt in church what they once felt to come forward — expecting a tenth of the crowd and watching nearly the whole congregation step out. He insists feelings are not the basis of obedience: nobody prays every day because they feel like it, and he does not pray or live right on feeling but on knowledge of what is right. Yet a walk with God cannot survive without the capacity to be moved — to weep, to respond, to be broken in an altar until there is a puddle of tears. He traces how callousness creeps in through what young people watch and share until nothing moves them anymore, and he develops the Bible's picture of a conscience seared with a hot iron: repeated burning destroys the nerve until even a thousand-degree iron pressed to the same spot draws no reaction.

The close appeals for restored feeling — for God to reach hearts that have grown hard and make them sensitive again — and the service moves into an extended altar response of prayer and worship.

Scripture index: Ephesians 4:17-19.