The Lord of What You Have Left

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 Sunday morning, October 15, 2023, at Calvary Pentecostal Church of Jeanerette, Louisiana — a church with a hold on him: his father had preached there as a single young evangelist in the 1970s, and Copeland's own first six months of evangelising were spent there. Newly married since his last visit, he read John 6:8-9 — Andrew bringing forward a lad with five barley loaves and two small fishes, and asking, "but what are they among so many?" — and took his subject from the question: "The Lord of What You Have Left."

The first half is about the mask. We live in a world expert at acting like it has everything together — at Walmart, at the gym, on social media — and the performance has pushed its way into the church, where people with problems in their marriages, finances, minds, and homes come to God's house and act perfect. He retells a news story of a travel influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers whose husband did not know she battled depression until she took her own life: we have learned to hide even from those who love us most. Comparison is the thief of joy — obsessed with what others have, we forget how far God has brought us — and the church, a spiritual hospital, is the last place to tell the doctor nothing is wrong. Like Bartimaeus, who got his miracle because he would not keep his mouth shut, and like the first step of an AA class, deliverance begins with admitting the need: some struggles God allows precisely to drive us deeper, and a season's affliction becomes an identity only when we grab hold of it and call it who we are. He testifies out of his own season of depression — the devil had convinced him he would deal with it until he died — that what is turned over to the Lord can be broken off, generational cycles included: it can stop with you.

The second half turns to the text. The lad's lunch was nothing among fifteen thousand, and Andrew — a disciple who had seen the miracles, who should have known better — said so; but it matters whose hands what you have left is put into. In Jesus' hands the little multiplied; in anyone else's, nothing would have happened. Copeland makes it personal: starting out, every invitation felt like it came because of who his daddy was — Tim Copeland, who evangelised and pastored for decades — and he was paralysed trying to preach, walk, and talk like his father, until the Holy Ghost settled it in prayer: "I never called you to be Tim Copeland, but I called you to be Clark Copeland." It is not about what you bring to the table; it is about how much of yourself you are willing to leave there — not the good parts only, but the insecurities, the problems, the issues. The widow of Zarephath gave Elijah everything she had left and ate from the barrel all the famine; Elisha's widow had one pot of oil, and that was all she needed; Peter had no silver or gold, but what he had he gave, and a lame man walked. You have more left than you have lost: little is much when God is in it. He opens the altars on that word — take everything you've got left, your time, your remaining years, your little bit of talent and anointing, and give it to God, and let him multiply it.