The Wonder of God

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, October 21, 2025. The sermon opens on a frightening human speed: how quickly people get over things. A child begs for a toy or a game until it is all he can talk about, then loses interest; a buyer who had to have the car at any interest rate watches the polish and the new-car smell wear off. What fades with possessions, Copeland argues, also fades with God — and the longer some people are in church, the less joy they have, growing critical and cynical about the things of God. He tells of a young man asking a aged, uneducated evangelist — a dropout under whose ministry thousands had received the Holy Ghost — for his secret, and builds toward his own resolve, stated at twenty-seven years old: he will not get cynical about revival, and the walk is going to get sweeter as the days go by, as the old-timers testified.

Jesus' word that a person must be converted and become as a little child or not enter the kingdom becomes the sermon's standard: childlikeness is not optional. He remembers traveling with his father to Virginia as the youngest of four brothers, walking into a World War II museum with a new digital camera and photographing everything, even the plaques, while his older brothers had already outgrown the wonder. Some believers now need a stick of dynamite or a tsunami to be moved; the quickest way to tell who has been in church longest, he says with a wince, is to find who shouts least, and the newest converts are the ones first in the aisle. The longer he is in the truth, the more responsive he intends to be — and he turns the charge on the older saints: grandchildren are watching; do not just tell them to dance and pray, show them how.

The close is a prophecy over the church — FPC is not at its pinnacle; God has not yet given its greatest revival or harvest — and an altar appeal for the ones who have not wept between the porch and the altar in a long time, asking God not to let them be comfortable or satisfied.

Scripture index: none.