You Can Mourn What's Missing or He Can Multiply What's Left

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 Sunday morning, October 12, 2025, at the close of the church's Mid-America Conference weekend; Copeland had been preaching the revival there and the pastor asked him to stay over. Rather than reading a text, he preaches a direct exhortation on honesty before God: the sickness of a world — and a church — built on image.

He begins with the person smiling in a crowded room while anything but fine inside. People have become so committed to the appearance of a perfect life that they will not be vulnerable even with those closest to them; he recounts a magazine story of an influencer whose enviable, globe-trotting life ended in suicide while even her husband never knew she was struggling. The church, he says, has absorbed the same facade: saints learn to live with things they should never have learned to live with because they will not admit need in front of the person across the aisle. Trials and lonely seasons are often God's way of bringing a believer to the discovery that Jesus himself is the answer — peace, joy, and contentment are not found in money, relationships, or the world's remedies, though people will try any suggested cure for a disease of the body while resisting the one cure for the void only God fills.

He levels the room: there is no perfect person in the building — the suits and dresses hide people who were addicted and bound, of whom the scripture says such were some of you, but you are washed and sanctified; a just man falls seven times and gets back up. His father's saying about perfect churches gets a laugh and makes the point. Help, he argues, follows one rule everywhere from the altar to Alcoholics Anonymous: you will never get help until you can admit you need help. Jesus came to call sinners, not the righteous; the church is a spiritual hospital, and having it all together disqualifies a person from the help of God. There is no such thing as divine flesh — mountaintops still end in valleys where the flesh has to be fought.

The appeal comes early and runs long: take the mask off, stop hiding behind walls built over years of services, get desperate for deliverance and a miracle more than for appearances — and from about the seventy-five-minute mark the service gives itself to altar music and ministry.

Scripture index: none.