Your Appointments with 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 Monday night, April 26, 2021, in a church whose pastor was away — Copeland told the congregation he had not intended this message, but felt a different direction shortly before the service: a checkup sermon for a desensitized generation that has lost its fear of God and its reverence for hell. He read two texts: Acts 9, Saul stopped on the Damascus road by a voice from heaven, and Hebrews 9:27 — it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment. From them he built his subject: every person has appointments with God, and they are not all optional.

The first appointment is with Jesus Christ in this life, and it is the only one we can decline. Saul did not know he had one, but Jesus already knew his address, his thoughts, and his errands; every church service, Copeland argues, is such an appointment — a drawing of God, Christ standing at the door and knocking — and an opportunity to check the heart before a later appointment checks it for us. The woman with the issue of blood and blind Bartimaeus in Mark 10 both show what an appointment kept looks like: people who pushed past everything in the way, and whose self-talk had to change before their situation did. How a person handles this appointment, he warns, directly controls what happens at the next two.

The second appointment is death, and the third is the judgment, and neither can be rescheduled. He works the arithmetic of mortality — nearly two people die every second; over fifty million a year — and strips away the hiding places: you can hide things from your parents, your spouse, even your pastor, but not from God, who will bring every work and every secret thing, down to every idle word, into account before the judgment seat of Christ. We will not be judged, he says, on our good intentions or our someday plans, but on what we actually did; and one day there will be no more grace and no more mercy to cover what the blood has not covered.

He closes by turning the sermon into an examination. The ones who will have the most regret in hell, he says, are those who sat on Pentecostal pews with opportunity after opportunity and never took one. Heads bowed, he puts the questions one at a time — What is the condition of your soul? If God called your name tonight, would you be ready to stand before the judgment seat and give an account of your time, including what you did when nobody was looking? — quotes the old song of the man pleading "please search the book again" outside heaven's gate, and presses the church to make sure its name is still written in the Lamb's book of life as the altars open.