Kenneth Copeland - I Choose Life
Good morning, everybody. Good day, everybody, whatever time of day it is where you are. I'm Kenneth Copeland. This is the Believer's Voice of Victory broadcast on the Victory Network, praise God. And this is Kenneth Copeland Bible College, and the student body is here this morning and we're excited. We're excited about Jesus. We're excited about the things of God and we're excited about life. So all last week we had a faith refresher course and we just went all over faith all over the place. And I want to say this, I said it earlier, but I want to say it for the radio and TV audience. Faith is a way of life. It's our way of life. Praise God. Every day, day in, day out, the just shall live by faith. So by our faith in God, all that we have, all that we have in this life, spirit, soul, body financially, socially, every way, every thing we have in this life is in the Kingdom of God. And the way you bring the Kingdom of God, which Jesus said is within you, once you were born again, amen, you were baptized into the body of Christ, created in him, his workmanship. Glory to God.
So that faith, real Bible faith brings things, whatever is needed, whatever you want, brings things out of the unseen world and causes them to manifest in the seen world. That's just the way it works. Life, we live by faith and we die by faith. It's a way of life and living and dying is the way of the world. It's the way of mankind. And so we're not afraid of death because we've already died. If you know Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you've done all the dying you're ever going to do. Oh, well, your body will die, but that's not you. You can't see me this morning. You can't see a whole lot of my body, just my head and hands. But inside this body is where I live. And my soul, my will, my mind, my emotions, the intellectual part of me lives in my spirit. Amen. And we learned that by knowing the difference between spirit and the soul and body.
Father, we thank You this morning for the privilege of speaking to this student body and allowing the world to sit in class. Oh, we praise You. And we love You very, very much.
Now when I turned 85, I had lived 31,025 days. And I do that from time to time to stir myself up. I didn't do much with the first 30 years. Now I did marry Gloria Jean. Oh, that changed my entire life. And then six months later, she and I were born again. And that really changed our lives. And then December the sixth, 1966, I turned 30 years old. And the following January, I enrolled at Oral Roberts University and changed my whole course of life. Praise God. Amen.
So let's read from Genesis chapter six. And it came to pass when men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair. And they took them wives of all that they chose. And the Lord said, "My spirit shall not always strive with man". Now the New Living said he is only flesh. Now we are no longer only flesh because we have been regenerated. We have been born from on high. We have been born again. So we are no longer just flesh. Yet his days shall be 120 years. His days shall be 120 years. Now then look with me in the book of Hebrews, everyone in one form, in fact, I heard it just a few days ago, and it wasn't my place to correct this young man. He's a fine young Christian man. And it just wasn't the time or the place for me to correct him.
"Well, Brother, when your time comes, ain't nothing you can do about it. You're just going to die. Because every man has been appointed a time to die, right"? Wrong, absolutely, totally, completely wrong. That is an error, it's wrong. And I'll show it to you in Hebrews chapter nine. Let's read down into it. Verse 23, it was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. The blood of Jesus, Adam's sin polluted everything all the way, but not including the throne of God. And you remember when Mary recognized that it was Jesus. He said, "Don't touch me. I have not yet appeared to my God and to your God. Your Father and my Father". Jesus had to appear before Almighty God and present Himself the resurrected Son of glory. That had to be done. And his blood had to purify all of the heavenly utensils of worship.
Now all of his blood is there at the heavenly mercy seat right now, crying out. Hallelujah. Thank You, Lord Jesus. That's enough to shout about all day long. Praise God. But now look at this, look at verse 26. For then must he often have suffered since the foundation of the world, but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. He put sin away. He put it away. Did you hear that? He put it away. He broke its power. All the apostle Paul had to do to get saved to say, "Lord, who are you"? That's it, Lord. He just called him Lord. And that was it. And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this, the judgment. It's appointed under human beings once to die. Once. It's not a set time.
Now I will read to you Proverbs 3:1 from the Classic Amplified. My son, forget not my law or teaching. Law or teaching. Let your heart keep my commandments. You hear that? Let your heart keep my commandments. Not just your head, let my heart keep my commandments, for length of days and years of a life worth living and tranquility inward and outward, continuing through old age till death, these shall they add to you. So it's not a particular day. You can add to it. You can take away from it. There are things that will cut your life short. Sin, the wages of sin is what? Death. And it'll kill you early. So if it was just a set day, there wouldn't be anything you could do to cut it short. There wasn't anything you could do to add to it. Just be your day and bingo, you're gone. No, it is not that way. Glory to God.
Now the only way it's impossible for me to die before my 120th birthday, because I have a covenant with Almighty God, he asked me if I would do that. And I said of course I will. Amen. So that changed my life. It changed the way I think. It changed the way I speak. It changed my physical activity. I got really serious about the way I eat and the way I act and my exercising and all of that, because that's my way of life now. He asked me if I would do it. Well, his ask is my command. I'm a soldier in the Army of the Lord. When I was a soldier in the Army of the United States, I willfully obeyed every order. I liked it. I enjoyed the military and I like that whole way of life, but that's not what I was called to do. But I am called as a soldier in the Army of the Lord. And so I am his to command. He wants 120, then praise God, that's what it'll be. Thank You, Lord. So I have chosen life.
So now let's look at Deuteronomy chapter 30. Now we have come from the show and tell when Moses commanded this huge body of people, God's covenant people, but they had been in captivity for 400 years and they knew they had a covenant, but they were unaware of the reality of it. And so they stood on two mountains and they shouted the blessing and they shouted the curse. So now you come on over into Deuteronomy 29, look at the ninth verse. Keep therefore the words of this covenant and do them that you may prosper in all that you do. God is interested in the prosper part, not the curse part. And if you ask most people from what have we been redeemed? Oh, I don't know. Sin, I guess. And people that are seriously Christian will immediately tell you, "Well, sin". Well, yes, of course that's true. But actually we have been redeemed from the curse of the law. Now that includes it all. Sin, sickness, disease and poverty and spiritual death.
What is spiritual death? When God said the day you eat of that tree, you'll surely die, he didn't die physically, but the light went out on the inside. He had been crowned with the glory of God. Neither one of them could see physically their physical bodies anymore than you could see God's body. Because he's a fire from the loins up and a fire from the loins down, with the glory. He's clothed in glory. And the human being is the only one that is not clothed from the inside. Birds have feathers. Amen. Animals have fur. Well just flashed, horses just crossed my mind. I really like horses, but their coats change. When it gets cold, they put on a heavier coat. The hair grows longer. Amen. They don't have to try to do that. It just does it. Why? Because God just made them that way, that's why. Amen.
And that's true of the animal world, except for the human being. We were clothed originally from the inside out with the glory of God. That glory is a crown. You'd think about it as a crown that just comes down on and around. And when Adam sinned, the light went out and he was naked. He was naked. Now he had a perfect body and his wife was handmade by God. Oh my. I don't think there's any way to imagine how beautiful this woman actually was. But compared to the glory, even though their bodies were perfect, they didn't look very good. They were ashamed of them, the way they looked, because when they had looked at one another before they saw one another in the glory of God, hallelujah.
So now come on over into the 30th chapter. I want you to look at verse six, the Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart and the heart of thy seed to love the Lord thy God, with all thine heart, with all your soul, that you may live. Circumcise your heart. I am completely convinced cause of other scriptures and the things that I have learned from the Lord himself, that the moment we accepted Jesus Christ as Lord of our lives, the Word says we died. Yet nevertheless we live. Not us, but Christ in us, our hope of glory, right? I am absolutely convinced that in the Spirit, you can see that cut that the Word made because the sword of God killed me. It killed that old Kenneth. And I'm glad he's gone. And I was kind of like what the guy said, everything I liked illegally, immoral or fattening. I didn't like things that were illegal, but oh me.
Well, I have to tell you this. I swiped a pair of sunglasses one time, just because I was mad. I didn't need them. Didn't much want them, but I was mad and I just stuck them in my pocket. That has bothered me. It bothered me then. And it bothered me ever since. Well of course, the old man did it, so that isn't who I am, that's who I used to be. That I would even stoop so low as to steal something. Boy, thieves are... Well, Satan is a thief. He's a liar first. He came to steal, kill and destroy. Now Jesus put it that way, so don't change the order. I hear a lot of time he came to kill, steal and destroy. Well he did, but you need to realize he's a liar, he's the father of it, and he's a thief first. What did he come to steal? The Word.
Now, if he can steal the Word out of you, then he can get on the way towards killing you. And then he can get on the way towards destroying everything that you have, destroy your mind, destroy your thinking and push you into a state of absolutely no threat to him. That's his way of life, because he is a liar and a father of it. He is fear. The way God is love, he is fear. Amen. So we need to understand life. God is interested in life. Amen. So now you come on to, oh, I just love this. Verse 15. See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil, in that I command thee this day to love the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgements that thou mayest may live and multiply. And the Lord thy God shall bless thee in the land wherever you go to possess it. But it's there. You cannot deny the fact that death is here.
Like I said, that's the way of man. Death is here and life is here, but we choose life. Oh, look at this 19th verse. I call heaven and earth to, oh Lord I love it. I call heaven and earth to record this day against you. You don't have any excuse. I don't either. I'm a soldier. No excuse, no excuse. I call heaven and earth to record this day against you that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Therefore, choose. You is the understood subject of the sentence. And we're out of time. We'll take it up here tomorrow. Glory to God. Well, let's give the Lord a great praise as we close out today.