Kenneth Copeland - Mix Faith With the Promises of God
—Hello, everybody. I'm Kenneth Copeland. This is the Believer's Voice Of Victory broadcast. Of course, you know that. And this is Professor Greg Stephens, professor of first covenant survey at Kenneth Copeland Bible College. And besides that, he's just kind of smart. And he's helping us with the first covenant and moving into the things of God. We'll start again today with 2 Peter, but I have someone I want to introduce to you today before we begin. Jenny, would you come, would you and Elias come please? And I want to introduce you to Andrew. Just step up around here.
—Oh, man.
—And this is my little great grandson and he's a Thessalonian.
—Amen.
—Yes. Hey guy. Say, I'm from Thessaloniki. People really live there. And Jenny founded an orphanage there. Since Abba is a Greek word, and then the name of it is Abbahouse. It's father's house, and this little guy.
—Praise God.
—So he is my little Thessalonian. Praise the Lord. And Father, we thank you and praise you for his life.
—Yes.
—Thank you, Jesus. And the kids came over for Christmas and they're having to go back tomorrow. So I wanted to introduce them, and they can do whatever they want to, but this is... Father, we thank You in the name of Jesus for this broadcast today. We thank You for the power of the Living God and the Word of God. And we give You praise for the exceeding great and precious promises of the covenant. And we bless You today, Lord, and we thank You in the name of Jesus. Amen.
—Amen.
—Do you have anything you want to say?
—He'll do a Greek one with you one day.
—Yeah, he will. Yes, he will.
—Yes.
—Praise God.
—Even Rick Renner. They'll have a competition, who says...
—He and Rick Renner. Now that's good.
—Yeah. We love you, papa.
—Oh, I love you. Thank you, kids.
—Yes.
—Bye.
—Bye.
—Hey man, what a blessing.
—What a blessing. Oh my. I've always wanted to go to Greece and now I have to. Yes. Amen. Let's read this again from 2 Peter. Simon Peter, a servant or in the Greek. And I talked to Elias about that.
—Yeah.
—And about that word. And he said it's more like a bond slave. I'm a slave to him because I want to be.
—Amen. Glory to God.
—Not just a servant. Anyway. A servant and an apostle of Jesus Christ to them that have obtained like precious faith with us. Now we made a point that he called faith precious. As much as we've lived and talked and taught faith, I don't remember ever calling it precious until I read this. And so from now on I'm making a point of calling our faith precious. Anything that comes from God is precious.
—Right. Comes through the righteousness, he says right there of God.
—That's what it says.
—Savior Jesus Christ.
—Grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. According as His divine power have given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness through the knowledge of Him that have called us to glory and virtue or excellence, whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious, and I put a parenthesis, covenant promises that by these, you might be partakers of the divined nature. Now you remember 2 Corinthians. The apostle Paul said, we were made new creatures. All things passed away and all things became new and all things are of God. So the thing that passed away was that old nature.
—Right.
—So the divine nature, since it's of God.
—Yes. Right here. We just said it again right here. It's precious. Great and precious and you added covenant, promises.
—Yeah.
—Covenant's precious.
—Covenant is precious. The faith is precious. And so we are partakers of that divine nature. That's what we've been talking about with the attributes of God. That came in us the moment that we were born again. We talked about last week, the 13 attributes of God. Somebody says, why 13? Well, 13 is the age of when in Judaism, when a boy becomes a man. It's growing up. And that when we were born again, we became again, what was available to Adam in the first place.
—That's good.
—In Christ Jesus. And so there's one verse though, Brother Copeland in that, when we read that in Exodus 34 that troubles a lot of people and it's verse seven. And I want to touch it because I know there's somebody said, you guys skipped over verse seven. Verse seven said, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, upon the children's children under the third and fourth generation. See God is just and holy. Moses will intercede for the people right at that moment. Here's the simplest way I can look at that entire passage of Exodus 34. It's a sinner's prayer in the first covenant.
—Well, now that's good.
—It's the sinner's prayer for the first covenant, but it's rolled away. It's not done away with.
—Now you talk about something that's precious is the prayer of connection.
—Right.
—I'm totally convinced of this. Oral Robert said it more than a few times that Christian failure is a prayer failure. Christian failure is a compromised failure. Not knowing in the first place, not ever praying unless you're at church. Well, and someone said, you'd feed your body three hot meals a day and on Sunday you get one cold snack. The church, your spirit never gets fed. And without prayer, Jesus said and it's all over the Bible. Prayer is the connection.
—Yes.
—It starts at the very beginning and goes all the way through our business with God. Pray, pray, how to pray when to pray, who to pray to, who to a through. And people just don't, they don't know.
—Right.
—And I remember you do too. When Brother Hagin announced that you don't pray to Jesus. What? Oh, just their fangs came out like a mad cat. Don't pray to Jesus? Do you think Jesus knows what He's talking about?
—I think He does.
—He said up to now, you have asked me nothing but whatsoever you ask the Father in my name, He will give it you.
—Okay, so that's fulfillment of what happened in Exodus because Moses became the mediator or the intercessor between God and them. Jesus now has that place. Hebrews chapter three. Can I show you this real fast?
—Yes, please.
—In Hebrews chapter three and four, it explains it all for our covenant, our new covenant.
—Yes, it does.
—Chapter three, verse one. Therefore holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling, that's from 2 Peter.
—That's it.
—Consider the apostle and high priest of our profession or our confession Christ Jesus, who was faithful to Him that appointed Him as also Moses was faithful and all his house, for this man was counted worthy of more glory than Moses and so much as he who had built the house has more honor than the house. So every house is built by some man, but He built all things. All things were built by God. Moses barely was faithful in His house as a servant.
—Yes.
—For a testimony of those things, which we're spoken after, but Christ as a Son over his own house. And that's what we are. We are,
—Whose house we are if we hold fast the confidence and rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end.
—There it is.
—There's an if in it.
—Yes, sir. So when you go to chapter four, chapter four, verse two, for unto us was the gospel preached as well as under them, but the word preach did not profit them not being mixed with precious faith. I added precious in there.
—Yes, sir.
—Not being mixed with precious faith in them that heard it. So we enter into that arrest because we mixed faith with it.
—That's good, man.
—They never got to enter into that because they never mixed faith with it. They pulled back from this, but we've done it. There are 7,000 promises in the Bible.
—Yes.
—Brother Copeland, you know that. I say it like this, there's 7,000 bags of cement and they will not profit me until I mix faith with it.
—That is really,
—It's like if you're making cement, you have to have the water and you have to have the sand and you have to have that water mix.
—It have to be mixed.
—But you can have all of it, but if you never mix it, you can't build a wall. So those promises have to be mixed with faith. They have to, or they will not do anything for you.
—That's the reason it's precious. It is the activating force.
—Mm-hmm.
—If you can have the most powerful adhesive in the world is an Epoxy.
—Yes. But you have to mix it.
—Yeah, if you don't mix it, neither one of them would do anything, they're inert. But when you mix the two of them, the first thing you get is heat and you better do something quick because it is about to set up and you'd tear something up, you can't get it apart. That substance is precious faith. Without it, nothing happens.
—I can take any promise I have as a bag of cement if I do not mix faith with it. You're just reading words. You can memorize all 7,000 of them. Do you know good I love you, but if you've got all 7,000 promises memorized and you can quote them all, but you don't ever mix faith with them, they'll do you nothing.
—They don't do anything.
—It's like two chemicals, chemical reactions. Sodium and chloride. Together, they're both dangerous and poisonous. Mix them together, you get sodium chloride, you have salt, which you have to have to live.
—Yeah.
—They have to be brought together. So I do this in class at Kenneth Copeland Bible College to explain this, and I want to show it to you real quick. This is a little bottle of water that has red food coloring in it to make it red. Now in Hebrew, that's adam, that's the root word for Adam, red. We talked about it yesterday with the Sapphire stones. Blue is heavenly. So now I was red. The high priest garments are red, blue and gold thread in it, and purple, that's the garments that the high priests wore. And I believe it represented this. He was the mediator for the people. Before I was born again, this is all I was, red. I had no life of God in me. I'm just natural man. Now all the containers are the same, but the moment I was born again, heavily nature came into me and it made me purple. All I did was mix one drop of red with one drop of blue and it became purple, and that's royalty.
—That's royalty.
—Now I'll show you this. How can I ever get the blue out of that? I want to get the blue out of that and make that just red again. I can't do it. I can keep adding water and dilute it and dilute it and dilute it. That's yielding to the flesh.
—It'll never go back to that color.
—This is my spirit, man. I was this spiritually. The moment I was born again, the heavenly blue nature came in me and made me a royal priest to it. This is what He promised him in Exodus 34. If you'll do the covenant, you'll be a peculiar people. All these things will happen for you. I'll drive him out of the land. And He went on to say right there, do not make covenants with the people of that land. I think that's what the Lord meant for you when He told you to own no man anything, but to love him, and not go in covenant.
—I had no idea why He said that. We had come back down here to preach at Grace Temple, and as I was back in the bedroom that I had while I was in high school, and I had my Bible in my hand and it read across that. And I thought, surely, that doesn't mean that. And so I got the Amplified and it said, stay out of debt. Well. And, of course, you can't build anything on one verse of scripture. But you go into the blessing and the curse and it's all there, and then you find out that the borrower is servant or slave to the lender. It's part of the curse.
—Right.
—I couldn't figure it out. I didn't know what to do about it, but I called Gloria in there and she just looked at it and put her finger on it and said, if that's what the book says, that's what we're going to do. So we had to learn how. Well, we got sidetracked because I remember we leased some cars.
—Yes, sir.
—And they were from a good friend of ours out in California and he was a Chrysler dealer. And one of them is just a gorgeous car. It was a pale yellow with rich brown on the inside. And I'd drive it to the airport and I'd come back and the battery would be dead and nobody could figure out why. And we leased a gray one for the member of the staff and that thing, it was just terrible. And the Lord got on me. He said, that's just another way to borrow money and you are still obligated at, and it's talking about the ministry. He said, you are still obligated and you need to get out of that now. So I called Bob and I said, "Bob, I need to do something here. I need to send these cars back to you". And I could hear the silence on the other end because we had put some miles on them. I said, "No, no, wait a minute". I said, "We're going to pay for the cars. We'll pay that whole thing. And when you sell them you don't owe us anything," because that made him some money.
—Right.
—And that lifted off of me.
—Wow.
—And later, that pretty one had other problems. It just had problems all the time. There was a man contacted me and he said, Brother Copeland, you don't know me, but he said, I bought a car from Bob Harrison, and he said, it's a real beautiful yellow Chrysler. I understand you used to have that car. And I thought, okay. I said, yes, I did. He said, I want you to know that's the finest car. We haven't had a problem with that. We haven't had one problem with that at all. That is a great automobile. And he was just elated. And I saw what happened.
—Yeah.
—I opened the door and let that devil work on that car any way he wanted to. Now I related this at the minister's conference. I don't remember telling that story, but I talked about the fact that if you're in debt, you are servant to the lender. So I had a pastor contact me later. Now this goes back to prayer, because you have someone else in your prayer life. That's the reason Jesus said what He did about agreement prayer. He didn't start there. He started out saying, if this guy won't listen, get him out of your prayer life before you agree. Well, the next minister's conference he came to me. He said, we're building a new church. And he said, I applied for a loan, but he said, you said I had this thing about, maybe we should just be that debt free, just pay for it... But after what you said about being servant and you don't know who that banker is. You don't understand his life. You don't know what he does. You don't know how he lives, but you're spiritually in covenant with him. He said, I went straight back home and went straight to the bank. And he said, I went in and asked to see Mr. Banker and Mr. so and so. And he said that his secretary said, I think they're in there talking about the loan on your church right now. He said, well, I need to see him. So he walked out there. He's all, yes. He said, "We think we're going to go ahead and do that loan for your church". No, he said, "I believe the Lord wants us to pay for that church and build it debt free". He said that man's countenance completely, totally changed. He said, you can't do that without us. And he cursed him to his face. Now he was about to be in covenant with that man.
—Yes. I had the Lord tell me, I have churches that owe the mafia.
—Wow.
—And then later I didn't know it at the time. And I was ministering in a church, and I knew who he was, but you know, man, just great guy. He didn't thank all that much what I preached, but anyway, and I was in a church there and he came to the meeting where I was preaching. And when he walked in, I recognized him and I walked up there to him and shook his hand and a Word of the Lord came on me and I laid my hands on him and the Spirit of God said something like, I'll work this out. You'll not be in the bondage that you're in now, and your church will be free and so forth and so on, and he just stood there and looked at me. The pastor of the church told me later that he was about to lose that church. So he went to the mob representative and got the money. Well, then he sure enough couldn't pay it back. And the interest was unreal. And they were about take it out of his hands. And I found out that he was desperate. And when that spirit was broken over him, the Lord was able to move and the finances just flowed right in there, and he just paid them off and got them right out of the way.
—Wow.
—Churches, two things.
—Yes, sir.
—Churches that owe money on the church building, you're in covenant with somebody in that church. Churches that do not... that just invite grief in at a funeral. And everybody just grieves and squalls and balls and carries on. And you'll hear things like, well, just cry it out, baby, just cry it out till it goes away. It doesn't go away.
—No.
—The spirit of grief and the spirit of death are the same ones.
—Wow.
—And you'll find out that those churches have a spirit of grief in them then, and a lot of them preach healing and miracles and don't ever have any. So the prayer life is affected because of the covenants you make.
—Right. You believe that's why so many pastors burn out every year or die early? Because they've aligned themselves?
—The covenants they make, and putting themselves in a wrong place. I just got to get these people healed. I just have to, I just have to. If I don't, who will?
—Well.
—Well, you're not the healer.
—No.
—And you don't have to get them healed. It's your job to preach the Word of healing. Because when you're going at it that way, there is no precious faith, and you wind up preaching mad. And again, I have to go back to my spiritual father, Oral Roberts. He said, "Kenneth, if you don't do something to divert your mind and get your mind completely off what you're doing," he said, "You'll wind up preaching the same thing over and over and over and over, and there won't be an ounce of faith in it". And we're out of time. Praise God. Come on. Praise God. Thank You, Lord Jesus. And Brother Greg and I will be back in just a moment.