Kenneth Copeland - Refuse To Fear
We are delivered from fear by the blood and the body of Jesus. Let's go once again to the book of Job, the third chapter, Verse 25. "For the thing which I greatly feared, the thing which I dreaded is come upon me. That which I was afraid of is come unto me. I was not in safety, neither had I rest. Neither was I quiet, yet trouble came. So I was not in safety". So what does that show you? He's worried about it. Neither had I rest. I was worried. I didn't rest. I was working hard at this.
Now, neither was I quiet, yet trouble came. He just didn't understand it until finally, finally God got through to him and got Job's mind off himself. And when he prayed for his friends, it broke this nine month horror thing he'd been in. Amen. But the important thing is that the fear drew it to him. We talked about this already. Fear is a spiritual force. It's actually the fear of death, fear of dying. We found that in the book of Hebrews, that all of their lifetime, they were bound up with the fear of death and Jesus broke it. And tasted death for all men. Glory to God, we have nothing to fear. And when something comes up and presents itself as something to fear, we resist it.
Now, think about this. What do we resist? Everything that Jesus bore for us on the cross, we resist it. He bore our sins. We resist it. He bore our sicknesses. We resist it. He bore our poverty. We resist it. Amen. And we receive what he received. He received new life. It's the great exchange. Amen. He went to hell so we don't have to go there. He went to hell so he could invite us to heaven. He bore our sins in his own body, on the tree so that we could be dead to sin and live under righteousness. Don't let righteousness, that's an old English word. It's a religious word. Don't let that throw you. It just simply means right standing with God. Right standing with God. And that's not something you attain over a long period of time. That happened the moment you got born again. You accepted Jesus and you became a new creature and you were made the righteousness of God in him. He who knew no sin was made to be sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.
That's a good place to praise God. Amen. But we have no more business with sin. We have no more business with fear. We have no more business with sickness and disease, glory to God. We have no business with any of that. We resist that, with every fiber of our being, we resist it. And I don't care if your knees are knocking together. I refuse to be afraid. And things over the years that have been a problem to me. I've never been basically a fearful person anyway, because my dad wasn't. And when I was a little boy, if there was water, I wanted to jump in it. Never afraid of it. And of course, a lot of people in this part of the country don't know what a bar ditch is. I don't know why it's called a bar ditch. It's just a ditch, running alongside the highway. Where do names like that come from? I don't know, but that's what you call them, particularly in Texas, in Oklahoma and Arkansas.
And I noticed that it's more in ranching country and so forth. And when it rains, those ditches get full of water. It runs off of the road and runs in those ditches and we'd be driving along and there'd be a bar ditch, a lot of water in it. And I said, "Daddy, I want to, stop. I want to swim in that ditch". Well, he'd just stop. And he'd say, "All right, but don't you be jumping in there. You don't know what's in there. You don't, you go easy first". Okay. My grandfather, up on the plains of Texas. And they first discovered that aquifer under the Northern plains, had a big river running under there. And his oldest son, just my mother's oldest, and then uncle Bud. And he came back home and told his dad, he said, "Now there's a river under there and if we can tap into that". He said, "Dad, we'll never have a crop fail because we don't have enough rain on our cotton or our wheat". He said, "If we can do that". And my grandfather said, "Well, let's do it".
And my grandfather just couldn't read much, but he figured things out. So he ordered all of the equipment and he had an older Ford engine. It was in an older car. So he just took that Ford engine out of that car and overhauled it and made a well pump out of it. And that large concrete pool there and, oh, it looked good. And it was hot, and I was out there and I said, "Paw-paw, I want to go swimming in that". He said, "Yeah, jump in there". Little did I know that this water came from just to above the thermocline. Ooh. A little bit, and it would've been ice. I didn't even sink. And he thought that was the funniest thing he ever saw. Well, but you can just mess with it long enough, just get in it anyway. The only water I never could get in was the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. That's the coldest water. I finally had to get in it because some people wanted to be baptized. You remember that, Jerry? Oh, how sweetheart, it hurt.
So we... oh, it was a wonderful time. But anyway, fear is a destroyer. The spirit of fear. Who is the spirit of fear? The devil. Jesus said, "The thief comes, but for to steal, to kill and destroy. He is the destroyer". And when churches yield to grief and just go on and on and on, you'll find out that there is a spirit of death in that church. And people die strangely, sometimes. I've noticed it over the years and several places where I had the opportunity, I was able to minister to that. I was ministering a number of years ago and I had, this man brought his wife into, it was in a church and he brought his wife in there. And he brought her up in front of me, and she was just devastated. I mean, she, oh. And I started to lay hands on her and the Lord backed me away from it. And I stood back and I said, "What is this"? And she was just so devastated, she couldn't answer me. He said, "Our nine year old daughter died".
Well, the minute they said that, I mean, it hit my heart. I just, ooh, that hurts. But the Lord just kept me backed away from him. And I stood there for a few moment. In the natural, I would never have said something like this, never. I said, and then he went ahead and talked about it a little bit. And it was a terrible situation. But she was just out of it, just. And by the spirit, now listen, by the spirit, I said, "Lady, you got beat at the game of life". I want you to know, she rose up. I mean, she grabbed at me. She tried to scratch my face and he had to grab her and pull her away. Well, I just felt terrible at myself, but they came back that night in the evening service and she had this bright look on her face.
Now, I had been talking and teaching along down these same lines on faith and fear, so she came back that night and she apologized. She said, "Brother Copeland, you're absolutely right". She said, "I was grieving so bad that I was hard on my other children and I'm not a wife to my husband". And she said, "I wanted to die myself but you said I got beat at the game of life". She said, "At first, it made me so mad, I wanted to fight". But then she said, "I got to thinking about it. You know, I've given up". Something like that. Well, then I was able to tell her, "The reason for that is, the Word of God wasn't alive in you before this happened. And if you don't put it in there, it's not going to come out". Her husband took hold of that and he made a decision. This family is going to get the Word of God in them now. And that's the reason I know all of this is because he contacted me later and told me.
So he and his son, we're up in the mountains and all of a sudden, his son just fell and had a seizure. He said, "No, bless God, you don't". And he just grabbed that boy by the hair and he said, "No, devil, no, no. Uh-huh. No, no. You got my daughter. You're not getting this boy. No, no, no. The Word of God is in me. Now you take your hands off of it". And he said instantly, it stopped and never did happen again. The devil's going to try one more time to see if he'd start moaning and groaning. Well, I guess I'm going to lose this one too. Be very careful about how you express yourself, concerning people that have gone on to glory. I began to notice this. This is what the spirit of grief, the spirit of grief is a sense of loss. Depression is grieving when you haven't lost anything, because we're talking about fear and being delivered from fear. And we're talking about life. Major on the life, not the death.
Turn to the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 30. Deuteronomy 30, that's way over to the left of Job. It's the book of Job. The 19th verse, "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 life". You is the understood subject of the sentence. Therefore, you choose life, that both you and your seed may live, that you may love the Lord thy God. That thou mayest obey his voice and you may cleave unto him, for he is your life and the length of your days that you may dwell in the land, which the Lord swore under thy fathers to Abraham, Isaac, and to Jacob to give them. He said, God said, and he hasn't changed. There it is, right there. I set before you both life and death, blessing and cursing. You choose. You can't choose life without choosing life words. Jesus said, "My words are spirit and they are life". Amen.
John 6:63. "My words are spirit and they are life". This is a life book. This is more a life book than it is a death book. And this is a covenant book that God said, "I've made my choice. I've chosen you. Now, I set before you life and death. Now you choose". You choose. We choose the words we speak. We choose the thoughts we think. We choose them. Amen. I heard Brother Hagin say this, glory to God, talking about thoughts. I cannot help that the birds fly over my head, but I can stop them from building a nest in my hair. Well, you think about that, thoughts just as ... And it becomes very important to think God's thoughts after him. That's called the renewing of your mind. You can have such a life of joy. If you can keep that spirit of fear out. Out. If it shows up, deal with it.
Now we're down to the nitty gritty of this message. I'll close with this part of it. Fear can be coped with, and at the same time, it's not gone. But now, look at this in first John, chapter four. And when you come to the eighth verse, "He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. And this was manifested the love of God towards us because that God sent his only begotten son in the world and to the world that we might live through him. Herein is love. Not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation of the sacrifice for our sin. Beloved if God so loved us, we ought to also love one another. No man has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwells in us and his love is perfected in us".
If we love one another, love dwells in us and his love, who is God is perfected in us. Hmm. Hereby we know that we dwell in him, he and in us, because he has given us of his spirit. And we have seen and testified that the father sent the son to be the savior of the world. Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the son of God, God dwells in him and he in God. And we have known and believed the love. Believed the love. Well, what does that mean? We've known the love. We knew the love the moment we were born again, because it was God who is love that did it, by his spirit. And if you ask any Christians anywhere, I mean, what is the commandment of the church? Oh, that we love one another. Oh, yeah. Quick to answer that. But do you believe the love? Well, God, I just don't understand why you let that happen to me. Don't you care? Jesus' own disciples said that to him in that storm, on the lake, "Master". Here's that, here is the double mind.
Peter said, "Master, careth now not that we perish? Don't you care"? In the wilderness, the children of God, children of Israel did not believe the love. And Moses kept telling them over and over and over. And they kept saying, "He sent us out here to kill us. We're going to die in the desert. We're going to die in the desert. We're going to die in the desert. We're going to die in the desert. We're going to die. We're going to die. We're going to die. We're going to die in the desert. We're going to die. We're going to die. We going to, yeah. We are going to die. We are going to die". And God said, "Okay, all right. None of you are getting out of here over 20 years old".
Now, it was not that he didn't love them. He had to get them out of there before they destroyed themselves. Judgment is the mercy of God. They didn't believe he loved them. They didn't believe the love. We believe the love that he has to us. We have known and believed the love that God has to us. God is love and he that dwells in love, dwells in God, and God in him. Herein is our love made perfect, or come to maturity that we may have boldness in the day of judgment because as he is, so are we in the world. There is no fear in love, but perfected love casteth out fear because fear hath torment.
I'm telling you, the love of God will get rid of it. Not cope with it. We don't cope with it, we attack it. I refuse to be afraid. I don't care if your bones are knocking, I refuse to yield to fear. I'll not do it. I will not do it. Not after reading that, he that fears is not developed in love. We love him because he first loved us. Faith works by love, but faith alone won't do it. But perfected love, developed love, mature love. When you've come to that place where John 13:34 and 35 is a way of life to you, I give you a new covenant, new commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. And all men will know you're my disciples by the way you love one another.