Kenneth Copeland - The Spirit of Power Brings Life
— Hello everybody, I'm Kenneth Copeland. Father, we thank You for this broadcast today. We're very grateful to You for the anointing, for sending the Spirit of truth, to live in us and around us and on us forever. And Jesus bought and paid for that an awesome price. And we praise You and thank You that it has been done. And he is here today. He is in us, and around us, and on us. He is there wherever you are. In the name of Jesus, we bless You today and thank You, Father. Amen.
— Amen.
— Glory to God. Sitting Bull was a very spiritual man. And there's a lot of things that happened. I learned a lot from Ellson Bennett. And Ellson's Navajo. But, we had a lot of discussions and he agreed with me and I agree with him. These men knew God, they just didn't know what to call him. Sitting Bull, he would worship and he would talk to the forever Spirit. Now he said, they're bad spirits, but the forever Spirit is our God. The forever Spirit. He had a revelation of that.
— We talked about it Monday...
— Yes.
— .. that he's always been.
— He's always been. And there are many stories among the Cherokee people and the pale healer. He was among these people when nobody even knew they existed, he was among them. And I want to go today, the Lord dropped this in my heart again. And we'll go back to the book of Isaiah, and go back to, did you ever notice Jesus found himself in the book of Isaiah?
— Yes, he did.
— He quoted him. And anyway, look at Isaiah 43, 24. "Thou has bought me no sweet cane with money, neither has thou filled me with the fat of thy sacrifices. But thou hast made me to serve with thy sins. Thou has wearied me with thine iniquities. I, even I am he that blotteth out your transgressions for my own sake and will not remember your sins. Put me in remembrance, let us plead together. Declare thou that thou mayest be justified". I read that and I got stuck. I said, "Lord, now wait a minute". I made a decision when I went to Oral Roberts University, that a whole lot from what I learned from Brother Hagin, but I made a decision. I'm just going to talk to him just like I talk to anybody else.
— Absolutely.
— And I said, "Now, wait a minute. I know you're the one that brought out my transgressions". "No, for my sake. Not your sake".
— No.
— And he spoke up right on the inside of me and he said, "No, I did it for my sake". I said, "I don't get it". "Well," he said, "You've brought me no sweet, but that hast made me to serve with your sins. You wearied me with your iniquities. I, even I am he that blots out your transgressions from my sake. I will not remember your sins". I said, "I don't get it". Now this is the same Spirit that's here today. And he did that in Jesus. He blotted them out. Anyway, I said, "I don't get it". He said, "You want to remember bad things about your children"? I said, "Well, no". He said, "I did it for my sake". He said, "I don't want to remember bad things about you. And besides that, if I remember your sins, I can't bless you".
— I got that written right there. I heard you say that. I wrote that right there.
— "If I remember your sins, I can't bless you". And now see, he talked about the sins in 24th verse. And in other words, he said, "I've had to put up with this". So he said, "I've blotted them out and I will not remember them. Now put me in remembrance. Let us plead together. Declare thou that you may be justified". And here's what he said. And I want you to get it in the audience, and I want the class to get it. He said, "Now you've started with a blank sheet. Now tell me, you plead with me. You plead your case. What do you want me to remember"?
— That's right. See, the Holy Spirit convicts the world of sin. It convicts the believer of unrighteousness. Because I've been made righteous. So when I read this 26 and you can correct me here on this, if I've got this wrong. Put me in remembrance, I put him in remembrance of what I want him to know. Let us plead together. Declare thou that thou may be justified. That's an Old Testament version of first John, 1:9.
— That is, isn't it?
— It looks like it to me.
— It does.
— That I'm going to confess this so that it's not to be remembered anymore.
— Yes.
— But I've already been justified. He's not remembering anymore. Put me in remembrance, let us plead together. So now I'll come back and plead to him the thing that I did, even though I'm justified.
— I plead my case.
— Plead my case.
— My case is the blood of Jesus.
— That's it. That's exactly...
— I plead the blood.
— That's exactly...
— And for those of you that, particularly those of you that do not have a Pentecostal background, and there are people that plead the blood and still don't realize what they did. But, because they have faith in the blood, it works. But actually when I plead the blood, we have overcome him, the devil, by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony, who did not love their lives unto death. So what has happened when you stand up and you say, "Satan, I plead the blood over that situation, in the name of Jesus". You literally, we literally have thrown every covenant God made right in his face.
— That's right. Especially now when we use the name of Jesus, because that's the authority...
— Yes.
— ...that backed that blood. So put me in remembrance, let us plead together. Declare thou that might be justified. What am I supposed to put in remembrance of right there? That you're the one I'm putting myself in remembrance of, for his sake he blotted out my inequity, my sins no more. So why am I going to carry this? I'm not going to carry this. I'm going to lay this at your feet.
— That's right.
— Praise God.
— Praise God. And you can just sometimes just take that and just browse right on down through there and look at all those words and then get the New King James that takes the thee's and the thou's out of it, and just flow in here and just listen to him. And listen how he said it. He didn't just say I, he said, "I, even I am. I am". What are you today, sir? "I'm the one that blots out your transgressions from my sake. I am".
— So if you don't remember it, I'm not going to remember it.
— That's right.
— I'm going to blot it out for my own sake too.
— Yes.
— Because I'm like you...
— And I'm starting afresh today. This is the day of my receiving.
— That's right
— Today is my receiving day, and I'm one day closer to the resurrection.
— That's right.
— I'm one day closer to my birthday, and I'm one day closer to Christmas.
— Amen.
— Amen. Glory to God.
— Yesterday you talked about the Eden Covenant, and you said the moment we were born again, we were placed in the Eden Covenant. So in that Eden Covenant, what was Adam's responsibility? God made it. Adam's responsibility was to steward it.
— That's right.
— And that's what this verse is doing. We are stewarding our position in the place that he's placed us.
— Oh, that's good, Greg.
— That's all we're doing. And we do it largely with our mouth, because that's how he made Eden. It's how he made everything. It's how Adam operated in Eden. He brought the animals advice. He would call them. He's speaking things into existence. And the things that we're talking about. Romans 8, 11 says, "The Spirit of him that raised Jesus from the dead dwell in you. He, that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwells in you.
— Praise God.
— We have that same Spirit.
— And what page are you on?
— I am on that second page.
— Yes.
— When God created the universe, He didn't use all of his power. He used more of his power to raise Jesus from the dead. And that's the same Spirit that's now in me.
— That was what startled me so. I had been praying in the Spirit and questioning God concerning power and a lot of things. And that's when I had the vision of God holding that dead, gray object in his hands by the shoulders. And he asked me, "What was the greatest expression of my power"? I said, "Oh, when you created the universe". He said, "Oh no". He said, "That was easy". I said, "That was easy"? "Well, yeah," he said, "It was easy". He said, "I had no one against me". Now he said, "Do you remember that I said in my Word, in Malachi, your words are stout against me"? And he said, "When I raised Jesus from the dead, all of hell was against me. My own people were against me". He said, "I had to do that against all of the forces". And he said, "You still don't have a concept yet of what it was like for my own Son to go to hell. And he had to believe that I could get him out of there". Because no one else had ever gotten out of there. And Jesus said, "Hell was created for the devil and his angels".
— That's right.
— And he had to go there.
— God's actually fighting his own delegated power because Adam gave the delegated power to Lucifer.
— Now how did he do it?
— Okay.
— Abraham was willing...
— There you go
— ...to sacrifice his only begotten son because of his covenant with God. And if his covenant partner was willing to do that, and we see it in the book of Hebrews, that he did it by faith, and he received him raised from the dead in a figure. He saw it in his Spirit. "I'm the father of many nations and this boy has to live to do it". He fully intended to see him raised up from ashes.
— Well, an angel had to stop him.
— Yeah. He was doing it. He was doing this thing. He had the knife and the angel stopped him. And there was a ram caught in the thicket.
— Yeah.
— A what? A sacrificial ram.
— Yes.
— What kind of faith did Isaac have?
— Yeah, absolutely.
— Well, he even asked his dad, "Where's the sacrifice"? "The Lord will provide," that's what he said. And he goes up there with two servants, just like Jesus. It's a picture for us of the two that were on either side.
— And he said, "The boy and I will return".
— Yes, he did.
— He spoke by faith, but he fully intended to do it. And when Jesus said, "Is there any way that this cup could pass from me"? There's no way. God knew it was coming. He knew the day was coming. He knew he was going to have to face this.
— That was the fully persuaded moment...
— Yes, it was.
— ...with Abraham. So that takes us to Philippians three, 10. Let me read this to you on page three here. Philippians three, 10, "That I may know him and the power of his resurrection. And the fellowship of his suffering's being conformed to his death". Now being conformed to his death doesn't mean that Paul's looking to die like Jesus did. He knows he's identified with him. "I was crucified with him. I died with him. I was buried with him. I was resurrected with him. And now I reign with him". Far too many Christians are trying to reign with him without knowing all of that other identification that I was crucified with him. I died with him. I was buried with him. I was resurrected...
— I had the Lord say this to me, Greg. He said, "Christian people have never let me die".
— My, my, my. He said, "They see me hanging on the cross and they feel bad about it a one day a year. And then they run around with rabbits".
— And eggs. Yeah.
— And I didn't know where that Easter egg came from until...
— From Passover.
— It came from Passover and I didn't know it. Where that egg was roasted, it was cracked and roasted. In other words, it was hard boiled. And when they took the shell off of the egg, it had a pattern on it, and no two of them were alike. It was not an Easter egg. It's a Sabbath egg. Passover egg.
— Right.
— But that's where the...
— That's where that started from.
— And rabbits don't lay eggs. And Easter is only mentioned one time and it's in the King James translation. Every other time it's translated Passover.
— That's right. They changed it. Paul wrote, when I read that in Philippians three, 10, the resurrection's something that we should understand...
— That's good.
— ...and that we should study. The resurrection...
— Let's go over there and look at that.
— Yeah. The resurrection makes the distinction between the old and the new covenant.
— In the eighth verse, Yae doubtless. I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and do count them, but done, that I may win Christ". Now that's serious. This man, a Pharisee of the Pharisees.
— Brilliant.
— The most educated of all.
— That's right.
— Highly educated, sat at the feet of Gamaliel. And he counts all that as trash, rubbish. That's just trash. "That whom I have suffered the loss of all things, that I may win Christ and be found in him, not having my own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness, which is of God by faith, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering". My part of his sufferings. So what is our part of his suffering? We are to resist everything...
— That's exactly right.
— ...that he paid for on the across. We are to resist sin. We are to resist sickness. We are to resist disease. We are to resist poverty.
— Right.
— With all the faith we have. And sometimes that can get tough. And Gloria and I had to learn how. And when you start with nothing and the Oral Roberts, he said, "You're going to," talking about him, "You're going build me a university". He said, "You're going to build it out of the same thing I did, nothing".
— Right. Right.
— That's what Oral said. So what'd he do? He would take Richard, and he'd put Richard's bicycle in the car, and he'd go out here in his farmland. And he would stand there under a shade and he would pray in tongues.
— There you go.
— He would stand there and pray in tongues.
— He's accessing the power.
— And Oral Roberts University stands in that plot today.
— Praise God.
— And they just had a graduating class. And a very close friend of ours, her niece graduated with a 4.0 at Oral Roberts university. And they had over 900 graduates.
— Amen.
— Amen. The first class was 300 all together. And I was there the second semester.
— Amen.
— But now think about that. It was out in the country, it was a farm, but he knew where it was. The Spirit of God had showed him where it was. And so he would pray in tongues and then interpret back to himself. And out of that was born the design of the university. And that's when the Lord said to him, "Prayer is the most essential part or it is a core value," because all Christian failure is a prayer failure. So the first structure on campus was the prayer tower.
— It's still in the center, right there in the center.
— Right in the center. And everything else was built around it.
— Brother Copeland, that was his Eden.
— Yes.
— He went out there and stewarded it.
— And the first day that we drove in there, my daughter Kellie was standing up in the seat. Gloria had John. John was a baby. Kellie was three. She said, "Oh daddy, Jesus lives here".
— Amen.
— The impact of the Spirit was so strong. But when you go back to where it came from...
— That's right.
— ...it came out of the Spirit. And he read where the Spirit of God showed David the design of the temple.
— Yeah. Wow.
— And Solomon built it. Amen. So he stayed in the Spirit until he got the design of that university and where it was to be. And the people didn't want to sell it. But later they did. And the address is 7777 South Lewis...
— That's right.
— And we're out time. Glory to God. We will be back here.