Kenneth Copeland - Putting the Fundamentals of Faith To Work
I want us to go over here now to Hebrews the 10th chapter, please, verse 23. Oh, this book of Hebrews... Verse 22, let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith. Draw near. Let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith, in full assurance of faith, having our heart sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering, for he is faithful that promised. Hold fast our confession of faith without wavering, for he is faithful who promised.
All right. Let's go over to the letters of Peter. Praise God. Thank You, Lord Jesus. The second letter of Peter, Simon Peter, a servant or a slave, and an apostle of Jesus Christ, to them that have obtained like precious faith with us through the righteousness of God, and our savior, Jesus Christ. Like precious faith with him. Now, this man, if you'll read his writings and see how many times he used the word precious, to him faith is precious because it came from Jesus. It came from God, faith in God, faith in what that Word says, realizing that these are blood-backed promises. "Grace and peace be multiplied under you through the knowledge of God and of Jesus, our Lord, according as his divine power, his divine power has given unto us all things". Say "all things".
Now, we have obtained like precious faith with him. Where did he get his faith? Jesus is the author and finisher, or the author and completer, the author and developer of our faith. Amen. Now, talking about the fundamentals of faith, as we said, faith is a spiritual force and not a mental force. Now, in order to... Turn over there to the 11th chapter of Hebrews, please. We were at the 10th chapter, 11th chapter. Verse 38, "now the just shall live by faith. If any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him, but we are not of them who draw back unto perdition, but of them who believe in the saving of the soul. Now, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, for by it the elders obtained a good report. Through faith, we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God".
Now, here it is in the Classic Amplified translation, if you all put that up there, or I can just read it from my... Okay. "Now faith". Say "now faith". Faith is now. How does that come? It comes by taking those promises and meditating on them, and meditating on them, and thinking about them, and talking about them, and mutter to yourself, and talk about it, and talk about it. Thank God, thank God, thank God. Yes, amen. Yes, amen. Now, how does this affect me since by his stripes I was healed? Now that I'm healed, what do I do? Now that I'm... Oh, yeah. Now that I'm out of debt, what do I do? How do I conduct myself now that I'm debt-free? Well, do I do Brother Copeland, just go by motorcycles? No. That came a long time later. Amen. No. The day we saw that... Now, you can't build any doctrine on one verse of scripture. But we left Tulsa and went back to Fort Worth, and I was preaching at Grace Temple, which became our home church, and Harold Nichols baptized Gloria and me and John and Kellie in water. Praise God.
We just had a time together. But anyway, I went back to... I was preaching at our nearest church, and I was just walking around the room with my Bible and just reading book of Romans, and I got down to Romans 13:8 and said, "Owe no man anything but to love him". I said, "Well, I'll get the Amplified". He said, "Stay out of debt". Gloria! She came in there. Her face fell because there went her house. My face fell because there went my airplane, we thought. She just put her... She said, "If that's what the book says, that's what we're going to do". Well, we found out that the borrower is servant of the lender. Look that up. It says the borrower is connected to the lender, and you don't know what's in the covenant life of that person you're borrowing the money from.
I mentioned that in the ministers conference a few years ago, and I talked about that, that this is... When you enter into that loan, it is a covenant, and you're getting your sworn oath that 30 years from now, 40 years from now, your financial situation is going to be exactly like it is now. So, you've entered into a covenant contract with someone you don't know. So, this pastor told me later, he said, "I've got to think about that". So, he said, "We got home, I went to the bank," and he said, "I walked in there and I asked for the banker, and she said, 'Pastor, he's in there. They're talking about the loan on your church right now.'" Well, he said, "I need to see him. I want to talk about that".
So, he came out there and he said, "Well, we're working on your loan, Pastor". He said, "Well, that's what I want to tell you". He said, "I've decided not to do that". He said, "We're going to build that church debt-free". He said that man's countenance changed. He said he turned into somebody else. "Why, you sorry blankety-blanky. No, you can't build a church without us". You can't do it. He said, "I was so glad to get out and away from him," and he said it was just amazing what God did, "to get us where we are in. We owe no one anything but to love him". Amen.
Now, that very night, I needed a large Ampex recording deck. I wanted it for... We were going into the radio broadcast, and it had high speed. It would go up to 30 inches a second, so you get a lot of quality then. When you slowed it down, it was really sharp and good. So, I called the young man that I knew over in Louisiana, and I called him, and I said, "You guys, you handle those, don't you"? "Yeah". He said, "We do". So, I said, "Well, I need to buy one of those," and I said, "How much are they"? and he said, "300," and whatever it was. I said, "I don't have money right now, but I'll send it to you". He said, "Nah". He said, "Listen. I'll just put it on a bus".
This is the same day, night service, "And I'll just put a note in there, and you can sign it and send it back to me, pay it any time you need to". I did that, and I thought, "What have I done? I just got through telling the Lord I wouldn't borrow anymore". Oh, Jesus, forgive me. So, I called my dad. I said, "Dad, there will be a package coming for me at the Trailway bus station, and I'd like for you to pick it up and just bring it to me". I said, "You may be late for service, but I need you to pick it up". "Okay".
So, he went, and he got back right at the close of the service, and I thought, "Here's what I'm going to do". I told Dad, I said, "Here's what I'm going to do. I want to turn this around and reship it". He said, "Why"? I said, "I promised God I wouldn't borrow any money, and now I've gone and borrowed this 300 and some odd dollars". "No," he said. "Now, wait a minute. No, no, no, no, no. Wait just a minute here". He said, "I was on the way out to go to the bus station," and he said, "There was a woman that handed me this and said, 'This is for Kenneth and his ministry.'" He said, "Wait. Let's look here," and it's 300 and some... The Lord said, "I already knew you needed the tape deck. I already planned on that. I knew where it was. So, I arranged to pay for it". He said, "If you'll remember that, you won't get worried about not having enough because you can't borrow it".
So, that turned my fear into faith, and that's when it began to work. It took a while. We had to learn how to live debt-free. Just keep walking by faith because Gloria and I both, and in turn, the entire ministry had to learn how to be debt-free. George gets stuck with most of it because I'd say, "Well, we're going to this, and we're going to do that," and he turned out to be we, and he had to deal with it, knowing that we're going to have to have the money before we do it. You have no idea how many bad wild deals that suddenly I just think, "Boy, we need to be doing that. That's what we need to do right there," and then don't have the money to do it, and by the time it would take to have the money to do it, I realized God didn't call me to do it in the first place. I just got all excited and wanted to do it.
I did that a lot in the early days. I would stand up when I was preaching, and I'd see something in the Spirit that needed doing, and I'd just stand up there and announce that we're going to do it. Then once I got done I thought, "How in the world are we going to get that done"? We're not, but my word was out, and I had to do it anyway, and had to overcome that. Now, listen to what the Lord told me. He said, "You have mistaken my anointing when you're on that platform. You have mistaken my anointing for natural strength". He said, "Don't announce things when you're on the platform. You seek me and inquire of me, and I'll tell you when and where and how, if no or if yes. But once you announce it, then you're going to have to do it".
Now, he said, "I've bailed you out for now," but he said, "I'm not going to do it anymore. You're going to just be stuck with it". Well, I had to work harder than I should have, and I put pressure on my body that it didn't need, and more than once I became exhausted, and I promised God I would never come to that exhaustion state again. That's a hard place to be, where you're so exhausted that you're just in a daze, tired, worn completely out, no rest. 2004, Sunday, the Southwest, a disc blew up in my back. I've experienced a lot of pain in my life in different ways, but not like that. That hurt. That hurt. It knocked me on the floor. I couldn't get up.
Finally, the Lord said this to me. He said, "I created you to rest 52 days a year. You don't rest 52 days in five years, and it's killing you. Now stop it". He said, "You've stopped reading the Word for any reason other than to find something to preach". He said, "You look up healing scriptures to preach instead of healing scriptures to receive healing". Well, right after that, still in a lot of pain, but I went back into the Word. He stopped me right in the middle of what I was doing. I said, "What are you doing with that"? I said, "Praise God. This is healing". He said, "What are you doing"? I said, "I'm going to preach this". Uh-oh. He said, "You need healing right now for yourself".
So, I had to start over in the ministry of healing and receive it for my own body. It turned into a series of corresponding actions that put me into the place where now, at 85 years old, I'm in the best physical condition I have ever been in my life. I've never been in this kind of physical condition before. But this is good pressure. My diet is where it's supposed to be. I'm at a dream weight. I'm at the weight I always wanted to be all my life, but I got pushed to the point it liked to kill me. I pushed so hard that I injured my whole body, began to have heart trouble.
I was in a prison for Mike Barber, over close to Dallas. I got short of breath, terribly short of breath. I went in and finished service that night, got back in the airplane and was sitting there on the ramp at an airport close to Dallas, and I just sat down back there, and the Word of the Lord came into me and he said, "I have given you a new heart". "Receive it now," and I did. I took it that night, a little before 8:00 in the evening, October the 12th. I remember it. It seemed to me that airplane just filled up with his glory. I took my new heart right then, but then it took corresponding action to do it. I was diagnosed where I needed a pacemaker. I said, "Lord, I'll just get this by faith". No. He said, "No, take the pacemaker by faith, and then go to work". He said, "You're too far behind the power curve".
Now, power curve, that's an aviation term. You can actually get an airplane... The power curve is when you get to the point where all the power the airplane has will not keep it from stalling. He said, "You're too far behind the power curve. Take the pacemaker by faith," so I did, and it had a defibrillator in it. I set that thing off couple of times. Anyway... I was determined to get my flight physical back. There's a thing called a Bruce protocol. The treadmill that you and Phillis gave me, a professional treadmill is the only kind that will go up to a high enough incline to take that Bruce protocol. So, by the time it came time for me to take it, I was working out at the Bruce protocol. Corresponding action.
So, I went through the whole thing, and they had me all wired up, EKGs and all that, take your blood pressure every three minutes and all that. They kept saying, "Are you okay? Are you okay"? I said, "Yeah, I'm fine. I'm fine. Okay"? They said, "Okay". So, I took that test with the defibrillator in there. Then a tech rep came out, paired up with this thing, and turned the defibrillator off because I don't need it anymore. Had I obeyed God, I never would've needed the thing in the first place. I got my flight physical back.
Then I had to do a consultant test where the local cardiologists just consult for the FAA, and they said, "Well, we would like for you to do six minutes on our treadmill. Is that okay"? I said, "Yeah, sure". So, I did the six minutes, and she said, "Mr. Copeland, would you mind doing another minute or two? We can't get your heart rate up enough to tell". My heart's in too good of shape. We can't get your heart rate up. I took it by faith and operated by faith, walking by faith, eat by faith, live by faith, talk by faith, walk in faith, walk in love because faith works by love. Jesus said, "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another". Amen.
Well, what do you think? Did you get anything out of this tonight? Are we back in the fundamentals of faith? Well, stand with me, please. We'll close this service tonight by functioning in the thing that seems to me like, in the 55 years that I've been in this ministry, that this one is the toughest, particularly on Christian people. Sinners take it either way they get it. They don't understand any of it anyway, but calling things that be not as though they were by faith. God said, "I have made you," what? Father of many nations. God had the authority to do that.
Napoleon was reviewing his troops, and he always rode a great big stallion, and that horse bolted one day, and this young private reached out and caught that horse and settled him down. He said, "Thank you, Captain". He said, "Sir, I'm but a private". "No, you are a captain. You will ride with me". He had the authority to make him a captain. He didn't come up through the ranks. He was made a captain by the one who had the authority. God Almighty had the authority to make Abram father of many nations, and he changed his name. He put the H in the middle of his name, and in Hebrew, H, Hashem, the name. And a name change happened, and you and I, according to the third chapter of the book of Ephesians, we've been named after him. Glory to God. Hallelujah. Say it. "I call myself well. I call myself wealthy. I call myself free".