Kenneth Copeland - Sow the Seed of His Name
— Hello everybody. I'm Kenneth Copeland, and this is the Believer's Voice of Victory Broadcast. Father, we thank You today for Your Word. We come before it with open hearts and open minds to receive revelation from heaven in this life of faith. And we praise You and thank You for it in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, to whom we belong and whom we serve. Thank You, Father. And would you welcome today this mighty man of God? Come on, doc. Yes. Yes, he is Dr. Melvin Barney Esquire. Don't you like that? I wish I was an Esquire. Glory to God. Now he has written a book. This book has had a powerful impact on me. This man is an attorney and he pastors in Sacramento, California.
— Yes.
— And oh, look at the dog ears I've got all over this book. And Melvin, thank you for coming and opening our eyes concerning the name and the name that's above every name that's named, Glory to God. And his book. Say My Name, The Third Commandment, it's probably not what you think. And I thought I knew. I thought I... no, I didn't. I just had an idea. So let's go to the book.
— Amen.
— In the book of Exodus, where this is found, and we will look at it. This is where the 10 Commandments were written. Now Melvin, you're being an attorney and studied law, how many laws would you say are on the books in this country?
— Oh, my gosh. I don't even know if we can put a number behind it because you have so many different jurisdictions.
— Yeah.
— And all of the jurisdictions have hundreds of thousands, if not even millions of laws.
— All to enforce 10. There is a way to read these. Thou shall have no other gods before me. Why would you want another one? These were written so that he could bless his people.
— Yes.
— The blessing is what's behind all of this. So thou shall have no other God's before me. Thou shall make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above that in the earth beneath, or that is water under the earth. Thou shall not bow down thyself to them or serve them, for I am the Lord thy God, a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. Now, the seventh verse, third commandment, thou shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that takes his name in vain. I had an extremely limited view of that, probably like everybody else had. But now this is where you come in, lawyer, sir.
— Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Well, we were conditioned. I'm one who grew up in church, like many of us and we hear the 10 Commandments. We're introduced to the 10 commandments at a very, very early age. And most of us have been conditioned and taught that third commandment is speaking of irreverence, that we are not to use the name of the Lord in an irreverent way. Whereas when you actually go into the Greek and Hebrew, and this is something that I learned from you, learning from you what it means to actually dig into the Word of God and to go deeper into it. And so I studied the Hebrew. I wanted to know what this was. Actually, I was given an assignment to find out what this meant. And in going into the Hebrew and dissecting it from the Hebrews perspective, I came to the conclusion that what we've been conditioned and trained to believe that this passage of scripture means is absolutely untrue. It's not the case at all.
— Well, I wrote here, bless, don't curse. You use his name to curse somebody, but it's so much more than that.
— So much more than that, so much more. And in order to understand what it actually means, you have to, as I indicated, go into that Hebrew and that Hebrew word, which is translated in our translations, our English translations, many of them take, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. That Hebrew word that is translated take actually means to carry.
— That's what really opened my eyes.
— That word means to lift or to bear, like a person who is... police officers who are authorized to bear arms, a person who goes to a grocery store to carry her groceries from the store home. That's what that word means, how you carry something. It's not talking about using it the way that it's used. It's talking about the way that it's carried or toted, when you tote something from one place to another. So it gives me the image of how the people of God back when they were going through the wilderness, how they would carry the Arc of the Covenant from one place to another. They would tote it around with them and they would set up their camps around that Arc of the Covenant. And so with this part of scripture, it's giving you the same imagery of carrying the name of the Lord with us, if we're believers, everywhere that we go.
— Praise God. Let's go to the 18th chapter of Proverbs, in Proverbs 18:10. And we notice this and we won't just stop with this 10th verse. The name of the Lord is a strong tower. The righteous run into it and are safe. Now it means that the name is above every name.
— Yeah.
— It's a strong tower. It's a place of deliverance, but it's worthless if you don't use it. The title of the book is Say My Name. We carry the name. And now, Melvin, talk about the prayer that Jesus prayed, the model prayer and how you talked about the name there?
— Well, Jesus, when the disciples went to Jesus and they asked him, we see John's disciples praying, and we're looking at these scribes and Pharisees and all their disciples praying and different ones, disciples praying. Why don't you teach us to pray the way that John taught his disciples to pray? And Jesus in introducing that to them, he says, well, this is how you pray after this manner. You say...
— You say
— You plain out say, and that is so important when people ask the question, can you pray in your thoughts? I don't believe you can, because Jesus said when you pray, say our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name.
— That's the first thing he did.
— And so what does this business mean about hallowing the name and how does that relate to... When I studied this in my mind, just going all over the place, how does that relate to how we bear or carry or tote around a name? Because Jesus says to hallow the name. Well, that word hallow, it means to sanctify. It means to set his name apart, to recognize that it's distinct, that it's different, that it's not normal. And so he says to hallow the name. So then when we hallowed the name, it's like seed, something else I learned from you, words being seed. It's like seed and when you sow seed, the way that you sow seed is you take it and you plant it. And when you plant that seed, there's an expectation that that seed is going to bear a crop for you at some point or another. And so what Jesus is teaching when he tells us to start off by recognizing the holiness of God's name, recognizing what his name means, and what's all packed into his name, what he's telling us is that when we do so we're sowing his name. And as a result of sowing his name, what we have a right to do then is to expect a spiritual crop.
— Oh, that's good.
— That's a result of his name.
— That's a result of his name.
— When you sow an apple seed, you're not expecting lemons. You're expecting apples to grow. You're expecting an apple tree to sprout up at some time, and it's going to be full of apples. You're looking for that day that it's full of apples. And then if you know what to do with those seeds, you'll never run out of apples again. If you know how to take the seed that comes from each apple and keep sowing it, you're going to multiply in your apple crop. And before you know it you'll have an apple orchard. And so what Jesus is teaching us with respect to the name is that when we learn how to sow the name in order to reap the benefit of the name, whatever the name promises us, when we learn how to sow that name, we will reap a harvest that will result from what that name is.
— All right. Now, you've reminded me of something out of the book. Tell me about your mother and her gardens and the way she ...
— Oh, my grandmother.
— I mean, your grandmother.
— My grandmother.
— Yeah.
— My grandmother was from Mississippi, and my family at some point in time, they migrated to Ohio, which is where I was born. But my grandmother had the biggest garden in Ohio because she brought everything from Mississippi with her. And so I remember how she'd be out there on a daily basis working in that garden and she'd have us out there with her, just pulling up weeds and helping to plant seed and so on and so forth. And every once in a while, she would go out and say, "I think I want some corn today, or I think I want some lettuce today". And she'd go out to the garden or send us out to the garden and there were none. And so we'd used up all the lettuce. And so what we noticed is that my grandmother used to always, for some reason, stockpile seed in her window sill. So she would send us upstairs and go get the seed that's in the window sill and that seed... the packet may have turned yellow now because it's been in there for so long. Sometimes it's been sitting in that window sill for a year. And what I noticed is that as long as that seed was sitting in that window sill, it never produced a harvest.
— It never produced anything.
— It could be sitting there for months. It could be sitting there for years. You would not get lettuce as long as that seed was sitting in the window sill. But when she said, go grab that seed, and we would go get the seed, bring it down to her and then she would plant it in the garden, after a few weeks, now we've got lettuce growing. So what I learned from my grandmother is that you have to sow your seed if you want to produce your harvest.
— That's right.
— And likewise, with respect to the name of the Lord, God's name is so all encompassing. It is the name that is above every name. When Moses asked the question, who am I going to tell the people it is that sent me? He said, you can't put me in a box. Just tell them I am that I am, because whatever it is that you need me to be, that's who I am. And so with respect to the name, if I need something that God's name promises me, I need to learn how to sow the seed of that name, just as I would learn how to sow that lettuce seed in order to produce lettuce or sow that apple seed in order to produce apples. I learn how to sow the name of the Lord in order to gain the benefit of that name. And when I do so, I've got a harvest that's coming.
— Isn't that good?
— Isn't that awesome.
— Isn't that powerful?
— That's the Kingdom principle, Brother Copeland.
— Well, yes, it is. Jesus said it was.
— He said it is.
— He said, if you can understand this parable, you can understand it all, the sower sows the Word.
— The sower sows the Word.
— And the whole Kingdom of God is as a man plants a seed in the ground.
— And I like Luke's rendition of that same passage, because Luke lets us know that the seed is the Word of God.
— Yes, that's good.
— Yes.
— Now the name, the Lord had me write this down like this, the names of love, Jehovah Raah, he's my shepherd.
— Yeah.
— Jehovah Jireh, or jireh, he sees and provides.
— Yeah.
— Jehovah Rapha, the Lord that heals, Jehovah Tsidkenu, he is our righteousness, Jehovah Shalom, he is our peace. Now that's a huge word. It's translated prosperity, it's translated more than enough. And we learned years ago from Billye Brim, when she went to Israel and studied Hebrew, since it's a greeting there, they said the easiest way to translate that is nothing missing, nothing broken.
— Wholeness, praise God.
— So when God reveals to you or to me that he wants us to sow money into someone's life, then in his mind, something's missing from us. Well of course, this is the reason we get so terribly much flack from people because of teaching and preaching prosperity, because the reason of that is not the people it's the devil behind it.
— Yeah.
— Because as long as he could keep the church poor, they couldn't get done what God wanted them to do.
— Exactly.
— But God said, no, no. I told you to give that a 100$ so you have something missing. I'm going to replace it. I'm not going to give you 100 back. You might as well have kept the hundred if you... No, no. Jesus talked about an offering in the 10th Chapter of Mark, when the rich young ruler got sad and left and didn't hear the answer. And Jesus is the one that said... people have said that Copeland promises his donors a hundredfold return. I never did in my life.
— The Word does.
— Not one time. I never did say I would give you a hundredfold. I can't afford that. I wouldn't even try. That is not my place. Jesus said it, I read it, and it's a blood back promise. He's the one that promised it.
— He said it.
— Amen.
— Amen.
— In his name.
— In his name.
— Glory to God.
— And when you talk about that, it takes me over to the first chapter.
— Oh, you know what? We missed one here.
— Okay.
— Jehovah Nissi, he's my canopy, my covering, my banner. In other words, he never leaves me nor forsakes me. This is the one that people misread and don't get it. They read it, Jehovah Sabaoth. No, Jehovah Sabaoth, the Lord of hosts all over that first covenant, the Lord of hosts, the Lord of the angelic armies of God. And that comes up in Malachi 324 times in that little book, and it has to do with our timing. The angels are involved in it. Praise God. And then when you read Hebrews 1:14, it refers you to Malachi as one and then Malachi refers you to Hebrews 1:14.
— And all of it goes back... I was getting there earlier to Genesis chapter one, verse 11, where God said, let the earth bring forth grass.
— Let's look at that. Let's put our eyes on that. Praise God.
— So he says, let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit, according to its kind whose seed is in itself. I've heard Brother Copeland say, "God put the power in the seed to make itself come to pass". That's what Genesis chapter one is telling us right there.
— Yes, it is.
— It's a Kingdom principle. So any type of seed has within itself the power to make itself come to pass, to reproduce itself. And it goes back here to Genesis, chapter one, verse two, where God said, who seed is in itself. And so when you talk about how the devil has tricked the people of God with respect to giving, it's because we don't understand that seed has the power to produce itself. It's a Kingdom principle. It's how God operates. He says in that other scripture that you just quoted over a moment from Mark. He says, so is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground. It's a kingdom principle.
— Yeah. Everything's a seed.
— Everything.
— Everything comes from a seed.
— Everything.
— Everybody comes from a seed.
— Everyone.
— It has to be. Nothing can function without it.
— And that's, as you call it, that granddaddy parable.
— Yes, sir.
— The sower sows the Word.
— Yes, sir. Praise God. Now let's remind ourselves of something. We need to, I wrote right here, replenish, perpetually renew and supply. So we need to remind ourselves again what this book is. There was a charlatan preacher, he got caught, then he tried to make it in show business and flopped. And he said, I'll tell you, they're a bloody bunch. No, this is a bloody book. And when you hear someone say, well, I bloody well will, that's a blasphemous thing to say because that is using the blood in vain because these are blood covenants all the way through. The very first one in the 15th chapter of Genesis was in the blood of animals and a very specific manner of cutting that covenant, where the animal was cut down the center of the spine and the halves fell over, making a blood pool.
— Glory, glory.
— Each animal was done that way, except for the birds, and God walked in that blood. I'm convinced that Abraham saw his footprints.
— Ah, glory to God.
— And that changed his life forever. So now he had a type before him. And then in the 17th chapter of Genesis, what did he do? Let's look at it. And when Abram was 90 years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram and said unto him, I AM.
— Hallelujah.
— I AM El Shaddai the God who's more than enough. They're referring to a nurse or to nursing, a mother nursing a child more than enough.
— More than enough.
— And I remember that with John and Kellie, Gloria was everything to those children. She was their food. She spent all of her time with them. And then I wasn't there all the time, she was. And I'm not sitting in judgment of anyone as, as far as it goes, but when you put the feeding of your baby in someone else's hands, and then those people let you down, you got a problem. But there was an answer to that. Nobody has said a word about it on television. All any mother would have to do is go get some goat's milk. It is absolutely the closest milk there is to a mother's milk. Cows milk is not, the protein is too large. It's not good. You have to change it up with formula. You don't have to use formula in a goat's milk, but nobody mentioned that. Oh, you wouldn't want to do something like that. Well, all right, go ahead. Depend on the government, that won't work. Tell him what... Oh, he said we're out of time. Boy, don't you like these three or four minute broadcasts? Glory to God. Okay. We'll be back in just a moment. Glory to God.