Kenneth Copeland - Faith, the Creative Force of God
The simplicity of faith. People that do not meditate this book, miss so much of it. Holy Bible. What is it about? In the first chapter of the book of Genesis. Now, I was in one of the first meetings we ever had. Well, it really, it really was the first one after we'd been, I'd been speaking a lot in Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship and so forth, and little town there close to home. We had a place for the night service. It was an old abandoned drug store and when they just wasn't anything in there. When they turned on the power, sparks flew out of the, anyway, we got all that cleaned up and we called the guy that owned it. He said, "I don't care. I'm not going to fix it. You wanted to use it".
Well, it didn't have any place for the morning service. Aileen Arnold contacted a rabbi and he said, "Absolutely, please". I met him and he said, "Oh," he said, "Brother Copeland," he said, "Here is my study. Just use it like it was yours". I found a translation of this and I've checked it out since with Hebrew scholars and it's part of it. It's part of the, let us. God said, well, "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth," the earth was, and it comes down. Now that third verse, "God said, 'Let there be light,' there was light". That translation said, "Light be, light was". Light be. Have you ever noticed how powerful the word be is? B-E. Amen does not mean the end. It means so be it. In other words, that's done. Light be.
So now, come right down and flow in this and God said... Now in meditating this for quite some time, I just praying in the Spirit and meditating this and right in that area and several things happened during that session over a period of a little while. Just suddenly the Lord granted me a vision. I saw this gray lifeless man, and God had him by the shoulders and he was saying, "Man be in our likeness, have dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the earth, over the cattle, over all the earth and every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth, and God created man in his own image". All of a sudden he did that and he looked exactly like God. Because it was Jesus. He said, "Let us". His name was Adam, blood, red. Now, then, and the Lord pointed out to me, look at this, "And God blessed," say blessed them.
Now, you back up here and God blessed them saying, "Be fruitful and multiply". God blessed, God blessed, God blessed, saw it was good good, good, good, good, good, good. The first sound to ever touch a human ear was the blessing of the Lord. The blessing of the Lord. Now, as you come down through the years, let's go the 17th chapter of Genesis. Now, also this is a covenant book. Different covenants. Different animals shed their blood and in the garden, Adam sinned and they hid themselves with fig leaves. The Bible said they actually sewed fig leaves to cover themselves up. I thought, "Well, this was the first act of a human being, a family, the first family trying to meet their own needs without God". That was the first evidence of it.
Now, why this is a law book, there were no laws? That's the reason. God had absolutely no right. No right. The first recorded death was a murder, but it wasn't against the law. Until after that. After that, it was. Then the 10 commandments, "Thou shalt not kill". That doesn't say, "Thou shalt not kill". It says, "Thou shalt not murder". We have the same thing. We have homicide and different stages. Then there's premeditated murder. Number one, "We do not wrestle with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers and rulers of the darkness of this world and wicked spirits in the heavenlies". There's a lot of mess going on right now. Well, the Bible is still true. But we have to deal with it by dealing with the devil, not the people. Love the people. I don't care who they are. Love the people. Love the people. Love the people. Love the people. Glory to God. Justice for all.
Our ministry attorney, Dave Middlebrook graduated from Oral Roberts University, on purpose to work with ministries, churches 501C3 ministries and so forth. I asked him about it. I said, "Dave, you know, this justice for all," he said, "Kenneth, let me tell you now," he said, "I asked one of my law professors at ORU that same question and he said this, 'This country is as just as it possibly can be.'" It is as... There's a lot of nasty people. But now you go back to covenants. First covenants. The Mayflower. You go back when the cross was planted over 400 years ago and what is now Virginia Beach, Virginia. A chaplain by the name of Hunt had command of that ship and he knew that he would never see home again. They fussed and fought all that long voyage and when they landed there, he said, "Now, you're not fit to dedicate this land. You've been fussing all the way over here. So you're going to, we're going to fast and we're going to pray until the Lord says, 'It's time to dedicate this land.'"
Planted that big cross out there and they all gathered around it over 400 years ago. And dedicated this whole land. To the Lord, Jesus Christ. God never forgets. To him, that was yesterday. Then our first president, George Washington. Well, of course there wasn't any Washington, DC. Of course not, but a little chapel there in New York, it survived 9/11. That little chapel, the entire Congress walked to that chapel and dedicated this land. They made a covenant with God. Our first president said, "You'll be our God". "And we will be your people". Now, we're talking about the blessing. Then in the 17th chapter of Genesis, Abram was 90 years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram, said to him, "I am El Shaddai". "I am the God who is more than enough". A nurse, this refers to a nurse, it refers to a mother's breast nursing her child.
I remember when Gloria, she was everything to those children. She could understand them when I couldn't. She was everything. She was their life. She gave life to them. For me, "Behold, my covenant is with thee, and thou shalt be a father of many nations". Now notice this, "neither shall thy name anymore be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham, for a father of many nations have I made thee," that is the first record of a name change in a covenant. God put his name right in the middle. Yod Hey Vav Hey, Hashem, the name. Right in the middle of his name. And we still follow that today. Gloria Jean Neece, became Gloria Jean Copeland. But when she and I got married, I entered into a covenant with her. And I meant every word of it. And I still do. And I want her to have more than she'll take.
I just, I want to bless her. And bless her, and bless her, and bless her, and bless her. We started out with nothing. I said, "Gloria, we go up there at that school, ORU, these two little children, we going to starve out". She said, "Kenneth, we're starving now, we might as well starve in the will of God now". I said, "Okay, here we go". This is all about faith. You understand? But it's the blessing. Abraham fell on his face and laughed. He changed his name and he changed his wife's name to Sarah. Then it became the blessing of Abraham. The blessing of God became the blessing of Abraham. We're connected to him through faith. So this is a blessing book, all the way down through it. Just the blessing of the Lord, the blessing of the Lord. Oh, glory to God.
Oh, there's one I want to read to you. Praise God. Thank You, Jesus. Proverbs 10:22. "The blessing of the Lord. It makes truly rich, and he adds no sorrow with it. Neither does toiling increase it". This is the blessing of the Lord, it. The blessing of the Lord, it make it rich. Revelation chapter 22, "I am alpha and omega, the beginning, the end, the first and the last, blessed are they". It started in the first and it ended in... Right under that, it says the end. Faith is the glue that holds this whole thing together. It's the faith of Abraham. It started out with the faith of God. By faith. By faith. By faith. By faith. Glory to God.
Well I'm... First man I ever really heard preach for real. I mean, I heard a lot of them at that time, but Oral Roberts, an anointing that I couldn't conceive of that kind of anointing. I watched him, he would use his faith like a mechanic uses a tool. On purpose, not some scatter shop. My first day in the invalid room, where the people that could couldn't manage the crowds, of huge crowds. My first day in there, Colin Steele came around and said, "You're going to go to the invalid room and you'll hear the message over the speakers in there, and then you go back over it and get, prepare the people".
Well, he would go into a little booth and he had a little table in there and had all his partner's name on microfiche. You remember microfiche? The young kid said, "What kind of fish is that"? Well, they would store newspapers on microfiche. And it just shrink it down to this size and he would pray for his partners. First thing he said to me, caught me by the shoulder and he said, "You're going to do the praying". Well, I didn't like sound of that. It frightened me. That's what he said, "Don't touch them, until you're ready to release your faith".
Don't touch them until you're ready to release your faith. He called it the point of contact and when faith would come to a climax and he... One young girl that came up in front of him and he was talking to her, one of her hands was paralyzed. She had bad vision and the other, she couldn't make a fist and the other one, she had no feeling in it. He was talking to her and he said, "Now, I'm going to lay hands on you, because that's what God told me to do". He said, "Now, listen to me. Jesus is right here and when I touch you, my faith is going to go up to God and he'll heal you". He sat there for a moment. The manifestation of power in his right hand. That's another faith thing. The moment he touched her, I'm telling you, she just, and she just started doing this. Amen? He said, "Now, how do you see me"? She said, "Clear as a bell". Hallelujah.
Now, we'll go to Romans 3:27, I think. Oh Jesus, thank You. Let's look at that 25th verse, "And God has set forth to be the propitiation of the sacrifice, through faith in his blood". Now there's something to have faith in. In his blood. Faith in that blood, glory to God. "Now, then, where," 27th verse, "Where is boasting then? It is excluded". Listen to this, "By what law". Law. Of works? No, "But by the law of faith".
Faith is a spiritual force. It is the creative force of the Almighty God. "Now, faith is the assurance, the confirmation, the title deed, of things we hope for, being the proof, being the proof. Being the proof of things we do not see and the conviction of their reality, faith perceiving as real fact, what is not revealed to the senses, for by faith trust and holy fervor, born of faith, the men of old had divine testimony, born to them and obtained a good report". It is the title deed. It is that spiritual force.