Kenneth Copeland - God's Words Contain Life
My assignment beginning this morning, is to remind you and all the rest of us, that words are spiritual containers. All of them are. Did it ever occur to you that every human being ever to come alive on this planet speaks and a language comes out of their environment and all of their words contain spiritual things? Two things we need to see this morning.
To begin this, you may turn into your Bibles, to Jeremiah 29:11, but I want to read it to you from the New Living. Let's see, 29:11. I want to start reading back in the fourth verse. "This is what the Lord of Heaven's Armies, the God of Israel, says to all the captives he has exiled to Babylon from Jerusalem. Build homes and plan to stay, plant gardens, eat the food they produced, marry and have children. Then find spouses for them that you may have many grandchildren. Multiply. Do not dwindle away, for work, for the peace and prosperity of the city where I sent you into exile, pray to the Lord for it, for its welfare will determine your welfare. This is what the Lord of Heaven's Armies," that includes the angels, you understand?
The God of Israel says, "'Do not let your prophets and fortune tellers who are with you in the land of Babylon trick you. Do not listen to their dreams because they're telling you lies in my name. I have not sent them', says the Lord". This is what the Lord says. You will be in Babylon for 70 years, but then I will come and do for you all good things I have promised, and I will bring you home again. Listen, "For I know the plans I have for you," says the Lord. "They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope in those days when you pray, I will listen". In these days when you pray, he's listening. "I will listen. If you look for me wholeheartedly, you'll find me. I will be found by you," says the Lord. "I will injure captivity and restore your fortunes. I will gather you out of the nations where I sent you and bring you home again to your own land".
Now, God has a plan. I said he has a plan. Glory. Amen. And it's good and not for bad. It's for your good fortune. He has a plan and he has a plan for every day. We need to find that plan each and every day. Wake up with open ears. Now then, turn to the fourth chapter of the book of Mark. No, wait a minute. Before you do that, I want to read here from John 6:63. Now listen. "It is the Spirit that quickeneth. The flesh profits nothing". Listen. "The words that I speak unto you, they are Spirit and they are life. My words are Spirit and they are life".
In other words, his words contain life. His words contain life. Words that contain faith are words that contain fear. Words that contain doubt and unbelief, words that contain love, words that contain hate. You could just go on down the list. Words contain healing. He sent his Word and it healed us and delivered us from our destruction. Words. Words. A couple of days, three or four days ago, Gloria, she said, "Well, I started to get mad and I just decided not to". So what? She decided not to. So she didn't. She decided not to, so she didn't. Amen. Take time to think about what you are about to say.
Now, here's something else that came out of aviation. If something happens unexpectedly, just really doesn't look good at all, and you just, without even thinking about it, I don't care if an engine quit on this thing and it's a single engine airplane. It's not going to go like that. It's going to fly for a while. The airplane tries to fly. It doesn't try to crash. It tries its best to fly, and even without power, just took the nose down a little bit and it'll glide. So you don't want to get in a big hurry, and while in, start pushing and pulling knobs and make it worse, There is a saying, "Stop and wind your watch. Don't do anything until after you read the checklist because what just happened is in that checklist". Well, all right.
Now, there are certain emergency memory items like an engine fire on takeoff, which is so rare that in 60 years of flying, I never met anybody that had one or I've heard of it rare. It just doesn't happen, particularly anymore. The technology has increased over these hundred years. Now, when that happens, there are certain memory items that you already know. I may change the phraseology a little bit. You have already put these memory items in your heart, and the second it happened, you know exactly what to do, but still, you don't do it frantically. You take a good deep breath. And do what you've already learned to do. Amen.
Well, Brother Copeland, I don't have those memory items. Well, you need to. What happens when suddenly a big pain comes in your heart? You pray first, not later. The situation may warrant call 9-1-1 while you're praying. But don't just stand there and ring your hands. Have a checklist of scriptures. Keith Moore says, "You know what you have to have to be scriptural"? Scriptures. Now, think about this. You may have a movie script, the script for a play, but you put T-U-R-E on the end of it and it's holy. There she is right there. I could have let you got up there and said that. I didn't see you. Did I get it anywhere close to right? Absolutely. Stand up here. Stand up here. This is little Charles Capps. Oh, my, my.
I watched her and I think about her dad a lot. I want to tell you what he did one time. We flew over at his Barron, his twin engine Beachcraft airplane, and there was ground fog and you couldn't see the runway over there at the fishing camp. So I'm looking across there and I said, "Well, what do you think"? He said, "Just hold on a second". Well now see, sit down. He had landed there so many times that from the trees and so forth around it, he knew exactly where it was. He wasn't taking the chance at all, and it was early in the morning. It was just ground fog. So he flew down right in the top of that fog, right over the top of it, just skimmed the top of it there and turned off like this.
Phil, you know what happened to that ground fog? It parted. We called it the vortices. They were coming off of the wingtips. It just went, and he landed and it went... Oh yeah, well you got to want to go fishing really bad, and we did, and we caught fish because Charles talked to them. You don't think you'll go fishing without talking to the fish? He would get in the water. We sometimes would fish up to here. He said, "I'll take dominion over every fish in my vicinity here, you come here". Now that's scriptural. Can you tell me where you can find a scripture like that? Peter said, "I'm going fishing". And others said, "Yeah, we're going with you". There was Jesus up on the bank with fish already on the grill. No net. Where'd they come from? Jesus said, "Come here". They said, "Yes sir," just jumped out there where he goes. It's in the book. Thank you, Annette, for teaching that because it really helped me. It blessed me.
Now then, let's go now to John chapter one. In the beginning was the Word with a capital W. The Word. This is a book of words. God's thoughts are in here. What makes this a Holy Bible? Bible just simply means a collection of ideas, statements, and facts on one subject and related things to it. This is a Holy Bible because it is a book of blood covenants, and the more we are covenant minded and the more we realize that every word in here is blood backed. Beginning in the garden. In fact, the Chumash says, "And man became a speaking Spirit like God". That just startles me when I hear that I am a speaking Spirit like God. Every person is a spirit being. Every person is a spirit being. We have a soul. This is born out in what the apostle Paul wrote to the Thessalonians.
"I pray your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved holy, all one piece". A speaking spirit and every person does not have a time to die. That is something that has been misquoted and misread from the book of Hebrews. Every person wants to die, wants to. It's appointed unto every person wants to die unless you get raised up, but you're still going to die. Amen. Now, there are things in these covenants that are there to increase your time on this earth. There are things in there that will decrease your time on this earth, and I know there's a lot of you, don't like to hear this, but there are things in there that you're supposed to eat and things you're not supposed to eat.
Now what you poke him for, Mark? Well, those food laws were laws for those people, but they're right. Why? Words. Words trapped Christian people and others into believing that the normal lifespan is 70 to 80 years. Well, Brother Copeland, isn't that what the Bible says? The Bible says that, but that doesn't say that it's the normal lifespan that was in the 90th psalm, and Moses was crying out to God because and you'll find it over on the Book of Numbers, and we'll talk about this in Healing school at some length, because their days had been cut short. They're covenant people and they kept saying it and saying it. Words, huh? They kept saying it and saying it and saying it and saying it. We're going to die in this desert. And God said to Moses, "I have heard their cries in my ear and nobody over 20 years old is going to make it out of here".
He had to have an army that was born there. They weren't afraid of it. They were born there. This was their home. Think about how God prepared that. Here is Moses, an exile. Well, where did he go? He went into that very place. He knew that whole wilderness. He had been there and lived there. He knew that place, and then God came to him in a burning bush and said, "Go back and get him". And he did. But now he's lamenting. But Genesis 6:3, I'm paraphrasing. I'm not going to put up with people all that long anymore because they've been living enormous amount of years. The days of man will be 120 years. The normal lifespan of a person should be 120 years.
Now isn't it amazing that medical science came to the knowledge through their own, that the human body without sickness and disease should live about 120 years? Amen. Well, it's in the book. It is in the book. So now, those food laws were set up for that. There are things in there. Don't eat. Just don't do that. They're dangerous. And the scripture says in the Book of Proverbs, "If you give in to appetite, don't pay any attention to the king's meat and his deities. They're no good". Amen. But if you're a man give in to appetite, put a knife to your throat, and it's like putting a knife to your throat and threaten yourself.
So back in the day, I began to look up scriptures that had glutton in them. Every one of them was paired with the drunkard, the glutton and drunkard. How about, well, I got to put the knife to my throat. What knife? Sword of the Spirit, and write it down. Write it down. Write it down. You go back and say, "It is written". I began to say, "Somebody would offer me a piece of cake, a piece of pie or something, and I'd say, 'No thank you. I don't drink.'" What? I wouldn't explain it unless they asked me. I just kept saying it and kept saying it and kept saying it, and gained authority through the Word, through those scriptures by saying that and saying that and saying that and saying that, and it worked.