Kenneth Copeland - Walking In Forgiveness Closes the Door on Fear
At the beginning of the week, we began building a study outline entitled Seven Steps to Never Being Afraid Again, of anything, praise God. The process of coming to the place where there's no fear here and you can boldly announce to the devil, praise God, you don't have anything in me, praise the Lord, amen. We've come to the revelation and realization that fear tolerated is faith contaminated, and it's that contaminated faith that we're dealing with.
Now, the first step you remember was come to the absolute understanding that we are already delivered from fear. We got delivered from fear when Jesus went to the cross. He bore our fear of death just the same as He bore sin, sickness, demons, disease, griefs and sorrows, weaknesses and pains and so forth. They were laid upon Him and He bore them. Romans 8:15 and Hebrews 2, 14 and 15 was our scripture on that step. The second step was resist the spirit of fear knowing that fear is not okay. It is sin because it is the violation and the breaking, willful breaking of a commandment because God commanded over 110 times in His Word, fear not.
Revelation 21:8, Joshua 1:9, 1 John 3, 2 to the 4th verses were scriptures that we used there. Number three, which is where we were when we closed yesterday, faith is quote "filtered" in quote or decontaminated, would be a good way to use it since that statement we made earlier. Faith is filtered or decontaminated through love. Let's go now to the next step. Step number four is to purposefully by decision, make a decision to receive the love of God. The 17th chapter of John, let's look at that again. Verse 23, "Jesus prayed, I in them and thou in me that they may be made perfect in one and that the world may know".
This is something that the world would understand if we would walk in its fullness, "that the world may know that thou hast sent me and has loved them as much as you love me". Now you're going to have to make the decision. This is a quality decision. A quality decision is a decision from which there is no retreat and about which there's no more argument. Quality decision. I make a quality decision that I don't care how I feel about it. I don't care how it looks. God loves me as much as he does Jesus. Now let me throw something at you. Let me throw a problem into this. You come to that 26th verse and says that the love wherewith you have loved me may be in them.
Let me throw this problem at you. You miss it. You foul up. You did or said something that you just feel terrible about. Wish you hadn't have done it. You know good and well you sinned when you did it. And now here you're under conviction over it and you just, oh, you're feeling terrible. Oh, you're feeling terrible. I got into this one time back, oh, years and years ago. I was preaching the meeting and I really, I mean, I just, I just messed up. And so I really, I mean, it was just eating a hole in me. And so I confessed it before the Lord and I repented of it before the Lord early that afternoon.
But by about 4:30, 5 o'clock, somewhere along in there that afternoon, you know, I got to preach over there that night. And I just was feeling terrible. And I said, "Lord, I can't go over there. I just can't do this. You're just going to have to get you somebody else. I'm not going to go over there". He said, "Well, what are you talking about"? I said, "I'm not going over there". He said, "Why"? I said, "Why? You know why as well as I do. I'm not going over there and stand up behind that Holy desk and stick up my finger and said, 'thou saith the Lord.'" I said, "You got to get somebody else. I ain't going". He said, "What'd you do"? I said, "What do you mean what'd I do"?
Boy, he got on me. He said, "What you're doing now is as big a sin as what you did earlier. You just called me a liar". I said, "Lord, I wouldn't do such a thing". He said, "Didn't you open your Bible to first John chapter one and chapter two"? I said, "Yeah". Didn't you read before me that I'm faithful and just to forgive your sins and cleanse you of all righteousness when, when you confess it? I said, "I did. Yeah". He said, "Now here, you'd come and telling me that you're still burdened down with feelings of guilt" and so forth.
Now, if you've made the quality decision that God loves me as much as he does Jesus, he loves me with the same love that he loved Jesus with. And that same love has been shed abroad in my heart by the Holy ghost. Then I have to know he loves me at this moment of test and trial. I have to know, and I have to believe it whether I feel like it or not. I'm not moved by what I feel. I moved only by what I believe. So yeah, but Brother Copeland, Jesus didn't sin, but now wait a minute. He bore your sin. Amen. So don't come at me with that. That old dog won't hunt. Amen.
What's going on here? Sin consciousness. You become aware and conscious of that sin. Well, of course it's just eating a hole in you. I mean that you repented over the thing and you're sorry of it. And then you won't out of the thing. It's just tearing you apart. Now, when you confess that sin, don't ever run from God when you sin, my goodness sake, that's what the Satan will try to get you to do. And if you have a religious fear of God, oh man, I'm telling you what you will run from the devil. Tell you, well, you done smoked two cigarettes. You might as well smoke the whole carton. God don't care about you anyway. Might as well go on and get your dope out, get your pipe out and all the rest of it.
Now that's stupid. But to somebody that's under hard, sinful, satanic pressure, you know, that's a form of lust and persecution and affliction. That's all of those things mean intensified pressure. He's pushing you, trying to kill you, pushing you away from God. Don't ever run from God, run to him. When you don't feel his presence is when you are covenant committed to believe he's there. Cause he said, "I will never leave you nor forsake you even to the end of the world. I love you as much as I love Jesus. Now it's time for you to believe that".
This is when you need to put it into operation. Now, the feelings of guilt, once you have confessed that sin, see you believe you receive your cleansing, you believe you receive your forgiveness, believe you receive that because the Word said, Jesus is righteous to do it. It's a righteous thing for him to do. So for him not to do that would be an unrighteous thing. Once you confess it, isn't that right? Sure it is. But now I believe I receive it, but my flesh ain't found out about it. My soul hadn't found out about it. And the devil just beaten a way out of you, you know, trying to push you into it further.
What are you dealing with here? You have been forgiven of the sin. You have been cleansed from all unrighteousness. Now you're just dealing with symptoms. Stand up against those symptoms. I'm not moved by what I feel. I move only by what God said. And I have to remember here by faith in covenant, I suggest you do it over communion. I have received the love of my Father and nothing will ever come between us on that again. I don't care how tough it gets. I don't care how ugly I get and how much I foul up, mess up and all that. You can't do anything that cause him not to love you. Why? Cause he said he would, and he can't lie. Hallelujah.
Now, let me, let me give you another element of that. This'll help you two things here. One, this is... well, let me, let me go at it from this way. You can't break this covenant. The covenant is between the Almighty God who is love and our Father and his Son, Jesus, the resurrected Lord of glory. Now here is the Almighty untouchable, sinless, righteous God. And here is an immortal resurrected man. Death can touch neither of them. So this covenant doesn't have a curse on it. Neither one of them can break it or would break it if they could. Amen.
What do you and I have? You and I are in covenant with God, but we're in Jesus covenant with him. We're joint heirs with Christ. We have his deal with God. We have his righteousness with God. We have his love with God. We have his name. We have his everything. And eventually here before very many days go by, we'll get a glorified body just like him. We'll be immortal. Death never be able to touch us again. Amen. But as it is now, we're protected from it. We can't break the covenant. We can break our fellowship with it. See what I mean? Through sin, doubt, unbelief, fear, and all that. We can separate ourselves from the fellowship of it, but we can't separate ourselves from the love of God. You can't break the covenant.
Part of the covenant says all you have to do is confess the sin and he'll cleanse you from all unrighteousness. That's just as much a part of the covenant as any of the rest of it. So you didn't break the covenant. You just broke your fellowship with your Father. So get back in fellowship with him knowing he loves you just as much as he does Jesus. Amen. Now let's get over into this area. It's the same thing, but we change the perspective of it from God to us to us to other people. And here again, I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit, but there's a part of this I want to touch on here. And that's the area of symptoms.
Forgiveness is an act of the will. It is not an act of feelings. If you wait until you feel like forgiving somebody, all they have to do is call you and be a little ugly to you again. You'll be another 10 years. You might never do it, but forgiveness is... the act of forgiveness is an act of obedience to the commandment of the church. We're commanded to forgive one another. You remember Jesus said through the Holy ghost, through the apostle Paul, he said forgiving one another, being tenderhearted towards one another. Why? For Christ's sake, for the sake of the anointing. The anointing means everything.
You remember when they came to Jesus after John the Baptist had been beheaded and they said, "We want to ask you if you are the one", or in other words, "Are you the Christ"? He answered them with his own message. Remember he said, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, he's anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor" and so forth and so on. He said the way Jesus answered them, they said, "Are you the anointed one? Or are we supposed to wait and look for somebody else"? He said, "Look, the blind see, the lame walk and the poor have the gospel preached to them".
Now listen, you got your antenna run up. Listen, listen, listen carefully. He said, "They were not offended in me". He was just as anointed when he preached in Nazareth as he was when he preached in Capernaum. But in Nazareth there, he could do no mighty works because of their unbelief. Why? They got offended in him. They got mad at him. They got offended. They took him out behind the church, going to kick him off that cliff. See what happened? The scripture didn't say he wouldn't heal. It said he couldn't. In fact, to just prove to you God's will in the thing, he laid his hands on people knowing they weren't going to get anything when he's down at Nazareth, didn't he? Said he laid his hands on a few people with minor ailments.
That's how much Jesus wanted them healed. He laid hands on them knowing they ain't going to get anything. Are you getting it? Now, when you forgive as an act of your will in obedience, in the name of Jesus, I forgive so-and-so. I am not a condemner. Jesus said, "Pray for those that despitefully use and persecute you, that their spirit be saved on the day of the Lord. Pray for them". I pray for them every day. I have a lot of good opportunities, you know. People start writing ugly books about you and that kind of thing. Carrying signs out in front of your meeting, calling you a crook. Copeland don't believe in the blood. How they know what I believe? They ain't got a clue what I believe.
Well, you get a lot of opportunities, you know. I forgive them. It had nothing to do about the way I feel about it. I forgive them as an act of my will. I will to be obedient to the commandment that Jesus gave. As an act of obedience, I forgive brother so-and-so. I forgive sister so-and-so. In Jesus' name, Lord, I exercise the love that has been put in me by the Holy Ghost with which you love Jesus. I exercise that love. You loved me when I was yet a sinner. You loved me when I was ungodly. You died for me and gave Yourself for me when I was absolutely worthless. And You love me anyway. And with that same love, I love them.
And so I begin to think of them with faith and love thoughts and begin to absorb all that ugly thinking. Push that out of there. Squeeze that out of my thinking. Just keep hanging on to that thought and cast down all imaginations that surround it. And I'm going along. Everything's going pretty good here. It's been a couple of weeks. I forgot I prayed the thing there and I'm going along. And all of a sudden while I'm walking down the street here, here comes brother so-and-so walking right out of the store and here he stands right in front of me. And the first feeling and reaction, the first natural soulless reaction suddenly that I have is, I'm going to pull him right here.
There, God... talk about my family like that. And he ducks and runs across the other side of the street. Now I'm just fuming. I walk about four or five steps and I come under conviction. And oh, I thought I forgave that brother, dear Lord. There must be something wrong with me. I thought I forgave. Now you're in torment and you're exercising fear. So what do you do here? No, it's not a matter that you thought you forgave and didn't because you did as an act of your will.
Now don't dump that in favor of your flesh. It's just symptoms of unforgiveness. God supernaturally forgets. That don't mean he kind of sweeps it under the rug. That means it's not in his remembrance anymore. But then the Bible tells us to forgive even as he forgave us. So that means that we are supernaturally in... we are supernaturally capable of supernatural forgetfulness, just the same as he is, but you have to exercise it by faith. And you say, "No, in the name of Jesus, I choose to forget that right now. I drive that out of my consciousness. I receive the cleansing of it. As far as I'm concerned, they're forgiven and never committed it". I don't dig it up anymore.
Every time it tries to resurrect, put it right back down. It won't be long until you can see that person and it never occurred to you again. Why? Because it's been supernaturally cleansed, adsorbed out of your consciousness. Are you listening to me now? I rebuke the symptoms of that. I'm not moved by what I feel. I'm not moved by what I see. I'm moved by what I believe and I'm not a condemner. I'm a forgiver. Glory to God. I'm filled with the love of God. What's happening here? Let me describe the design of this. Receive the love now that God loves you as much as he does Jesus and receive the fact that that love is inside you. It's there. Become aware of the fact that it is there, but you have to believe it first by faith. We have faith that it is there with no evidence other than the Word of God.
Now, forgive, Jesus said, Mark 11:25, "When you stand praying, forgive if you have ought against any, that your heavenly Father may forgive you your trespasses. But if you don't forgive, neither will your heavenly Father forgive you of your trespasses". It's not because he's trying to hold it against you. It's because he can't get through to you. Can't get his hands on you. See, these things are not just two and three dimensional. They are three and four dimensional. You deal with the third dimension when you get in an airplane, leave the ground. Then you become three dimensional. You have roll around three axis instead of just two. But when you get in the Spirit, you step over into the fourth dimension.
Now, when you resist forgiving, remember you're over in the area now of omnipotence, fourth dimension. You can't resist forgiving on this level without resisting forgiveness on this level. You getting that? But when I act on the Word of God and I forgive as an act of my will by faith and obedience in his command, and I exercise the love inside me that God loved Jesus with, and I do it by faith and not by feeling. I do it as an act of obedience. I forgive you. I forgive that person. Glory to God. I just opened up the roof and God's forgiveness came down in me.