Kenneth Copeland - THE BLESSING Makes You Prosperous
— Hello, everybody, I'm Kenneth Copeland, Kellie Copeland, John Copeland, in the order in which they came. You know, back in the day, you had to have two names. Yeah, you had no idea. So we had both names picked before the first baby was born. There's Kellie, solid black hair, just letting out a howl. Anyway, the thing I want to tell you this morning, the blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich. That's our golden text. And we'll talk about that in a moment. Now, testimonies, kcm.org/BVOVstory. We want to hear from you about the broadcast and what it's done in your life. I've been watching Brother Copeland every day on Daystar, especially when COVID-19 was a serious issue. I became a born again Christian through his ministry and thank God every day. I remind myself that God is in control. We must read and believe his Word every day and put the whole armor of God on every situation. May God bless KCM and all who partner with his ministry, MT, Trenton, New Jersey. Yeah, glory to God. And when they put the prayer number up there on the screen, what does it mean, licensed prayer minister? It just means they've been well trained in intercession, the prayer of faith, prayer of supplication, the prayer of agreement and everything. And this simply means by licensed that they have been thoroughly trained in the intercessory ministry of prayer. It doesn't go to some other ministries, and I'm not criticizing them. That's what they believe the Lord told them to do. But my spiritual father, Oral Roberts said, "Kenneth, the major failure of Christian people is a prayer failure". Did you realize the Prayer Tower was the first thing he put on the campus? He said, that's the reason I had them build a prayer tower with the eternal flame headed up toward God. Because he said, "I go up in that prayer tower and I seek God". It's a prayer failure, not knowing what prayer to pray and so forth. And the Lord said to me when I wrote this book, I was praying in the Spirit and he said, "Kenneth, my people and my blessing has been boiled down to the answer of a sneeze. God bless you". He said, "I don't have any idea what my blessing is". It's the blessing of the Lord, which became the blessing of Abraham in which you dwell. The blessing of the Lord makes rich and he adds no sorrow with it. Proverbs 10:22 and in the Amplified...
— I got it right here, Dad.
— Okay, read it. Proverbs 10:22.
— The blessing of the Lord, it makes truly rich and he adds no sorrow with it. Neither does toiling increase it.
— I don't care how hard you work at it. It's his blessing. It's his blessing and it's more than a sneeze response. And when you say bless somebody in the name of the Lord and he said to renew your mind, bless, blessing, blessed in capital letters. To renew your mind that it's my blessing that I'm bestowing upon you. So now I checked it out today in just the regular dictionary. Blessing. But I want to show you what Noah Webster said about it. You have that, Carleen? Can you see it from there?
— You want me to read it.
— Yes.
— Rich, wealthy, opulent, possessing of a large portion of land, goods, or money, or a larger portion than is common to other men or to men of like rank. A farmer may be rich with property, which would not make a nobleman rich. An annual income of 500 sterling pounds would make a rich vicar, but not a rich bishop. Men more willingly acknowledge others to be richer than to be wiser than themselves. Abraham was very rich in cattle and silver and in gold is the sentence they used to...
— Well it starts out Abram. It was before he was Abraham. Very rich in cattle and silver and gold. Well, it's all right for him to be. It's all right for you to be. And it may be in some other way. And at breakfast this morning, we were discussing it. The Owens family, which is my mother's background. The Copeland family, which is my dad's background. The Neece family, which is Gloria's background. Nobody's fussing with one another. Nobody's suing one another over anything. It's just this. We've had tragedies, yes. But we moan together and we cry together. But we're together. Sally Briggs, my second cousin, and she looks so much like her mother, Sharon. That's on my dad's side. Texted me with a very sad thing. And so I texted her back and sent her many, many, many scriptures and stood... I said, "Sally, we're standing with you, sweetheart". She said, "Well, thank you, Kenneth. This is a very hard thing that we're going through". I said, "Yeah, I understand that. But you give Sharon my love and Joe my love". And so that's the way you do. Family.
— Families go through hard things. And then the blessing is that we've been encased in him to get us through it. To walk us through it.
— But the thing, none of us is causing it. That's it. We're so blessed. We're just taught better than that... all of us. Now, I want to... That was Proverbs 10:22 in the Amplified. 2 Corinthians 8:9. John, you have the Amplified there?
— No, I have King James. Kellie has Amplified.
— You're going to make me read?
— Yes.
— Here, you can read mine.
— I haven't done that since school. I'll tell you what... Kellie, you read it. I'll read it in the King James and then I'll want you to read it there.
— Yeah. I like that better.
— Oh, you're going to get that one.
— Now, y'all don't start that...
— Now you don't start that...
— 2 Corinthians what?
— Amen.
— Oh, Jesus. Now, this was, moreover, brethren, we do you to know the grace of God bestowed upon the churches of Macedonia. How that in a great trial of affliction and abundance of their joy, in their deep poverty abounded under the riches of their liberality. For to their power, I hear, I bear record, yea, beyond their power, they were willing of themselves, praying us. They had to beg him, praying us with much entreated that we would receive the gift which takes upon the fellowship of the ministering to the saints. All right.
— All right. For you are becoming progressively acquainted with and recognizing more strongly and clearly the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, his kindness, his gracious generosity, his undeserved favor and spiritual blessings. That though he was so very rich, yet for your sakes, he became so very poor in order that by his power or by his poverty, you might become enriched, abundantly supplied.
— The Passion ends that with him, that he impoverished himself for our sake so that by his poverty, we become rich beyond measure. Those are all good.
— So what did the Lord say there? Now, you think about it. He made Abram very rich. What did it happen after the slaughter of the kings? What did he do then? After the slaughter of the kings? Huh? He tithed. He brought bread and water. And became under God the richness and the heir of the world. And he is the author of our faith. So he became as poor as poor could be so that we in his poverty might become rich because we've been redeemed from the curse of poverty because he went to that cross and went to hell for three days and three nights. Glory to God forevermore. That's Galatians 3.
— And you know that Satan has attacked this message of God wants you blessed. I mean, think about it. If you were an adversary, that's where you would attack, right? You don't want God's people blessed because God wants all of his people blessed. That's where you're going to attack. You're going to twist it and say we're supposed to be poor. But it doesn't make any logical sense when you think about it from a standpoint, okay, just go through the Old Testament, right? How many people, his people were blessed. Abraham, Job. I mean, go down to the list. Solomon. I mean, the richest people in the land. They weren't just okay. They were, you know, the Elon Musk of today or the Bezos today, except more godly but they were the richest in the land. Like Bathsheba fainted because of the wealth that Solomon had, right? So it's like Satan has tried to twist that. Satan's twisted that, right? And try to tell us that we're supposed to be in poverty. But from just a logical standpoint, if I'm poor, how do I help somebody else? You know, I don't have the ability. If you need help with your medical bills and I'm poor, how can I help you? I can't help you. If you need help, you know, to pay off your car or fix your car, how can I help you if I'm the one that needs help? And so from a just logical common sense standpoint, how are you supposed to be a blessing if you don't have enough blessing yourself? And so Satan has just perverted it. He's turned it around.
— If I were to put a general theme on the book of Proverbs, that's it. And the book of Ecclesiastes says it just comes out and says it, but they had no revelation. They had no idea Jesus was coming to ratify all of that. And, uh, you know, uh, a poor man's poverty, who will listen, a rich man's, a rich man's word, all will hear. Well, Solomon is the richest man the world has ever seen. And because instead of asking for wealth, he asked for wisdom. And that's what you have in the book of Proverbs is the man's wisdom.
— You know how the Bible has just carried this. God hasn't changed during the Old Testament and New Testament, right? The Old Covenant and New Covenant are the same, but his themes and his, the way he, his modus operandi is all the same. Right? So why would he all of a sudden now, when you get into the New Covenant, which is an even better covenant, change that? Like when I was, okay, now you're supposed to be poor. It's like, no. And it's like, you read the scriptures we just read. Jesus went to the cross for our prosperity, which is not just money, you know, it's prosperous in your whole life or your family, your relationships, your business. I mean, prosperity, your soul, your happiness, it goes, it's more than just money, but it's like, he shows us right here. It's very plain, but yet still people get mad about being prosperous, you know, and it just makes no sense to me at all.
— Actually, I don't know if they get mad about being prosperous. They get mad about you being prosperous. Or you teaching it.
— The spirit of jealousy gets in and that's the spirit of the devil.
— They don't care about, you know, Paris Hilton or some movie star or Taylor Swift or any of these people being wealthy. They just idolize that. Right. But when you're a minister of the gospel, no, you need to be poor. Sorry.
— Oh yeah. Yeah. You keep him broke. You keep him on the wheel, keep him poor. Anyway, let's go back to book one. Genesis beginning. Now read this the way the Jews read it. In the beginning, Elohim, the one blessed, the blessed one, plural, El, God, Elohim, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost created the heaven and earth. The earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and moved upon the face of the waters. And Elohim said... now in the beginning of our ministry, we had meetings in two abandoned drugstores. And the very first one, Wichita Falls, Texas, looking for a place to have the morning services. Arlene Arnold was in the real estate business there. And she said, uh, the only place in Wichita Falls that I found for the morning services, you know why? They didn't want to have anything to do with me. I preach prosperity. No, we don't think he's ready. Anyway, she said, "The only place I have is a synagogue. Would that be all right"? I said, "Sure". So we had our morning services in a synagogue. And he said, "Brother Copeland, here's my study and all. Just study and make yourself at home and my books and so forth". And he just turned around and walked out and left me in there. I see it in my mind. And I began to look at several things and I picked, I know God led me right straight to it. And God said, "Light be, light was". Light be. 186,000 miles a second. Not sunshine. That was the fourth day. Light be. 24 hours. 16,074,764,800 miles a universe. Whoa. And it's still expanding at the speed of light. We only know one galaxy and that's ours. Now he made the two great lights so that was good. And, uh, and God created great whales and every living thing that moves in which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind and every winged fowl after his kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them saying, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters of the seas and let fowl multiply in the earth. Blessed be there. When he said, blessed, they were all there at once. But how do we know what to call them? And he saw that it was good... let us make men in our image after our likeness and give them dominion over every fish of the sea, over the fowl of the air, over the cattle and all the earth and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. And God created man in his own image. The image of God created he, him, male and female created them and God blessed them and said, Be fruitful, multiply, replenish the earth, subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. I saw this whole thing in a vision. Lasted quite some time. Let us make man in our own image. And he was holding me, this gray looking thing like this. And he was exactly the same size. It had to be Jesus. Elohim, plural. Father, Son, Holy Ghost. And the Spirit was moving. And God said... "Man, be in our image, have dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air". And he blessed him saying... bless them. God said unto them, "be fruitful and multiply, replenish the earth, subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth". That's the first thing that ever hit a human ear. Be blessed. And you bless. God blessed the man. Psalm 1.
— You know, dad, while you're turning there, when you said that about he made all the firmament, he made all the animals and he set it all into motion. I saw like that split second. When I was a kid and we would fly in an airplane with a prop. And I would watch you go out there and you would hit that and it would start spinning. Like you would push that prop down sometimes. I don't remember the kind of airplane you were on when that would happen, but somebody would be out there and would start the prop.
— It only happened to us one time. Gloria had learned how to fly. And so on a Sunday there, we had some partners in... down in South Texas, uh, not San Antonio, but close to there. And we were going down there to see them. And well, I have to explain something. It is actually called the P-lead. And an airplane flies by Mark magnetos, not spark plugs. So they constant, but you start on a battery and the P-lead connects the battery to the ignition. So we came back out to the airplane. I mean, we flew it in there and took off from here. And, uh, so I sat down in the airplane and, uh, I went through all the checklists and everything and nothing. What is this? Oh, well, I'm going to have to prop it. I said, "All right, now, Gloria Jean, you get over here in the left seat" because we were talking about her flying home. So I said, "You get over here in the left seat and don't put that switch over here yet". And we're out of time. How do you do me like that? We'll finish this tomorrow. Praise God. Amen.