Kenneth Copeland - Faith Believes and Faith Speaks
Hello, everybody. I'm Kenneth Copeland. This is the Believer's Voice of Victory broadcast. Hallelujah. Now just, come on, give the Lord praise and thanksgiving. Thank You, Lord. Hallelujah. Amen. Well, as you can see, all of our friends and neighbors are here tonight. And I'm going to do the same thing that Pastor George did a moment ago. How many people are here from outside the city of Fort Worth, Texas? May I see? Is anybody from Fort Worth even here? Yeah. Amen. Glory to God. And, of course, you're here. Praise the Lord. And this is for the television broadcast. And we conduct it just like we do in the studio with the exception that we don't take a break every 22 minutes and do something else.
Father, in the name of Jesus, we thank You today for this broadcast, and we give You praise and honor for it. We open our hearts, we open our minds to receive revelation from heaven, revelation from your Word and through your Word and by your Word. And we thank You for it to build our faith and to build our prayer lives and to become strong, growing up from babies spiritually right on up through and becoming spiritual adults. And we thank You for it, and we praise You in Jesus' name. Amen.
Let's open our Bibles today to the 11th chapter of the book of Mark. All this week, we're going to be talking about the fundamentals of faith. You could call it the ABC's of faith. "Well, Brother Copeland, it seems like you do that a lot". Yeah, I know. Amen. And you see, I just work here. And it hasn't been but just a few years back, the Lord got on me. Boy, I mean, He really got in the middle of me over this. He said, "You're teaching and preaching faith from where you are now," and He said, "The people that are just coming in, they ain't got a clue what you're talking about". He said, "Go back to the fundamentals".
And especially now that the BVOVN network is alive and well. Because now you can see there are people coming in every day that have never heard a thing in the world about what we've been talking about for 51 years. So we go back then to the fundamentals. Now, I learned this from my grandson, Jeremy. And, boy, I've learned a lot from that young man. And he said, "What are you watching when you watch the Super Bowl? What are you watching when you watch the World Series? What are you watching when you're watching the U.S. Open? Wimbledon? World Cup? Masters of the fundamentals. Masters of the fundamentals.
Let me ask you this: What are you watching when you're watching the Little League World Series? Masters of the fundamentals for that age. The game is the game. It's got the same rules. Amen. Not some strange unheard of play. No. Just the same fundamentals. And how do you get there? Practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, study. Practice study, practice, practice, practice. And practice, practice, practice, practice. So if you're an Olympic champion or just beginning to reach for that, you have to spend time at what you're doing. And to grow spiritually, you have to feed on spiritual food. There's natural food, there's mental food, and there's spiritual food.
Jesus said, you know Matthew 4:4, "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God". Amen. All right. Mark 11, please. And let's begin reading in Verse 22. "Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God. For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, be thou cast into the sea; shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you, What things soever you desire, when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you shall have them. And when you stand praying, forgive, if you have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses".
Now, the very first basic fundamental of faith, number one if you're making an outline and keeping notes, you believe it, you say it. That's number one. You believe it in your heart, and you say it with your mouth. Now, believe what? Well, I'll tell you what. "I believe Brother Copeland's going to give me his airplane". Well, I don't believe he is. Now, see, that's the kind of thing where people just, you know, get really bent out of shape. No. You believe the Word. You believe the Word.
Now, you notice what Jesus said now in Mark 11:23. What did he say to believe? He said, "believe those" words, "those things". Yeah. What things? Words. "Believe that those words which he says will come to pass". That's what Jesus said to believe. All right. Let's take a look now in II Corinthians 4. I really do like this. II Corinthians 4, and Verse 13. "And we having the same spirit of faith according as it is written, I believed, and therefore have I spoken; we also believe, and therefore we speak".
Think about it a minute. This is so basic. You always say what you believe. Whether you're doing it on purpose, we're talking about doing it on purpose. But human beings are spirit beings. You don't have a spirit, you are a spirit, huh? You have a soul inside your spirit. Your soul is made up of your mind, your will, and your emotions, the intellectual part of you. And you and your soul live in a flesh, blood, and bone body. That's your tabernacle in this earth. Thank You, Lord. Let's look at Romans 10:10. Well, let's read down into this. Verse 6, "But the righteousness which is of faith speaketh".
See, words are everything. Words are the most important things on this earth, in this universe. Are you listening to me now? We live in a word-created, word-upheld, you remember Hebrews 1, "He is upholding all things by the word of his power". It is a word-created, word-upheld, word-dominated universe. You and I can't help that. We can't change that. We live under the force and power of words. You remember what the 18th chapter of Proverbs says? "The power of death and life are in the power of the tongue". Now, you and I cannot change the fact that we live under the force and the spiritual law of words, but we can change the words and choose the words under which we live. Hallelujah.
Now, that makes the Word of God the most precious thing in this entire universe, hallelujah, in more ways than one. This Word, yes. But Jesus, "The" Word Himself. Most Christian people don't know what you and I know. Jesus did not cease being a man, a divine human being. No, He's still a man. He still has flesh. No blood. He said, "Handle me". You remember that? Remember that in the 20th chapter of John? He said, "Handle me. A spirit hath not flesh and bone as you see me have". All of His blood, not just a few drops of it, is in the Holy of Holies tonight, crying out for you and for me. If that don't set you on fire, your wood's wet, brother. Hallelujah! Oh, think about it. Nobody but Jesus, how precious He is. Oh, you need to fall in love with Him all over again. Glory to God. Hallelujah. Thank You, Lord, and praise You, Jesus. Thank You, Lord.
Now, I wanted you to see this: "The righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this wise, Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down from above:) or, Who shall descend into the deep"? or into hell, "(that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead.) What does it say? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach". The apostle Paul was a faith preacher. Amen.
"Well, why preach so much faith"? Well, you can't please God without it. Why is that? Why can't you please God without faith? It's impossible. Impossible to please God without faith. It's not because He's hard-nosed. It's because He's love. You can't get saved without it. You can't have victory over the world without it. "This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith". But the real key to why we can't please God without faith comes from Romans 4. "Therefore it is of faith, so that it might be by grace...", and grace is everything. Grace is everything.
I'll give you, in one phrase, I had asked the Lord so many times, over and over again, year after year after year after year, "Tell me what Your grace is". I know it's unmerited... Yeah, I understand that, but that just didn't satisfy my longing. And then it'd come up again, you know, several months later, and say it again, "Come on, Jesus. Give me something I can work with here". And this went on and on and on and on. Finally, to my shock, He answered me. Why did He wait so long? I don't know. I guess I was just dumb, I reckon. No. I was just dense. I should have known this myself. He said, "Kenneth, grace is my overwhelming desire to treat you like sin never happened". Now I understood it. Now I could get it. Jesus "bore my sins in his body on the tree that I, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes I was healed". Hallelujah. That's grace!
"Well, you go to hell for lying same as you will for stealing". Ain't nobody ever gone to hell for lying. "What"? Put your gun up. You know, I'll fix it. Nobody's ever gone to hell for committing sin. You go to hell because you don't know Jesus. Only one man that God ever sent to hell, made sick or poor, and His name is Jesus. Amen. So now study that and work with it. And, see, all of those old religious tags and stuff that just, you know, came out of men's ideas, but thank God God is opening our eyes. Revelation knowledge is coming, not the book of Revelation, knowledge revealed by the Spirit of God. Isn't it wonderful? Hallelujah. About this life and about Jesus, we're in the day and the time for insight, ideas, concepts from heaven. The Word is opening up more than in any other generation in history. Hallelujah. Thank You, Lord Jesus.
Now, Romans 10:10, "For with the heart man believeth". See that? With the heart, with the spirit, the inner man, the real you. "With the heart man believeth". Now, thank God Greg showed that picture of the human heart. That's your blood pump. That's wonderful, isn't it? Glory to God. But you know what? You can't believe with that pump, no more than you can your nose or your liver. Oh, I'm trying to believe here. See, faith is not in the mind. Faith is not in the physical being. Faith is in you.