Kenneth Copeland - God's Ways Are The Right Ways
Hello, everybody everywhere. I'm Kenneth Copeland and this is the Believer's Voice of Victory broadcast.
Father, we just praise you today. We thank you for the leading of the Holy Spirit. We thank you that you are our guide, our teacher, our trainer, our helper, our comforter, our advocate, our standby, our healer. Oh, and we praise you. You're the one that has revealed Jesus unto us. You're the one that takes the mind of Christ and develops it on the inside of us and renews our mind to think like you think and to think like Jesus thinks and talk like Jesus talks, act like Jesus acts, and get Jesus results right here in the Earth. We thank you for it, Heavenly Father, in Jesus' name. Amen.
Glory to God. Don't forget to download the study notes, KCM.org/notes. Amen. Very important. I want you to take my lead and guidance on that because these things are important. We started right here yesterday talking about going into total immersion. Well, just completely giving yourself over to the Word of God and to develop your spirit, develop your mind, and like we prayed there a while ago, to where you think like Jesus thinks, we can't ever do that. Well, you can if you think the word. I mean, that's who He is. That's the Word of God. That's what the word is for.
We went through the Scriptures to show you that. That's not my mission today. But when you have these study notes, you can use them to study these Scriptures. You may just gone out and bought a brand new Bible and got saved last night. Well, these notes and so forth are all there. You don't need to be stumbling around trying to read the Bible on your own. That's what the Spirit of God is there for. That's what we're here for, is to help you. Amen. You take those study notes and you say, "Okay, now, this is what Brother Copeland said yesterday. This is what Pastor George and Gloria said. Okay, now, that Scripture was over here. Now, where is that? Okay". I mean, you'll grow just like that. It's all part of total immersion. You begin to think according to this. "Yeah, but I thought that says". Yeah, but it didn't. Here's what the word actually said. Glory to God.
Alright. Let's go to our golden text in Isaiah 55:8. "My thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the Earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, my thoughts higher than your thoughts". Now, think about it like this. Well, he just said over here before we got it, "Let the wicked forsake his way, the unrighteous man forsake his thoughts and return to the Lord". He's saying, "My thoughts are right. My ways are right. I get it right the first time". Jesus said, "If you'll seek first the kingdom of God and His right way of doing things".
That's the Amplified translation, Matthew 6:33, where He said, "Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you". "Seek first the kingdom of God and His right way of doing things". I'm going to say it again. "Seek first the kingdom of God". Put the kingdom of God first. He said, "All these other people out here, all these Gentiles, are running around seeking what they wear and everything. They're working hard for their own provision and so forth". But He said, "If you'll stop worrying about that, and if you'll begin to seek first my kingdom, and His right way of doing things," in other words, He said in Mark 11:22, "Have the faith of God".
Well, when you got born again you got the faith of God on the inside of your spirit. It's in there right now. "Well, I don't know what to do with it". I know it. I didn't either. But it's in there. I got born again... Let's see, we were almost five years before I finally obeyed God and did what He said, went to Oral Roberts University as a student, but when I got there, the Lord introduced Gloria and me to Brother Kenneth Hagin's ministry where he began to teach on faith and we learned how faith worked and how it operated. I'm traveling with Brother Roberts in his healing ministry. I'm traveling with him. I'm part of the flight crew. He couldn't get out of town without me, so I was everywhere he went. It dawned on me. I saw him lay his hands...
He said this to me the first time I ever ministered He said, "Don't touch them until you're ready to release your faith". I realized in his ministry that I had, and he had, and we have, control over the faith of God that's put inside us. It dawned on me right at the very beginning there that he was using faith the way a mechanic uses a proper tool. A mechanic gets ready to do something. He goes to his toolbox and he needs a number three metric wrench or he needs a 1/2 inch English wrench. One of them won't work on the other bolt, so he goes and gets exactly the one that he needs at the moment and he goes over and he uses it for the job. I noticed no mechanic can fix everything with a hammer. You see sometimes they thought maybe they thought that, but you can't. There are certain tools you gotta have. But that's the way that we treated faith.
My dad told me when he said, "You know, we always believed we just prayed to Jesus, pray to the Father, pray to the Holy Spirit, cry, carry on, just like slinging mud. Maybe some of it would stick somewhere". Well, when that's all you know, I mean, and God in His mercy would help us. But you need to grow up. As you grow up spiritually, you need to get more trained in the things of the Spirit, and that's what we're talking about. Now, God's ways are the right ways to do it. The more we learn of how to do it right, then what happens? It turns out right. That's what "righteous" means. His way of being right. That's an old English spelling of a word that literally means "right". God is right. He's never wrong. He has no wrong in Him. The righteousness of God.
Now, when we got born again, now you wanna listen to this. In fact, let's turn over there and look at it. We'll go over to 2 Corinthians 5. This just comes as a shock. Woah! I remember the first time I saw this. See, I thought righteousness, and many, many, many, many probably billions of Christians think this, that righteousness is something that once you get saved and once you get born again, then you work on righteousness and you increase in it, and one of these days, probably take you 40, 50 years, probably if you're lucky, and get that word completely out of your conversation. There's no such thing as luck. If you trace the word L-U-C-K "luck," back to its origin, it goes to L-U-C "Lucifer". Chance. God is not a God of chance, and nothing happens by chance. Anyway, that's a good Bible lesson right there. You might become righteous and you might not. You might just go to Heaven, but I never could get to be righteous. No. No, you grow in holiness, but most people think righteousness and holiness are the same thing, but it isn't.
Now, notice this. This is 2 Corinthians 5. Let's start reading verse 17. "Therefore, if any man". Now, let me say this again. I need to say this every so often. The word "man," the way the Bible uses the word "man" includes male and female both because the Bible is talking about mankind, human, human, hu-man. You understand? There's male men and there's female men. You can include women. There's nothing wrong with that. You could just say "all of us". But it's very important that you understand that because people have taken it literally and thought women couldn't be saved. There's nothing in the world that's further from the truth than that. "Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature, creation".
See, your spirit man, the moment you made Jesus Christ the Lord of your life, you weren't just forgiven. You're not just an old sinner saved by grace. No, no, no, you are a new creation. That word "creation" literally means "a new species of being that never existed before that moment". Created in Christ Jesus, born again. "Old things are passed away". Now, that's talking about all the things in your spirit. This old man died the death of the cross. Hallelujah. A new person in there, the person, you. If I was able to set aside this body, this physical body, which in the Scripture is called "clothes," "clothed with," and I could step out of my body and you could see my body and my spirit, they look just alike.
Now, the spirit man is not fat. It's not skinny. It is a replica of Jesus, but you would recognize me. I've had people ask me, "Brother Copeland, do you think we'll recognize one another when we get to Heaven"? You will if you know me here, you'll know me there. I mean, you're not gonna turn into something else. But if you don't know me here, we'll have to be introduced when we get there. Isn't that good? But I wanted you to make sure you understand that. Now, this is the reason. Hebrews 2 said Jesus tasted death for all men. You know Jesus as your Lord and Savior, this inner man is born again. This outer man, this body, dies. When it dies, it just falls away.
Now, this again, you're seeing both of us here together. If I had on a coat, I could demonstrate this to you. Both of us are here together. My body dies and falls to the floor. I could still be standing here. If you could see the two of us, I'd still be standing here. The Apostle Paul said when he went into Heaven in the presence of God, he said, "Whether in the body or out of the body, I couldn't tell".
Now, I have talked with several people, one in particular a very, very close friend of mine, and another that has become a friend of mine, that died, one of them in a massive heart attack and the other one in a car wreck. But I've worked for the man when I was flying for Brother Roberts. He was my boss, Brother Bob DeWeese, associate evangelist to Oral Roberts. He died on a handball court with a massive heart attack. He never knew it. He absolutely never knew it. All of a sudden he was in the most beautiful place he'd ever seen and he was telling this to Gloria and me. He said, "I was standing on this road. I'm out here and I'm looking around". He said, "Where is this"? He said it was a little road, a little lane of a road going down, just gorgeous. He said there was a beautiful wooden fence on each side and he said, "I examined that fence". He said, "Kenneth, as close as I could tell, it was hand-worked mahogany, hand-carved. Kenneth," he said, now, he's always an athlete".
At the time this happened, he was in his early 70s. He was always, always a strong athlete. He was 70 years old, man. He was out there on that handball court and you had to get up early in the morning to beat him, too. He said, "I never felt such power in my body. I never felt such power in my... body". Now, I want you to hear this. He couldn't tell whether he was in the body or not, and he never paid any attention to it. Wasn't any different to him. The other man I talked to, he said, "You know, I had no knowledge of that car wreck. God raised me up. I was in the hospital dead and all of a sudden," he said, "God just came and raised me up like I spent some time in Heaven and came back into my body. I couldn't tell the difference".
Now, I wanted you to see that because it's this man, not this physical man that's laying here in the floor. This is not the one that got born again, it's the man that's identical to Jesus in every way except your spiritual appearance, which was your physical appearance. Now, this is really important to what we're seeing here. Notice it. Let me read this again. "Therefore, if any person be in Christ, or born again, he is a new creature. Old things have passed away. Behold, all things are become new".
Now, listen, it's talking about your spirit man. "And all things are of God, who hath reconciled to himself by Jesus Christ and has given to us the ministry of reconciliation". See, God's already forgiven you. You're going to see this right here. He's forgiven the whole world. He's not holding any trespasses against anybody. "Well, everybody going to Heaven". No, they're not. You have to accept that forgiveness by accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior and be born again. Somebody just got it. Hallelujah. To know that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, that's the reason the angels shouted and said, "Good will towards men," not among men, "Good will towards me".
The war is over between God and man because the sacrifice is here, and 33 years from now it's gonna end forever. "Reconciling the world unto Himself, not holding against them their trespasses". That's what the word "impute" means. "And hath committed unto us the word of that reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ as though God did beseech you by us, we pray you in Christ's stead you be reconciled to God, for He hath made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin".
That's a little bit scrambled in Old English. Let's say it like this. "For He who knew no sin was made to be sin for us," listen, "that we might be made, M-A-D-E "made". It's like manufacture, "made the righteousness of God". When you were recreated, you were made the righteousness of God in Him. The moment you got born again, you were as righteous as you're ever gonna be. You are the righteousness of God. You are in right standing with God. You've been raised up together to sit with Him in heavenly places with God right there on the throne of grace. You're seated right next to Him. Hallelujah. Glory be to God. Amen!
Isn't this wonderful? The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. Suddenly... I'm that man. I'm that person. I can pray that prayer in James 5. I can do this. I can do this. I'm righteous. Now, I need to grow in holiness. I need to grow in faith. I need to grow up. Praise God. But when I got born again in that little bitty baby Christian, I'm the righteousness of God and there's people all over the place that are the righteousness of God and don't even know it.