Kenneth Copeland - Exercise Your Faith For Spiritual, Emotional, And Physical Health
KENNETH: Hello everybody. I'm Kenneth Copeland. This is the believers voice of victory broadcast. Let's have a word of prayer together this morning.
Father, we thank you and we praise you. We lift forth praise and honor and glory to the name of Jesus. We open our hearts. We open our minds for revelation from heaven, revelation concerning this life of faith and the wonderful things that you've done for us and you've given us and prospered us and we give you praise and honor for it. We pray it in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Praise God. We're excited again today. All last week we had such a wonderful time with Dr. Jackson. Dr. Avery Jackson III, I thought, "boy, that sound, good doesnt it"?. It is good! Dr. Avery Jackson III, chief executive officer of Medical Director, Michigan Neurosurgical Institute, and the Detroit Michigan area. And I'm a product of Bishop Keith Butler. Deborah Butler in that mighty church. Praise God! Right there in the Detroit area. In fact, that's where I first met Keith, years and years ago. I had heard about him and I wanted to see for myself and we were having a meeting at Cobo Hall there in the big arena there in Detroit. And just flashed a lot of things across my mind, about that meeting, it was marvelous. Anyway. And so we stayed over Sunday and went to church, told Gloria, I said, you better watch this man. I mean, he has got fire in his bones and faith in his heart, praise God. Raymond graduate. And Dr. Jackson was literally raised in that church. And you know, it just occurred to me, I want to say something before we get into the beginning and the message of this today, you can go ahead and be looking at first Thessalonians 5, if you want to. And don't forget to download the notes. kcm.org/notes. it is show important to have every scripture and all of the outlines and you can study them later. You can teach from them. Praise God. It's a wonderful thing to do. You were talking about the fact that God dropped it in your heart to be a brain surgeon when you were in grade school.
DR. JACKSON: Yes sir.
KENNETH: I'm made a little boy. I want to say this. Listen to me carefully. If you're a born again child of God, if you're interested at all, And living this life of faith, then we, you and I do not have the privilege of just picking anything we want to do in life. And this is something that hasn't been taught and it should be that you and particularly you don't put your children in this pipeline and just shove them through it until after they get out of college. Um, I remember a young man that I, I went to a Oral Roberts university with and I would just following God, I fully planned on staying there 12 years and then the one at the close of that, that first semester, I was been a bit shocked, Dr. Jackson at the Lord said I'm ready for you now. That wouldn't have been right for me to stay there as badly as I wanted to. Man. I found a home in the will of God, but I was about to get out of the will of God because I liked it in the will of God.
DR. JACKSON: Yup. Understood.
KENNETH: And you pray and you seek God and you tell your children, look, we need to know what God has called you to do and we're going to seek God and we're going to find out and we're going to walk in it. Amen. Now, here's a young man and of course, Yeah. You know, the seven year old wants to be a brain surgeon. Well, he's way over seven today and he's a brain surgeon. Amen! Because the lord dropped it in his heart. Now, particularly in the African American community, we saw people raised in church, God loving God, praising people, and music is so predominant in that community that the great music stars had to leave church to make a living.
Now that's sad and it cost many of them, even their lives. I won't go into all of that, but that's a very, very important thing. You watch your children and you see where their gracious are and you see what they really like. And my dear friends in heaven today, Lester Sumrall, he was, he said, watch your children. She what they liked to do and do it with them. That's it! That's it. One of them want to preach, one of them wants to manufactured boats. I mean, you don't at attend to fort that. Now if they want to be a gangster. You changed that. I had a young guy, and forgive me for telling stories, but I finally met him. He told me he said I was raised in a criminal family and he said everybody I knew were criminals and he said it was the family business and he said, of course I would end up in penitentiary.
And he said, I end up with a life sentence at 14 years old. But he said I began to hear things about God and he said, I got born again and then, and then God rearranged my life and I got out of prison and he said, the thing that he got saved on was your material and listening to you. So he said, I got your schedule. And so I would go a week or two ahead of where you would be and I'd get me a job washing dishes or something in that area, just to pay for my food. And he said, and I'd go to the whole meeting and then when you'd leave I'd quit. And he said, I'd go to wherever your next appointment was. That was my appointment. He kept doing that. He kept doing that. He kept doing that. He kept doing that and end up being the president of a Bible College.
DR. JACKSON: Wow. Praise the Lord!
KENNETH: Now that you know. But now that was his passion. See, but what I wanted to point out, he was just flowing the way his parents flowed. Well, our children need to flow the way we flow. And one of the ways to burn them out on the life of faith is to push them in some, some direction that they don't. They just don't want to be there. Well, love them, work with them. Amen. Buy a motorcycle and ride with them. Come on. Do it. Amen. Go to work!
DR. JACKSON: You mentioned, Brother Copeland, but first of all, I just want to thank you for having me on the show and the program. It's just been an honor and you and your family and everyone, it's just amazing people. So thank you so much.
KENNETH: Thank you, sir.
DR. JACKSON: You mentioned about some things that were kind of near and dear to your heart as it related to the family and things that happen to you. And when you were younger and growing up. And I think that you had mentioned about the children and that children are just an important piece. And I think we separate out what seems to be a secular from the Lord. And I think where we're missing it is on being led by him because what looks to be besides the gangsters, but it looks to be not Christian may not necessarily be that, or it looks to be not God's will may not be the case. Like in my choice, it was this is what you're going to do. And I didn't have a choice.
And I said, okay, and that's going to be important because we're going to get into over the next couple of days, exercise your faith and exercise your body and exercise your soul, your mind will and emotion. And I think that is a central theme in what we're discussing as it relates to what happens when you start as a child and you work your way up and God's got a plan for us all. One of the things that I just wanted to mention is for me just to give a little bit of background of who I am as a neurosurgeon and what that means. So as a neurosurgeon, I started out, as Brother Copeland mentioned knowing, learning at a young age I was going to be a neurosurgeon. And what that means is I went to medical school, I went to the University of Chicago Undergrad and then medical school at Wayne State University for four years.
And then from there to Northwestern for general surgery. And then Penn State for my surgery, neurosurgery residency, and then a complex spine fellowship at the Med College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. And then from there ended up and in my current job, and so I was about 15 years of training after high school, you know, and so there's a lot of trials going through that. And so I think about the kids and you'd mentioned about, you know, pushing them in one direction. Well, they're going to get pretty tired out at some point along the way if, if it's not God's will or God's best and they know in their heart because God dropped the, you know, drop that direction into their heart.
And you know, you think about it now, we have 122 specialties and subspecialties in medicine, and to figure out how complex we are and how complex God has made us in how to help people. And God just took one day and he had all the answers like right now. Right? But we separate him from science and from the how we're x supposed to exercise our faith and exercise our health and how they're really connected. And so that's such an important piece. I think sometimes we dichotomize to him and the exercise and the science, you know, and one of the areas is in our mental health, you know, and children when they start out, you know, they're exposed to certain situations, and sometimes it's just perceived trauma. It may not be real trauma, but then that leads to some emotional instability and then from there into chronic pain and even into depression.
And so we've all seen people who've had issues and phobias and other issues of that nature where we need to work on exercising our emotional health and our faith in order to combat some of that. And God, and his word clearly states that, you know, that we just, we need to work have faith in him, and then we can overcome some of that. And so, you know, when we look at science and medicine, and that's obviously the area that God dropped me into, you know, we look at how really that's about one third of the equation, the other two thirds of the equation. It's not just the physical, you have the spirit and then you have the soul, which is the mind, will and emotion.
And so when you're over in that physical side, it's an okay place to be. I mean, there's a lot of advancements we've made and we've helped a lot of people in the medical side of things, but without the other two thirds in God's perspective from here versus, you know, being over here and just having the one third perspective. And oftentimes we don't have those answers and we're pushing, pushing. And we mean well but I think that's when we can kind of get off as supposed to listening to the Holy Spirit, what do you have for us?
KENNETH: Well, and this is where the time spent not only praying, but listening and meditation in the word. When God, Joshua was in trouble, he'd followed Moses for all of these years. Moses made every decision and he followed it to the letter. And you think about the situation that he was in the last time he was over there, there was a lot of John's in that land. And you think about him thinking it's on his mind, man, I've got to face these guys and I haven't been there in a long time. And I'm wondering what's there now. So what was God's answer? Pray. Well, yeah, but meditate, meditate my word night and day. And then you will observe, you will see into how to prosper and deal wisely.
Now that's what we're looking for. Yeah. Okay. So if you spend that time for and with your children, you spend that time. I'm still doing that because I'm still responsible for this. And just the fact that I was blessed and beyond measure. and allowed to serve and praise God in this kind of ministry. But the more expanded, the more responsible for it I became and it never gets easy, but if you do it right, it never gets hard. Now I spent some hard times at this because I was not doing that. And I got my nose bloodied and and other things that I, that I was doing a shouldn't be doing and should be doing things I was not doing, but I had to go back to the basic fundamentals of it all. Now don't you have to do that in surgery?
DR. JACKSON: Yes sir. And when you were speaking, an example rose up in me that the Lord gave me, and that is there's a case where I was operating on an aneurysm. So that's where as a blood vessel in the brain, and it hemorrhages, it ruptures and the person comes in and she was basically in a coma. So we had to rush her to the operating room, got her prepped, had to take her the skull off after she was anesthetized. And now I'm operating in a space that's about five inches by five inches by about four inches deep, full of blood. And now I've got a fish down to get that blood vessel closed and the feeding blood vessels closed to stop that bleeding. I've got about four minutes to do that. Okay. Because at the rate and power of that, that blood flow, she's gonna lose 50% of her blood volume in a short amount of time and then she's going to die.
And so there's a fair amount of stress there, obviously, right? You can't see, or you have to go and you're, you know, if you, if you get out of faith and you get out of listening to the Holy Spirit, you know, the stress level goes through the roof and then the blood pressure we talked about the other day goes through the roof and you're really stressed. And so just ask the Lord to help guide my hands. And so we've got a suction in there. We put some temporary clips on the, the feeding vessels, and then we're able to clip the, the vessel that was bleeding, take those temporary clips off and then close the skull back. And she did fine ultimately.
But you know, the stress that you can kind of feel is that, you know, being in God's will and exercising faith and exercising in that the mind will and emotion and in the soul and in the physical. Because when you get stressed out, blood vessels constrict and your coordination changes. And so when you're outside of his will, like in that case and that surgery had I second guessed myself, had I not listened to the Holy Spirit, all those areas would have been, would have been out of sinking out order. But having the peace of God, I was able to calmly get in there and take care of what I had to take care of. And then she did well. So that's definitely an example that happened to me. And so again with God and listening and spending time with him verses without.
KENNETH: Praise. God, are you praying in the spirit just under your breath?
DR. JACKSON: Yes sir. The whole time I get in the operating room. So here we go. Yeah, let's go. I have this painting. That's by Nate green and it's called be thou my vision. And, and there is a surgeon who's got the microscope in the field and the patient's positioned on their back and the surgeons doing brain surgery from the side. And Jesus is standing right there directing his vision in surgery. Yeah. And so that's one of one of my paintings I have. And I, when I walked by that I've got one at home and in the office that just, you know, reminds me of his presence and what he's done for us and how he's made us intricately and then how he's there for us to guide us. You know, at all times so.
KENNETH: You know what just occurred to me. The ministry into which God call me has had the privilege and the honor of feeding your faith and preparing you to do that. Praise God.
DR. JACKSON: Thank you. Since I was a little boy. You come to Detroit and we take the bus and see you whenever we could.
KENNETH: Don't tell me churches. Local church that preaches and teaches faith and love and these powerful spiritual principles produce life saving people like this. And it's the same thing. It's the same thing when you've got a policeman that's called to do that job. And I had a young man, it was a police officer and almost the same thing came up on this ministry and so forth. And he said it had happened to him over and over again. He told me about one situation. He's sitting in the car with his partner and this call came through and he was sitting there praying in the spirit about it and the Lord said and told him exactly where the guy was. And his partner says, we need to and he said no, just go over there and turn to that, and then the guy was there. And his life had been saved because he knew who/where the danger was, this is life in the faith lane. Praise God. And all of us working together. We help people and save lives. Glory to God. There's good stuff. Go ahead.
DR. JACKSON: Yes sir. So sometimes when we think about the Lord and we think about medicine, science, there's a difference. we separate those two. But God created our DNA he created the stem cells when the sperm and the egg mom and dad come together, he was the author of all of the detail in that. So he's the one who is the author of the science. And oftentimes when we think about our health and exercising, you know our health in these areas, in our authority in these areas will tend to separate him from the science that he created. And when you look at it, for instance, God created our DNA. And so that in and of itself is a premeditated love because within that DNA there's reparative mechanisms. And it's so stem cells that repair injured tissue, injured brain. When we're older, broken bones, you know, surgeons, we help, we can cut, we can sew. But we can't heal.
KENNETH: That's right. Yeah, that's true!
DR. JACKSON: He heals. He heals that. And he did that in premeditated love before we were even formed in our mother's wombs for us. And so I think that's an important piece to take home when you're seeking the Lord for your health, then you're exercising your faith in the tri-part area and who you are as a spirit person and your mind will and emotion. And then the physical as well is that he's the author and he knows, he put it all together. He knows all the specifics and then DNA and stem cells. And so the other piece is, you know, there's a scripture Proverbs 17:22. A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: right? And, but with a broken spirit that can dry up your bones. Well, it's kind of interesting. So the bones have bone marrow, right? And what's bone marrow? Stem cells? Bone marrow is stem cells. So what happens is, is that when you're not exercising your faith and in the soul there's depression. What that depression can have an effect on your stem cells and the bone marrow. And you can try the bones up that way, literally!
KENNETH: And the book knew what it was talking about all the time.
DR. JACKSON: Yes sir. It's right in there.