Kenneth Copeland - Your Breakthrough Is Today
Luke chapter 4 Jesus came to Nazareth where he'd been brought up and as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up for, to read. There was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written. He did not follow the Sabbath reading which is in succession. He took a specific text. What you and I know is the 61st chapter of the book of Isaiah. And he began in a very specific spot and he stopped in a very specific spot. To continue on in that verse changes the time. He stopped exactly where he was that day. And he preached. It's amazing to me, of course you do, you've been taught this but how many Christians all over the world do not know and understand that Jesus was first of all a preacher. And he got loud, shouted with a loud voice He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. That's the reason we do it. Amen!
And, he said, He read, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he hath anointed me to preach". My Lord, I love it. "He has anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted. He has sent me to preach deliverance to the captives and to preach recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, and to preach the acceptable year of the Lord", which was the Great Jubilee, which was supernatural debt cancellation, glory be to God forevermore. And Gloria and I experienced that many years ago. Amen. We had to learn. We had a lot to learn and, but we learned, and praise God, she and I have never been in debt since. And this ministry is not in debt. And this church is not in debt, glory to God.
Now it took a while to learn how, and you had to put your foot down and say, No, no, I'm not going to do it. I'm committed to this and I'm not going to do it. Anyway, He closed the book, gave it again to the minister and set down. Can't you just see him. Just sit down. The eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say, he preached a message. This is the summary of what he preached. This day, uh oh John, there's coming a day. Oh, the Messiah is coming. Yes. Moses was wonderful. Oh, there's coming a day, oh yeah, But today, now don't get me on today. Who do you think you are today? Talk to me about today? Today, the scripture's fulfilled in your ears. Made them some mad. They tried to kill him. Today. This is the day.
Now, yeah, ahora Amen. Find the scripture that covers your situation and find the other scriptures that join that scripture. Out of the mouth of two or three witnesses, scripture witnesses, can't build a doctrine on one verse. And then take hold of today. This is mine, today. This is going to happen today. This is going to happen today. My mother used to say, she'd say, Kenneth, Jesus is coming this year. I said, is that right, mama? Yeah, he's coming this year. And the next year I said, she'd say, Kenneth, Jesus is coming this year. I said, you said that last year, She said, I know it, but he's coming this year. She said that all the time, My mother, bless her sweet heart, she prayed for me and prayed for me and prayed for me. She prayed Gloria into my life and she just kept praying, just kept praying.
And there was a day, she, at the time, she hadn't realized, First Peter 5, that casting the whole of your care, Look that up, care, worry, anxiety, says the same thing in Philippians 4. But she just, she had prayed for me for years. And she just got up from the kitchen table and threw her Bible down on the table. And she said, I've prayed for him the last time. If he goes to hell, it's your fault. Now I messed up everything. I had a job, good job, flying. and I fouled that up. I'm not going to go into that stupid story. But anyway, but the Lord was in this whole thing. And we had, we had this opportunity, and there were people that were really making a lot of money with this thing. It was a very powerful insulation and it worked. Well, I'd had a lot of sales experience thanks to my dad and so forth.
And so, this other fellow that worked with me, good friends, Gloria and mine and his wife and so forth. In fact, he was my flight instructor when I got my multi-engine rating and, and, and, and Gloria rode in the back seat while he gave me my multi-engine training. And then, and then of course, the man that owned the place gave him a check right that afternoon Anyway, I got out and sold that stuff. I mean, just sold, just sold a lot of it Man, it's just going like this. So, Gloria quit her job. She had a job with an insurance company, and so she quit her job and, and we bought this house on a lease purchase and it's a nice place.
But man, I'm telling you the way I had sold enough of that stuff to where just all we needed to do is get the product in there and get it done and boy, there the money was. It had been a considerable amount of money and then just continue with it. No appliances, no furniture. It was cold. So we had everything in a box out on the back porch. Only thing we had for food mother sent us 25-pound sack of potatoes. And of course, she and I, I mean, we literally covenanted together, When we got married, we're not going home. All right, we're not going home to mama, we're not going home to papa or anybody else. We're going to get this done. So, the only thing that we had was a rented rollaway bed with a mattress on it, about that thick and a coffee table that I made in metal shop when I was in high school.
Now this is a stunning piece. Well, and I'm, I was driving out close to the airport, now this is Little Rock now. And of course we had the number on that car And I saw the car headed back out. Man, I ran just as fast as I could to a phone booth. I grabbed and I called Harvey. I said, look at that, the car's headed out of town. It was on its way to Kansas city. Well, we were completely out of, out of money. So I had to do something. I said, Hey, I gotta, I gotta quit this. So I had messed up my job where I was. And so I was out hunting another job. Gloria is sitting on that rollaway bed in that empty house. We had a big dripolator, some of you kids don't know what a dripolator is, but it's the pot, you boil water in that pot. And it had a big top on it. And then the boiling would percolate up through it and then make coffee.
So, we didn't have any coffee. So she was cutting up those potatoes and boiling them in that pot. That's what we were eating, Steve. I was out hunting this job. Well, you remember Arkansas Aviation there in Little Rock Piper dealership. Yeah, Yeah. Well, I was working for Central originally. Anyway, the general manager at Central Flying Service at the time was a man named Joe Stewart. He was, he had gone to the Southern Baptist Mission Board to apply for mission support. They said, well, you got to do this and this and this and this and this. And he did that. And his dad-in-law taught him how to fly and got all of his ratings to use the mission field. He went back and said, I'm ready. They said, you're too old. Too old, What is this? I thought, I'm still out hunting a job and I thought, I'm going back over there to Central Flying Service.
So I went in to talk to Mr. Stewart. He said, you know, I don't know why I'm doing this. You don't have any time. You don't even have a multi-engine rating yet but you have sales experience. I said, yes I do. Okay, I'm going to hire you. Joe Stewart married us. My boss was my best man. We borrowed a hundred dollars and went to hot Springs for the honeymoon over the weekend, had to be back at work Monday morning. Amen, six months later, we got saved, three months after that, born again, filled with the spirit. I'm out hunting another job. I didn't know that while I was out looking for that job, Gloria is sick.
And like I said, and, she said, well, in fact if you had watched that entire service from healing school in 1997, Southwest believers Convention, had you watched that entire, she, Gloria mentioned in there that she really wanted to go to church. She wanted to be a good girl. And there was a friend of hers that was a Methodist girl. And she went to church every Sunday and Gloria just wanted to go. And she just, just couldn't. Well, I went but I didn't pay any attention to them. I was raised in the Southern Baptist church. It just didn't stick.
Anyway, so I'm out looking for a job. She's sitting there on that rollaway bed with a mattress about that, It is terrible, $6 it cost to rent that thing, and that coffee table, there was a Bible laying on that coffee table. She picked it up. My mama, sent me another Bible, Ken precious, seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you. Gloria read that and she said, well, I certainly do need things and she'd never read that. And so she kept on reading and then she found that the Lord takes care of the sparrows. She just said, Lord, take my life and do something with it. That's all she prayed.
I didn't know anything about it. I'm out looking for a job. I went to work for Arkansas Aviation, the reason I'm talking to Steve, he's a airplane jockey. And I flew a trip that day from Little Rock, Shreveport and back, a man that was an executive with the Arkansas Louisiana gas company. His name was Weir. I got in that evening, and Gloria was fixing supper. And I, I went into our little bedroom there, furnished apartment, yeehaw, brand new, nobody had ever lived in it. Come on, nobody ever lived in it. And it's pretty, blue and gray and smell good. And so, she is at the stove.
I had changed clothes. I took my suit off and changed clothes. And I walked into the kitchen out of the little bedroom there. And I sat down and I had one shoe on. I sat down and put the other one on and oh my, oh no. Oh the glory of God. I thought, if I open my eyes, I'll see Jesus. If I see Jesus, I'll have to preach. I'm not going to do it. Gloria said, she'd never marry a preacher, well she didn't. She married this airplane guy that couldn't make a living. And I said, Oh God, Oh Lord. And I heard this. Kenneth, right here, if you don't get your life straightened out with me, you're going to the devil's hell. I said, I know it. I know it. What do I do now?
I heard my Sunday school teacher in that Southern Baptist church in Abilene, Texas. Her name was Taggart. And she was a widow woman, she was old and she wore black and a little straw hat. And we called her, old lady Taggart. She called herself, old lady Taggart. And I heard her voice, Boys, you have to ask Jesus to come into your heart. I thought that sounded as dumb as it did the first time I heard it, but I don't know what else to do. So I sat right there and I said, Jesus, come into my heart. Oh my, I've tried for years to explain that. But it's like, you had been born in a boiler room and suddenly somebody turned it off, and the silence would be the loudest thing you ever heard in your life, on the inside of me.
Now up until that point, my vocabulary lacked a lot, it was bad. And we came home one night and Gloria said, I'm not going out in public with you anymore. I said, why? She said, your filthy mouth. That night, I could physically feel it. It felt like I had a square block in my, Somebody said it's probably that dial soap your mother used to stick in your mouth, no, it felt, it had for a good little bit. And the moment it was gone, there was never any profanity in my mouth again. Not ever again, not ever again. And it, thank God. That day, That day changed everything. That was the day of salvation, that day. I said, Gloria, she turned around and walked over there.
Now since I was raised in a Southern Baptist church, she was raised in the Church of Christ and her grandmother and my grandmother, No, we just didn't go there. My grandmother thought that Jesus and all of the disciples were Southern Baptist. I mean, they had to be. We just didn't, we didn't talk about it. We didn't spend any time talking to them about it anyway. I called her over there and I said, Gloria, what if I, I didn't know how I'm going to tell this woman this...
Well, well, you know, what if I were to uh maybe, you know, go somewhere from time to time, you know, and maybe talk for God or, you know, give them a testimony. And she said later, she thought, what testimony! I'm trying to tell the woman what happened to me and finally I just told her. I just asked Jesus to come in to my heart. She said, Hallelujah! Huh? Come to find out, she'd just done the same thing two weeks before. She did that last part of October. I did that the first week of November, 1962. Hallelujah! "2021, A year of divine healing, divine health, divine prosperity, divine recovery".
Well, now you don't think the devil's not going to challenge that. Absolutely, He'll challenge it. When, today? Today! Hey, look over there in Mark 4. I remember the Lord said, I spoke to a man by the spirit of the Lord concerning that fact that he would prosper and that there were certain things about that. Well, there were people there that heard that. So, they just wanted to see what he was going to do. And, and so what he started doing they decided they'd just invest in whatever he did. The Lord didn't say anything about them prospering. And they got him so fouled up, they got him in debt.
Well, see the devil is doing everything he can to kill what the spirit of God had said to him about his prospering. People have more problems from a, Christian people have more problem over money than they do anything. Of course they do. The devil has had more opportunities through money, but this is going to be a time of great prosperity. We're coming out of this. We're coming out of this hell hole of a year for a lot of people. I mean, thank God, we knew how to believe God, thank God we weren't in debt. Thank God, we were standing strong, and stood strong and thank God for our partners. And you guys in this church, glory to God this ministry's came out the end of 2020. with more money in the bank we've had ever, but we didn't have any debt. Debt is the killer. That's what's trouble. When something unexpected like COVID-19 hits, particularly when the devil lays a trap.