Kenneth Copeland - THE BLESSING Is for Today
Now then, divine recovery or restoration. Isaiah 42. And, well, really, let's begin with the first verse. I'll tell you what, I'm reading this out of the Amplified Classic. So why don't you just listen. "Behold, my servant whom I uphold, my elect, in whom my soul delights. I have put my spirit upon Him, and He will bring forth justice and right and reveal truth to the nations". Who's he talking about? He's talking about Jesus.
"He will not cry or shout aloud or cause His voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed, He'll not break and dimly burning wick, He will not quench. He'll bring forth justice and truth. He will not fail or become weak or be crushed and discouraged till He has established justice in the earth, and the islands and the coastal regions shall wait hopefully for Him and expect His direction and law. Thus says the Lord, God, He who created the heavens and stretched them forth, and spread forth the earth and that which comes out of it. He who gives breath to the people in it and the spirit that walk on it. I the Lord have called You the Messiah for a righteous purpose and in righteousness. I'll take You by the hand and keep You. I'll give you for a covenant to the people Israel, for a light to the nations of the Gentiles. To open the eyes of the blind, to bring out prisoners from the dungeon and those who sit in darkness from the prison. I am the Lord, that's My name. My glory I will not give to another, nor My praise to graven images".
Now let's just go on down, let's go to the 20th verse. "You have seen many things but you do not observe or apprehend their true meaning. His ears are open, but he hears not. It was the Lord's pleasure for His righteousness' sake in accordance with a steadfast and constant purpose to magnify instruction and revelation to glorify them. But this is a people robbed and plundered, they are all snared in holes, and hidden in the houses of bondage. They have become a prey, with no one to deliver them, a spoil, with no one to say, restore". No one to say restore. No one to say recover. Restore. "A year of divine healing, divine health, divine prosperity, divine recovery," divine restoration. Restore.
And I had the Lord say to me that day, "I'm saying restore". And He said, "I will restore everything that COVID stole. I will restore all the economy. I will restore it". If somebody will go on and join me and say, restore. Lord. Restore. 1 Samuel 30. Praise God. Verse 8, I'm still in the Amplified. "David inquired of the Lord, saying, shall I pursue this troop? Shall I overtake them"? The Lord answered him, "Pursue for you shall surely overtake them without fail, recover all". Recover all. Pastor George reminded me of that. Well in the message he preached, Sunday. Recover it. You'll get it all. Sure, I hear God saying to him, when is this gonna happen? Today. Go get 'em today, it's done. Since He said, you will recover all, all right. It's starts today. And that's one of them. They had a forced march, a forced march.
Now, those aren't maybe not familiar with military terms. That means you don't quit till you get it done. You don't quit until you get it done. Patton, World War II. Bad situation in bad storm. This is the Battle of the Bulge. Bad deal, worst weather, imaginable. The worst winter in 50 years of records. General Patton told General Eisenhower, he said, "I will pull my troops out, and we will go to Bastogne". I'm paraphrasing now. "And we will take care of business". General Eisenhower said something like, "Well, all right, when can he leave"? "Now". "Be reasonable". "No, I'm going now". "Your troops are already worn". "Yeah, but they'll do it". He pulled a bunch of tired troops, and on a forced march, in a worst kind of weather you can think of, and they pushed it and pushed it. And then they got the Bastogne.
I was in the army with a man that had come. He had gotten out but he had come back. Well, he'd been out enough that he had to go through the basic training again just to get back in the groove, and then he went from there to duty. And he and I were very good friends. He was at Bastogne. And he was just a kid when that happened. And he pulled his shirt open and showed me one day. He was bayonet ripped from here all the way up to about here. And there was another guy carried him out. I said, come over. Man, why are you back in here? "'Cause," he said, "I love my country". He wouldn't quit. He wouldn't quit. Glory to God. Praise God. Somebody give the Lord praise.
Now, divine prosperity. Proverbs chapter 10. Amplified. "The blessing of the Lord, it makes truly rich, and He adds no sorrow with it, neither does toiling increase it". THE BLESSING of the Lord, it make out the rich, it makes it. Well, I'll tell you one thing, I make $479,321 million a year. I'm a self-made man. I make deals. Yeah, is that right? You're making the deal, that's right. A fellow told me one time he said, "I'll tell you, if I wasn't making so many deals, I'd go broke". He was so far behind, so far in debt. He's having to make deals to stay up trying to pay his debt. And he eventually did go broke. He's making the deal. THE BLESSING of the Lord, it makes it. THE BLESSING, THE BLESSING. It's the blessing of Adam. It's the blessing of Noah. And then it comes down to the blessing of Abraham and praise God, hey. The blessing of Abraham has come on the Gentiles.
"Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law. Being made a curse for us, for it is written, cursed is everyone that hangs on a tree, so that the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles". Praise God. Hallelujah. That we might receive the promise of the spirit through faith. And sickness and disease and poverty is under that curse. Amen. Well, that was just for the Jews. Now wait a minute. Just for the Jews? Whoa, wait, whoa, whoa, stop, oh, hold it. Jew is short for Judah. Jesus came from the tribe of Judah. The apostle Paul was of the tribe of Benjamin. Why are they not called Ben's? That's something else that the savior, brought into being. And wonderful. No, it's not the blessing of the Jews. It's the blessing of Abraham. And we are his descendants.
For in the Galatian, book of Galatian again. "And if you be Christ or if you be in Christ, then are you Abraham's seed". And what. "Heirs according to the promise". Not sub heirs, joint heirs. Gracious, and grace, and goodness, and the wonders of his goodness. He's given us heaven. He's given us the earth. He's given us His name. He's given us His Word. He's given us His blood. He's given us His life. He's given us all that He has and all that He is, belongs to the body of Christ. And we never quit, we never quit. Praise God we'd never quit.
I'll close with Ephesians 5:1-2. And here's the key. "Be you therefore followers of God". Now, hang on just a moment. You're gonna like this. "Therefore be imitators". That word follower, it's mimic in the Greek. "Be therefore imitators of God, copy Him". And of God, we're gonna copy God? How do you mean you can copy God? You can't copy God? Yes, you can copy God. That's not right. You just go around copying God? Steve, I wanna point to you again. Now, you're a flight instructor. You get somebody in there don't you intend for that unit to copy everything you do? You better or she'd better stick that thing up like a dart. You want them to copy everything you do to the point they can do it as well as you can. Or better, yeah. You hope they do it better.
And then you just keep copying the rest of your life. You just keep striving to be better. And you'd go back to recurrent, you get in the simulator. I'm gonna fly that thing better this year than I did last year, and simulators don't fly good. They're real skittish, you go off a little bit and hit, and it goes off in the boonies you need to get in the weeds somewhere. This is what they're supposed to do. What am I doing? Back when I was trying to learn how to ski, and I wasn't any good at and Gloria just... I did my best to copy my instructor. I'm doing my best to copy Jesus. I'm just doing my best imitating. How do you imitate God? "Be imitators of God, copy Him, follow His example. The well-beloved children, imitate their father and walk in love".
That's the key right there. That's the key, that's the key. Now, I'm gonna say something to you that most people, cannot understand how this could be. Very, very, very close friend of mine, he's in heaven now. F-100 pilot flew into Misty Squadron. Later, he and I, Steve, compared to those guys, I don't know how to fly, no. Pete Ford, Pete, the top guy in F-15 before he left the Air Force and close friend, and he's on our board now. One of my favorite of all people. Compared to Pete Ford, I just wall around in the sky you know? These guys are good. And yeah, shout out for him. That means he gets on your six. It's like kinda to get rid of your shadow.
Anyway, there was a mission plan, well, I'm getting behind, ahead of myself. I heard him said, he started having a dream. Kept dreaming it over and over and over to the point where it's just about drive him nuts. Well, this went on for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks, and the he finally quit. The mission that they were assigned, they said, you could have as much as 50% casualties in this. This is bad. They came off of the tankers, went in, and he was telling people where gun gun emplacements were, and I'm flying that dream. He didn't lose anybody. The guys that gunshot down, he knew where they were. But now let me tell you what he did. Now he's a born again guy. He wasn't spirit-filled at that point but he knew God. And he considered himself like a warrior like David and you can't kill me.
Now, they would go in and they would bomb, just rip runways apart, and the minute they're out of sight, thousands of Chinese would come in there and they'd fix the runway. It'd be operational again in a few days. And he said, "I lay in my bunk at night, figuring out, what I need to do is kill a bunch of those Chinese". So he said, "I laid there in my bunk figuring out a way to kill those people". So we went in and bombed, but he said, "I had my second squad waiting at altitude". When all the Chinaman got out there and he said, we went in there and then. So, then he came out of the Air Force and he was having problems. He started to go to where their airlines and he was really having problems. And he went to my mother's prayer group. And George, mother laid hands on him. She said, "Young man, there's a spirit of murder on you". And he said, "At first I thought that woman's crazy". She said, "There's a spirit of murder on you. You laid you and figured out how to kill a bunch of people". He said, "I did it, I did it, I hated those people". And he said, "She cast that spirit out of me". And he said, "It was like such a freedom".
How can you fight a war and not hate people? Let me explain it. You have to be covenant aware. Pray for those that despite fully use you and persecute you. I am in covenant with Gloria Jean Copeland. To take care of her, cherish her, till the day we die. And I'm wanna do that. I have a covenant with her. I'm very covenant-minded about it. But you come, you come to hinder her. No, I don't hate you. God loves you. I love you 'cause I have to. But I mean it. I'm not in love with you, but God loves you and I love you. I don't hate you. I'm not gonna let you hurt her. If it comes to it, I'll kill you graveyard dead and sleep like a baby. Because I know what the book of Numbers says, not the soldiers psalm, but the soldiers promise. "You go to war armed by Me". And I'm paraphrasing. "And you take out My enemy. You will return. And you will be guiltless before God and before the nation".
Don't you wish a lot of guys had known that? What that would have done? That gets rid of the PTSD, didn't? If you know how to believe for it and you just don't let that happen. I'm not no, no, no, no, no. I go right there in the book of Numbers, I love you because God loves you. I don't hate you. But if I have to, if I need to protect my wife, or to protect my in my country, I'll take care of business. I don't like that. Thank God I never had to do it. I was in at a time when there wasn't a war. Irritated me. I love this country more than I love my life. Now, I didn't have a war. That's my message for the night and I approve of it.