Kenneth Copeland - THE BLESSING Is the Goodness of God
Good morning, everyone. This is the Believer's Voice of Victory broadcast, and this is Kenneth Copeland Bible College this morning to give the Lord a praise and thanksgiving. Give yourselves a big hand of clap. Glory to God. Thank You, Lord Jesus. I'm going to ask all of them, the ones that are graduating this year, to stand up and face that camera, please. Yeah. Praise the name of Jesus. You may be seated. 58 tigers are being loosed upon the world. Yes, hallelujah, glory to God.
Father, we thank You this morning for the goodness that You have shown us and to this college and to this ministry and You're precious in our sight, and we give You praise and thank You for the anointing of God to deliver this message with accuracy, and that the ears and the hearts of the people hear it equally as accurately together in the spirit, by the spirit, for the spirit, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.
Open your Bibles, please, to the gospel of Luke, chapter 18, the 18th verse. I'll wait until you get there. All of you watching by television, oh, I know this is going out to a lot of places, so get your Bible. It's very important. Get your Bible and you do as we do, praise God. Now then, Luke chapter 18. Now, you'll find this also in the gospel of Matthew in his account. But, well, and I'll say this to you in the beginning. Luke, in the Book of Acts, of course it's the same author, the gospel under his name, and then it's been called the Acts of the Apostle. It's not. It's the acts of the Holy Spirit. Amen. But these are documentaries.
Now, Matthew and Mark and John were there. That's the difference between the two. But Luke talked to people. He searched things. And also, being a physician, He adds things. For instance, Peter's mother-in-law. Well, Matthew just simply says that He touched her hand. Luke says she had a great fever and He touched her hand and rebuked the fever. So, just a word to the wise, praise God. All right. The 18th and 19th verses. And a certain ruler. This is not a parable. This is a certain ruler. This certain ruler existed. It happened just exactly this way. He didn't say, "It was as if a man, as if a ruler". No, it's a certain ruler asked him, saying, "Good master," or, "Good teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life"? I want you to listen what Jesus said to him. "Why callest thou me good? None is good save one, that is God. Don't be calling me that," He said. "What do you call me that for"? God is who's good.
What, in your opinion, what is Jesus doing here? At least two things. Pointing to the absolute goodness of God and drawing attention away from Himself. He's saying to this young man, "There's no man, no man, no man that's good. God is good. God is good". The Lord said to Gloria in 1998, "I want you to teach and preach the goodness of God without reservation and without caring about what men say about it". Brother, Copeland, how could anybody say anything wrong about the goodness of God? Oh, listen. My father in the faith, Oral Roberts, preached on it all the time. There were songs written from the sermons that he preached. "God is a good God", Amen. In all of the tent meetings, everywhere he went. "God is a good God".
I personally had a pastor to come to me. Kenneth Hagin tells this, very much the same story. I heard him said it. This was, of course, back in the days of the Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship and there's a lot of big meetings going on and tons of testimonies. I mean, businessmen testify. They didn't let us preachers testify, but boy, we had a chance to preach and teach and do all the things. But those businessmen telling about God and what He's done for them and how they came into the kingdom and so forth. And this pastor came up to me and said these words, "I wish he wouldn't say that". I said, "What"? "I wish he wouldn't go around saying God's a good God all the time". Well, that slapped me in the face. Well, and here again, let me remind you of something. When people asked me back then what my background was, where'd you come from and about your church life and all that, I said, "Sinner". I didn't know anything. I was a scriptural illiterate when I got born again. So was Gloria.
First message we ever heard was faith. And somebody said, "You couldn't tell me God was a bad God". That didn't make sense, particularly when I began to read the Word. I said, "Well, what do you want him to say? He's a bad God"? No, no. I said, "Well, why"? He said, "Well, he gives people the wrong idea about God". See, this goes back to the same thing that was happening when Jesus said this to this young ruler. All they ever heard was the curse. They had never heard the blessing. And Jesus came with the blessing of God, that He's wonderful, and people just flocked to hear it. They wanted some good news, that God is good. Amen. We're going to talk about the goodness of God. Where should we start? How about Genesis? Is that a good place? All the way back to the beginning. You don't have any trouble finding that, do you? Just catch your Bible, two outside, and do it this way and it'll be there.
"In the beginning, God", I like that, "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters". And God said, well, now we've been through this, "Let there be light". Actually it was, "Light be". Amen. It'll do you good to study the little word be. It's huge, but that's not our study today. Verse four. "God saw the light, that it was good". Now, come down to the ninth verse. God said, you notice God said? He didn't think, He said. And God said, "Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together and under one place. Let the dry land appear," and it was so. "God called the dry land earth and the gathering together of the waters he called the seas and God saw that it was good". Praise God.
Okay, and just go down to the 12th verse. "The earth brought forth grass and herb yielding seed after his kind and the tree yielding fruit whose seed was in itself after his kind, and God saw that it was good". Praise God. Amen. Now, we'll just keep coming down and let's see, let's go to the 18th verse. And to rule over. 17th verse. "And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth and to rule over the day and over the night and to divide the light from the darkness, and God saw that it was good". Amen. Praise God. And let's go down to the... Thank You, Lord. Yeah, yeah. Thank You, Lord. All right, now let's go down to the 25th verse. And God saw that it was good. Amen. So you can see. How could God be anything but good, and how could what a good God created being anything but good? It couldn't. It was all good until Adam fouled it up, but it was good. Amen.
Now then, and then, praise God in that 31st verse, behold. No, let's read that one. And God saw everything that he had made and behold, or look at it. Or, like John when he's a little boy, said, "Look at that". Well, look at that, it was very good. Yeah, but now, wait a minute. There's something that was not good. Well, let's go to the second chapter and the 18th verse. And the Lord God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone". I totally agree. "I will make him a helpmate out of the ground". The Lord God formed every beast of the field and so forth and Adam and you know the story of that. "Now, and Adam gave names to all of them and the Lord caused," in the 21st verse, "a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept. And he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof".
Two things you'd want to, particularly as ministers of the gospel, be very cautious about and teach people this. Be very, very cautious about what you read on Wikipedia about people. Because if anybody is well-known enough, then I learned there's so much that's about me on Wikipedia that's not true, and I finally found that anybody can edit it. I don't know anything about this stuff and don't care anything about it. But now we're in the process now of locking that down where somebody... In fact, when we were talking about it on the phone, and Mike Evans, you know the great guy that works for us, and he's working on this, he said, "Somebody just edited it while I was looking at it". But we're in the business now of locking it down and taking care of all of that. The other thing you want to be careful about, artists who paint Adam and his wife with belly buttons. A scar, maybe.
Come on now, I've seen it. I have seen it. David Weiner and I were in a place just not all that long ago and there they were, with their little belly buttons, just shining. This was in a place they should have known better. Look for things like that. If you're going to call yourself a Word person, then you can't fuss about what you read on Wikipedia about somebody. Just forget it. Amen. And pictures that tell the wrong story. The famous Last Supper picture, you can't get any more wrong than that. And like one fellow said, "If you want to be in the picture, sit on this side of the table". Another man said, "We need a table for 26, because half of them, they're only half of them going to sit on one side". There was no table there. If there was, it was very small and more like on the floor. Hallelujah. Thank You, Jesus.
Now, what do your take away from this? Watch out for the little small traditions that get in the way. The apostle Paul said, "I know how to abound. I know how to be abased". I have seen this, for instance, in churches, particularly in the very beginning days. I will be preaching in a church and I'll more than once be in a Sunday school room without a speaker's room. I'm in the Sunday school room waiting and praying and so forth, and you see things there in the Sunday school room. It didn't say, "I know how". It said, "Sometimes". That isn't what the Word said. "Sometimes I abound. Sometimes I'm abased". I don't know, you never know what God's going to do. Sometimes He just does this. No, He said, "I know how. I know how to do this". In other words, I'm not impressed by either one of them. I know how to be abound and I know how to be abased. Amen.
When a person understands that God is 100% good, then you understand very quickly, He's not your problem. He is not your problem. Well, you know and I know, I would, just in my opinion, probably 90% of this comes from, is by reading and not understanding the first covenant. You know, how God will kill you and put disease on you. Don't just take it out of one chapter, 28th chapter Deuteronomy. Read the 27th chapter. Come on. And then you don't have the problem with God will bring upon you. No, God's not in the business of cursing anybody. He had this. What He's saying is here is, "Here is this nation of people that have been out of touch for so long, They don't know anything about the covenant under which they're now to live". And so they just simply divided up the tribes into two, set them out on two mountains, and one would shout the curses and the other would shout the blessing.
And how many of you, anyone in here came out of the Methodist church? They did that in church, didn't they? The pastor will read and then you read. The pastor reads, then you read. That's what they were doing. One was reading the blessing, one was reading the curse, only they were shouting them across the way. Amen. Praise God. So that never was God cursing anybody. Praise God. So those are the places where you take much care to make sure that the traditions are not doing what Jesus said they will do or make the Word of God of no effect. Why? Because you're doing what James talked about. You're wishy washy from... Brother Hagin.
One message I heard from him, he's talking about the wishy washy well-wishers. He got hung up on it and then I couldn't say it. The wishy washy... The wishy washy well-wishers. I'm talking about the wishy washy traditions that mess up and really confuse the minds of baby Christians. And you've got baby Christians that have been saved for 35, 40, 50 years and don't know anything, and they're still wishy washy. Well, you know God loves you? Yeah. You don't dare say no. And you read their face. Well, yeah, He probably does, but He doesn't care anything about me. And like this guy said one time, God loved Toledo. It's Cincinnati He don't care nothing about. And we're out of time. Come on, Jeremy, come out and help us here, son.