Kenneth Copeland - Course Correction
— Hello, everybody, I'm Kenneth Copeland and that's Jeremy Pearsons, my grandson. Amen. Give the man a howdy doody welcome.
— Thanks, Pawpaw.
— Hey, man.
— Glad to be here. Thank you.
— Yeah, you're not standing off over there doing...
— I know, this is good. I'm at the grownup table. This is great. I grew up going to Thanksgiving at Pawpaw's house and the kids had their own table, and I'm getting to sit at the big people table today. This is great.
— I wouldn't have thought of that if I'd a thought for a month. Praise God. I'm excited about 2022. As we were discussing it earlier, when I wrote a Partner Letter for January, of course, this is January, and I started out, I was thinking, because of something that the Lord had been dealing with me very recently, about to maintain and the war against fear over all of this virus and all that. I really thought that's what I'd do the letter about. The letter wound up being on the blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich. Amen.
— Amen.
— The title of it, Jeremy, is, In 2022, You'll Know What To Do.
— Yes, I will.
— You will know what to do.
— Yes, I will.
— Now, our golden text for this series of broadcast is found in the Book of Proverbs, Chapter Four. Don't ever just read that verse, look at the neighborhood always. The Lord corrected me about First Peter 2:24, he said, "You're just jumping from Isaiah 53 to First Peter 2:24". He said, "Start at First Peter 2:1". There's 23 verses ahead of that, and from the first chapter down there's instructions there before you get to the healing. Now, in the Book of James, talking about the wisdom of God, five chapters before you get to the healing part, and all of that is instructive. Father, we thank You today for the Word.
— Thank You, Lord.
— Thank You that You and the Book of Luke, Jesus, call the written Word the wisdom of God. And we thank You for it with all of our hearts.
— Thank You, Lord.
— Amen.
— Amen. Thank You Lord.
— Proverbs 4. "Hear, you children, the instruction of a Father and attend to understanding". So start out, I'm going to understand this. The Lord's going to reveal it to me. Verse 5, "Get wisdom. Get understanding. Forget it, not". Get it, but don't forget it. "Wisdom is the principle thing, therefore get wisdom, and with all you're getting, get understanding. Exalt her. She shall promote thee. She shall bring the through honor and when you do embrace her, she shall give to your head an ornament of grace. A crown of glory shall she deliver to thee. Hear, oh, my son, and receive my sayings and the years of thy life shall be many".
— Thank You, Father.
— Glory to God. Now, then, Jeremy, my father in the faith, Oral Roberts, I don't know how many times I heard him say this. He said it to me personally, referring to my future, and so much of the wisdom in my life came from him, because he's my father in the faith. He taught me a lot of things. But one of the big ones, success without a successor is a failure. I'm thinking about a ministry right now. Powerful. Miracles. There are people today that never heard of it. Now, according to what's been prophesied, it will come back, but it didn't need to go away. Now, this is one of my successors, because I remember one day sitting in my car you said something like this. "Pawpaw, I just don't know. I just don't know what to do. I don't know what I'm supposed to do and what I'm supposed to be". I just said, "Jeremy, now just wait a minute, son. You're not supposed to know right now". He said, "Huh"? I go, "How old are you"? "18". I said, "Boy, now listen, Jesus didn't know until he was 30. You have a while to go before you know".
— That's right.
— "Before then, you will know". Now, I noticed, and I'm going to say this and then I'm going to turn this over to you, I noticed, right, I mean just almost immediately. Well, I really like Colorado and he came up there with us and I took him out skiing. Remember basher bow?
— Yeah.
— We just had a marvelous time. He fell in love with Colorado. Colorado. Colorado. So he founded the Legacy Church, where?
— Colorado.
— Yeah, yeah.
— That was the wisdom of God working in you all the time.
— It was. Yeah. You told me something that night in the car, and you're right, I was 18 years old, I was a senior in high school, and you said something that night that stuck with me then, and it is so big in me today, and I've lived by it, I've given it to others, this is what you said in response to my panic, and it took all the pressure off me. You said, "Jeremy do what's right in front of you. Do what's right in front of you to do". Years later, well, almost 12 years ago now, Sarah and I, we had been thinking and talking about Colorado for a long time. And when that first really came up strong in our hearts, 10 plus years ago, we came up there to see you and Mimi, and we were sitting at breakfast with them, and I remember working up this question. This was a deep question and I was going to throw it to Mimi and I wanted to hear everything she had to say about it. I said, "Mimi, how do we get from where we are to where we see ourselves being"? I'm ready, it's almost like pen and paper in hand and I'm ready for... You know what she said? And she said it like this too, "Just keep walking". And that's all she said. That was it right there.
— That was when we came over to that place that you had rented, and she and I came over and just talked to your group. What a powerful day that was.
— It was so special. And what she said to us that day, and it's really the exact same thing you said, "Do what's right in front of you". In other words, just keep walking. Take the step that's right in front of you to take. And without realizing it at the moment, you put the entire walk of faith in that one statement. You do what's in front of you to do. It doesn't matter what kind of super Christian you think you are, nobody can walk more than one step at a time.
— That's right.
— You can take a big step, but it's still just a step. And what you said to me that night as a senior in high school, what Mimi said to us all those years later, is exactly how we got from where we were then to where we are now, and it's exactly how we'll get from where we are now to where God's called us to be in 2022, in the years to come. It's how you, or you, or any of us get to where we're called to be, it's by taking a step. And what you said today about the wisdom of God, this is so crucial. Well, you read it. It is the principle thing.
— The principle, not a principle thing.
— It's the priority.
— The principle thing.
— I went back over the last several days, looking at the Word of the Lord that came through you about 2022 and listen to how much it goes right with what you were saying about that Partner Letter. You'll know what to do. This is the Word of the Lord. It is the year of correction.
— Yes.
— Direction.
— Yes.
— There's knowing what to do. Protection.
— Yes.
— Perfection in the spirit and the soul and the body. That's every area of your life. Now, one of the reasons I believe that's so significant, well, for everybody, but for us, for Sarah and I and our church, our family, our ministry, is one of the things the Lord's tasked us with, the assignment, the mission on our church, among other things, is to teach people how to prosper spirit, soul, and body. That's prospering in every area of your life. Now, for the last 10 plus years as Sarah and I have traveled, I've stood in front of congregations and churches and I've said things to them like, "You fill in the blank. A prosperous person is somebody who has a lot of..". And it's like they all rehearsed it like a choir. "Money". And I said, "That's interesting. Why didn't you say peace? Why didn't you say wisdom? Why didn't you say love"?
— They did just exactly what Solomon didn't do, and God commended him for that because Solomon asked for wisdom, not money. And he said, because of that, you'll have more than enough. And he became the wealthiest man that has ever lived.
— But if we're going to get to there, which is what this Word is talking about, because you follow the progression here. Correction, it's got to start there. This is what I want to get into. But what that results in is direction. What that results in is protection. If you're on the right path, you're in the safe place, wherever that is. What that results in is perfection. That completeness. That maturity. But it's in every area of your life. It's first spirit.
— Yes. Always.
— This is the order. It has to come this way. Prosperity has to come this way. It has to come spirit first. And Jesus said, talking about that rich man who's ground yielded plentifully, this guy who, listen to these words, these are Jesus' words, "Thought within himself, there's the problem".
— There's the problem.
— Never made it outside himself. He said, "I know what I'll do, since I don't have room to store everything..". That's a good problem, and it's a problem that I believe you and I are heading for. It's the promise of the windows of Heaven being opened above us and a blessing being poured out, so much there's no room enough to contain it. That's this guy's problem. "I don't have room to store my crops". But he got the wrong answer. "Here's what I'll do. I'll pull down my barns, build bigger ones, and there I'll have room to store my crops".
— Now think about that.
— That's his big vision storage units.
— Jeremy, think about that.
— You're just putting everything in storage.
— I'll tear down my barns. He's going to tear down his barns. That's stupid. "What's wrong with your barns"? "Well, they're not big enough". Well, build on, dumb, dumb.
— Why do you got to destroy it?
— Yeah. Why do you have in your mind to destroy what you have already built? Everything he's doing has no sense to it.
— And you see that because Jesus called him on it, and the guy said, "I've got many goods laid up for many years. I'm going to take my ease," which literally translates to do nothing. Do nothing. "I'm going to eat, drink, and be merry". This is his big vision, this wealthy man with all these means and all this stuff. You know what it is? It's a pathetic lack of vision.
— It really is. That's well said.
— And what Jesus said, God said, to the man was, "You fool, this night your soul will be required of you and then whose will those things be that you've provided"? There's the problem, he never got outside himself. And Jesus said, "So is he," or "So is he a fool who hoards up without having a rich relationship with God". That's prospering spirit first.
— And he had no successor.
— Exactly what you were saying.
— He had no successor.
— That's right.
— Oral Roberts University, what a successor. Our Bible College, people coming through there, taking the message into places I'll never be. And should the Lord tarry, I won't have a chance to even go there. They'll go places that I've never been. You're pastoring now, which neither one of us had any idea that's what you were called to do, but when you realized it and the thrill of that came. So all of it is wrapped up in what God already knows. I want to hear about how the direction came about being a pastor in the first place, and then how the direction came to go to Colorado, in the very place where you are now, which is absolutely beautiful, by the way, and to purchase this very strange piece of property to turn into a church. Now this ought take you a while, but it all had to do with direction. Correction.
— It did. Correction. Direction.
— Correction. Direction. All right, I stand corrected.
— I've stood that way a lot myself. Well, the Word the Lord gave Sarah and I years ago, years ago, when she and I sat down with Mimi and Pawpaw at their kitchen table and said, "Guys, the Lord's talking us. We submit this to you. We believe we're called into our own ministry". Now we'd been serving them for, I had been, for a long time, and Sarah and I got married and for a number of years that's what we were doing together. They prayed over this with us and said, "It's God. It's good," and helped us step into it. And the Word the Lord had given us for our ministry was not just a word, but a concept behind it, and it was legacy. And there's some real obvious reasons that we think in that way, but the Lord spoke to me years ago and said, "There are actually two kinds of legacies. There's the one you keep and the one you leave". This is what I've sensed is an assignment on our lives for a long time, is to serve as a bridge from one generation to the one that's coming after.
— That's good.
— Honestly, if you look at it, that's what you did, and that's what every one of us are called to do. Called to keep something and give it to somebody else. This is the assignment on our ministry, to take what we've been given and just become a bridge. I've stood on the platform of our church and I told everybody unashamedly, "We love y'all, but just so you know, we started this for our kids. We hope you enjoy it and get a lot out of it, but I'm thinking about them and I'm thinking about their generation and I'm thinking about what's coming up after us". That was the whole idea behind it, and that's what we started with all those years ago. And the first day in our own ministry in 2010, September 1st, 2010, Justice, our son, who's now 11 years old, was three months old at the time, we were in Colorado driving I-70 out through the Vale Valley, going, "Lord, where is it? It's got to be here somewhere". And we were right.
— I love it.
— We just were about 10 years off, that's all. But the time came, without telling the whole thing, the time came, we had come up on that trip, on many trips after that, we'd see you guys and stay at the house and pray and say, "Lord, our place has got to be here somewhere. It's got to be here somewhere". Until finally Sarah, when she was pregnant with Jesse, our second, we were up there in Steamboat, praying, and the Lord said, "Not yet. Go home and just get established". We said, "Okay". That would've been in right about 2013 or so, 12, 13. So we went home and we just dug into our own ministry. We launched our television broadcast and we were traveling out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and just going right along. Until 2018, here comes all this Colorado thing again. And the Lord just woke it back up on the inside of us. And when it happened, it surprised me because I had not forgotten about it, but just thought, well, maybe we'll just have a place there someday. Maybe we'll just go there and rest, like you guys have done, and hadn't thought a lot about it. But all of that vision and excitement about it came back up again in a strong way. From October of 2018 to January of 19, it got so solid in us, I knew we were going. And I went before the Lord and I said, "Father, you got to help me understand this". Because we were here in Texas and we had bought a piece of property, we'd built out in it, and we were looking to acquire more land around us. And I said, "Lord"...
— It was an absolute miracle the way you got the property.
— Yeah, it was. The Lord was involved in all of it. But I said, "Lord, we were doing this and now you're saying this". And he said two words to me, and you'll know about this, he said "Course correction".
— Yes.
— Course correction. And he took me right here to Proverbs 1, and I want to read it...
— Just so that all of you know, this young man is an excellent pilot and I'm going to tell a little story on him.
— Oh, boy. Well, we're out of time. No? We got... Okay.
— He and his very close friend learned how to fly at the same time, and now there are two different kinds of navigation in all airplanes, you have satellite based navigation, but the form of navigation that we had before we had satellite is still available and very important, it's called short range navigation, or the VOR system, variable omnirange system. I said, "Now, Jeremy, the first you get that private license you're going to want to go somewhere immediately. Now, before you leave the ground, you make sure that you have your navigation already set up in the secondary system". "Oh, yeah, Pawpaw". "You make sure of that before you go, now. Because if something happens to the satellite, or if something happens to the receiver, you're going to be sitting there fumbling around wondering what in the world am I going to do? What radial am I supposed to fly? Where are my other charts"? You want to tell what you did?
— No, I don't. He walked me through the whole thing and taught me how to triangulate and find out where you are and you got your map, and I won't take time to explain the whole thing, but basically you use exactly what he's talking about and you find out where you are in the intersection of these radials. So, sure enough, I'm up there and I'm just trying to do visual looking at the map and seeing where am visually. Long story short, 30 minutes into the flight I am lost. And you don't pull over and ask for directions. And I thought, okay, I'm going to do what Pawpaw said. And I'm getting my lines, and my lines look like this. Not like this. Like this. And so I'm trying to figure out where I am, and by the grace and mercy of God, I made it home. And my instructor was waiting for me said, "How was your flight"? "It was fine. This is fine. I got to go". God is merciful.
— Yes, he is.
— So is Pawpaw.
— So is grandfathers.
— But that's what the Lord said.
— Now, all of this has to do with the wisdom of those that went before us. It goes all the way back to the Wright brothers, who, by the way, were strong Christian men. Bishop Wright, that seminary is still there in Dayton, Ohio. They telegraphed. He was the one that encouraged them to go on with this thing. "You can do this. You can fly". They said they telegraphed and said, "We have an appointment with the queen". The Bishop wrote back and said, "That's fine. Don't drink her wine". They said, "Okay". And we're out of time. We have a correction here.
— Yes.
— Come on, everybody, give the Lord praise. Thank You, God. Thank You, Lord Jesus. Praise the Lord. Thank You, Lord. Thank You, Jesus.