Good News! By Kenneth Copeland
“Go ye therefore and teach all nations
that God is mad at them.”
That’s not what Jesus said in the Great
Commission. But all too often, that is the
message traditional religion has preached.
People (believers and unbelievers alike)
have been told how unworthy they are.
They’ve been told what sorry creatures
they are. They’ve been told they don’t
act right or talk right or pray right.
Sound familiar? If so, I have some good
news for you today: God is not mad at you.
In fact, He’s not mad at anybody!
The Bible says He [God] “was in Christ,
reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing
their trespasses unto them” (2 Corinthians 5:19).
Every person ever born on this earth has already
been guaranteed by God, the right to stand
before Him without any sense of guilt or shame.
Every person, no matter how covered in sin he
may be, qualifies to receive God’s righteousness.
Not everyone takes advantage of it, but everyone
has the opportunity.
Statements like that shock religious people.
Do you know why? Because, as Romans 10:3
says, “They being ignorant of God’s righteousness,
and going about to establish their own
righteousness, have not submitted themselves
unto the righteousness of God.”
That’s what religion always does. It tries
to establish its own righteousness, its own
rules, its own right-standing with God.
Religion says, if you act right, talk right,
dress right and look right, then God will
give you favor.
But God isn’t religious. He says, I don’t
want you to establish your own righteousness.
I want to give you Mine. But before you can
receive it, you have to quit trying to establish
your own.
You can’t earn the righteousness of God.
There’s nothing you can do to deserve it. It’s
God’s gift. All you can do is receive it.
When I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord,
God declared me righteous. I didn’t look very
righteous. I called on liquor stores back then.
Alcohol was my business. I sold it and I
drank it. But the day I submitted to Jesus,
my life changed.
I went back to work the next Monday
morning in those same liquor stores. I didn’t
know a thing about the Bible. I only knew
I was different. Soon, I began to tell people
that I had two kinds of spirits, alcoholic
spirits and the Holy Spirit. “Which one do
you want to hear about first?” I’d ask.
I found that many of them were interested
in Jesus. They weren’t interested in religion,
but they were interested in knowing that God
was no longer “imputing their trespasses” to
them. They were interested in knowing that
He had settled the account of the whole
world’s sins. That was good news!
The sad thing is many believers—people
who have already been made righteous in
Jesus—don’t fully grasp that news. They
don’t realize God isn’t mad at them. They
don’t realize they can go boldly before the
throne of God without shame—dressed in
the righteousness of Jesus Christ.
That’s because they’ve been taught to focus
more on how they’ve messed up than on what
Jesus has done for them. They’re more sin-conscious
than they are righteousness-conscious.
Kenneth Copeland Ministries
The Spirit of Faith by Kenneth Copeland
The Apostle Paul refers to the spirit of
faith in 2 Corinthians 4:13 saying, “We having
the same spirit of faith, according as it is written,
I believed, and therefore have I spoken; we also
believe, and therefore speak.”
The spirit of faith speaks! It calls things
that be not as though they were. It makes
faith confessions—not because it’s “supposed
to” or out of desperation, but because it’s so
full of eager anticipation and confident
expectation it can’t keep its mouth shut!
The spirit of faith says, “I don’t care what
God has to do, He’ll turn the world upside
down if He has to, but He will change this
situation for me.”
Every time I talk about the spirit of faith,
I think about my high school football team.
For years, the teams from that school had
been losing teams. But something happened
to the bunch on my team. A spirit of winning
got into them.
When we were sophomores, we were on the
B squad. We were the nothings. But somehow
we got the idea that we could win. Every year
the B squad would have to scrimmage the
varsity team, and usually the varsity just beat
the daylights out of the sophomores.
But the year our B squad played them,
that changed. We didn’t just beat them, we
had them down by several touchdowns, just
daring them to get the ball, when the coach
called off the game. He was so mad at the
varsity team, he didn’t even let us finish.
What happened to that little B squad?
We reached the point where we expected to
win. We had an inner image of ourselves as
winners, and it eventually took the best team
in the state to beat us.
The same thing happened to Gloria and
me in 1967 when we went into the ministry.
We began to have an inner image of preaching
the Word of God to thousands upon
thousands of people. It was 10 years before
we could gather up more than a handful of
them at a time for one service, but we didn’t
let that stop us.
We saw the thousands in our heart and
in our mind and we just kept our necks stuck
out—in more ways than one—expecting God
to bring the people. Sure enough, He did.
Of course, there were some hard times.
Times when people stayed away from our
meetings by the millions. Times when I
preached to 17 people with the same intensity
that I would preach to 6,000.
That’s what hope does. It keeps you
intensely focused on God’s promise. It keeps
you seeing that promise on the inside, even
when you can’t see it on the outside. It keeps
you operating by the spirit of faith.
When you have hope, the devil can’t beat
you down. He can’t tear you down. He can’t
stop your faith from working. Everyone
around you can just stop in their tracks, but
you’ll keep right on going.
When the devil knocks you down, you
just get up with a deeper resolve to hit him
harder the next time...and harder the next
time...and harder the next time.
You get to the point where you expect
God to move with such vigor that all the
distractions in the world can’t turn your
head. All the failures of the past drift into
nothingness. You can’t even remember them
anymore because you’re so absorbed with the
expectation of what God is about to do.
When that happens, you no longer sit
around wondering what went wrong. You
blast off into the glory of God, laying hold
of His promises and watching your dreams
come true. You live the kind of life that those
who give up hope will never know.
Kenneth Copeland Ministries
Stick Your Neck Out by Kenneth Copeland
How do you develop that kind of hope? You
stay in the Word until your neck stretches
out. I particularly like that part of the
definition of hope because I know what it
means to have your neck outstretched.
When I was a little boy, my grandfather
was my hero. He was a full-blooded
Cherokee Indian and I wanted to act like
him, look like him, curse like him, chew
tobacco like him and spit like him—much
to my mother’s chagrin. When my mother
would tell me that he and my grandmother
were coming to see us, I would get so
excited I could hardly wait.
Every minute or two, I’d run to the window
to see if they had arrived. Every noise sent
me running for the door. I tell you, my neck
was stretched out in anticipation. My
Pawpaw was coming and I expected him
any moment.
That may sound like a silly example, but the
Lord once told me if people would just
expect Him to move as much as a child
expects his grandparents to arrive, He could
move on their situation and change things
drastically by the power of His Spirit.
That’s what happened in Acts 3 to the
crippled man at the gate Beautiful. He had
been sitting by that gate begging, his head
down and his eyes to the ground. But when
Peter and John walked by and said, “Look on
us!” that man lifted his head and began
to expect.
Hope rose up in him because he was
“expecting to receive something of them”
(verse 5).
Of course, he received a lot more than he
was expecting—he expected alms, but he
got legs! That’s because his expectancy
hooked into their expectancy—and, believe
me, their expectancy was running high!
It hadn’t been more than a few days since
Jesus had risen from the dead, defeated
the devil and all of hell with him. It hadn’t
been but a few days since Jesus had looked
the disciples straight in the eyes and said,
“Now, you go into all the world and use My
Name to cast out devils. You lay hands on
the sick and they’ll recover.”
(See Mark 16:15-18.)
I can just imagine Peter saying, “Hey, John,
you know that crippled beggar down there
by the temple? Come on, let’s go use the
Name on him!”
They could see themselves doing what
Jesus said they could do. Their hope was
“white hot.” So they went charging down
to the temple and said to that cripple, “In
the Name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise
up and walk.”
When they said it, they grabbed him. He had
to walk, brother! They yanked him completely
off the ground (Acts 3:1-8). What made them
do such a thing?
Expectancy!
They didn’t tiptoe up to that gate, look
around to make sure no one was watching
and then whisper, “Dear Lord, if it be Thy
will, heal this poor crippled man.”
The only people who pray “if it be Thy will”
are those who don’t have any hope or
expectancy. If you’ve been praying that
way, stop it! Go to the Word and find out
what God’s will is. The Word of God is His will.
It is His will for you to be well. It is His
will for you to be prosperous. It is His will for
you to lay hands on the sick and it is His
will for them to recover.
So stay in the Word until you’re so confident
and expectant that your neck is stuck out
in anticipation. Meditate on the Word until
your hope gets crisp and that image inside
you gets strong and clear.
Stay in there until you’re so full of expectancy
that when someone walks up to you and says,
“Good morning,” you jump on them like a
chicken on a bug saying, “Yes! Bless God!
It is a good morning. Do you have anything
wrong with you? I’ll lay hands on you right
now and you’ll get healed!” Once hope gets
that strong, it becomes courage...and hope
plus courage equals the spirit of faith in
action!
Kenneth Copeland Ministries
Supernatural Expectancy by Kenneth Copeland
Before you can understand how important
hope is, you have to realize that real,
Bible hope is not “wishing.” That’s worldly hope.
People in the world say, “I sure wish I would
get a raise at work,” when what they mean is,
“I want a raise. I don’t think I will get it...but
it would be nice if I did.”
The kind of hope the Word of God talks about
is much stronger than that because it’s
not based on wishing or wanting. It is based
on your covenant with God and the anointing
God has provided to carry out that covenant
in your life.
In fact, Ephesians 2:12 says before you knew
Jesus, you were “without Christ [or without the
anointing], being aliens from the commonwealth
of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of
promise, having no hope, and without God in the
world.”
“But, Brother Copeland,” you say, “I’m a believer.
I know God’s promises. Doesn’t that mean I have
all the hope I need?” Not necessarily. You see,
hope comes when you take those promises, keep
them before your eyes and in your ears until they
begin to build an image inside you. Hope comes
when you begin to see yourself with what God has
promised you—instead of seeing yourself without it.
When you have hope, you have a supernatural
expectancy that what God has promised
will come to pass in your life. The Apostle Paul
talks about that kind of supernatural expectancy
in Philippians 1:19-20 where he says, “I know
that this shall turn to my salvation through your
prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ,
according to my earnest expectation and my
hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed….”
In that scripture, Paul uses two different words
from the Greek language, each of which
can be translated hope. One of them means
“the happy anticipation of good.” The other
can be defined as “eager longing, strained
discovering the power in supernatural
expectancy, watching with an outstretched head,
and abstraction from anything else that
might engage the attention.”
When divine hope comes alive in you, you’re so
locked in on the Word of God, you can’t be
distracted from it. I know what that’s like. There
have been times in my life when I was so focused
on something God had called me to do, and I was
so tuned in to what the Word said about it,
I couldn’t think about anything else.
People would try to have a conversation with
me and I’d always end up talking about
my hope. It would come up so big inside me
that at those times, I was bigger on the inside
than I was on the outside.
When your hope gets that strong, it doesn’t
matter what kind of unbelief the devil
tries to throw your way, it just bounces off you.
You’re so one-track minded, you can’t
be drawn off course.
Back when Gloria and I first found out about
faith, I was like that all the time. If someone
walked up to me and said something that
sounded like unbelief, I would just one word
from god can change your destiny explode all
over them. (I’m still like that, actually, I’ve just
learned to be a little more gentle about it!)
One night I was in a bookstore, in a church
where I was preaching, when one of those
explosions took place. I had stepped up to the
cash register to buy my book and when I
reached in my pocket to get my money, I sniffed.
I just sniffed! I don’t know why I did it. I guess
I just felt like sniffing. When I did, the lady
running the bookstore said to me, "Is it a cold or
hay fever?”
Almost before I knew what I was doing, I had
opened my mouth and started spurting the Word
as fast as I could talk. “THE WORD OF THE LIVING
GOD SAYS IN GALATIANS 3:13, I’M REDEEMED
FROM THE CURSE OF THE LAW. DEUTERONOMY 28:61
SAYS ALL SICKNESS AND DISEASE IS UNDER THE
CURSE AND I AM REDEEMED FROM THE CURSE OF
HAY FEVER. I DON’T HAVE COLDS, IN JESUS’ NAME!
I’VE BEEN WASHED IN THE BLOOD OF JESUS! AND
BY JESUS’ STRIPES I AM HEALED! discovering the
power in supernatural expectancy HE BORE MY
SICKNESSES AND CARRIED MY DISEASES....”
I nearly pinned that lady to the wall with the
Word of God. Finally, she exclaimed, “Forgive me,
Brother Copeland. I knew I was in trouble when
I said that! But I finally understand what you’ve
been preaching about. I’ve had migraine headaches
all my life. I have one right now, but if you’ll lay
your hand on me, I’ll be healed.” I did—and she
was!
What happened to her? That explosion of the
Word went into her heart and suddenly she could
see herself healed. Her hope came to a crisp
sharpness. She saw an inner image of who she
is in Christ Jesus and that no migraine could stay
in her body. The minute she did, the force of
faith went to work and brought that image to pass!
That’s what the Bible means when it says “faith is
the substance of things hoped for”!