12Nov/100

Kenneth Copeland — Exposing the Deadly Nature of Grief Pt 7

Kenneth and Gloria Copeland

Those kinds of supernatural experiences don’t come to you when you’re squalling and bawling, yielding to the devil’s henchmen. They don’t come to you when you can be bought off with a two-bit rush of emotion called grief. They come to you when you’re willing to fight the devil and live by faith, yielding to the Holy Spirit. They come when you refuse to give in to sorrow—even when the devil puts the pressure on. Can you see how we’ve been robbing ourselves by playing the devil’s deadly game?

Several months after Stanley left, while Gloria and I were in a meeting, a woman who had a prophetic ministry came and spoke to Gloria. “I don’t know what this means,” she said, “but a fellow told me to give you this message.”

Then she explained that she’d been praying and interceding recently when, in a vision, God had caught her away to heaven. She found herself standing in a huge dining room, having a discussion with someone. Their discussion had nothing to do with Gloria and me. Yet while she was there, a young man who had been setting places at the big table nearby came over to her. He said, “Tell Gloria, Stanley wasn’t in the truck.”

Do you see? This stuff is real! Real, you understand? It’s a lot more real than this death game we’ve been playing!

My friend, we can’t afford this devilish game of grief and sorrow anymore. It is killing us—it is stealing the real and powerful experiences God wants to give us, and destroying us in a far deeper way than we ever imagined.

So don’t give in to it anymore. When the devil tries to burden you with grief and sorrow, resist him. You may have to walk the floor all night long. But instead of worrying and crying, walk the floor and quote the Word until that sorry spirit leaves and the real rush and overflow comes—the joy of the Lord, which is your strength.

Remember who you are! You’re the one who shall obtain gladness and joy. You’re the one sorrow and grief shall flee away from. You’ve got no business singing the blues. You’re the redeemed of the Lord.
Don’t you think it’s about time you started saying so?

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

Tagged as: blues, emotions, faith, grief, joy, sorrow, Spirit, strength, vision No Comments

4Nov/100

Kenneth Copeland — Exposing the Deadly Nature of Grief Pt 6

Kenneth and Gloria Copeland

Let me tell you about an incident that happened in our family. It will show you clearly what I mean. One of Gloria’s younger brothers went home to be with the Lord quite suddenly because of a car wreck.
Stanley’s departure took us all by surprise. No one was prepared for it.

When we got the news, the spirit of grief attacked like a flash, trying to get a foothold. I walked up and down my den floor fighting it in the Name of Jesus. Every time my emotions would try to rise up, I’d
say, “No, no, no! I will not partake of sorrow. I partake of joy and gladness.” Up and down I walked, praising God until it was whipped.

Once I got grief and sorrow out of the way, I began praying for Gloria’s mother, Mary. As I prayed, the force of compassion came up on the inside of me so powerfully that it just gushed up through me. When it did, I had a vision. I saw Stanley in heaven. I saw him just as plainly as I’ve ever seen anyone.

To fully appreciate the vision, you have to understand that Stanley was a brick and rock mason, a very powerful man, physically. He worked hard with his arms so he used to cut the sleeves out of his shirts. You just couldn’t get him to wear a shirt with sleeves in it.

When I saw him that day, he was running across a pasture. (Yes, a pasture! Heaven’s not made of clouds, you know. The earth is a copy of heaven, so the two look a lot alike.) Anyway, he was wearing
a robe, a good-looking robe, and life was all over him. The wild thing was, that robe didn’t have any sleeves in it!

Now isn’t that just like Jesus to give Stanley a robe without any sleeves in it? When I saw him, the Lord spoke to me and said, Tell Mary I snatched him out of that truck before the collision. He never knew anything about it.

Here’s what I want you to see. If I’d let grief and sorrow come in and take over the way they tried to, I wouldn’t have been able to receive that wave of compassion. I wouldn’t have been moved by God’s power, and I certainly wouldn’t have seen Stanley. I wouldn’t have seen anything but grief and sorrow.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

Tagged as: compassion, death, earth, family, grief, heaven, joy, praise, shirt, sorrow, vision No Comments

28Oct/100

Kenneth Copeland — Exposing the Deadly Nature of Grief Pt 5

Kenneth and Gloria Copeland

As a believer, you’ve been redeemed from the curse of grief and sorrow by the blood of Jesus Christ. You don’t have to put up with them any more than you have to put up with sin, sickness or disease. So,
if you’ll follow the instructions in James 4:7 and resist them, they’ll have to flee from you!

Psalm 107:2 tells you how to do that. It says, “Let the redeemed of the Lord say so!...” That means when sorrow and grief start bearing down on you, say, “Oh no you don’t! I’m the redeemed of the Lord. I’ve been delivered from the likes of you. So you just get right on out of here!”

God started teaching me about this personally several months before my mother went home to be with Him in August 1988. Every time He’d show me something about it, I’d put it into practice. (You ought to do that with anything God is teaching you. Start practicing it immediately so you can walk in it when the time comes!)

So, eight-and-a-half months before my mother went home to be with the Lord, I began standing against grief and sorrow. I made a decision to “sorrow not.” Immediately the devil began to attack my emotions.

But I’d say, “No. I won’t receive that. I take authority over these feelings in Jesus’ Name. I’ve given my body as a sacrifice well-pleasing to the Lord, and I won’t partake of anything but His joy.” Then I’d start speaking the Word and praising out loud. “I sorrow not. I’m the redeemed of the Lord, and I’m not going to tolerate grief, you understand? I rejoice; I rejoice in my momma’s homegoing! I release her to You, Lord Jesus!”

When I did that, the spirit of grief would go away for a while. Then it would come back and try again. I went through three rugged days of that, and each time I resisted it. The last time that spirit came at me, he was whimpering. “Please?” he begged. I just said, “Nope. Get!” After that he was gone.

What I’m telling you is this: You’re going to have to stand against grief and sorrow. They don't belong to you. They are not from your heavenly Father. But the devil’s a scoundrel. He’ll put them over on you if you’ll let him get away with it.

We’ve let him saddle us with grief and sorrow for too long. It’s time we put a stop to it. Once we do, some glorious things will happen.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

Tagged as: curse, deliverance, grief, joy, praise, redeemed, resist, sorrow No Comments

18Oct/100

Kenneth Copeland — Exposing the Deadly Nature of Grief Pt 4

Kenneth and Gloria Copeland

Webster defines grief as “a heavy emotional weight resulting from loss.” That’s how it feels, isn’t it? Like a heavy weight on your heart that’s aching for release. When you give in to it, there’s a rush, a wave of emotion that rolls over you and the tears overflow. It feels good. Your friends nod, pat your back and say, “Go ahead...just let it all out.” So you do, and the pressure lets up for a while.

Then later, when all the mourners and the back patters have gone home, that grief comes rising up in you again. This time it comes with an overwhelming pain of loneliness that is almost unbearable.

That’s the agony that woman in Oklahoma had been through for years. People had probably told her that time would help. But it didn’t, because once she allowed these spirits of grief and sorrow to get inside her, they just kept on doing their deadly work.

Contrary to popular belief, grief and sorrow don’t come to help you. They come to hurt you. They’re deceivers sent for one purpose: to choke the Word of God out of your heart.

In Mark 4:18-20, Jesus warned us about that. He told us that the devil would come to steal the Word from our hearts, and one way would be through the lusts of other things entering in. Most of us have assumed that phrase referred only to sex and pleasure. But the Holy Spirit has shown me plainly that the spirits of grief and sorrow fall in this category.

If you’ll look up the word lust in the dictionary, you’ll find that it literally means “applied pressure.” Sorrow comes when the devil applies pressure to our emotions. He pressures us to give in to the fleshly tendency to grieve—to lust after and long for that emotional flood and release that sorrow initially provides.

So what should we do about all this? If grief and sorrow are not inevitable—if, in fact, they’re part of the devil’s bag of misery and death—how do we get rid of them?

Isaiah 51:11 says, “The redeemed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing unto Zion; and everlasting joy shall be upon their head: they shall obtain gladness and joy; and sorrow and [grief] shall flee away.” Did you hear that? It said sorrow and grief will run from us!

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

Tagged as: emotions, grief, joy, lust, pressure, sorrow, weight, Word of God No Comments

4Oct/100

Kenneth Copeland — Exposing the Deadly Nature of Grief Pt 3

Kenneth and Gloria Copeland

“But, Brother Copeland,” you may say, “aren’t grief and sorrow just natural emotions?”

Yes, they are. That’s what makes them so dangerous. We’ve seen them as such a natural part of life that we haven’t even questioned them. As believers, we’ve just opened the church door and let them come right in.

Most people don’t realize it, but those sorrowful old hymns we’ve sung on Sundays aren’t much different from the secular blues songs I used to sing years ago. It was a shock to me when I first came out of the beer joints and into the Body of Christ to hear church folks singing songs written by guys I’d known in my earlier days.

By their own admission, they didn’t know Jesus and didn’t plan to know Him. But they sure knew how to write sorrowful, gut-wrenching music. So they threw in a few Bible phrases, called it gospel music, and started peddling it among believers.

We bought it, too! We swallowed it hook, line and sinker. We didn’t even question the source. It just seemed natural.

Some believers will even fight you for the right to be sad. When I was teaching a series of meetings on prayer in Oklahoma, a woman was there who was grieving over the death of one of her children. Although it had been several years since the child had died, she was still deep in sorrow and grief when I met her.

After one of the sessions, she came up to me to tell me how she’d prayed and prayed over that child and it hadn’t done any good. She was crying as she spoke. Again and again, she sobbed, “My baby died...my baby died....”

When I opened my mouth to reply, the Spirit of God came on me and I said to her, “God didn’t take your child. You let the devil beat you at the game of life, and he’s still whipping you today.”

Suddenly, she was furious. She wasn’t about to let me or anyone else take her grief away from her. Her husband had to take her out, she was so mad.

The next night, however, she came back with a smile on her face. Something had obviously changed. “Brother Copeland,” she said, “please forgive me. How can I ever thank you? For all these years I’ve been so caught up in grief that I’ve failed my family. I haven’t been a wife to my husband or a mother to my children.

“When I got to thinking about what you’ve been teaching on prayer, I remembered all the unbelief we cried and prayed over that baby. We thought it was prayer, but there wasn’t any real prayer to it. We just all agreed she was dying and kept hollering about it. We didn’t release any faith to keep it from happening.

“I did let the devil beat me, back then, and he’s been beating me ever since. But I’m telling you this: I will never let him do it again.”

If you’ve ever been seduced by grief, like this woman was, you’ve experienced an addictive kind of agony. You’ve found that even though the sorrow hurts, there’s something in it that makes you reluctant to let it go.