Strife will cause the grace of God to fail in our lives. Strife, unforgiveness, being critical—these things restrain the Holy Spirit from moving on our behalf. He will be hindered in blessing
and favoring us, because the Spirit of God ministers grace through our obedience.

“This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you” (John 15:12). We are to love as Jesus loved. If we don’t walk in love, we won’t be able to walk in the manifested grace of God on a day-to-day basis. If we fail to keep this commandment, the work of God’s Spirit is greatly hindered in our lives.

If you have been praying for some specific needs, but have not been getting results, check your love life. Are you loving the people with whom you come into contact? If not, the power of God is restrained in your life because you are walking in disobedience. Until the love of God begins to operate in your life, the Holy Spirit will be unable to minister unhindered to you to accomplish in your life the good that God desires.

The Bible says when man subverts his ways, his heart frets against the Lord (Proverbs 19:3, The Amplified Bible). Many times we go about living the way we want and simply expect God to fill in the gaps when we get into trouble.

When trouble comes, we say, “God, why did You let this happen to me?”

God did not let it happen to you. You let it happen to you by being disobedient.

You might say, “Well, I didn’t know any better.” Then you need to become more knowledgeable. You cannot stay in ignorance and stay in blessing at the same time. Satan will cram defeat down your throat as long as you will stand there and take it.

The word grace means “free, undeserved favor.” The Greek word for grace is charis. When Christians believe in the gifts of the Spirit, they are called charismatics. What are the gifts of the Spirit? They are simply gifts of God’s grace shed abroad in our midst. We don’t deserve them. We can’t earn them. They come at God’s will. They are a manifestation of His grace. Many times a person who receives a gift will not even be standing in faith. (In this situation, someone’s faith is active, but not necessarily the one who receives.) God just comes down by His grace and distributes the gifts of the Spirit as He wills. Why? Because God is good. The gifts of the Spirit are gifts of grace. God lavishes them upon us because of His goodness and His mercy.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

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

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

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

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

“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.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

Grief and sorrow are dangerous. Years ago, God started jerking the wraps off them and unveiling their true nature to me in a startling way. He showed me that they’re not the innocent emotions we’ve thought they were. They are actually spirit beings sent by the devil himself to steal, kill and destroy.

In fact, grief and sorrow were part of the devastating, satanic barrage Jesus took on Himself when He died on the cross. Isaiah 53:4 says: “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.” That phrase, “griefs and sorrows,” can also be translated sickness, weakness and pain. But any way you translate it, they’re all pieces of the same destructive puzzle.

Grief and sorrow are part of the devil’s game. They are the ever-present, shadowing companions of death. Jesus bore them on the cross, so we wouldn’t have to. Yet countless Christians are still shouldering them today. In doing so, they’re ignoring the direct command in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14, where we are clearly told to “sorrow not!”

Let’s read that scripture: “I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and
rose again....”

Stop there and notice that according to those verses, sorrow is only for those who have no hope, who don’t believe that Jesus died and rose again.

So, obviously, it’s not for you! As a believer, you do have hope—not just where physical death is concerned but in every other circumstance as well. In order to partake of sorrow about a particular situation, you’re going to have to reject the hope you’ve been given through Calvary concerning that situation. You can’t have hope and sorrow at the same time!

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

It comes disguised as a simple, “healthy” emotion. Then, little by little, it drains you dry. It is devious and destructive, and it’s the constant companion of death itself.

Singing the blues. It’s one of humanity’s favorite pastimes. Everyone does it in one form or another. Drunks balance on bar stools and blubber about how hard life is. Christians clutch their hymnals and sing mournfully about the same thing.

They all think they’re doing it because they’re sad. But they’re not. They’re doing it because, in a peculiar kind of way, they like it.

I first realized this years ago, before I met Jesus, when I was singing in nightclubs and bars. It seemed that no matter where I went, some guy would come stumbling up to me and ask me to sing Melancholy Baby—not so he could forget about his sorrows, but so he could burrow more deeply into them. So he could really, really get into the blues.

On the surface that may seem strange. But, the truth is, you’ve probably done the same kind of thing yourself. We all have.

Why would we actually choose to feel sorrow? Because sorrow has an emotional kick to it. It offers a surge of feeling that, in the beginning stages, is almost intoxicating.

The great blues singers have made their living off people who wanted to feel that rush of emotion. But it’s interesting to note that the really great blues singers don’t usually live very long. Take Billie Holiday, for example. People begged to hear her sing because the spirits of grief and sorrow within her were so intense they just seemed to reach out and grab you when you heard her. Yet those same spirits that made her blues so gripping, drove her to destruction.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

Then, “having done all to stand, stand” until your healing is fully manifest (see Ephesians 6 6:12-14). Steadfastly hold your ground. Don’t waver. For as James 1:6-8 8 says, “he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord. A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.”

If your condition is serious, you may also have to resist the temptation to worry. The devil will try to use anxiety over your situation to choke the Word in your heart and make it unfruitful (Mark 4:19), but don’t let him succeed. Just trust God, “casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you” (1 Peter 5:7) and constantly keep in mind these wonderful words from Hebrews:

He Who promised is reliable (sure) and faithful to His word.... Do not, therefore, fling away your fearless confidence, for it carries a great and glorious compensation of reward. For you have need of steadfast patience and endurance, so that you may perform and fully accomplish the will of God, and thus receive and carry away [and enjoy to the full] what is promised (Hebrews 10:23, 35-36, The Amplified Bible).

Above all, keep your attention trained on the Word—not on lingering symptoms. Be like Abraham who “considered not his own body” (Romans 4:19). Instead of focusing on your circumstances, focus on what God has said to you. Develop an inner image of yourself with your healing fully manifest. See yourself well. See yourself whole. See yourself healed in every way.

Since what you keep before your eyes and in your ears determines what you will believe in your heart and what you will act on, make the Word your No. 1 priority. Attend to it—and it will attend to you!

Kenneth Copeland Ministries