Kenneth Copeland — Exposing the Deadly Nature of Grief Pt 4
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
Kenneth Copeland — Exposing the Deadly Nature of Grief Pt 3
“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
Kenneth Copeland — Exposing the Deadly Nature of Grief Pt 2
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
Kenneth Copeland — Exposing the Deadly Nature of Grief Pt 1
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
Kenneth Copeland — Having Done All…Stand! Part 2
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
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