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