Let’s not be like the Galatian Christians. Christ became of no effect to them. They fell from grace—they deprived themselves of the ministry of the Holy Spirit from Whom they received daily grace for daily living. You and I need not spend one day in darkness and defeat if we will be obedient to God and listen to His Spirit.

We read in Romans 8:13-14: “...if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.”

The word sons in the Greek means “mature sons” of God. “For they [our earthly fathers] verily for a few days chastened [or disciplined] us after their own pleasure; but he [God] for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness” (Hebrews 12:10).

The Holy Spirit is here for our profit. He is here to instruct us. The word chastened does not mean He makes us sick or knocks us in the head. It means He teaches, instructs, admonishes, corrects and disciplines us. “Thus saith the Lord, thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel; I am the Lord thy God which teacheth thee to profit, which leadeth thee by the way that thou shouldest go. O that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments! then had thy peace been as a river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea” (Isaiah 48:17-18).

God teaches us to profit. He is in us to teach us to profit in all things, first of all spiritual things. When we profit in spiritual things, profit in the natural realm is the byproduct.

He will teach us how to be holy as He is holy. We are to be separated from the world so we live like the Father instead of like the world.

Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees; and make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed. Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord: looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled (Hebrews 12:11-15).

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

The Word tells us to “count it all joy when
we fall into divers temptations” (James 1:2) or,
as the Greek text says, “into different trials
and tribulations.” What does the Word say
about joy? There is a difference between joy and
happiness. Happiness is controlled by the
condition or the comfort of the five physical
senses. Joy is not. The Bible says that joy is a
fruit of the spirit. It is a spiritual force—it is
born inside the human heart. We read in
Nehemiah 8:10 that the joy of the Lord is
our strength, so we can count it strength
when these trials and tribulations come our
way. Don’t count it defeat—count it strength!
Don’t count it negative—count it affirmative!
Jesus said, “Ask, and ye shall receive, that your
joy may be full” (John 16:24). Count it
answered prayer.

To count it all joy does not mean that you
are to thank God because your child is sick.
Let’s look at a portion of the Scripture here
that is often misunderstood.

Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing.
In every thing give thanks: for this
is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning
you. (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)
Some of us have read this verse and
thought, “The will of God is for me to give
thanks for everything.” That is not true. That
thing or circumstance
is not the will of God for you—giving
thanks is the will of God. When
you praise God and give Him thanks in the
midst of your situation, you step under the
protective umbrella of the will of God. You
may not know what the Word says about
your particular situation, but the Word does
say to give thanks. Then, while you are under
that protective umbrella, Satan can’t touch you.

You may ask, “How do you count it all joy, Sister
Copeland?” I had a good opportunity to do this one
night when my little daughter had a high
fever. I went into her room, laid hands on
her and prayed, “Father, in the Name of
Jesus, I count it all joy to prove once again
that the Word is real and filled with power.
I’m a faith man, and I’m not moved by what
I see. I’m turning her over to You, and I
believe that You will take care of her in Jesus’
Name. Now, I just praise You and thank You
for her healing.” I didn’t praise God for her
fever because it wasn’t hers and God didn’t
give it to her. Jesus bore her sickness and
disease. If it belonged to anyone, it belonged
to Satan, who was trying to put it on her.

I have accepted Calvary as the sacrifice
that paid the price for my total redemption—
from sin, sickness, poverty, and death. I
believe that and I stand on it. I have certain
rights, called righteousness, in the kingdom
of God and one of these is the right to a
healthy body. Jesus has provided it for me,
and I take hold of it with my faith.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

The reason we haven’t seen more of that
kind of thing is that until recently, the Body
of Christ has put very little emphasis on joy.
There was even a time when we thought the
more grief-stricken you were during church,
the more spiritual you were.

There is nothing further from the truth.
God is full of joy. Jesus is a man of joy. So
if we’re going to follow after Him, we’ll have
to be full of joy too!

Joy used to be my weakest area, spiritually.
I spent so much time majoring on faith that
I didn’t pay much attention to it. But the
Lord eventually taught me that you can’t live
by faith without joy.

That’s because it takes strength to live by
faith. We’re surrounded by a world that is
flowing toward death. The natural pull of it
is always negative. When you leave things
alone and don’t work against that negative
flow, they always get worse—not better. If
you leave a garden unattended, it dies for
lack of water or gets taken over by weeds.
If you leave a house unattended, the paint
peels off and the boards begin to rot.

To move toward life you must constantly
swim upstream. If you ever get too weak
spiritually to do that, you’ll find yourself
being swept back toward sickness, lack or
some other form of defeat. So you can never
afford to run out of strength.

No wonder the Apostle Paul wrote,
“Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say,
Rejoice” (Philippians 4:4)! To rejoice means
to re-joy, to back up your spiritual truck and
get another load of it.

Paul understood the link between joy and
strength. That’s why he prayed for the
Colossians to be “strengthened with all might,
according to [God’s] glorious power, unto all
patience and longsuffering with joyfulness”

(Colossians 1:11). If you were to diagram that
sentence and take out the intervening phrases,
you would find it actually says we are strengthened
with all might with joyfulness!

Paul reaffirmed what was true in
Nehemiah’s day under the Old Covenant is
still true today under the New Covenant. The
joy of the Lord is our strength!

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

Read Colossians 1:11 again and you’ll
see it is that joy-inspired strength, which
enables us to be patient and long-suffering.
(So, if you’ve been running short of patience
lately, check your joy supply. That could be
what you’re lacking.)

Read Ephesians 6:10 and you’ll see it
takes that same strength to operate your
spiritual armor. If you don’t have the joy of
the Lord, you’ll eventually get too weak to
wear it!

The fact is, joy and the strength it
provides are far more vital than we ever
imagined. Study Ephesians 3:16-19 and you’ll
see what I mean. There Paul prays:

That [God] would grant you, according
to the riches of his glory, to be
strengthened with might by his Spirit
in the inner man; that [the Anointed
One and His Anointing] may dwell in
your hearts by faith; that ye, being
rooted and grounded in love, may be
able to comprehend with all saints
what is the breadth, and length, and
depth, and height; and to know the
love of [the Anointed One and His
Anointing], which passeth knowledge,
that ye might be filled with all the
fulness of God.

According to those verses, we can’t abide
in the anointing without joy. We can’t
comprehend the love of God without joy. We
can’t be filled with all the fullness of God
without joy. We can’t do any of those things
without joy because we simply wouldn’t be
strong enough!

Can you see now why joy is such a major
force in this end-time move of God? Even
more importantly, can you see why joy must
be a major force in your life if you’re to be
a part of that move?

“Oh yes, Brother Copeland, I do. So I’m
planning to attend every Holy Ghost meeting
within 100 miles of my house.”
That’s great. But, frankly, even if you do,
it won’t be enough. You see, as wonderful as
it is to be in services where there is Holy
Ghost laughter, you need joy all the time.

And since you can’t carry Kenneth E. Hagin
or Rodney Howard-Browne around in your
pocket, you’d better learn to release the joy
of the Lord yourself!

Kenneth Copeland Ministries