Posts Tagged ‘Spirit of God’
Kenneth Copeland — Real Bible Hope
Posted by admin | Filed under Kenneth Copeland, Kenneth Copeland Ministries
Now when I say you need to have hope, I’m not saying you just need to start thinking optimistically. Positive thinking is fine and it certainly is better than negative thinking. But just thinking optimistically will never cause you to burn with confident expectancy like the Apostle Paul did. Positive thinking will never give you Bible hope.
Real Bible hope has to be based on God’s Word. Otherwise, there is no foundation under it.
For instance, someone who has liver cancer might say to me, “I fully expect to be healed of this liver condition.” I might say to them,
“What makes you believe that when the doctor just declared your condition incurable?”
Now, that person can respond in one of two ways. He can tell me he believes he’ll be healed just because he wants it to be true. If he does, he has no foundation beneath him. He’s just wishing. That’s the world’s kind of hope, but it definitely isn’t the Bible kind.
If he has Bible hope, he’ll say, “I will be delivered from this liver condition because God’s Word says every sickness and every disease is under the curse of the law, and Galatians 3:13 says Jesus has redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us. In other words, Jesus has already redeemed me from the curse of this liver condition. That’s why I fully expect to be delivered from it.”
When you have that clear, Word-based image inside you, you have real Bible hope and it’s an absolute must for anyone who wants to live by faith. Without that kind of hope, your faith has nothing to grab onto and you’ll let the devil talk you out of your healing (or whatever else you need to receive from God). He’ll look you right in the face and say, “Well now, I don’t see any healing taking place in your body. It looks to me like you’re as sick as you’ve ever been. Obviously, this healing business just isn’t working for you.”
The devil will feed those kinds of words into your mind and try to get you to think about them. If you do, you’ll be in trouble. But if you’ll dwell on the Word of God until the hope of the gospel rises up on the inside of you…if you’ll meditate on God’s promises until you begin to have an inner image of yourself healed and strong…if you’ll speak those promises day after day…you’ll be able to look at the devil and say, “Oh, shut up! I know what I know and I know God’s Word is working for me. That Word says I’m healed and that’s what I’m looking at and nothing else.”
I don’t mind telling you, it’s rarely easy to do that. (If it were easy, everybody would be doing it!) Sometimes you have to get rough on yourself to make yourself stand on the Word of God when you’re in great physical pain. Your emotions will want to take over. They’ll push you to start crying and feeling sorry for yourself.
But don’t do it. Instead, take charge of those emotions by the Spirit of God within you. Don’t ever let your emotions cause you to back away from hope. If you do, you’ll kill it.
Yes, I said you’ll kill it. You see, hope is a living thing. Paul says hope “abides.” To abide means “to live.” Only living things abide, so hope is a living thing and you have to guard it and nourish and feed it with the Word of God so it can grow. If you’ll do that, hope will paint a picture on the inside of you, a picture of God’s promise fulfilled in your life. It will give you an inner image of yourself healed and prosperous, with your loved ones saved, your marriage restored or whatever else you’ve been hoping for. Hope will paint that picture so clearly inside you and make it so real, you’ll begin to be blind to what you see on the outside.
