Have you ever read a promise in the Bible and wondered how it could ever come to pass in your life?
Have you ever read, by [His] stripes ye were healed when your body was wracked with sickness and pain? Or heard someone preach that God will meet all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus when your bank balance was zero and your unpaid bills were piled high?
Healed sounds great, you thought. Needs met sounds great. But I don't know how to get there from here. It looks impossible!
Everyone who has ever lived by faith has felt like that at one time or another.
Everyone.
Even Abraham, who was one of the greatest God-believing, impossible-promise-receiving, scriptural heroes who ever lived. The first time he heard God's promises to him, he had no idea how they would ever come to pass.
He'd grown up in a totally heathen culture surrounded all his life by people who worshipped the moon. So when God said, I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing (Genesis 12:2), Abraham had no clue how to connect with that blessing and cooperate in its fulfillment.
He must have been especially puzzled about how God was going to make of him a great nation After all, Abraham's wife was and always had been barren. What's more, they both grown too old for baby making.
How do you get from being a childless old man with a barren old wife to being a great nation? he must have wondered. It's impossible!
Live the Life of Faith
Over the years, God answered that question for Abraham. He taught him how to think in a way that would connect him with THE BLESSING. He taught him how to talk and live the life of faith so well the Scriptures call him the faith father of us all.
Granted, Abraham's faith made him look, sound and act different than everyone else. But it sure produced results.
It opened the door for THE BLESSING to do the same thing in his life it was originally designed to do for Adam and Eve when God spoke it over them. It empowered him to Be fruitful, and multiply and have dominion (Genesis 1:28). As Abraham's faith connected with THE BLESSING, that blessing produced such supernatural abundance in his life it created around him a kind of Garden of Eden wherever he went.
That's how THE BLESSING works. It worked that way for Adam and Eve until they cut themselves off from it by yielding to sin. It worked that way for Abraham when God passed it down to him. It worked that way for Jesus during His earthly ministry, and it will work that way for us.
According to the Bible, as born-again believers we have inherited THE BLESSING of Abraham through Jesus. God didn't give it to us as just an afterthought. He had us in mind from the start. When He blessed Abraham, He did it so that through the plan of redemption, we could receive that blessing too. Galatians 3:8-9 says it this way: The scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed. So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham.
Praise God, the former heathens described in those verses are believers like you and me! We are the people who have been made righteous by the blood of Jesus and blessed with faithful Abraham.
That means if we can find out what Abraham did, if we can learn what God taught him about how to connect with THE BLESSING, we can enjoy the benefits of it as surely as he did.
You Are Whatever God Calls You
Galatians 3:13-14 confirms that. It says: Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree: That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.
The last phrase of that passage leaves no doubt about it: We receive THE BLESSING, which is the promise of the Spirit, the same way Abraham did through faith.
But Brother Copeland, you might say, I don't know what Abraham knew about faith. God hasn't taught me the things He taught him.
Sure He has. He put them down for you in black and white. Right there in your Bible, He recorded every faith lesson Abraham ever learned. Read Romans 4 and you'll see those lessons for yourself. You'll find out exactly how to walk in the steps of that faith of our father Abraham (verse 12).
You'll see, for example, that God called Abraham a father of many nations, and He didnâ't start calling him that after Isaac was born. God called Abraham the father of many nations when there were no sons in sight.
'When God calls you something, that's what you are. You may not look like it, you may not feel like it, but God's Word is the truth no matter what you can see or how you feel.
That's how it was in Abraham's life and that's how it is in ours. If God calls us overcomers (and He does in I John 5:4) that's what we are. We aren't going to become overcomers one of these days. We already are because God said so. If we've made Jesus the Lord of our lives we are born of God, and He said, Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world.
Abraham understood that principle. That's why Romans 4:17 says when God called him a father of many nations, Abraham stood before him whom he believed, even God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were. Abraham not only stood before God and believed Him, he acted like God by calling those things which are not as though they were.
Since Abraham is the father of our faith, we should do the same thing. After all, the Bible says we have been born again in God's image (Colossians 3:10). It tells us to be imitators of God as dear children (Ephesians 5:1, New King James Version).
God always operates that way. He speaks things into being. So He taught Abraham to do it, too. He showed him how to connect with THE BLESSING by calling himself blessed.
If we want to follow in his footsteps and enjoy THE BLESSING like he did, that's the first thing we must do.
Are You Into Mind Control?
The second thing we are to do is study and meditate on God's Word until it takes over our mind and nothing can shake our confidence in it. We'll learn to think like Abraham: Being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah's womb: He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; and being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform (Romans 4:19-21).
Abraham didn't focus on his negative circumstances. He didn't meditate on his 100-year-old body or his very old and barren wife. He fixed his mind on God's promises. He meditated on THE BLESSING until THE BLESSING controlled his mind.
Abraham's thinking was so dominated by and saturated with THE BLESSING that when God told him to sacrifice Isaac, he didn't even flinch. He was able to march up Mount Moriah with confidence because he figured after he obeyed God's command and sacrificed that boy, God would raise him right back up.
We know that's what Abraham was thinking because Hebrews 11:17-19 says: By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, That in Isaac shall thy seed be called: Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure.
When you think about it, Abraham's attitude was amazing because he didn't know what we know about God. He'd never seen or heard of God raising anyone from the dead. Yet he was so fully persuaded that God would keep His promise to make him a father of many nations through Issac that he expected the impossible to happen.
If Abraham could be that fully persuaded, how much more should we be? We have inherited the same blessing, and ours has been guaranteed not just by the blood of animals like Abraham's was, but by the precious blood of Jesus, God's own Son!
What is more, we don't have to believe God with our own, natural mind like Abraham did. As born-again believers, we can think supernaturally because we have the mind of Christ (I Corinthians 2:16). We have the mind of the Anointed One.
Talk about having an advantage! That same kind of divine mind is available to us, but we have to take it by faith. If we want to follow the faith of Abraham, we must begin to call things that be not as though they were. We must speak God's Word over our minds and say, 'I thank God my mind is as anointed as the mind of Jesus. THE BLESSING is working in me now and an anointed mind is part of my blessing. Praise God, I have a brilliant mind! Then act on II Corinthians 10:3-6.
This Is the Victory
Once you start saying things like that, scriptural promises such as those in Deuteronomy 28 will come alive as you read them. That chapter spells out in detail the things that are included in THE BLESSING of Abraham. It says:
And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth: And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God. Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field. Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep. Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store. Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out. The Lord shall cause thine enemies that rise up against thee to be smitten before thy face: they shall come out against thee one way, and flee before thee seven ways. The Lord shall command the blessing upon thee in thy storehouses, and in all that thou settest thine hand unto; and he shall bless thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee .
Do you really believe God will do those kinds of things for us? you might ask.
Yes, I do because THE BLESSING of Deuteronomy 28 is our blessing! It has come upon us through Jesus. If we'll connect with it like Abraham did, it will do for us what it's always done. If we'll fill our anointed minds with it by meditating those verses and speaking them over ourselves until we are fully persuaded, no matter how impossible our circumstances might appear to be, that blessing belongs to us. It will do for us the same thing it once did for Adam and Eve and Abraham and Jesus. It will empower us to be fruitful, multiply and have dominion in every area of life.
Some folks think that's too good to be true. They claim we can never enjoy that kind of blessing on this earth. But I know we can, not only because the Bible says so but because I've proven it in my own life again and again.
When I was diagnosed with degenerative joint disease a few years ago, for example, I knew I had to connect with THE BLESSING to turn that condition around. So I did exactly what Abraham did. I considered not my body that was screaming in pain. I focused on THE BLESSING of God instead. I fixed my mind and my mouth on the fact that I was healed by the stripes of Jesus (I Peter 2:24).
I called things that be not as though they were. I said, I'm healed, and I said it not just once or twice but countless times month after month.
I won't kid you, it wasn't easy. Sometimes I hurt so bad I thought I'd have to stuff a rag in my mouth to keep myself from talking about it. I'd sit on my back porch with heating pads wrapped around my legs and turn the heat up as high as it would go, hoping the heat would hurt bad enough to distract me from the pain in my joints.
It took effort to speak words of faith during that time. I was tempted to say things like, Dear God, how long must I be in pain like this? How long before my healing comes?
But I didn't do that. I stuck with the truth. I locked on to THE BLESSING and refused to let go. I connected with that blessing by speaking, believing and acting on the Word of God and, sure enough, the impossible happened. I have MRIs to prove it. One shows my body with degenerative joint disease and ruptured disks in my back. The other, done some time later, shows all the disease is gone and all the disks healed, regenerated and standing tall!
That's the kind of thing that happens when we make the faith connection. We open the door to THE BLESSING of God and His goodness pours into our lives. Sickness becomes health. Poverty becomes wealth. We start living like the overcomers God made us to be.
We discover for ourselves the lesson Abraham learned some 4,000 years ago: This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.
Kenneth Copeland
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