by Kenneth Copeland
Almost 2,000 years ago, Jesus warned us that in this world we would have trouble. Sure enough, He was right. Trouble is here...and more is on the way.Everyone knows it, saints and sinners alike. All you have to do is look around, read a paper, or turn on the television and you can see that natural answers are just not enough for the problems we are facing. The world is looking to politicians, scientists, doctors and psychologists for a remedy. But the fact is, we've exhausted man-made solutions.
We are entering the day when even those who once scoffed at the gospel will soon realize that the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ is the only source of light in this dark world. We are entering the day when the Spirit of God is saying to His people:
Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising (Isaiah 60:1-3).
The problem is, many believers aren't hearing His voice. They aren't seeing His Glory in their lives. Instead of arising in the power of God, their hearts are burdened down and troubled by the pressures of the world. They're wringing their hands and crying, "Oh my God, what are we going to do?"
I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll do exactly what Jesus said we should do in times like these. We will let not our hearts be troubled!"Well, Brother Copeland, I just don't see how that is possible. After all, these are dark days. Wickedness is just running rampant. Good people are suffering."
Those are exactly the kinds of things happening when Jesus gave that instruction. He was about to be crucified by wicked men. His disciples were about to see everything they had believed in and hoped for appear to crumble before their very eyes. They had invested their whole lives in the ministry of Jesus and they were about to see Him killed like a common thief. Naturally speaking, their entire world was about to come to an end.You want to talk about pressure and trouble? There has never been a darker time than that.
Yet Jesus looked those men straight in the eyes and said, "Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me" (John 14:1). He wasn't just giving them an emotional pat on the head when He said it, either. He was giving them a command, a command so important He repeated it just a few minutes later saying, "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid" (John 14:27).
When I was a kid, I knew how serious my Dad was about something by how many times he told me to do it. If he just told me once to take out the trash, I might be able to get away without doing it. But if he said a second time, "Now boy, don't you forget to take out that trash like I said. Do you hear me?" I knew he meant it and I'd better follow through.
I believe that's what Jesus was doing when He repeated Himself in John 14. He was saying, "Listen to me, now. I said, don't let your heart be troubled and I mean it. I'm telling you again so you can get it straight. I don't care how bad things look, don't be afraid!"
Dominating the Storms of Life
If you understand the way fear works, you can see why Jesus warned us so sternly against it.
Fear is perverted faith. Just as faith is confidence in God's ability to protect you, fear is confidence in Satan's ability to hurt you. And in the same way faith opens the door for God to bring blessings into your life, fear opens the door for the devil to bring destruction.
If you refuse to fear, you can go through trouble without that trouble getting inside you. You can go through it in peace and come out on the other side in victory.
But understand this: When Jesus said don't let your heart be troubled, He wasn't telling you to stick your head in the sand and pretend like the trouble isn't there. He wasn't telling you to ignore the events around you. No, look again at what He said: "Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me."
The secret to maintaining an untroubled heart in the midst of troubled times is to believe Jesus! It is to put more faith in what He said than in what the devil says.
Exactly what did Jesus say?
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised (Luke 4:18).
Jesus is the Christ. The Greek word Christ means the Anointed One. And since Isaiah 10:27 tells us that the yoke of the devil is destroyed by the anointing, we don't have to run scared when the devil comes against us, our loved ones or our nation. We can put him to flight with the blood of the Lamb, the Word of our testimony and the yoke-destroying anointing of Jesus Christ Himself!
That's what Jesus expects us to do. He has already taken care of every kind of trouble that could ever come to the human family when He was put on the Cross, raised from the dead, and glorified at the right hand of the Father. He spoiled the principalities and powers of darkness. He triumphed over them and made an open show of them (see Colossians 2:15). He stripped the devil of every last vestige of power.
"But if that's the case," you ask, "why is He letting the devil wreak so much havoc on the earth today?"
He isn't. We are!
Jesus has done His part. He has taken back the devil's authority over the earth and He has given it to us. Just before He ascended to heaven He said, "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore..." (Matthew 28:18-19). He delegated His power and authority to us - His Church - then "after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, [he] sat down on the right hand of God; From henceforth expecting till his enemies be made his footstool" (Hebrews 10:12-13).
Jesus doesn't expect us to cower and whimper under the attacks of the devil. He expects us to take authority over the devil and overcome him. He expects us to stand up in the midst of the storms of life and dominate those storms with faith-filled words. He expects us to look sickness and lack and terror in the face and say, "You get under my feet, in the Name of Jesus!"
I realize you may not feel like you can do that. But, regardless of how you feel, if you're a born-again child of God, you can because the Bible says, "Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith" (1 John 5:4).
No One Said It Would Be Easy
I'm not saying it's easy to exercise that kind of overcoming faith in times like these. It's not. The devil will bring all kinds of pressure against you. He'll do everything he can to discourage you and wear you out because he knows that if you succeed he'll lose control not only of you, but also of those in your sphere of influence.
Some people have the idea that if you live by faith, you can float through life with no problems at all. Forget about that. It will never happen this side of the rapture.
Just look at Jesus. If anyone should have been able to float through life, it was Him. He had perfect faith. But He never had an easy day of ministry. He had the toughest time of any man who ever walked on earth. He was persecuted, criticized and plotted against. What's more, He was tempted with every sin mankind has ever known. Yet He resisted it all.
If you think that's easy, think again. There's nothing tougher than feeling the pressure of sin, sickness, lack or grief, and yet refusing to let it dominate you. There's nothing tougher than standing up at those times and saying, "No! I'll not receive this sickness on my body. I'll not yield to this circumstance! I've been set free from the curse by the blood of Jesus, and I will live free by faith in Him!"
If you want to see just how much pressure such a stand of faith can bring, look at Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane before He went to the cross. The pressure of the temptation He faced there put such a strain on His physical body that drops of blood poured through His skin like perspiration. But even then, sin could not conquer Him.
None of us will ever face that much trouble. We'll never have to stand against that much pressure. Yet, we have available to us the same power and peace that took Him not just through the pressure at Gethsemane, but through the whipping, the mocking and the Crucifixion. We have the peace that took Him all the way through to the Resurrection!
"Peace I leave with you," He said. "My peace I give unto you.... Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."
But, praise God, He didn't stop there. He told us how to gain access to that peace. He told us how to stand in faith when frightening things were happening all around us.
"If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you" (John 15:7).
Think for a moment. If you knew beyond any doubt that God would do anything you asked Him to in any situation, then would you ever be afraid? Would your heart ever be troubled? Of course not!
You know God has the power to make everything right. He has the power to prosper you in the midst of famine. He has the power to rescue you and your family from danger. He has the power to save your children - spirit, soul and body. In fact, the Bible says:
His divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue: Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust" (2 Peter 1:3-4).
Make the Word Your Home
What's the key to having God's promises fulfilled in our lives? What's the key to receiving whatever we ask? Abiding in Jesus and letting His words abide in us!
Abiding in the Word is more than just knowing it. It's more than just mentally agreeing with it. Abiding in the Word means making the Word your number one priority.
When you abide somewhere, you make it your permanent place of residence. You make it your home. You wake up there in the morning and you go to sleep there at night. When trouble hits, the first thing you want to do is go home, because that's where your heart is.
The same thing is true with the Word. When you abide in the Word, it's the first thing you think of when the storms of life come - not the second thing or the third thing. It's the first! When you abide in the Word, your heart is so full of it that when the devil puts pressure on you, the Word is what comes out your mouth. You don't have to run and get your Bible. You don't even have to think about it. You're so full of the Word, it just spills out.
Abiding in the Word is not some passive state you slide into accidentally. The book of Hebrews says we labor to enter into that rest of faith (Hebrews 4:11). We don't labor to fight the problems and trouble surrounding us. We labor to enter into our rest with God.
What does that labor include? Sometimes it includes getting up out of your chair, turning off the TV and saying, "I'm not watching the world's news anymore. I'm tired of seeing this conflict through their eyes." It includes spending more time reading and meditating on the Word of God, building your faith until you can boldly say, "It doesn't matter how bad this situation looks, I believe God's Word. And I declare that my family, my church, my community and my nation will come through this in victory!"
Some people are afraid if they turned off the TV and buried their nose in the Bible, they'd be caught off guard by world events and be unequipped to handle them. But the truth is, they'd be more equipped to handle them than ever because the primary battles aren't taking place here on earth where you can see them and hear them. They're taking place in the heavenlies.
They're spiritual battles and you can't fight spiritual battles from a natural perspective. You have to see God's perspective. You have to put aside your natural human thoughts and start thinking His thoughts. You have to stop handling things your way and start handling them His way. As the prophet Isaiah says:
Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near: Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it (Isaiah 55:6-11).
Do you see the cycle there? We take God's Word - His thoughts and ways - and put it in our hearts. It causes faith to spring forth within us. Then we return that Word to God by speaking it out our mouths.
When that happens, the devil has to run for cover because there is nothing he can do to stop that Word from coming to pass. He can only stand by wringing his hands and crying, "Oh my, what am I going to do?"
This is no time for us to let our faith in God slip. This is no time to start fastening our eyes on the conditions around us. This is no time to open our hearts to fear.
On the contrary, now more than ever, we must immerse ourselves in the Word of God. We must fill our hearts so full of it, that there's simply no room there for trouble. We must make it our first thought when we wake up every morning and our last thought before we go to sleep at night. It must be the most precious thing in our lives.
We can do it. We must do it. Not only for ourselves and our families, but for this desperately troubled world.
We have in our mouths and in our hearts and in our lives the only hope: the burden- removing, yoke-destroying power of Jesus, the Anointed One. Let's hold Him high.
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