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Enjoying Life More
4 Steps to Enjoy Life More
Kenneth
Copeland
If you’re a Christian, you should be enjoying life.
Did you know that?
If you’re born again, if you’ve made Jesus Christ your
Lord, you should be so satisfied — so joyful, so overflowing with life that you
should seem almost ridiculously optimistic to the unbelievers around you.
You should greet every day with such confident
expectation that it’s going to be filled with the goodness of God that others
watch you with wonder and ask, “How can you be so full of hope when the
world is so dark? How can you be so certain your life will be blessed?”
Those are the kinds of questions the early New
Testament believers heard all the time.
That’s why Peter had to write them and say, “… be
ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the
hope that is in you” (I Peter 3:15).
Apparently, those first century disciples understood
what many, long-faced, woebegone Christians today do not.
They realized Jesus truly meant it when He said
in John 10:9-10 (The Amplified
Bible), “I am the Door; anyone who enters in through Me will be
saved (will live). He will come in and he will go out [freely], and will find
pasture. The thief comes only in order to steal and kill and destroy. I came
that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, till
it overflows).”
Most believers today can quote those verses, but few
fully believe them.
They don’t realize if we, as Christians, are not
enjoying abundant life we’re missing it somewhere. We’re not taking hold by
faith of what Jesus came to give us.
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1. Realize that You Have a Good Shepherd
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1. Realize that You Have a Good Shepherd
“But, Brother Copeland, you don’t understand my
situation,” someone might
say.
“I have some serious problems. I came from a poor
family. I don’t have the opportunities most other people have. My circumstances
are bad.”
That may be true, but according to Jesus, all those
things are irrelevant. He said anyone who receives Him as the
Door of salvation becomes a free person.
They can come and go and find plentiful pasture (or
provision) for their spirit, soul and body. They can have abundant life.
Notice Jesus didn’t say that just certain people — like
preachers, or highly educated people, or people of a certain color and a
certain social standing could do it.
He said anybody who came through the
Door could have and enjoy overflowing, abundant life.
If you are an anybody you qualify.
You’re free to come and go as the Lord leads you.
You’re not trapped inside your natural circumstances,
or locked out of God’s blessings.
You have become a free person, and wherever you go
you’re going to find pasture. You don’t have to depend on someone else to give
it to you.
You don’t have to look to your employer, the
government or anyone else. Jesus is your Shepherd and He will lead you.
He will provide for you. What you have depends only
upon what you are willing to receive from Him.
Oddly enough, many well-meaning believers seem more
willing to receive what the devil wants to give them than what Jesus has for
them.
They’re constantly embracing devilish gifts like
sickness, oppression and lack because they’ve been religiously brainwashed to
believe God sent those things to teach them something.
But they have it backward. The devil — not Jesus — is
the one stealing their health and their finances. He is the one trying to kill
and destroy them.
Jesus said, “I am the Good Shepherd. The Good
Shepherd risks and lays down His [own] life for the sheep” (John 10:11, The Amplified Bible).
Does a good shepherd pick up a little lamb and break
its legs just so he can demonstrate his ability to fix them?
Does a good shepherd starve them or leave them without
water? Certainly not.
When you’re under the care of the Good Shepherd, you
can say what David said in Psalms 23: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He
maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his
name’s sake” (verses 1-3).
2.
Chase Away the
Shadows
“Yeah, but that psalm doesn’t stop there,” someone might say. “It says that sometimes we’ll
have to go through the valley of the shadow of death.”
Sure it does. But you can even enjoy life in that
valley if you’ll stay with your Shepherd.
That’s one thing I’ve learned over the past 40 years.
I’ve found out that it doesn’t matter where I go, if Jesus is with me, things
will be good.
He’ll turn that valley of the shadow of death into a
banquet hall for me. He’ll lead me into green pastures.
He’ll make me lie down beside the still waters. He’ll
make sure I have everything I need to have and enjoy abundant life even in that
seemingly dismal place.
So if Jesus says we need to go through the valley of
the shadow of death, I don’t mind going there. I just say, “Well, praise
God, let’s go! I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me.”
“But, Brother Copeland, what about the shadow of
death? Doesn’t that scare you?”
Why should it? My Lord and Savior is the biggest
Person in the valley and He is right there with me.
What’s more, a shadow never hurt anyone. All a shadow
can do is scare you.
The shadow of a dog may look big enough to bite your
head off. But when you turn on the light, you find out the dog behind the
shadow is half the size it appeared and it doesn’t even have any teeth!
Remember that the next time you’re in a valley and the
devil tries to cast a shadow over you.
Instead of letting that shadow scare you, just turn
the light on and get rid of the silly thing.
You’re fully equipped to do that because the Bible
says you are born of light (Ephesians 5:8).
It says you can walk in the light as Jesus is in the
light (I John 1:7).
You can cast off the works of darkness and put on the
armor of light (Romans 13:12).
As a New Testament believer, you don’t have to put up
with the shadow of death like the Old Testament saints did.
You’ve been delivered from the power of darkness and
conveyed into the kingdom of the Son of Light (Colossians 1:12-13).
So don’t let the devil darken even one of your days.
When he tries, throw him into confusion with the brightness of your light.
3.
Live in the
Light of Love
Think about it and you’ll see why. Have you ever
walked out of a dark room into the bright sunshine? You couldn’t see anything
for a moment or two, could you?
That’s what happened to Saul on the road to Damascus.
He’d been living in darkness, persecuting Christians, and when Jesus shined the
light of God’s glory on him, he couldn’t see for three days.
Someone had to go pray for him to be filled with the
Holy Spirit before he could get his sight back.
According to John 1:5, that’s the effect light always has on darkness. That’s why,
when the light of Jesus shines in the darkness, the darkness
comprehends it not.
The word translated comprehends (or comprehendeth in
the King James) can also be translated find.
So you might say it this way, when the light shines in
the darkness, the darkness can’t find it.
Wouldn’t you like to live so fully in the light that
the devil couldn’t find you? According to the Bible, that’s possible.
It tells us we can live in such a way that the wicked
one touches us not (I John 5:18).
I John 2:10 gives us the secret to that lifestyle. It says, “He that
loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of
stumbling in him.”
In other words, the key to living in the light is
keeping the New Testament command of love.
Once the Lord spoke to me and said, “Wouldn’t
it be foolish to walk through the door, turn out the light, and stumble over
everything in the room?
“Yet that’s the way most of My people try to live.
They turn the light out by neglecting to keep the commandment of love. They
yield to unforgiveness, strife, envy and all kinds of other unloving attitudes
and behaviors. Then when they can’t find their way in life, they start crying
out to Me. ‘Oh God, lead me! God, direct me! God, help me!’
“But all they really need to do is turn the light back
on. All they need to do is repent and start walking in love.”
The more I thought about that, the more it dawned on
me how true that is. Jesus proved it when He was on the earth.
No matter how hard the devil tried to corner Him, He
could find the way out of any difficulty because He always walked in the light
of love.
4.
Get Rid of
Strife, Unbelief & Unforgiveness
As His disciples, Jesus intends for us to operate the
same way. That’s what He had in mind when He said, “… whosoever shall smite
thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:39).
He wasn’t telling us to just let people beat the
daylights out of us. He was teaching us to put on the armor of light, to step
under the protective covering of love so the devil couldn’t touch us.
The only time we see the Church as a whole walking in
that kind of love was during the first great spiritual outpouring in Jerusalem
right after the Day of Pentecost.
The book of Acts tells us the believers at that time “were
of one heart and of one soul” (Acts 4:32).
They loved each other so completely that they “sold
their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need”
(Acts 2:45).
As a result, the power of God got so strong among them
that sick people who got within a shadow’s length of Peter would be healed.
Sometimes people think the shadow itself did the
healing. But there wasn’t any healing power in Peter’s shadow. The power or the
light of God that was coming out of him was doing the work.
You were born again as a child of light, so that light
is in you in its most powerful form. But it cannot shine forth as long as you
keep clouding it with strife, unbelief and unforgiveness.
If you want to walk in the full power of that light,
you’ll have to repent of all those things. I don’t mean just feel sorry for it.
Repentance isn’t just being sorry, it’s getting in
agreement with God about those things, acknowledging to Him that they’re wrong,
and then believing you receive your forgiveness for it and your cleansing from
it.
Once you’ve done that, determine to become so
committed to keeping God’s command of love that you’d rather die than violate
it.
If someone mistreats you, take the position Jesus and
Stephen did when they looked at those who were about to murder them and said, “Father,
forgive them….”
That kind of love literally arms you with light. It
protects you so that the ugly stuff people say and do doesn’t bother you. You
stop worrying about how they’re treating you and concern yourself instead with
how you’re treating them.
I’ll never forget the day the Lord showed me that
perspective.
I’d been moping around because I felt like Gloria
wasn’t paying attention to me the way I thought she should, and I said to
myself, “Aw, she doesn’t care about me anyway.”
The second I said that, the Spirit of God jerked me to
attention and almost hollered at me. “It’s none of your business
whether she cares about you or not! It’s your business to care for her! It’s
enough for you to know that I care about you. So you see to it that you care
for her and whether she cares a thing about you or not is between Gloria and
Me!”
The Lord’s tone of voice was so strong it left me
trembling. I didn’t want Him to ever have to speak to me like that again. So I
committed myself right then and there to do what He was telling me to do.
As a result, Gloria and I have walked in the light
where our marriage is concerned, and the devil hasn’t been able to touch it.
It’s like heaven on earth in our house.
That’s the way our Good Shepherd wants us to live all
the time.
Everywhere we go, in everything we do, He wants us to
enjoy green pastures and rest beside still waters. He wants us to live in
freedom, coming and going wherever He leads us. He wants us to enjoy abundant,
overflowing life.
Whether we’re walking through the valley or sitting on
the mountaintop, He wants us to be living in the light.
Kenneth Copeland Ministries is dedicated to building up believers’ faith and
deepening their walk with Christ, so they can live the victorious life God
promised.
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