BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

But you have to hear what He’s saying. You have to spend time with Him reading and meditating on His written WORD and fellowshiping with Him in prayer. Personally, I talk to God all day long. It’s easy to do. After all, He lives right here inside me. I abide in Him and He abides in me. So it just makes sense for me to commune with Him throughout the day about what He wants me to do and how He wants me to do it. “Well, that sounds like a great way to live, Brother Copeland, but The LORD just doesn’t speak to me like He does to you.” Certainly He does. He’s not an absentee Father. He’s speaking to you constantly. In fact, He’s speaking to everyone. Otherwise Jesus wouldn’t have said, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:20). According to that verse, any man can hear the voice of God because He is speaking to everyone all the time, not in an audible voice from heaven that can be heard with physical ears, but with an inward voice that can be heard on the inside of a person, in his spirit. If people aren’t listening to God on the inside, even if He did speak to them audibly it wouldn’t help them. The folks in the New Testament proved this. When they were with Jesus and God spoke to Him out loud in a booming voice from heaven, they heard the noise but didn’t understand what was being said. They just thought it thundered (John 12:29). When God Said, Run! That kind of thing happens all the time. On Sept. 11, 2001, for example, God spoke to everyone in the World Trade Center—every one of them. But they didn’t all hear and understand what He was saying. If they had, the World Trade Center towers would have been empty that day. Gloria and I have a close personal friend who pastors a great church on Wall Street not far from ground zero. Many of his congregation worked in the World Trade Center. In the weeks prior to 9/11, he’d been teaching on the protective power of the blood of Jesus and on listening to the voice of God. He wasn’t teaching on those subjects because God had told him about the terrorist attack. He was just following God’s plan, doing what Jesus said to do, and so were the people in his church. As a result, not a single one was injured. One of them was about to walk through the doors of the World Trade Center that morning and he heard God say, 'Run!' So he just took off, ran around the corner and down into the subway. Another was on his way to work there when he decided to take his daughter out to eat instead of dropping her off at school. 'She and I just don’t get to spend much quality time together,' he thought. So, although he was rarely late to work, he was late that particular morning because he spent some extra time with his daughter. This is the way we, as believers, are supposed to be living! We’re supposed to be listening to Jesus and doing whatever He says to do. That’s the key to being protected, directed and prospered all the time. I was vividly reminded of this a few months back when I went to preach in Maracaibo, Venezuela. The pastor of the church there was driving out to meet me at the airport and decided to stop by the bank on the way. When he did, two guys grabbed him and his son, put a gun to his head, tied the two of them up and put black hoods over their heads. They intended to kidnap them and steal his new pickup truck. Now, this pastor is a very bold man of God. He’s been in Venezuela doing what Jesus has told him to do for years and God has BLESSED him. His church has grown and affected all of Latin America. So he wasn’t worried. He just started pleading the blood of Jesus and forgiving those guys. The kidnappers took them to an abandoned building to kill them. All this time the pastor kept speaking words of faith and love to them. Suddenly he and his son heard a female voice say to the kidnappers, “You’d better think about what you’re doing. This is a man of God and he helps a lot of people here. You’d better just leave him alone.” When the kidnappers heard that, they huddled up and talked between themselves. Then they untied him and turned him loose. They did steal his pickup truck, but he had such favor with the police that they quickly found it and returned it to him. Actually, he didn’t even bother to tell me about the incident. I heard about it the next morning in church when he told the whole congregation. 'That was yesterday?' I thought. 'You got kidnapped?' The words he kept saying were, “I’m in God’s plan! I’m not finished! No one can kill me! That’s not God’s plan!” This is the supernatural life, my friend, and it’s a wonderful way to live! So get with the program. Decide that what God called you to be is what you are, and that’s what you’re supposed to be doing: You’re supposed to be good at it and successful at it. You’re supposed to be healed and prosperous and powerful. God doesn’t have any little plans. His plan for you is big and it’s absolutely perfect. Find out what it is. Be still and listen to Him every day. And whatever He says to you, do it. V BVOV : 7

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