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It's wonderful to have your needs met by faith in the Word of God! It's great to receive healing when you're sick. It's marvelous when God lifts you out of financial difficulties and supplies your needs supernaturally. It is a thrilling experience when, by standing in faith on God's promises, you step out of trouble and into victory.

If you know what that's like, you're probably saying, "Oh, yes! Amen, Brother Copeland. That's the greatest way to live!"

There was a time when I would have agreed.

But fasten your seat belt, my friend. God has shown me in His Word that He has something even better for us. It's a life so powerful, it exceeds anything we could ever ask or think, a life so full of the fiery light of God that darkness of every kind flees from its very presence.

I'm aware that there are some religious folks who would rather I didn't say such things. As far as they're concerned, this earthly life is miserable now and always will be. They sing songs about how we're "just poor beggars trudging through the heat and the cold, footsore and so poorly shod...but at the end of the journey, there's God."

They don't think we should ever expect anything grand and glorious in this world, just in the world to come. They try to keep people from getting their hopes up.

But I want you to know something right now: My greatest intention is to get your hopes up. I pray that by the time you finish reading this article, your hopes will be so high, you'll have to peel yourself off the ceiling!

Now, it's important that you understand that when I say "hope," I'm not talking about the weak, wistful kind of wishing the world calls hope. I'm talking about real, Bible hope, the kind of hope the Apostle Paul was referring to when he said:
For I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, According to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed....
(Phil. 1:19-20)
The terms earnest expectation and hope found in that scripture come from two Greek words, each of which can be accurately translated "hope". Paul put both of them side by side for emphasis.

If you'll research them, you'll find they mean "a confident expectation, a happy anticipation of good, a strained expectancy and eager longing". They refer to an expectation so strong that it absorbs all your attention.

Raise Your Sights
If you know how to live by faith, you've experienced that kind of hope. Maybe you've been sick, for example, and you set your hope on the fact that by the stripes of Jesus, you were healed (1 Peter 2:24).

You began to meditate on those scriptures until you built an inner image of yourself healed. As that image grew more crisp and clear, you began to expect, or hope for, that image to become reality. Eventually, faith rose up, put substance to that internal image and turned it into an external reality.

Actually, what you did is activate the scriptural process described in Hebrews 11:1: "Faith is the substance of things hoped for...." Boil it down to its simplest form, and you could write it like this:

God's Word + Hope + Faith = Manifestation!

That spiritual process always works the same way. Hope forms the image according to the Word, then faith rises up and gives substance to that image, making it a reality in the natural, physical realm.

Now, I have a question I'd like you to seriously consider: In the light of all God has promised us in His Word, what are you and I to expect? What should we be hoping for? What inner image should be so capturing our hearts and minds that it is all we can see?

Certainly, healing is great. Financial supply is wonderful. But could it be that God has something even more grand for us to fix our hope upon?

Yes, He does.

You'll find it in Romans 5:1-2: "Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ (the Anointed One): By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the Glory of God."

Read that last phrase again. It says we're to rejoice in the hope of the Glory of God! We're to expect the Glory, not just the healing!

As long as you're just expecting healing, you'll always be battling it out with your flesh. But if you're expecting the Glory, you'll be raising your spiritual sights to something bigger than healing. You'll be expecting the very presence of God to rise up in you so powerfully that instead of believing for healing every six weeks, you'll walk in divine health every day!

When you expect the Glory, you'll start living like what you really are, joint heirs with Jesus!

That's Heavy, Man
What do I mean by the Glory? It's a hard thing to put into words. But God gives us glimpses of it all throughout the Bible.

The first time the Glory is mentioned is in the book of Genesis and it's referring to the wealth of God. So, God's Glory includes His wealth, but it's much, much more than that.

The word Glory actually means "heavyweight." God is heavy with everything you could ever want or need. He is so heavy with healing that if everyone in the whole world believed Him for healing at once, no one would have to wait until tomorrow to get healed because God got tired. No, God is so heavy with ability to heal, he could obliterate sickness entirely with the flick of a finger.

In the book of Exodus, God's Glory could be seen going before the Israelites in a pillar of a cloud by day and in a pillar of fire by night (Ex. 13:21). Habakkuk saw God's Glory and described it as lightning-like shafts of splendor that streamed from His hands. "...and there [in the sun-like splendor] was the hiding place of His power" (Hab. 3:4 AMP).

When Ezekiel saw God in His Glory, he said He was a fire from the loins up and from the loins down (Ezek. 8:2). The fire of God is called the Glory. The wind of God is called the Glory. The smoke of God is called the Glory. The fullness of God is called the Glory.

It is all the Glory because the Glory of God refers to the supernatural life and essence of God. The very power that makes Him God!

"Well, Brother Copeland, that kind of awesome Glory is reserved for God and God alone."

Not according to the Bible. In fact, Psalm 8:5 tells us that in the beginning, man was crowned with that Glory.

That's right! In the Garden of Eden, man and woman weren't walking around unclothed. God had crowned them with the same fire and flame of beauty that was on God Himself.

Do you know what it means to crown? It means "to anoint"! God put His hands on their heads and crowned them with His own presence and Glory so that they began to shine just like God shines.

They weren't standing out there vulnerable to the elements. They were surrounded and protected by a shimmering force field of Glory.

That Glory was lost to mankind when Adam sinned. Most people know that. But what they don't realize is that the Glory was restored when Jesus was resurrected! Romans 6:4 says, "...Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father." That verse doesn't stop with Jesus either. It goes on to say, "Even so (or by that same glory) we also should walk in newness of life."

According to the Word of God, you and I are supposed to be walking in the Glory!

You can get a glimpse of what that's like by looking at what happened to Peter in Acts 5. The Glory was flowing out of him with such force that people were healed as he walked by them: "Insomuch that they brought forth the sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and couches, that at the least the shadow of Peter passing by might overshadow some of them" (v. 15).

It wasn't Peter's shadow that healed them. What was it? That field of Glory that surrounded him.

That's what God put hope in you to expect. The Glory! Not just healing. Not just increase of finances. Not just deliverance. All those things are great and they're all available to us, but God wants us to lift our expectations higher than that. He wants us to expect the Glory!

If we'll do that, we'll have all the rest. After all, there is healing in the Glory! There are finances in the Glory! Everything you could ever need, and more than you would ever want, can be found in the Glory of God!

It's a Mystery
Now, hold onto your hat because here's the most astonishing thing of all: That Glory isn't off in heaven somewhere, waiting for some great prophet of faith to pull it down. It isn't hovering out there behind heaven's gates.

It is inside you!

I can just hear your mind working: Oh, man! I just can't understand how that can be!

I know you can't. It's a mystery! As the Apostle Paul said in Colossians 1:
Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints: To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ (or the Anointing) in you, the hope of glory.
(Col. 1:26-27)
Do you realize what that verse is saying? It's saying that the Anointing of Jesus Himself, the very Glory of God that raised Him from the dead, is residing right now within you and every other believer on the face of this earth. Second Corinthians 4 confirms this fact as well.

You are as big on the inside as all of heaven! The Glory of God is in you. The faith of God is in you. The love of God is in you. The mind of Christ, the Anointed One, is in you. All the fruit of the spirit is in you. Healing is in you. Deliverance is in you. All the wealth of heaven itself is in you.

Those things were born in you when you were born again and they ought to be flowing out of that mortal, subject-to-death, meat-and-blood-and-bone body you're living in right now! The Glory of God should be pouring out of that earthen vessel!

Why isn't it? Because we've never developed the expectancy for it.

We've talked about it. We've said, "Yes, amen, Brother, the Glory of God is going to cover the earth." But we've had the idea that Glory would only come when God decided to just shoot the earth with some big Glory gun. We thought He'd say, Boy, I'm going to show them something today. They haven't seen My Glory for 2,000 years. Pow!

No! The Glory of God is within us! So it is going to manifest when we start building our hope. It will flood the earth when we meditate on the Glory of God so much that hope rises up and provides an image. Then faith will release the Glory of God from the inside of us where we can't see it, to the outside where we can see it!

A Church on Fire!
Remember the words Jesus spoke to Martha when Lazarus died? He told her, "Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the Glory of God?" (John 11:40).

Those words are just as true for us as they were for Martha. If we'll believe for the Glory, if we'll meditate on the Word of God until we develop our hope and begin to intensely expect the Glory, then faith will become the substance of it - and we'll begin to see it.

Does that sound wild to you? Well, it's not!

If you'll go back and read the Bible, you'll see that's what Christianity is all about. God intended for the Body of Christ to walk through this earth with such a manifestation of His presence in our lives that it would either scare people spitless...or draw them into the kingdom of God!

He intended us to live in such Glory that sickness and disease flee at our presence. He intended us to have a foretaste of the resurrected body right here on the earth. The Apostle Paul was reaching for that in his ministry. That's why he wrote:
[For my determined purpose is] that I may know Him...And that I may in that same way come to know the power outflowing from His resurrection...That if possible I may attain to the...resurrection [that lifts me] out from among the dead [even while in the body].
(Phil. 3:10-11 AMP)
I've experienced little touches of that kind of Glory and, believe me, I'm eager for more.

More is coming, too! There are evidences of it all around the world. A good friend of mine pastors a church where the Glory of God manifested so powerfully that someone called the fire department. All they were doing was having a prayer meeting, but the Glory of God settled in the attic and made it look like the church was on fire!

When the firemen arrived, they crawled up in the attic and, sure enough, the fiery Glory of God was still blazing up there. Those firemen couldn't figure it out. They knew it wasn't fire, but they didn't know what it was.

They checked it out to see if it was the result of some peculiar ray of the sun shining in there. Finally they just left. It was beyond their realm of expertise!

Ashes Under Our Feet
They could have found out what that was by reading Malachi 4:
But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall. And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet in the day that I shall do this, saith the Lord of hosts.
(Mal. 4:2-3)
Notice that scripture said "Sun of righteousness," not "Son of righteousness." It's talking about a bright, blazing Glory. And the wings it refers to aren't birds' wings, they're flames of fire that are shaped like wings.

But most exciting of all is the fact that Malachi didn't say that "He shall go forth." He said, "you shall go forth."

You and I are the ones who are going to go forth with this blazing Glory - the same Glory that appeared as a pillar of fire by night and cloud by day...the same Glory that filled the temple with such power the priests couldn't approach the altar without being knocked backward...the same Glory that raised Jesus from the dead...the same Glory that God said would fill the whole earth - that same Glory is what we'll use to tread down the devil until he is ashes under our feet!

The expectancy of that Glory is going to grow so strong between now and Jesus' return that it is going to fill churches. It's going to come on congregations with such power that people are going to run from all over the neighborhood to find out what it is.

The Glory is coming! Your confession of faith and your expectancy is going to pull it out of you and you're going to walk in that Glory right in the face of hell and everything it has to offer.

Fasten your seat belt. Things are about to change, my friend. Things in this nation are about to change. Things all over this earth are about to change. They're not going to keep heading into the devil's ditch as they have been.

No, you'll get up one of these mornings very soon and everything will be changed. God changed all of Eastern Europe in a day. He brought the Berlin Wall down in a day.

You think that was spectacular? Well, hold on - because that was only the beginning. Dare to release your expectancy of the Glory and before long you'll realize...you haven't seen anything yet!

Excerpt permission granted by
Eagle Mountain International Church, Inc.
aka:  Kenneth Copeland Ministries

Author Biography

Kenneth Copeland
Web site: Kenneth Copeland Ministries
 
For the last 50 years Kenneth and Gloria Copeland have been passionately teaching Christians all over the world how to apply the principles of faith found in God’s WORD to their lives.
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