In fact, The Amplified Bible translates Proverbs 4:20 this way: “My son, attend to my words; consent and submit to my sayings.” Submitting to the Word means making adjustments in your life. Say, for example, you hear the Word in Philippians 4:4 that you are to “rejoice in the Lord always.” If you’ve been doing a lot of griping and complaining, you’ll have to change in order to submit to that Word. You’ll have to repent and alter your behavior.

In addition to inclining your ear to the Word of God, the Proverbs 4 prescription also says you must keep it before your eyes and not let it depart from your sight. In Matthew 6 6:22-23, Jesus reveals why this is so important. He says: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!”

Your eyes are the gateway to your body. If your eye (or your attention) is on the darkness, or the sickness that is in your body, there will be no light to expel it. If, however, the eyes of your heart are trained strictly on the Word, your whole body will eventually be filled with light, and healing will be the result.

I can tell you from experience how important it is to keep the Word constantly before your eyes and in your ears. Several times since I have been walking by faith, I’ve let myself get too busy to do it. And, almost before I realized it, I became too sick to stay on my feet.

On those occasions, I would immediately get my Bible and begin meditating on the healing scriptures. I would even go to sleep listening to tapes of the Word. Usually, within a few hours, I was completely healed.

There were a few times when I had to stand in faith longer. But whether my healing came instantly or over time, the wonderful truth is—it always came. God’s medicine has never failed to bring a healing and a cure in my body.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

“But, Kenneth,” you may say, “I’ve met people who know the Bible from cover to cover and still can’t get healed!”

No doubt you do. But if you’ll look back at God’s prescription, you’ll find it doesn’t say anything about “knowing” the Bible. It says attend to the Word.

When you attend to something, you give your attention to it. You make it top priority, setting aside other things so you can focus on it. When a nurse is attending to a patient, she looks after him constantly. She doesn’t just leave him lying alone in his hospital room while she goes shopping. If someone asks her about her patient, she doesn’t feel it’s sufficient to say, “Oh, yes. I know him.”

In the same way, if you’re attending to the Word, you won’t leave it lying unopened on the coffee table all day. You won’t spend your day focusing your attention on other things.

On the contrary, you’ll do what Proverbs 4 says to do. You’ll continually incline your ear to God’s Word.

Inclining your ear includes more than just putting your physical ears in a position to hear the Word being preached (although that, in itself, is very important). It also means opening the ears of your understanding by meditating on and pondering that Word. To truly hear, you must listen with the ears of your spirit to what the Holy Spirit is saying to you through the written Word. Mark 4:23-24 puts it this way: “If any man has ears to hear, let him be listening, and let him perceive and comprehend…. Be careful what you are hearing. The measure [of thought and study] you give [to the truth you hear] will be the measure of [virtue and knowledge] that comes back to you—and more [besides] will be given to you who hear” (The Amplified Bible).

The hearing referred to in these verses is not a passive activity. It requires actively engaging with God’s Word, believing and obeying it.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

In the spiritual realm as a born-again believer, you have life
and the ability to share it with others. You need to learn how to
give this life to meet their needs. The Word of God says, “How
beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and
bring glad tidings of good things!” (Romans 10:15). I wondered
what this really meant until I heard the story of a missionary
and his family who were captured by the Japanese during World
War II. After they were taken captive, they were told that
Washington, D.C. had fallen, that the United States had surrendered,
and that Japan was in control. Well, you can imagine
what this did to those people. They felt absolutely hopeless! The
Japanese dragged them around the country and finally began
killing them because there wasn’t enough food. They took this
missionary’s little girl and shot her. The next day they heard a
deafening roar and saw the sky covered with B-29s! Those people
just went crazy! They had been completely without hope,
laboring under the lie that their country was defeated. Later a
G.I. kicked in the door on their compound and said, “You’re
free,” and when he did, the missionary fell down before him and
kissed his boots! You have the life-giving force of God Himself
residing inside you, and the world is desperate for that life!
Don’t be stingy with it. Freely you have received…freely give.

When you make it your need to get salvation into the hands
of the people, when you make it your purpose to feed the gospel
to the unsaved, God will support what you do. This is true
prosperity! God has obligated Himself to communicate the
message of Jesus Christ to the world. He will move heaven and
earth to do it because, to the man who has never heard it, Jesus
has never died or been resurrected from the dead. To that man,
the sacrifice of Jesus means nothing. The Word says in
1 John 4:17, “…as he is, so are we in this world.” God is feeding
us through Jesus. When you go to the Lord, He has more than
enough to meet the need. Have you ever turned to the Lord
with a problem and had Him say, “Well, that’s new! You’ve
come up with something heaven can’t cover”? Of course not!
God has more than enough to solve the worst problem you
could have. Jesus is the channel to us, and we are the channel
to the world.

True prosperity is the ability to look a man in the eye in his
moment of impossibility and take his needs as your own. Those
who are spiritual are to help those who are not. We are to bear
one another’s burdens. When a brother comes to you with a
problem, join with him in prayer, join your faith with his. Put
pressure on Satan with the Name of Jesus and get him off the
man. Put pressure on the laws of the Spirit of life in Christ
Jesus. Lean on your righteousness in Jesus Christ. Lean hard on
it! Lean hard on your sonship. Lean hard on the blood of Jesus.
Praise God, they work!

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

Suppose a man decided to save his left arm and just use
his right one, thinking that years later when his right arm got
tired, he could switch over and use the left one again. What
would happen to his left arm? It would lose its ability to function,
wouldn’t it? Now, this is a foolish idea, but the principle is
true for a man with $100,000 stashed away because of fear that
one of these days there wouldn’t be any money left.

If you are exercising this kind of fear with a few dollars, you
are just as guilty of being a reservoir—a dead end, a satanic
stoppage—as the man who stopped up a million dollars.
Someone with no more than a secondhand shirt can be just as
guilty of greed as a man with millions of dollars piled up somewhere.
One is just as deceived as the other. To a person who is
cold, a secondhand shirt looks pretty good. As I pointed out
before, the Bible does not say that money is the root of all evil;
it says the love of money is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10),
and there are millions of people committing that sin who don’t
have a dime! God can do more with 15 cents given in faith than
kings can do with mountains of gold! The little widow proved
this with her two mites (see Mark 12:41-44). Remember not to
limit God to only what you can see and understand with your
head. When the entire world is completely destitute, God will
still have plenty and can make it abound toward you. As He is,
so are we in this world. So don’t be afraid to become a cheerful,
freehearted giver.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

You know, the Bible says in Philippians 4:19 that God will
meet your needs according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus,
not according to your need. I have heard it preached that if you
ask God for $100 but need only $20, you’ll probably just get
$10. You won’t find that in the Bible, but God does say:

If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of
the land (Isaiah 1:19).

What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that
ye receive them, and ye shall have them (Mark 11:24).

…ye have not, because ye ask not (James 4:2).

When you act on the Word of God, the desires of your heart
will begin to grow and line up with God. Then He can cause all
grace to abound toward you (see 2 Corinthians 9:8). The first
step is to get your mind off yourself. Begin to take up the needs
of the Body of Christ as if they were your own. The Word states
very plainly that if a man comes to you needing food and
clothes, don’t just pray for him and send him away cold and
hungry. Feed him and clothe him!

Another thing, God will not just meet your needs according
to your job. Businessmen have come to me and said that these
things work for me only because I am a preacher, but this is
foolishness! I know preachers everywhere it’s not working for.
Some men say, “But I don’t have the opportunity for people to
give to me. I’m not out preaching. They don’t think of me when
they give. I have to work for mine.” Well, if you have more faith
in your job and your own ability to work than you have in the
Word of God, then it definitely won’t work for you. God will
certainly use what is available in your job to bless you or even
get you a better one, but He is not limited to your job unless you
limit Him to it. If you will stop and think for a moment, God
did not make His covenant with a preacher; He made it with a
farmer, a working man named Abram. The Scriptures show that
Abram turned to the Sodomite king and said, “I don’t even want
the string from your sandal because you could say a man made
Abram rich” (see Genesis 14:23). No man made Abraham rich.
God made him rich. Can you see this?

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

In John 14:18-23, Jesus was teaching His disciples and gave
the perfect outline of prosperity:

I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. Yet
a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye
see me: because I live, ye shall live also. At that day ye
shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I
in you. He that hath my commandments, and keepeth
them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me
shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will
manifest myself to him. Judas saith unto him, not
Iscariot, Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself
unto us, and not unto the world? Jesus answered and
said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words:
and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him,
and make our abode with him.

This is speaking of a manifestation of God. When God
manifests Himself to you and lives with you, then you are living
in prosperity. You see, God by the Holy Spirit is here in the
world. He is ready to move whenever a sinner makes Jesus the
Lord of his life, but He will not manifest Himself in a person’s
life until that person calls on Him. If God’s presence were
enough, every human being on earth would get saved because
we all are in the presence of the Holy Spirit. He was sent to
earth on the day of Pentecost and is still here today. The manifestation
of God is the important thing. When we operate in the
Word of God, when we keep His Word, then Jesus will manifest
Himself, or make Himself real, to us. He won’t just be there—
He will live there! Do you see the difference? If we put His
Word first in our lives, Jesus will reveal Himself to us. Then
whenever a problem arises in the physical realm, we know the
answer is in His Word. We also know the Great One living in us
will put us over when we act on that Word, no matter how
impossible the situation is.

Some people are waiting for a special manifestation of God’s
grace before they will get saved, but they don’t have to wait at all.
We are born of His Word (see 1 Peter 1:23). If a man will confess
Jesus as Lord and believe that God has raised Him from the dead,
he will be saved (see Romans 10:9-10). It is a simple matter of
believing God’s Word. You don’t have to wait to receive salvation—
it is being offered. You don’t have to wait to receive prosperity—it
is being offered. These things are offered by Jesus in His Word.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

At this point, let me emphasize Satan’s part is this. When
you hear the Word, when you learn to believe God—especially
in the area of giving—you become dangerous to Satan! Jesus
taught that the sower sows the Word and Satan comes immediately
to take out the Word which was sown (see Mark 4:1-20).
Why? For three basic reasons:

1. The Word of God is the key to the laws of the Spirit.
2. The laws of the Spirit govern the laws of the natural.
3. Satan works in the natural world.

When you take the power of these laws and function them
by faith, Satan is finished! When you learn the rules of the
game, he is through. He is a defeated foe!

Let me mention that these laws of prosperity will work for
anyone, regardless of their age! My children operate them just
as successfully as my wife and I. They have learned God’s system
of finance and can absolutely believe God for anything in
the world and get it! I remember when we needed a van for the
ministry to carry our equipment. My daughter Kellie came to
me and said, “Daddy, I want to be the first to give money for
this truck.” She had a couple of dollars, so she gave it, and we
made an agreement together. Then she started confessing the
return on her money and got it! It didn’t take her several
months, and she didn’t start whining about it—she simply said,
“In the Name of Jesus, it’s mine!”

One day our little boy, who was about 6 years old at the time,
came in and said, “Daddy, I want to give my money.” No one had
said anything to him, he just came through leadership of the
Lord. He doesn’t fully realize that God is directing him, he just
responds to it. He’s a child. (This is how we are to respond as
children in obedience.) He gave his money into the ministry and
began believing God for the return. A few days later, he got it! A
6-year-old boy! It works for him proficiently! Why? Because he
is a born-again believer filled with the Holy Spirit. He is a child
of God, and he has a right to work these laws. It isn’t a man’s age
that causes the law of gravity to work; the law of gravity works
because gravity is a force. Remember, faith is a spiritual force and
works by spiritual law (see Romans 3:27).

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

Let’s look for a moment at the world of finance, the biggest
problem area on earth. Sickness is not our main concern. There
are many healthy people who are head over heels in debt, and
God’s people have no business being in debt! Here again, we find
that the world has a system of finance which is complex and
very poor in operation. It continually rocks back and forth
between the two extremes of depression and inflation.

However, when you are functioning in God’s system of
finance, life can be very simple. Don’t borrow from anyone—
get it from God. The problem with borrowing is that it is controlled
by the world’s system. In order to borrow, you must subordinate
yourself to another person. Proverbs 22:7 says the borrower
is the servant to the lender. By borrowing, you subordinate
your name to another person. This is very important because of
the spiritual significance of your name. Your name is the same
as your nature. If your name is good, then you are good—your
reputation is good. You can do whatever your name can do.
However, when you borrow and go into debt to someone else,
you bow your knee to that person and look to him as your
source of supply. This creates a spiritual problem that can be
very serious, particularly if the other person is ungodly.

Look to God, He will give to you, not loan to you! Believers
need to learn how to operate in God’s system. It isn’t easy to
learn; but as you search the Word, you will have the desire to
know God’s system. When you begin to operate by it and live
by faith in every area of your life, God will step in and make up
what you don’t know. He will put you over! The deeper you get
into the Word and the more you learn, the more you will
expand; the more you expand, the more Satan will fight; the
more he fights, the bigger the victory; the bigger your victory,
the more glory to God; the more glory to God, the more you
will expand! It is constant growth!

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

We must understand that there are laws governing every
single thing in existence. Nothing is by accident. There are laws
of the world of the spirit, and there are laws of the world of
the natural.

The laws of the world of the natural govern our activities in
this natural, physical world. We don’t float; we walk. If the law
of gravity were not in action, we would float. These physical
laws can be manipulated. For instance, the law of gravity is
used when flying an airplane, but it is superseded by another
physical law, the law of lift. When you put the law of lift into
operation, you can fly, but you must know something about the
law of gravity in order to use the law of lift. You don’t do away
with the law of gravity; you just supersede it with a higher law.
These are natural, physical laws, and they govern this natural,
physical world.

We need to realize that the spiritual world and its laws are
more powerful than the physical world and its laws. Spiritual
law gave birth to physical law. The world and the physical forces
governing it were created by the power of faith—a spiritual
force. God, a Spirit, created all matter, and He created it with
the force of faith. Hebrews 11:3 says, “…the worlds were framed
by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of
things which do appear.” The law of gravity would be meaningless
if gravity were not a real force. It is the force of gravity
which makes the law of gravity work. In the same way, spiritual
law would be useless if the force of faith were not a real force;
but faith is a real force. Faith is a spiritual force, a spiritual
energy, a spiritual power. It is this force of faith which makes
the laws of the spirit world function. When the force of faith is
put to work, these laws of the spirit function according to the
way God says they will.

Romans 8:2 says, “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ
Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” There are
two functional laws in the world of the spirit. One, the law of
sin and death, was put into operation by Adam when he disobeyed
God in the Garden of Eden. The other, the law of the
Spirit of life, was put into operation by Jesus Christ at His
Resurrection. The law of the Spirit of life is the master law
under which we operate as children of God. It supersedes the
law of sin and death and faith causes it to function. There are
certain elements which, when combined, will bring forth the
result God intends. Salvation is available to every human being
on the face of the earth because the Word says anyone who
calls upon the Name of the Lord shall be saved (see Joel 2:32;
Romans 10:13). This higher spiritual law of life is here in the
earth, but every day people die and go to hell. Why? Because
the law of salvation hasn’t been put to work in their particular
lives. It will work only when it is put to work.

This same rule is true in prosperity. There are certain laws
governing prosperity revealed in God’s Word. Faith causes them
to function. They will work when they are put to work, and
they will stop working when the force of faith is stopped.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

You will never be healthier or more prosperous than your
soul. You can be born again, even filled with the Holy Spirit,
and still not be prosperous in your soul. For instance, an old
saint of God, living in poverty, can pray revival down on a
church, get everybody in town saved, and be lying in bed sick
the whole time—if she does not believe the Word of God for her
health! She can do these things, never knowing the fullness of
the infilling of the Holy Spirit and speaking with other tongues,
even though healing and prosperity belong to her all the time.
You see, her soul was not prosperous in these areas; her mind
had not grasped the full meaning of the Word of God; her mental
computer had never been fed on God’s Word concerning
healing, the Holy Spirit and prosperity. She knew the Word
enough to seek salvation and revival and used this knowledge
to pray down the power of God. Her soul was prosperous in
this area.

The world’s definition of physical prosperity (prosperity of
the senses) includes gold, silver, financial favor or power, political
favor or power and social favor or power. The world’s definition
of mental prosperity (prosperity of the soul) is “knowing
it all.” Put these two ideas together and you have a person who
can use his mind to get financial and political power. This is
the world’s total concept of prosperity. You can easily see its
drawbacks! Wealth and power cannot answer every problem.
Money makes a lousy god! It can’t buy good health or prevent
sickness and disease from taking over the human body. Yes, it
can go toward buying it, but the world’s system of healing just
isn’t good enough. In the mental realm, a person can have all
the facts in his head and not have the ability to use that knowledge
to obtain the money or the health that he needs.

What produces spiritual, mental and physical prosperity?
What brings all these areas together? The Word of God. The
Bible says in Hebrews 4:12 that the Word is alive, powerful and
sharper than a two-edged sword. It says that it divides the soul
and the spirit, the joints and the marrow, and that it is a discerner
of the thoughts and intents of the heart. When you are
walking in the Word of God, you will prosper and be in health.

We cannot settle for prosperity in the physical or the mental
realm only. It would be easy just to settle for spiritual prosperity,
but we can’t afford to be lazy and to discount physical
and mental prosperity simply because we are saved and filled
with the Holy Spirit. It is the will of God for us to be made
whole—spirit, soul and body—and to be kept that way until
the return of our Lord Jesus Christ (see 1 Thessalonians 5:23).
As you walk in the light of God’s Word, you will become prosperous
in every area of your life.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries