If you want to walk in obedience and receive God’s goodness, I have good news for you. God wants to be God to you in a very personal and intimate way. He wants to be God in the Church. He wants to be God in your individual life. But He can only be God to you as far as you will follow Him.

As we have already learned God waited and waited for a people who would be obedient to Him, so that He could be God to them, manifesting His presence and glory. Finally, in the New Testament, one man fulfilled His call. One man was absolutely obedient. His Name is Jesus.

Jesus, the Son of God, came into the world to fulfill the perfect will of God. He stripped Himself of His heavenly privileges and was born of a woman. He took upon Himself flesh. The Holy Spirit hovered over Mary and conceived in her a holy thing. Because God was His Father, and not man, Jesus was born without sin.

The life of God was in Him instead of spiritual death. But Jesus did not just come into this world saying, “Look at Me—I’m the Son of Almighty God,” and then live anyway He wanted. The thing that set Jesus apart and qualified Him to pay the price was His living as a man without sin. Yet when the time came, He was willing to lay down His own life and take sin into Himself for you and me. “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Had Jesus lived in the earth after His own will, He would never have gone to the cross. But Jesus did not live in the earth after His own will. When faced with death—separation from God—He changed His will in the Garden of Gethsemane to agree with God’s will. Why? Because He knew the scriptures. He knew the Spirit of God. He knew His Father. He had the knowledge of God Who said, “Keep My statutes and ordinances. Keep My Word and obey My voice.”

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

God’s Word to you is “I will be with you.” When Moses asked, “Who am I to go to Pharaoh?” God’s answer was, “I will be with you.” After Moses’ death, God told Joshua the same thing: “I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. Be strong and of a good courage…” (Joshua 1:5-6).

Even if you get into trouble by your own thinking, God will honor you if you accept correction: “…whoever heeds correction is honored” (Proverbs 13:18, New International Version). Glory to God! If you press into His kingdom, stretching toward your prize, and remain correctable, He will make sure you stay headed in the right direction. He is with you and for you.

Do you wonder where your attention is? Watch your life. Watch what motivates you and what you’re thinking about. Your words will follow your actions. So keep watch and don’t let divine things lose out.

Don’t be dismayed. Don’t lose your courage. Do what you’re called to do.

You have everything it takes to be a winner—everything you need to be part of the glorious, victorious end-time army of God. As Kenneth E. Hagin said in a prophecy God gave him in 1977, “You can be a part of that army if you want to be. Purpose in your heart that you’ll not be lazy, that you’ll not draw back, hold back or sit down. But purpose in your heart that you’ll rise up and march forward and become on fire.”

Get aggressive. Press in. Lay hold of the kingdom of God with every bit of force you can muster. That’s the price you pay to win this race. But one thing is certain—the eternal victory you gain will be worth it all.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

Once your focus and your fellowship is in place, press. To press means “to act with steady force or weight; to be insistent about; to exert pressure.” It means “to go forward with energetic or determined effort.”

Paul said, “I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14).

To be a winner, you press. You press in to what God has called you to do. You don’t float into it. You press forward by faith, believing the Word of God and not what natural circumstances say.

No matter where you are today in your spiritual growth, you won’t progress without pressing. Remember what I said about those Olympic athletes? They know what it means to press toward a goal. They know what it means to put everything else aside and live like winners.

If natural people with natural discipline and desire to reach a goal can do that, certainly you and I can do it in the Spirit! We can do it with the power of the Holy Ghost in us and the Word of God in our hearts and in our mouths. We can press until we finish the race God has called us to run.

Remember, the natural world will always tell you that you can’t do it—it’s too big for you. You’re too foolish. You’re too weak. But God just says, Do it, and I’ll make up the difference.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

The fact is, if you want to lay hold of the authority of God and walk in the supernatural, you can’t do it from your easy chair. You have to press in. Jesus said, “The law and the prophets were until John: since that time the kingdom of God is preached, and every man presseth into it” (Luke 16:16). Paul wrote, “…I press on to lay hold of (grasp) and make my own, that for which Christ Jesus (the Messiah) has laid hold of me and made me His own” (Philippians 3:12, The Amplified Bible).

Press in. That’s as important a concept for us today as it was in Moses’ time. Moses pressed in the Spirit. He wanted to see God’s glory. I’m that way too. I’d want to see God’s glory even if I knew I wouldn’t live through it.

That heart cry to know God keeps us pressing in to lay hold of more of His kingdom each day of our lives. It pushes us toward the goal of knowing Jesus and finishing the race God has set before us.

If you want to go on with God like Moses and Paul did, then that desire is going to have to become the cry of your heart. Paul’s heart cry to know the Lord made him determined not to quit. He was determined to press on until he laid hold of every task the Lord had for him.

One day while on a journey to bring persecution to the Church, Paul was laid hold of by Jesus. The King James Version of the Bible says he was “apprehended” by Jesus. From that time until the day he went to be with the Lord, Paul was committed to fulfilling the calling for which he was apprehended. He would not quit early. Even with his intense desire to be with Christ in heaven, Paul was willing to stay on earth knowing the need of believers to whom he ministered (Philippians 1:21-26).

Kenneth Copeland Ministries

If you’ll read the Bible, however, you’ll see that spiritual power has been affecting this physical world ever since time began. In fact, it was spiritual power released in the form of God’s Word that brought this natural world into existence in the first place. Just look at Genesis 1 and you can see that for yourself. It says:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light…. And God said, Let there be a firmament…. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together…. And God said, Let the earth bring forth…. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night…. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly…. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind…. And God said, Let us make man in our image….

Now, in the light of those scriptures, can you believe that God’s Word—the force that originally brought into being everything you can see and touch, including your physical body—is still capable of
changing that body today? Of course you can! It makes perfect sense.

John G. Lake says this about divine healing and divine health: “Divine healing is the removal by the power of God of the disease that has come upon the body, but divine health is to live day by day and hour by hour in touch with God so that the life of God flows into the body, just as the life of God flows into the mind or flows into the spirit” (John G. Lake—His Life, His Sermons, His Boldness of Faith, p. 9 9-10).

Kenneth Copeland Ministries