Pastor Terri Copleland Pearsons

Sunday Outline – November 12, 2023

Pastor Terri Copeland Pearsons ministered this past Sunday

Pastor Terri began with … 

“Would you set your faith with me, and we'll pray. 

Father, I'm so thankful for so many things. I'm thankful for you. I'm thankful for the Lord Jesus. I'm thankful for the Holy Spirit. I'm thankful for his equipping. I'm thankful, Lord, that you fill all the gaps. I'm thankful for the anointing that enables us to do what we could not do apart from it. I'm thankful for the anointing to speak, and I'm thankful for the anointing to hear, thankful for the help of the Holy Spirit and the grace of God to comprehend and to understand, and that, Lord, this message today will be a help to our understanding. To better see who we are and our assignment, and our role, and to comprehend and to evaluate the things that are happening so rapidly around us. As we look to watch for the coming of the Lord, we do look up Lord.

We thank you for the covenant that has already expressed a change in our lives. But we are grateful, Lord, that you're not done yet. We're grateful, Lord, that there's yet more and more that there is an eternity, in which you will be displaying the very wonders of your grace. We're thankful for it. In the name of Jesus, Amen.”

1 Corinthians 10: 31-32; (NKJV)

“Therefore, whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God, give no offense either to the Jews or to the Greeks, or to the Church of God.”

(AMPC) “Do not let yourselves be a hindrance by giving an offense to the Jews or to the Greeks or the Church of God.”

From this passage, there are three groups of people. God is dealing with each of those three groups in the most specific way that He ever has. This church age is coming to a close, and His assignment for the church is winding up on this side of heaven. But His dealings with the nations and with the Jews is escalating. We still have a role and a part in that. 

2 Timothy 2:15; (AMPC)

“Be eager, do your utmost.”

Those are very specific words written by the Apostle Paul with great intention. Be eager. Do your utmost to present yourself to God. Tested by trial. It's not tested by sickness and disease, but yes, as believers, we are tested. We are tested by the world that we live in, but we're also given opportunity by God to test and try our faith. Why would that happen? This gives us the opportunity to see what we are capable of, to see how we've grown, to see where we need to grow. It gives us opportunity for constant self-evaluation in light of the scripture so that we may grow. 

The Bible says that the trying of our faith is precious. It's precious to us. It's important to us. Otherwise, we begin to live without any spiritual fortitude, or strength, or capacity. He says to be present ourselves to God approved a workman who has no cause to be ashamed, correctly analyzing, and accurately dividing, rightly handling and skillfully teaching the word of truth. 

To rightly divide the word, you must know who the scripture is speaking to and who it is about.

“All the Bible is for the church, but not all the Bible is about the church.” The Bible says He would that all men would be saved and come into the knowledge of Him. He, God would not have any person lost, He understands and knows the heart and the nature of man. He knows the formidable nature of our enemy. And He has a plan for all three groups and will reach to each group as far down as they will allow Him to connect with them.

1 Thessalonians 5:23;

“May the God of peace.”

Peace comes from a root word meaning nothing missing, nothing broken, completeness, total unity, and wholeness. 

There is no shadow of turning in God. There's no gray in God.

This verse continues that He may sanctify you. What is sanctified? It means separate. To be separate means to be separated from something to something. May He sanctify you through and through and separate you from profane things, take you out of something profane and make you pure and holy, W-H-O-L-L-Y. Completely consecrated to God. And may your spirit and soul and body be preserved, sound and complete. 

Notice that there are three parts. The spirit, the soul, and the body, they are connected, and they are separate. 

Three things identified here and through other scripture as well. Each part is supposed to be separated to God from profane things. The new birth, as we will see, separates us in spirit, but we can be separated in soul and embody the spirit is the core of what you are. You are a spirit being, even as God is a spirit being, you are created. Think of this, you are by design created to live in the spirit. So don't be intimidated by spiritual things. You are by design created for that more than you are by design created to be in the flesh.

No other earthly natural creature is a spirit being. Nothing else in this natural realm is a spirit being, animals are not spirit beings. What about angels? What about demons? Yes, but they are not natural. They're of the spirit and don't have natural bodies. So the same essence of God's nature, His ‘godness’ is in your spirit. Why is it that way? Why are you made of the same essence, spiritual essence as God, so that you can express Him! So that you can connect with Him, and so you can fulfill all that He is called and destined for you to do, if you will.

Every spirit first proceeds from God, Mom and dad don't create spiritual beings. All spirit beings have proceeded first from God.

The soul consists of your mind, your thoughts, your will, and your emotions. Most notably your will. The will is more than just a director of natural decisions. Don't forget to turn out the lights. I want to wear blue. What's on the calendar? I want to have spaghetti for supper. I like this. I like that. I don't like this. I don't like that. Those are all on the lowest level of the soul's determination and what the soul's responsibilities are. 

The soul’s highest responsibility is in spiritual and eternal decisions. You are empowered by God to make the highest level of choices which He will respect. God created every individual thing, apart from the curse, everything is an expression of something about God. Don't you suppose there are a billion different bugs, and without the curse, they would express something of God's nature.

Through the soul. We have process and reasoning and deduction. No other spiritual being has a free will as you do. They're not allowed. Satan took it for himself, which damned him for eternity. You are a spirit, you have a soul, and you dwell as long as you are in this earth, in a natural body. At creation, at the creation time, the body was clothed with the glory of God. That glory was extinguished, but yet the body still reflects God's vast abilities, His great wisdom and His marvelous love with the body.

These three elements, spirit, soul, and body, make you a completely unique expression of God. When God created man, He began with a seed. All of creation was created with seed in itself. Jesus said in Mark 4 that the whole kingdom of God is as a seed. Genesis 1, that that seed was to reproduce after its own kind. This process was more than just a prototype. Adam was not a prototype. He was the seed from which all creation of mankind was to spring from in the spirit, Adam was the seed. All mankind would follow after that seed, the three-part being spirit, soul, and body. When God created Adam, he gave him dominion.

A seed is meant to grow and develop. Jesus said, just like the corn, first was the stalk, then the blade, then the full corn in the ear. When God created Adam, He gave them this dominion. But it was to be done in union with God. Why? Anything outside of God is not right. 

There's a hierarchy in these three parts. The spirit was and still is to rule the soul. The spirit is what is alive to God and where He fellowships with man.

Proverbs 20:27,

“The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord searching all the inward parts of the belly.”

It's by the spirit of man that the light is turned on. The soul then is to direct, to rule and to govern the body. The spirit in Bible terms is the heart, the spirit and the soul are eternally connected. The two together are the hidden man of the heart. You can't see your spirit apart from a divine revelation. You can't see your soul, but united together, they are the hidden man of the heart.

Luke 16:25, Abraham addressed the rich man that went into hell, and he was trying to get Abraham to let him cross over that great divide. Abraham said to him, remember. The brain is not the soul. The brain is the physical liaison between the soul and the natural world. It's a processor, it's a computer. The rich man's brain was in the grave, and yet Abraham called on his memory, called him to recollect his time on the earth so the spirit and the soul are eternally connected. When Adam and Eve were created, they were full of the life of God, but they still needed to grow, to mature, and to develop just like God. They were to be eternal with no end, with no limitations, just to continue to grow like the Father of Creation.

The Tree of life was there for that reason, but something happened. Eve made an immature decision in her soul. She based her decision on direction and reasoning that came from her flesh. The scripture says that when she saw the tree was good for food. She looked to a resource apart from the instruction that God had given, and she was influenced by a deceiver who got her eyes off the word of God. How was he able to do that? What made it so easy for Eve to fall that way? Because he said to her, did God really say that about that fruit? And put a question in her mind and she opted to go with what her flesh wanted, what she saw with her eyes, what appealed to her. Instead of finding out exactly what did the word of God say to her, she didn't check with the word, so she got it wrong. Her soul reasoned in favor of her flesh.

Adam made a much more serious decision. He was standing right there. The Bible says she turned and gave to her husband. He was right there. He saw it. He heard it, and he knew. He decided on purpose, ignoring the God rule of His spirit. He understood and he made a high-level spiritual choice to defiantly try to exalt himself above any need for God. He was offered pride, and he took it. And when he did, he exchanged the nature of God for the nature of Satan. 

Adam was the first one to be born again, but instead of born again from death to life, he was born again from life to death. Thus, Adam, the seed plunged mankind and to an existence that was ruled by sin and death from the inside out. What allowed sin to rule, what allowed death to rule over creation? The dominion that God had placed in Adam, he didn't lose his dominion, he lost his ability to exercise it n line and by divine connection with the life of God. And instead, he yielded it over to Satan, who would then in turn dominate and exercise dominion over him. He no longer had his lifeline with God from the spirit man out, God is now in essence on the outside looking in. 

So, what did God do? He promised a new seed would come and fix the problem. A new seed would bring an opportunity to overcome this domination of sin and death. The next thing He did was to shed innocent blood. Supreme justice demanded equal retribution. Man's blood was no longer innocent. What good would it do for him to spill his blood to atone for that sin or for you? In God there is always a divine balance, a divine justice. And He comprehends it in a way that we still must learn and grow in insight to understand it.

Man's blood could not equalize the sin that he had committed this high treason. But God, in His love didn't want to just kill the man, getting rid of creation. So, what did He do? God killed an animal, and He clothed Adam and Eve with its skin. Why did blood have to be spilled right away? 

Leviticus 17:11 “The life of the body is in its blood. I have given you the blood on the altar to purify you, making you right with the Lord.”

It is the blood given in exchange for a life that makes purification possible. But the blood of an animal was not enough to change a man from the inside out. It simply kept complete judgment “at bay.” The life of God had been so strong at creation that the full nature and expression of sin did not come instantly. It did not instantly have a full expression. Sin can and will develop and grow and spread if it's unchecked.

Adam and Eve were removed from the garden, removed from the tree of life, lest they seal that condition with no help, no hope of redemption. And yet there were things that he understood of the spirit – they didn’t forget their past prior to sin. There were things that he knew and could glean from what he had learned and knew of God. 

First, Adam was called to teach his children. He taught his children, and it was this inherent ability and instinctively to tell his children what he knows. Adam lived over 900 years. That's a lot of children. And in teaching his children, he taught his children to teach his children. What were they taught? 

Take One

• God is creator. He exists and He's supreme. So, no other gods should be recognized. 
• God gave provision. This is His nature. So, no one has a right to curse Him. 
• He gave man dominion over creation. So, creation is not to be a God or an idol to you. 
• He understood that a man was to leave father and mother and be joined to his wife and his wife alone. Therefore, they were not to engage in any other form of sex. 

Since man had no spiritual ability to rule his soul or his body, he became more highly developed in the nature of Satan. There was a risk of closing the door on this promise of the new seed, a new Adam. Imagine if you will, millions of people, all the people as full of evil, as the Hamas terrorists of October 7^th. There were only eight people who had not crossed the line of no return. Noah and his family.

The flood was the result. God overwhelmed sin with the flood. A year later as Noah left the ark, God reaffirmed the same blessing that He had given Adam is the blessing. 

Take Two

He added a few more specifics that we have in writing. These specifics were resulting in what God said was an everlasting covenant promise to every living thing. Then He confirmed His blessing and said it was to Noah and to his sons. Genesis 10:32. 

These are the families of Noah after their generations in their nations by these were the nations divided in the earth. After the flood, mankind began with Adam. The nations began with Noah and his sons. The Bible gives us a list of 70 nations. At that time there were more to come, remember, this is a covenant. The word covenant is mentioned nine times, even everlasting covenant. A covenant is two-sided in God's promise. He withheld judgments and He gave blessing. But the blessing had conditions. 

There are seven laws that the Jews have identified through scripture and through the oral law. 

1. Don't curse God by denying him. 
2. Don't practice idolatry. 
3. Do not engage and elicit sexuality. 
4. Do not shed blood. 
5. Do not rob, do not be a robber. That sounds odd. I think to our ears at first, because you are thinking of a guy with a dark mask who sneaks in at night and steals your jewelry, but they understand it much more than that. Don't be a robber. Not money, not time, not dignity, and not someone's future that eliminates abortion. You not only stole that person's future, but you also just stole all the futures that would have come from that person. 
6. Do not eat flesh from a living animal. What does that mean? Why would they have to say that? It put value on all kinds of life, but with no refrigeration, how easy it would be to cut off a leg, save the rest of it for later. But God elevated the value of life. What seems so basic to you wasn't even a consideration. 
7. Establish courts of justice.

God put inside mankind instinctively to establish law, but without some source of spiritual light, even these seven basic laws could not be kept by the nations. They were still left to themselves. So, God called a man named Abram that later changed his name to Abraham. He offered him a better covenant with better promises. 

Abraham accepted what God called the everlasting covenant. He accepted the blessing, but he also accepted the conditions of it. Abraham became a seed for a different nation, a different kind of people. Abraham was then replicated in Isaac, then was replicated by Jacob who also had a name change when he had an encounter with God, and his name became Israel. From his 12 sons came the nation of Israel. All the descendants of those 12 sons are the children of Israel. This covenant gave so much more from God. 

The Blessing. 

Deuteronomy chapter 28, Blessed coming in, blessed going out, the head and not the tail, above and not beneath – being blessed in prosperity in every way. Everything you set your hand to do would be blessed. God told Abraham; I'm going to bless you so that you can be a blessing to all the other nations. This nation of Israel also had more expected, not seven laws, but through Moses and through the law, they found 613 laws. They were to be separated to God. They were to be an example to the other nations. They were to keep God in the forefront of them. And they will tell you that they were assigned to be God's ambassadors to, “repair the world.”

Look online and see the vast things that the Jews have brought into the world. How could they as a nation do this, they needed the power to be able to keep their part to walk in this blessing that God had promised. God on Mount Sinai through Moses gave them the written word, something they didn't have. Something that had only been passed down through oral law and through oral tradition because God had instinctively put it in Adam. The oral law was written down in the fourth century.

Now, God is still having to deal with sin, the inside nature as well as the sin of the soul and body of the individual. But now that we have this, this new thing called nations, He must deal with the corporate level of balance of sin.

He wanted to lift man closer to him, but He had to still work from the outside in. So here's what we need to appreciate about the law. It curtailed sin. How? By training the soul and the body in the ways of righteousness. So, God would be able to bless them so that He could interact with them at some level, even if it was just limited. He set a standard that they could reach for even though it was a standard they could never fully attain. Why did He do that? To protect the bloodline of the new seed, to release His words of perfection that would later produce and become the perfect seed from which a new man would come. No one person or even a small group of individuals could conquer sin enough for everyone else. So, the blessing and the curse rested foremost on them as a nation. So that the corporate works of righteousness, the corporate motivation, the corporate heart could balance, bring some tipping to the scales of balance more in favor of God being able to bless them. 

He told man, it's eye for eye, is tooth for tooth. What you do, allows Me to bless and My blessing will always be better than what you could do for yourself. But it's always going to be limited. If you will do this, then the blessing can follow. But if you do otherwise, then the curse is there to swallow you up.

God spoke to this nation of Israel. He spoke to them as a nation more than just as individuals. Why? Because they had no indwelling Holy Spirit in their spirit. The word, however, did affect their souls and it would stir their heart hunger for God that is embedded in every man, whether you'll recognize it or not. The heart hunger to know and to walk with God. 

There were only a few individuals that you can read about through the scripture that are identified as those who were ascending towards God. Man had descended to the lowest level in sin, but through acts and works and deeds of righteousness, it began to lift them and move them towards God. Not all the way up to where Adam was, but it moved them towards God and whenever they moved towards God, He could move towards them.

So how did the people, the Jewish people, ascend by their works and deeds of righteousness? If they acted righteous, then God could bless them. So, they were always working towards righteousness from the outside in. The law laid out these deeds. It laid out what righteousness looked like. You can still gain and learn from that. The Bible tells us that the law is a teacher. It tells us what righteousness looks like and how it thinks, how it thinks in society, how it thinks towards people, how it thinks towards finances, how it thinks towards wisdom, and skill and knowledge.

They would work from the outside trying to work a way to get to God through trying to understand His divine wisdom. He called some people to execute even greater or more difficult deeds. Some were more yielded to Him, and they would follow after that pattern. David is a great example. David would do what the word said, and then he yielded to that heart hunger, those two things together would be rewarded by an even greater deed. You mean I do something great, and my reward is the opportunity to do something else? Yes.

With every greater work, every greater challenge and deed, there was a corresponding response of God with His anointing and with Himself, some further insight and a revelation of Him. David pressed through so much. We have much of the book of Psalms because of him and that anointing that came on him as he pressed towards God. Let's just look for a moment of his life. What happened with him?

• He communed with God while tending sheep. 
• He did the works that were set in front of him, 
• An anointing came for music, and he yielded to it along with his worship with that music.
• The music became an instrument of deliverance for Saul. He yielded to that and obeyed.
• He faced Goliath, which was a far greater work and deed, requiring a greater anointing.
• He came to fight for his country and for his king.
• That fight became a fight for his own life without losing honor. 
• He had no vengeance in his heart against the anointed one, King Saul. There was no murder in his heart. 

What a challenge.

• He pressed in, determined to do what the word said to do out of his hunger and his heart for God. 
• He became the king first over half the nation. And then over the whole, 
• He faced war after war. All the while he's building and unifying the kingdom. 
• He established the city of David, Jerusalem for God,
• He brought the ark of the covenant home.  

All of these outweighed the fact that he was still in a fallen condition, and it brought blessing on the nation. However, all that he did, all of his works, all of his great achievements in his greatest hunger, could not remove the sin nature from his inner man. He wasn't even close to where Adam had been.

From this more elevated place, David yielded to that sin nature. He yielded and decided in his soul based on the desires of his flesh, his soul reasoned for his flesh, and the price was very high. Murder followed adultery and death. Followed the murder not only of his child, but war after war, all the way to civil war. There were many other costly choices that David made, but these choices were not just about him, but the blessing or the cursing came on the nation because of his position. Individuals could follow God and some did, but rarely could someone rise above the leader. Why? Because the power to overcome the national status just wasn't there. The power from the inside out just wasn't there.

It just seems like the right thing to do because everybody's doing it.

Why do you think we come to church, each of us brings a presence of God and a spirit of faith; we come in and corporately it ministers and equips, and it helps those so that God can move in and among us. It's not all up to whoever stands behind this pulpit. You make a difference and God knows when He's assigned you and your faith to be here and you aren't. 

Forsake not the assembling of ourselves together. As Mark Hankins says, there are some things in which some assembly is required.

So, the power to overcome the national status when it was sinking just wasn't there. That power comes by the Spirit through the spirit of a man, which was extremely limited in how much power it could handle. The amount of power that would be needed would cause a person to rise above this national status, was the same power that would destroy that human spirit because it was embedded with the very nature of sin. God's power destroys sin and it would have destroyed the man. Sin is the work of death to draw people into itself. Sin empowers sickness, pain, sorrow, fear, lack, destruction, violence, brutality, and left unchecked. It escalates and it deepens, and it broadens not only individually but throughout society. Sin and death is everything that's wrong. It's the reciprocal of everything that's right. God is love, He's light, He's life. All that essence of God produces a rightness or what the Bible calls righteousness. God's desire is to have perfect companionship, in spirit, and soul and body. The law was the picture of perfection. The covenant required it of man, as man so that God could require it of Himself.

God understood that man could not keep it; so, a system was put in place to close this gap as far as it could with the blood of animals. 

It took lots of animals, different kinds of animals for all different kinds of things. This “bell's so short” that it had to be repeated not only by the thousands of thousands of animals, but day after day and year after year. It was an outward work that could not reach the inner man, and that solution was not good enough to satisfy the plan of God. All of this was a step-by-step layered plan to produce a new being, one that is created to live from the inside out instead of trying to live and get and reach the inside from the outside in. 

A plan for a man to live from the spirit man out as Adam originally had, but with an intention of a failsafe, a non-failure nature, a spirit born of a new seed, not Adam's seed. Then the plan was to fill that being with God Himself and that that filling would overflow to soul and to body. 

God would no longer be working on the outside in, but He would be working and living, He would be expressing from the inside out. That meant there was a need for a new birth, a recreation. Jesus came as the fulfillment of that law, both on the part of man and on the part of God.

An unbreakable covenant bond, and God wasn't going to fail. Jesus as a man wasn't going to fail a covenant that is indeed everlasting, and Jesus was and still is the word made flesh.

Jesus’ blood was pure, and He gave it as the full sacrifice to satisfy divine justice for Adam's sin. Because He personally was without sin, defeated death itself and with His resurrection, He became the last Adam, the new seed. Anyone who would respond with a sole decision to receive what Jesus offers. The Spirit of God now had permission to end the existence of the sin infested human spirit and breathe a new life into its being not after the seed and pattern of Adam or of Abraham like the nations, but after the God in man seed of Jesus. This new birth is about the individual, not a nation; but each individual is placed in the body of the anointed one. Israel was called to lead the nations to God as far as they could, and Satan has always tried to stop that by killing the Jews. But thank God, He kept them. Now, we as individuals, and corporately as the body of Christ as a whole, we have a calling. We are one-on-one, to live our lives by letting Christ live through us. We are to show His love and the power of the new birth to other individuals, to the Jews and to the nations. 

You don't express this the same way to the Jews as you do the nations.

The Jews are not a people without a covenant. God said, make no hindrance to the Jews. 

• It's a hindrance when you kill them.
• When you threaten them that if they don’t convert to Christianity, we're going to kill. We're going to drown your children.

That sounds like the Hamas terrorists. We are to show the love of God. We are to demonstrate the power of His presence.

The Jews who have be chosen by God, they've taken their call to the nations as a matter of total commitment. They order their lives by what they understand the word to say. They don't see what you see. You've been quickened. You've been made alive on the inside by the Holy Spirit. The power of the Holy Spirit is in you, but now you must join that power of the Holy Spirit. It's up to us to learn and to grow up in Christ. 

Ephesians 4:12-13;

We're here to equip you for growing up into Him for the work of the ministry. This is the call of God. This is the plan of God. This is the purpose of God. 

Why is the nation, the world, and especially America in the condition that it's in? Because the church has not grown up in God, not grown up in the things of the Spirit and understanding her rightful place and duty and responsibility. 

One of the things the Jews understood and all the nations that were scattered by God told them, “You see to it that that nation prospers.” That's still our assignment too, to see to it that this nation prospers under the hand of God. Every Christian is to walk and live in the light that they have and let that light lead to more light. Our core values are more than just a creed. They're there to direct and to help us and to rule our thoughts and our actions, which is to say our soul and our flesh. What are our core values? You should all know them.

Click here for EMIC Core Values

Ephesians 2 says, we have been recreated in Christ Jesus unto the works for which He's called us. We're supposed to do works from the inside out instead of the works trying to get from the outside in, and to do them in love and in power. We walk in love, but only as much as we walk with love Himself.

Are we acting and thinking and reasoning even as Adam and Eve did and said, that looks good to me. But if the word is first and our fellowship is with the Spirit and we're praying about everything, then we have the equipment necessary to walk in the spirit. 

If we've prayed about everything and we didn't receive an answer, then we missed something. But did we seek the Word to find out what we missed? We protect the anointing. I love this that the Lord said to me a couple of years ago, promotion is not so much a reward as it is a response to the anointings demand for more room to express itself. So do all that it takes to increase the power at work within you. 

Have we invested enough to really know what honor means? This is not a rebuke. I know that if each of us were doing and pressing for more, even as much as God loved them, our covenant brothers, the Jews, if we would look to the word by the power that's within us. This building couldn't contain the people nor the power of God that would be present, and it would be there everywhere you go. 

Our works and our efforts do not redeem us, but they do determine if God's purpose in our life is fulfilled, we are to live from the inside out. He's given us grace to do it. But grace is by faith, and faith comes by hearing the word that we choose to hear. The resources are here. Whether it's the victory channel, books, MP3s, downloads. You just have to turn your attention to it and make a decision that every 10- or 15-minutes counts.

What you turn on in the car when you have a 15-minute drive makes a difference.

It's the extra time in the morning. It's the letting go of one thing to have something more of Him. It's just walking in the light that you have and looking and pressing towards a little more of that light. Working on the outside, using my soul, my mind, my will, and my emotions to direct whether or not my flesh gets what it wants.

We matter to God's plan for the Jews, and we matter to His plan for the nations. We are of the heavenly Jerusalem ambassadors sent to execute His will on earth, even as it is in heaven. What a privilege. What a call.