Joyce Meyer - Developing the Character of God - Part 2

One of the things that baby Christians do is they talk bad about themselves. How many of you say bad things about yourself out of your own mouth? "I'm so stupid. I just can't do anything right". That is one of the worst things that you can possibly do. There's a scripture, I mean, I'm sure I've read it hundreds of times, but you know that's how the Bible is. You can read it and read it and read it and then one day you see it. And it says that "We are to acknowledge every good thing that is in us in Christ". Wow. "Acknowledge every good thing that's in you in Christ". So, that means you should be saying, "I'm a child of God. I've been made right with him through the blood of Christ. God loves me. I'm not where I need to be but thank God I'm not where I used to be".

You just have no idea how awesome you are. I mean, really, I'm just not trying to puff you up. God lives in you. I mean, how much better can it get than that? "The mystery of the ages is Christ in you, the hope of glory". Who can understand that? It's the mystery, the greatest mystery of all the ages. Christ has come to live in us. Wow. That's what we need to think about, not the last thing we did wrong. When you repent of a sin, it's gone, forgotten, moved as far as the east is from the west, and if God can forget it, then you should be able to forget it. Verse 14, "But solid food is for full-grown men, for those whose senses and mental faculties are trained by practice to discriminate and distinguish between what is good and what is evil".

What's right and what's wrong. And how many of you know that there are signs like this in places? And so, this is basically saying, if you go the wrong way, you gonna get lost. Well, all the people in the world that are lost are lost because they've gone the wrong way. But you can be found and go the right way. You're gonna make hundreds of choices next week, little ones and maybe some big ones. And the more right ones you make, the better your life's gonna be. The more wrong ones you make, the worse it's going to be. Let me tell you something. Your life can be as good as you want it to be, but it's not gonna be just because you're lucky. Amen?

Let me tell you, my life started out wretched, and I have got a great life now. I'll tell you what, I had a bad and a painful and a dysfunctional beginning, but I am having a good finish. And you can too. But you can't feel sorry for yourself. You can't have a chip on your shoulder. You can't hold unforgiveness. You can't make excuses for your bad behavior. Oh yeah, I made excuses for years. "Well, if I wouldn't have been abused then I wouldn't act this way". And God, I mean, God talks to you. And he spoke to my heart and said, "Yes, you do behave the way you behave because you were abused, but don't let it be an excuse to stay that way".

Maybe the problems you have are because of things that have happened to you, but there's answers. You don't have to stay that way. Every right choice you make starts to undo something, some bad choice that you made somewhere in the past. At least give God the same amount of time you gave the devil. Amen. A woman was coming to my session, she'd seen me on TV, and she came to the altar one night at the end of the service. And she was all upset and she said, "I want my money back". I said, "What are you talking about"? She said, "Listen I've been doing what you said to do for two weeks and nothing's changed". I mean, honestly, it was all I could do to keep from laughing in her face. I thought, "Two weeks?! How long did it take you to make the mess you're in? I bet you didn't make that mess in two weeks".

Let me tell you something, if you're gonna hang out with God you better get ready for some patience, 'cause he's not in a hurry about anything. He's one of those slow cooker guys. Chapter 6 verse 1, "Therefore let us go on and get past the elementary stage in the teachings and the doctrines of Christ (the Messiah), advancing steadily toward the completeness and perfection that belongs to spiritual maturity". So, let me just say it like this. Let's make a decision tonight to just quit dancing around the same dumb stuff all the time and let's go on to some spiritual maturity. Let's stop getting our feelings hurt every time somebody says something to us that's... See, when you're secure and you know who you are in Christ, then you don't have to go through all that silly stuff. You don't have to get upset because you heard so-and-so was talking about you, because if you know who you are, you don't care what they think who you are.

1 Corinthians 13 says, "Love is not touchy". You don't have to be touchy. "Well, you hurt my feelings". No, you got your feelings hurt. I told you we're having meat. I dare you to come back tomorrow. So, here's some things he says we need to let go of, "Let us not again be laying the foundation of repentance and abandonment of dead works". Do you know that guilt is a dead work? Say, "What do you mean by that"? Well, when you sin and you repent and you continue to feel guilty, all you're doing is trying to pay for your sin. And Jesus already paid for it, so it's a dead work. See, some people think it's spiritual to go around and feel bad about themselves. That's what religion does for you. Jesus didn't die to give us a religion. He died to give us a love relationship with God.

Focus on your love relationship with God, loving him and letting him love you. That's what'll make you whole and complete. Every person in the world is looking for love. They want unconditional love. They want acceptance, not rejection. And let's go on beyond that faith by which you turn to God. You know, things that we're still having trouble with, I mean, I'm gonna write a book pretty soon on faith because a lot of people say they're faith people and don't even know what faith is.

There's so many things that we hear and we hear and we hear, but we don't really understand what they are. He said, "It's time to let go of this thing about repentance". And that doesn't mean that we're not to repent, but we don't need to be confused about it. We need to know that when we repent, it's done. It's done. We try to use our faith to get a new car, and that's not what it's for. Characteristics of immature Christians. They're controlled by fleshly impulses.

Galatians 5:19-21, "Now the doings of the flesh are clear (and obvious): they are immorality, impurity, indecency, idolatry", that's putting other things ahead of God. Loving anything more than God is idolatry. "Enmity, strife, jealousy, anger". Let's go back up here to sorcery for a minute. Let me make somebody mad. You don't need to read your horoscope every day to find out what's gonna happen. And I'll admit sometimes I see that thing somewhere and I think, "Ah, I think I'll just see what it says about me". And then I'm like, "Nope, not doing it". Don't be playing with a Ouija board. Don't be going somewhere to get your cards read or your palm read. And for goodness sakes, don't call one of these psychics, who for a dollar a minute, listen, you give me a dollar a minute, I'll tell you some stuff that will really change your life. Oh, my gosh.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw that in there. Mainly not for you, but all the people watching by TV. "(sects with peculiar opinions, heresies), envy, drunkenness", it's kind of interesting, he puts drunkenness right along with envy. "Carousing, and the like". Okay, now, I don't know what you want to do with this next sentence, but I'm gonna read it to you. "I warn you beforehand, just as I did previously, that those who do such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God". Yeah, you don't know whether to clap or not. And I understand how you feel because, you say, "Well, wait a minute. I thought that, you know, in order to be saved, all I had to do was believe that Jesus died for me".

That's true but let me expound a little bit. If you really do believe, I mean, if you really believe, then you will also obey. And I'm beginning to see something that I think is a real problem. When we do what we call "Altar calls" in services, we usually invite people to receive Christ. But I think we need to also tell them that they need to be ready to surrender their life to him. We don't just get him if he doesn't get us. And I don't think we're doing people a favor by telling them "God wants to forgive all your sins and he wants to come and live inside of you and he wants to make your life better". Yes, he wants to do that, but he wants you to surrender everything to him. We don't just get to tack Jesus onto our mess and drag him along with us and pull him out like a little genie out of a bottle every time we have a problem. Live for God.

Let him be your life. Not just somebody who rescues you when you're in trouble. You're in trouble all the time and so am i. Jesus said, "Apart from me, you can do nothing". And I remind myself of that every day. "Apart from him, I can do nothing". This is not a Sunday morning thing, and then you know now, I mean church services are down like 38 minutes or something like you know it's like, I'll tell you if we're in that big of a rush to get out of the house of God then maybe we just ought not to go. I mean, I don't think we need to just see how long we can keep people there, but. I didn't fly all the way here to just have you in here one hour and give you a little tickle and send you home.

See, we don't even wanna try to explain a scripture like this. Usually I'll read that and not even try to explain it because that just scares people. "I warn you that if you keep doing stuff like this, you won't inherit the Kingdom of God". Now, he's not saying that if you make a mistake here and there, you're not gonna inherit the Kingdom of God. But if it's our habit to live an immoral, ungodly, flesh-controlled life, then something's wrong. You didn't really make a commitment. You might have said some words and prayed a prayer, but you didn't really make a commitment. You didn't really give your life to God. Because when you really give your life to God, he starts Messing in every area of your life.

You can't say, "Well, I want you to help me when I'm in trouble, but don't convict me if I'm watching junk on TV. Don't convict me if I'm selfish and self-centered". Is anybody alive out there? Baby Christians are easily offended, insecure, blame others for their faults, difficult to correct, prideful and easily angered. Galatians 5:22 and 23, "But the Fruit of the Spirit [the work which his presence within accomplishes] is love, joy (gladness), peace, patience (an even temper, forbearance), kindness, goodness (benevolence), faithfulness, gentleness (meekness, humility), self-control (self-restraint, continence). Against such things there is no law that can bring a charge".

Now, that's what you're full of. You're pregnant with all that stuff. Maybe you haven't delivered yet, but you're pregnant. And some of you are about to have birth pangs. All right, I'm gonna say something you're not gonna like it, but it's true. Suffering and spiritual maturity go together. Oh boy, here we go. Okay, you get yourself out of concordance and see how many times the word suffering is in the New Testament. The Bible says that Jesus learned obedience through the things that he suffered. Well, how can he learn obedience he never disobeyed? Well, he learned the cost of obedience by doing the right thing when it was hard.

1 Peter 4:1 and 2, "So, since Christ suffered in the flesh for us, and for you, arm yourselves with the same thought and purpose [patiently to suffer rather than fail to please God]". So, he says, "This is the way we should think. 'i will suffer rather than fail to please God'". Just because you're a Christian, that doesn't mean everything's supposed to feel good. And some of the preaching that you've gotten in the past maybe didn't tell you the full story. I started out in the word and faith movement was taught.

Boy, if you were going through anything, then you didn't have enough faith. I mean, I tried living like that and it just wasn't working. I mean, I rebuked the devil till my rebuker just was completely worn out. And I finally thought, "Okay, I'm doing all this and I'm still going through hell". And so, I got with God to see what he had to say. And I started reading stuff like this, and you can't deny it. Everything is not gonna be easy. Everything is not gonna feel good. We go through things, but we never have to go through them alone. And there is not a person here that doesn't go through stuff. And you can't faith it all away either.

Faith is not something that God gives us to get rid of all of our problems. He gives it to us to get us through them in victory. When I was a kid, I prayed and prayed for God to get me away from my dad. I prayed and prayed. I mean, I prayed that my dad would die. I prayed my mother would leave him, anything to get me out of the situation I was in. And God didn't get me out of it, but he got me through it. And you know, I'm smart enough to realize he could have gotten me out of it, but God had another purpose. He knew what he was gonna do with me later on, and I had to have that experience of seeing God be faithful to me... Otherwise, what do I have to say to you? I tell you, just believe God and all your problems will go away and then when they don't, you think, "Well, what's wrong with me"? Come on, am I telling you the truth or not?