Joyce Meyer - Is There Hope for Me To Change? (08/18/2019)
This empowering message reminds believers of their true identity in Christ: righteous, capable, and equipped by God. It emphasizes resisting the devil's lies by declaring who you are in Christ, choosing daily to yield your faculties to God as instruments of righteousness rather than to sin, and understanding that spiritual warfare is a constant part of the growth journey.
Your True Identity in Christ
You really can do all things through Christ who strengthens you. The greater one who lives in you really is greater than he that's in the world. You really are a great person. You really are an amazing creature. And you really do have a really, really, really good heart. Because God has given you his heart and he's put his spirit in you. And amazing, more than amazing than anything, he took our sin and gave us his righteousness. You are right with God through the blood of Christ. And in your spirit there is righteousness, not wrongness.
Wrongness may be in your soul, wrongness may be displayed through your flesh, but in your spirit there is righteousness. You are full of the righteousness of God and right desires and right want-tos. And God would never ask us to get out in the world and do right if he didn't give us the equipment to do right. So here's what it is. You've got what it takes. You have got what it takes. But the devil doesn't want you to know that. So he keeps you thinking about how bad you are, how no good you are, and how often you fail, and how you don't this, and you don't that, you don't something else.
Talk Back to the Devil with Truth
And I'm telling you, you need to start talking back to the devil and saying, "I am a new creature in Christ. I am more than a conqueror. My sins are forgiven. I am full of the righteousness of God. And I may not be where I need to be, but thank God I'm not where I used to be. I'm learning. I'm growing." You have to keep your mind on who you are in Christ. That doesn't mean that we're not responsible for our mistakes, but we can't just camp on top of them all the time and not do anything but think about what we don't do, we don't do, we don't do, we don't do.
"Do not continue offering or yielding your bodily members and faculties to sin as instruments and tools of wickedness, but offer and yield yourselves to God as though you've been raised from the dead to perpetual life and your bodily members and faculties to God presenting them as implements of righteousness." You know, we're always, "Well, I just wish the devil wouldn't, I just wish the devil would leave me alone." Well, he ain't gonna leave you alone. He is never gonna leave you alone. Get that. He is never gonna leave you alone.
The Constant Choice: Yielding to God or Sin
I remember saying to Dave, years and years ago when we were trying to start this ministry and it was just one thing after another, after another, after another, and I just got so tired of dealing with stuff all the time. And I said to him, "When, when, when are we ever gonna get to the point where we don't have to deal with something all the time?" And he said, "Never." And I guess we still deal with stuff all the time. To be honest, I don't pay that much attention to it now. I just deal with it and go on about my business. We make too much out of these things that happen to us. We don't want to resist God. We want to yield to God and make sure that we resist the enemy.
Verse 16 in Romans 6 says, "Don't you know that if you continue to surrender yourselves to anyone to do His will, you become a slave of Him whom you obey." Now many of you have had the sad experience of being a slave to some kind of addiction. Because you yielded to that over and over and over and over. And it became a controlling factor in your life. But God does not want anything from the outside controlling us. He wants us to be led, guided, and controlled from the inside. Now the devil will press, he will push, and he will torment. The thing about God is He suggests, and He's gentle, and we're led by these little promptings. That sometimes, if you're not sensitive to God, are almost imperceptible. What are you yielding to? Are you yielding to the flesh? Or are you yielding to the spirit?
Understanding Spirit, Soul, and Body
There is definitely a war for man's soul. And we need to understand the difference between our spirit, our soul, and our body. We understand the body pretty well. We look at it all the time in the mirror. We dress it, we feed it. When it doesn't feel good, we lay it down. But we don't understand as much about the soul. And we probably even understand very little about the spirit. But maybe even the spirit we understand even more than the soul. The spirit is the deepest part of your being. You have a spirit, a human spirit.
And if you're not born again, then your human spirit is disconnected from the spirit of God. God is a spirit and He communicates with us spiritually. So if you're not alive to God, or not full of God, then you're gonna miss everything that God wants to say to you in your life. When a person receives Christ, the spirit of God comes to live on the inside of them. And once again, they become alive to God. One of the things that happens when you become alive to God is you begin to hear from God. And it's not necessarily words that you hear, but you begin to sense things spiritually.
The Battlefield of the Soul
I call it a holy knowing. There's just a knowing that you shouldn't do that, or you should do that. Well then, it's our job to yield to what we're sensing in our spirit. However, at the same time, Satan, because he wants to keep us from growing, he will be pressuring us, not through our spirit because he can't get in there, but he'll be coming at us from outside, trying to use our soul, which is the second layer of our being. And your soul is your mind, your will, and your emotions. So he'll come through the outside trying to get into our soul and then back out through our body, so his ugliness and his trash and his meanness comes out through us.
God, on the other hand, is in us, and he's trying to work from the inside to work through our soul and out through our body with his goodness and his mercy and his grace and his love and his stability. So, we're in quite a war. And it goes on pretty much all day long in different ways. How many of you sense that sometimes, that you just feel like you're in a war? And the Bible says that. Actually, in 2 Corinthians 10, it teaches us that we have a war going on in our mind.
The New Nature and the Journey of Growth
When we receive Christ, we get a brand new nature. We become a new person on the inside. God puts something in our spirit that not only makes us alive to Him, but we get a brand new want to. A new want to. All of a sudden, now something deep down inside of you is wanting to do good things. But many times we're not successful because we still have the devil pressing through this outer man. And so we need time to feed the inner man enough of the Word of God, and to practice the good things that God asks us to do, and begin to learn how wonderful it is to have those kind of victories.
And we grow, and we grow, and we grow. If you're growing, that's good. You don't have to be mad at yourself because you've not arrived. The good news is, keep growing. We spend too much time being upset because we haven't arrived, and it keeps us from enjoying the journey. And we spend way too much time thinking about everything that's wrong with us, and not enough time thinking about the new creature that we are in Christ, and what God has enabled us to do.
Walking in the Spirit, Not Fighting the Flesh
But I say walk and live habitually in the Holy Spirit, responsive to and controlled and guided by the Spirit. Then you will certainly not gratify the cravings and the desires of the flesh. Now, I'm actually gonna be using this scripture a lot at our women's conference too because God has really been impressing on me that it's possible for us to preach so much about what we shouldn't do, that we never get around to preaching enough about what we should do. And if we just never do anything but try to work on what we shouldn't do, we actually end up in a fight with our own flesh.
And it just becomes very frustrating. But if we'll concentrate on just doing good, then there's no room for bad. If you'll get up every morning and fill your mind full of things that you can do for other people and do it on purpose, because you will have to do it on purpose. We don't ever have to act bad on purpose. That's just gonna happen if we don't do something to act good. I've never had to try to be selfish. I've never had to try to be impatient. It's just right there, sure enough. But I can make an effort in Christ, not my own effort, but in Him, to do the right thing.
And as soon as we take that step, we say, "God, I want to do the right thing." And as soon as we take that step, He links up with us and gives us the strength that we need to do the right thing. We have to learn to be sensitive to these temptations that God gives us to be good. And just really learn to be led by the Holy Spirit. And you know what? When we think about being led by the Holy Spirit, we think about being led to the mission field. Being led into our pulpit ministry. You know, being led to write the best worship song that's ever been written.
Learning to Be Led in Daily Life
But let me tell you something, the first place you learn to be led is in the little, teeny, tiny, everyday affairs of life. And if we won't obey God there, then we're not going to obey Him other places either. And those things are still probably more important to me than other things. I love my daily walk with God. I love being led by Him. If you're going to follow the leadership of the Holy Spirit, every day will be an adventure because you never know what He's going to come up with on any given day. And it takes a real closeness with God, I believe, to just get up every day and follow Him.
How many times do we pray for God to do something for somebody that He's given us the ability to do it, but we just don't want to make the sacrifice? If God shows us a need, it's because He wants us to have the joy of meeting the need. He doesn't want us to pray that somebody else will do it. Verse 2, Romans 6, certainly not. How can we who died to sin live in it any longer? Remember, we died to sin when we received Christ. The spiritual part of us died to sin. In your heart, you no longer want to sin.
Dead to Sin, Alive to God
Your flesh may want to sin. Parts of your uncrucified soul may want to sin. But the real you, the renewed you, the new creature you, the born-again you, does not want to sin. That's why you cannot do it and do it comfortably. You can sin and be comfortable when you're not born again. But you have a hard time with it when you're born again unless you get a very, very, very hard heart and become very insensitive to the Holy Spirit, which is also possible but very dangerous.
Are you ignorant of the fact that all of us who've been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? When you go down in the water, you're signifying burial to the old life. When you come up, you're signifying resurrected to a new life. It's already happened spiritually the moment you receive Christ. Now this is just simply an outward sign. This water baptism is an outward sign making a declaration, especially to enemy spirits, that I am dead to sin and I am alive to God.
And I'm a whole new different creature now that you're gonna be dealing with than the one that you have dealt with before. We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, so that we might habitually, habitually live and behave in newness of life. No wonder Paul said to the Galatians, don't be weary in well-doing. You are gonna have to do what's right for a while before you're gonna get a right result. I wanna make sure our television people get that. You're gonna have to do what's right for a while before you get a right result. When you sow seed, it takes a little bit of time before you get the harvest.