Joyce Meyer - Finding Stability

TOPICS: Stability

Following the leadership of the Holy Spirit is an exciting journey, because He has ideas that we don't have, and you never know on any given day when you get up exactly what God may lead you to do that day. I love being led by the Holy Spirit. It's wonderful to be led by the Holy Spirit in my preaching. I have messages and notes, and I've studied until I can't cram anything else in there, but I can promise you that when I come out, I'm more led by the Spirit than I am by my notes. I have it all in me, but God will bring things out of me that I didn't even plan to say, and didn't know that I was gonna say, and many of you may think, "How in the world did you know that? That's exactly what I was asking God". Well, I don't know it, but when we're led by the Holy Spirit, life gets exciting. Can anybody say amen to that, when we are led by the Holy Spirit?

Now see, I know we have all kinds of people that come to these meetings and some of you are not even saved yet. Last night, we had 695 people receive Christ, so some of you, you're just a 24-hour-old baby christian, so you don't know much yet. Some of have been in your church all your life, and you still don't know anything. Love you. And some of you are very spiritually mature, and then we have people all along the way. And so I'm not gonna assume that you already know these things. I'm gonna sit here tonight and act like none of us know anything, and I'm gonna start with some of the really basic things that we need to learn and grow in.

God has got a wonderful life planned for every single one of you. Every single one of you, God has got a wonderful life planned for you. You do not have to sit in the audience of life and watch other people have a good life, and think it's only for them and not for you. God has got a good life for you, and it is never too late to begin again. It is never too late for a fresh start. You can begin again. So let's start by talking about the mind, because the truth is is where the mind goes, the man follows.

Now, 2 Corinthians chapter 10, verses 4 and 5. I actually have about four scriptures that I want to these, I think, are some of the most important. "For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal. They're not physical weapons of flesh and blood, but they are mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds". What is a stronghold? A stronghold is an area that's dominated by an enemy. If you're in a war and there's an enemy stronghold, it means that somehow the opposing party, the enemy, has managed to dig into a place, and you're having a hard time getting 'em out of there.

Well, God is getting ready to talk to us here about the mind, and we have strongholds in our mind, and what that is is areas of our thinking that satan has somehow managed to dominate. He tells people lies. There are people sitting in here tonight, beautiful, lovely, wonderful people, but you believe lies. And because you believe those lies, they become your reality. Just like I believed lies for many, many, many years, and still may have a few things that God has yet to show me that I'm not aware of. There's only one way to know when the devil's lying to you. One way and one way only, and that is to be educated in the Word of God. That's the only way. There is no other way.

So let me just sit down here and act like your mama for a minute and tell you something. If you want victory, but you're not gonna be a student of the Word of God, then you might as well forget it. Not gonna work. "Well, I go to church". You can go to church and sit there week after week after week and honestly not learn anything. You may get a few goose bumps. You may sing a nice song. You may even hear some sermons that are worth hearing, but what can you remember about 'em the next day? Now, some people do learn a lot as they hear other people teach, but nothing like what you learn when you study yourself. I believe that you learn when you listen to your pastors and prayerfully when you listen to me. I think you got some good stuff coming at you, but I'm trying to make a point that you can't let somebody else spoon-feed you the word all the time.

You cannot survive on what I call second-hand faith. You have to have your own experience with God. It's good to hear my testimony. It's good to hear other people's testimonies, but I want you to get your own. The only way that we're ever gonna know whether satan is lying to us, or whether our thinking is the God kind of thinking or not, is if we are educated in the Word of God. So I'm just gonna throw something out. You obviously don't need to answer out loud. Don't want to embarrass anybody. How much time do you spend in a week studying the Word of God?

You just think that over, 'cause if your answer's none, or even if you say, "Well, I listen to you every morning," well, that's good. I mean, I'm glad that you do, but I would least like you to try taking some notes, and maybe then getting out your own Bible and looking those scriptures up that I talked about and reading them for yourself. We can't afford to get spiritually lazy. If we're spiritually lazy, we're not gonna have the victory in our life that we want.

Now, you're all kind of looking at me like a calf at a new gate, because I know you're just like, "Study the Word of God"? How much time do you even spend even thinking about the Word of God? We have to meditate on the Word of God, and you do know how to meditate. If you know how to worry, you know how to meditate, because worry is just meditating on your problem, rolling it over and over and over in your mind, trying to figure it out and understand it. Well, that's what it means to meditate on the Word. You just think about it and think about it, you think about it and you think about it. You know what? I am very convinced that God loves me.

You know why? Because I have thought about that scripture and quoted it in my mind at least probably 50,000 times in the last 30 years. I know that I've been made right with God through the Blood of Christ, and that I do not have to live under condemnation, but it took a long time of meditating on those scriptures. The more you think about something, the more it becomes a part of you. And you're gonna think about something anyway, so you might as well think about something that's gonna do you some good and produce some good fruit in your life.