Joyce Meyer - How Can I Move Beyond The Problems Of My Past? (08/21/2019)
Joyce Meyer vividly describes the "pit" of self-pity, bitterness, regret, and unforgiveness we all fall into, sharing her own raw journal entries from years of misery. She declares it's time to come out – receive God's healing love, forgive completely (including yourself), stop blaming others, own your attitude, count blessings daily, and pursue freedom so others see God's power and want Him too.
The Pit – We've All Been There
You see my pit here, don't you? How many of you know about being in the pit? Some of you probably still have one somewhere. Keep it around just in case you need to go in and visit for a day or so.
Our pit is where we go and feel sorry for ourself when we go and remember all the bad things that everybody's ever done to us. And the pit ultimately refers to hell, but we can experience some of hell right here on earth unless we choose healing.
Psalm 42 and 3, wonderful promise from God. He drew me up out of a horrible pit, a pit of tubal and of destruction, out of the miry clay, froth, and slime. And he set my feet upon a rock, steadying my steps and established my goings.
And he has put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many shall see and fear, revere and worship, and put their trust and confident reliance in the Lord.
Do you see what that's saying? He said, look, I was in a pit. He lifted me out of that pit. He set my feet on a rock. People saw it and then they wanted to serve the Lord. Come on!
People saw it and then they wanted to serve the Lord. One of the best things you can do for yourself and for God, one of the greatest ways that you can serve God is to let him heal your life and then be an example to other people that if God can do it for you, God can do it for them.
And if God does it for you, God will do it for them.
I'm here to tell you tonight that you do not have to stay broken. You do not have to stay miserable. You don't have to live in depression. You don't have to live in self-pity.
You don't have to live hating yourself and despising yourself. You don't have to live in regret and you don't have to live in dread and you don't have to live in fear.
God is living in you and you can And live the life that Jesus died to give you.
Decorating Your Pit – A Familiar Place
So, in my pit, I wasn't this dressed up when I went into my pit, by the way. Because if you're going to sit in your pit, you certainly don't want to look good while you're in there.
And I would sit there and just hate people. And, you know, if you, if you live in a pit for a long time, you might as well just decorate it and make it kind of nice, you know, so you got something when you go in there.
And, so, you know, you can have pictures in your pit of all the people that you hate. And then it's like... Boy, I remember, I remember what you did to me.
And if you think I'm ever going to forgive you, I'm not going to forgive you. I hate you.
And then I can just feel so sorry for myself. Dave plays golf, and he doesn't even understand what I'm going through.
When I try to tell him, he just says, cast your care. Just cast your care.
And then I had this book of remembrance. I was so dumb. I actually remember one time getting out a pad of paper and writing down on a piece of paper everything that I thought was wrong with my husband.
Well, the last list I made, I made one of everything that I thought was right with my husband. God has changed me. Amen?
Get Up and Come Out – No More Pity
Now, here's the thing. You know, we said, oh, God, you've got to change me. God, you've got to help me. God, you've got to do something. You've got to do something.
Remember what I said last night? The first thing that Jesus said to a lot of the people that he encountered was, get up, make up your bed, and go home.
And what he meant was, get up, get some gumption, shake that junk off, decide you're not going to live like that anymore, and let's clean up the mess and leave no evidence that you were ever in that kind of a situation. Come on.
Instead of letting our problems tear us apart, let's let them make us that much more determined that we are going to show how great God is. Amen? Amen?
First Step – Receive God's Unconditional Love
First point to the healing of your soul. You must receive God's unconditional perfect love for you. You receive it as a gift. You can't deserve it. You can't earn it.
And I don't care what you do, you cannot keep God from loving you. Because love is not something he does, turns on and off. It is who he is.
You are accepted. Close your eyes and swallow this. God loves you unconditionally. He is not going to love you anymore when you behave better.
God, God will never love you anymore than he does at this moment right now because he already loves you with a perfect love.
God loves you. Even though my mother and my father have forsaken me, the Lord will take me up and adopt me as his own child.
Nobody in here is an orphan. We are sons and daughters of the Most High God. Amen?
Sons and daughters of the Most High God. And I think sometimes it's how we see ourselves.
If you see yourself as broken, if you see yourself as an orphan, then you're always going to be that.
But if you say no, God loves me and no matter who did not love me, instead of taking it on yourself and saying something had to be wrong with me, something had...
There was something wrong. There was something wrong in Christine's birth mother's life that she didn't want to keep her child. It wasn't her fault that she was not worth having. There was something wrong on the other end.
But you think the devil tells us that? He don't tell us that. He tries to blame it on us and then make us ashamed that there's something wrong with us.
And you don't have to live like that.
You know, just a little bit of patience. A little bit of not giving up.
I want to read you something. You know, I've kept these journals, I guess, for 40 years. In the beginning, I didn't write in them every day. But, I mean, you see, written. All written.
And so, this is funny, really. December 26, 1989. Well, Christmas is over. God is good. But from a spiritual standpoint, I've been having a very rough time.
A lot of things have been going on for a while that I've been saying, Oh, well, cast your carriage, Joyce. It's going to be okay.
But today, everything just blew up in my face. Dave and I had a discussion that wasn't good. That means we had a fight.
He feels I have to have control, or I'm not satisfied. I feel he's wrong and being unfair. We have a hard time communicating when we differ in our opinions.
But today was the last straw, so to speak. And everything I've been feeling, but casting my care about, came tumbling in on top of me.
So, here it is. Colon. Oh, you haven't heard it yet. So, now I'm like going to tell the truth here.
I've been having a hard time getting my messages, at least much harder than usual. I've been having a hard time hearing from God. I've been feeling very little anointing.
It seems that the more I've pressed into the Spirit, the more God hides. And He's requiring me to go strictly on faith alone. Can you imagine that? God wanting us to walk by faith.
I just had had to have a breast removed because I had breast cancer. And this was like maybe three months before I wrote this.
So, now I've had this operation. I've got two more to go for plastic surgery. The attendance at our meetings has fallen off because of the holiday season.
I've had a lot of weird feelings. My mind's been lazy. I've been bored. I've been discontent. All of this stuff seems to have just caved in on me at once.
I also feel... You notice how many times I'm saying I feel? I almost feel that I just don't know how to pray. I really have a hard time praying.
Today it all seems to be too much. God help me. I feel like I'm going to go under. But I guess I won't.
I trust you're doing something and I underline something. But I don't know what it is. It's probably you're wanting a greater degree of abandonment.
Well, I'm not sure I can do it, but I'm willing to let you do it if you want to.
Dave always feels I'm at fault and it's never him. I've got to try to tell you some of the stuff you've got to get through if you're going to actually commit and go home and try to get from where you are to where God wants you to be.
I'm just trying to be real with you. To be honest, this is really hard on my flesh for him to always think he's right.
But then I wrote down, but I don't guess it really matters that much anyway. It's all pride.
Okay, now here comes the funny part. Okay, now it gets funny. I'm really sorry to have to report that I have had to tell the Lord tonight that I have gone as far as I can go.
I've been telling him this for two years. Lord, take me as deep as you want to. I'm willing to do whatever you need me to do.
But I really don't want to go on like this. I have gone as far as I can go. I want this pressure to let up.
I would like some feelings, Lord. I don't know for sure if I can get out of this. He may not let me out of it.
But I never thought that I would be the one who would back down. So on top of all my other problems, now I find that I am a spiritual coward.
I tell you what, I was in my pit big time when I wrote this.
Well, Lord, I just want you to know that I've gone as far as I can go. I know you say you got this call on my life, God, but I just can't take this anymore.
You deal with me about every little crazy thing and Dave just never has a... You never deal with him about anything. It's all me, all me, all me, always me, always me.
And if I complain, you tell me it's pride. Well, God, I just want you to know that... Now, God, I really mean it. I just, I can't go any further.
You have got to do something.
Okay, well, I don't know what happened the next day because I didn't write anything in here the next day, but, but now here.
Nine years later, I found this thing that I wrote here on December 26th, nine years before. I don't know what happened in those nine years, but this is what I put here.
I was reading this old notebook today and thought I'd give you an update. Things have changed drastically.
I'm now on 375 TV stations, 250 radio stations. I travel the globe preaching the word of God. I've changed drastically.
I enjoy peace almost continually. I've continued all these years to have different health struggles, but in the midst of it all, God has given me grace to do all he's called me to do.
It's been hard at times, but I can report that God is faithful. I have four grandchildren. Now I have 11 and one on the way.
And Danny got married six weeks ago, but now he's been married a long time.
And Dave and I get along better than we ever have in our whole life. And we love each other so much.
Now, I asked him to give me an update. And now we're on 1,000 television and radio stations preaching the gospel in 90 languages around the globe.
But I want to tell you, to get from there to here, I had to stop. I remember what you did to me. And there is no way that I'm going to forgive you.
I got a new book of remembrance now, and it's not this one full of this junk. I keep a book of remembrance of all the amazing, amazing things that God does for me.
And I want to tell you something. If you're still in the pit, I know exactly how you feel, but I'm telling you, this is your night to come out.
When Jesus walked up to the tomb of Lazarus, he said, come out. When the king went and opened the door of the fiery furnace, and he saw not three men in there that went in, but he saw four, because Jesus is always with you in your fiery furnace.
He said, come out. And when they came out, they didn't even smell like smoke.
And I'm telling you right now, it's time for you to come out. It's time for you to stop living like Jesus never died for you and start acting like the unbelievable, amazing human being that you are.
Come on, give God a praise.
Receive Healing – First Steps
If you want your soul to be healed, you have to receive God's forgiveness. And that means that you have to forgive yourself.
The Bible says, when he forgives us, he forgets our sins, and he removes them as far as the east is from the west.
You don't need to sit around and think about all the things that you did that were wrong. Don't park at the point of your pain. Let it go.
I don't care if you did it 50 years ago, or 10 years ago, or five years ago, or this morning, or on your way to this conference. Ask God to forgive you and let it go.
Receive his forgiveness and forgive yourself and let it go.
Completely forgive all the people that have hurt you. Why do you want to stay mad at somebody that's out having a good time and don't even care that you're upset?
That doesn't even make any sense. All you're doing is hurting yourself.
When you stay angry, you're not hurting them. All those years I hated my father, that didn't change him. That didn't make him want to repent or change him.
Forgive people. What has God told us to do regarding forgiving our enemies? Pray for them? Come on, don't sit there and look so innocent.
How many of you actually really sincerely pray for the people that have hurt you to be blessed? Yeah, well, we got a few holy hands up but not very many, let me tell you.
You know why? Because the truth is you don't want them to be blessed. And I get that and I'll even tell God that sometimes.
I, you know, I'd like to bless them with a smack upside the head but, you know.
The Bible says that you bless and do not curse them. To bless means to speak well of. To curse means to speak evil of.
So that means you got to stop retelling everybody what they did to you over and over and over and over and over and over.
You got to zip your lip, pray for God to bless them. It is very hard to keep hating somebody that you're praying for every day.
You don't have to feel like praying for somebody to be blessed to pray for them. You do it in obedience to God.
You don't have to feel like blessing your enemies but you can do it in obedience to God.
And it's perfectly fine if you say, you know, God, I don't feel like doing this, but I love you so much that I'm going to do whatever you tell me to do, because I believe that your word works.
And so I'm just going to tell you right now, you are going to be living in this stupid, ugly pit the rest of your life if you don't make a decision that you are not going to live angry, and you are going to start getting so good at forgiveness that you are going to give the devil a breakdown.
Lord, help me.
No More Self-Pity or Blame
No more self-pity. You know, no matter how bad you think you've got it, there's somebody else in this room right now tonight that's got it worse than you do.
Count your blessings, and I mean that. I've been doing something the last week or so, week and a half. I don't know how hard it'll get after I do it a while, probably harder, but I'm writing down 10 things every day that I'm thankful for in my journey.
Journal, but I made a commitment that they had to be 10 different things every day. They can't be the same thing. It's getting pretty interesting, but you'd be amazing.
I mean, really just jaw-dropping amazed at all the things that we have to be thankful for if we would just actually stop for a minute and pay attention to them.
It would so drive self-pity out of your life that it would have no way to even hope to get in.
Woo, I love this. I wish I had an hour and a half.
Stop blaming other people for your problems. Own your own junk. Own it. I have a bad attitude. And my attitude belongs to me, and nobody can make me have one if I don't want to.
Own it. Take responsibility for it. I'm having a lousy day. Well, I think it's your fault. Well, no, I can choose to have a good day if I want to.
Nobody else can make you have a bad day if you really don't want to have a bad day.
Numbers 21.5, the people got tired of being out in the wilderness. They blamed God and Moses.
You know, as long as we blame, we're never going to get anywhere.
Here's the thing. What my dad did to me when I was a child and sexually abusing me was the reason why I had the problems I had.
But I had to stop using that as an excuse to stay that way. Come on, hear me. That was the reason, but the reason now became an excuse to stay parked at the point of my pain.
And so I had to stop blaming, start realizing that all painful, hurtful things come from the devil. He just finds somebody to work through.
And I figured out how to get him back. And the way you get the devil back is by doing as much good as you can every day of your life to as many people as you can as long as you breathe.