Joyce Meyer - Psalm 23

Well, thank you for joining us today for "Enjoying everyday life". You know, I believe that anytime you take time to receive the Word of God that you're much more likely to enjoy that day than you would a day where you did not give God's Word a place of priority in your life. And so today we're gonna teach on Psalm 103. Very wonderful Psalm. Little bit lengthy but I think we can get to most of it. One of the things that amazes me when I study the word compared to just reading the word is the amount of different lessons that's in, like, one chapter of the Bible or in one Psalm. You're gonna find out today that there's, like, close to a dozen different lessons in here and if you just read through something real quickly, you don't really get that. I think it's just there's so much more that we can learn if we'll take time and slow down and so I actually like to kind of write down the things that I learn.

So we're gonna get started. Psalm 103, verses 1 and 2: "Bless (affectionately, gratefully praise) the Lord, o my soul; and all that is deepest within me, bless His holy name! Bless (affectionately, gratefully praise) the Lord, o my soul, and forget not one of all of His benefits". Now, this is what I think. I don't know this for sure, but I think David was talking to himself. I think maybe it could have been a morning when David woke up and maybe he didn't feel so hot that morning, emotionally, or maybe his body wasn't just exactly cooperating with him that day. I think we forget that the people that God used to write the words that we read in the Bible were people just like us. They were flesh and bone like us and so, I don't know about you, but I have a lot of mornings where I have to talk to myself because I find that when I first wake up in the morning, there's a lot of things that I know that I need to do that day that my body's not real interested in at all.

And one of them is I weight train 3 days a week and it's interesting sometimes within the first 3 to 4 minutes when I first open my eyes, I think, "Oh, maybe I'll just call the trainer and tell him I can't go today". And so we have to talk to ourselves. I think a lot of people would improve a lot if they would just go have a meeting with themselves occasionally. So I think we can look at it that way. Maybe David just got up and felt some of the things that we feel and he said, "Okay, listen, soul," which is your inner life and whatever's going in us will come out of us. So he's saying, "Today, we're gonna praise the Lord". And I love this verse 2. He says, "And forget not one of all of his benefits". Do you know how easy it is to complain? I honestly think it would be a major accomplishment if any one human being could get through one whole entire day and not at least murmur just a little bit. We do it so much we don't even realize that we do it.

I was reading a book by a gentleman that went to be with the Lord a long time ago but he was a very great man of God and he said, "It's very challenging for us to not murmur". He said, "All we have to have is a little bit of food that doesn't suit us or if the weather doesn't suit us or if things don't turn out exactly the way that we want it to," and complaining actually is a bigger problem than what we think it is sometimes. And I'm gonna show you that today. So David tells himself to praise the Lord. The question is do we complain more about the things we don't like in our life than we do praising God for the benefits that we have? There's not one of us, myself included, that doesn't need to hear this about two or three times every day.

I mean, you all are wonderful Godly people. I know you are because you work for me so, I mean, you're the most awesome, and people watching today may be very wonderful Godly people but it would be pretty interesting to see how many people even in this room have made it this far today and not found anything at all to just, you know, we think about complaining but then there's murmuring. And you know, the Israelites, they murmured when they were in the wilderness. And so they were there 40 years trying to make an 11-day journey. Forty years trying to make an 11-day trip. And one of their big problems, one of the things that kept them there was murmuring and complaining. And you're gonna see a little bit later why that even happened, but it says that the Israelites complained and their journey took them 40 years.

And in 1 Corinthians chapter 10:9-10 we have a New Testament scripture where God is using the example of the Israelites to remind us of how, really dangerous it is 'cause I think that we open a door for the enemy when we complain. I think that when we praise God and give thanks that we're opening the door for God to work in our life. But when we murmur and complain, we're actually inviting the enemy to come in and just give us more of what we already have that we don't like. So it says: "We should not tempt the Lord try His patience, and become a trial to Him, critically appraising Him, and exploiting His goodness". So if I'm complaining about my trials, God says, "Okay, look, you're actually becoming a trial to me. I'm tired of listening to you murmur and complain. I wanna hear about the good things that I'm doing in your life".