Joyce Meyer - Set Your Mind For Victory

TOPICS: Victory

RICH WILKERSON: I think we're wanting to talk about some of your latest works, but it has so much to do with the faults that we all seem to battle on kind of a regular basis and how to kind of break out of that. On a direction we should go tonight.

JOYCE MEYER: Well, Romans such a beautiful Scripture. It tells us basically that God has a good plan for our life, but that we'll never prove it out. We'll never actually really see it unless our mind is you know, I teach from an amplified Bible. I always have.

There's a lot of good translations, but I enjoy that one because I'll never read Greek or probably study Greek, and that Bible helps expound on things for me, so this is an entirely new way to think, an entirely new attitude.

God has a good plan. Jesus died for us to have a good life. The thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy, but Jesus came that we might have and enjoy our lives and have it in abundance to the full until it's flowing out of us and happens to get onto somebody else, which will then, hopefully, bring them into the Kingdom.

You know, tonight we're gonna talk about "Power thoughts," and it goes a little bit beyond "Battlefield of the mind," this just talks about things that you can think on purpose that will change your life, and what I suggested people do was take one for a month, confess it loud, meditate on it, think about it, and then go to the next one. See, I think sometimes we rush past things too quick.

RICH WILKERSON: What you're talking about is elevating your thoughts, and that's where so many of us, when we're talking about faults, when i mess up, then i get to dwelling on the mess-up.

JOYCE MEYER: Yeah, and what you focus on becomes the largest thing in your life. So, for example, the Bible says, "Looking away from all that will distract..." Well, what does "Looking away" mean? It really means "Get your mind off of the things that are distracting you from Jesus. Put your mind back on him." And so, if I focus on what my faults are, they're just gonna get bigger, and bigger, and bigger because what we focus on becomes bigger, but if I focus on Jesus, then He becomes bigger than my faults.

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RICH WILKERSON: I don't know that we can get through all topics, but I love this one. You have to talk about this: "I am difficult to offend." I love that line!

JOYCE MEYER: Yeah, you know, some people will say, "Well, you know, I can't help it. I'm just touchy." Well, first, you need to stop saying you're touchy, get over yourself and realize that you don't have to be touchy. But the bible says love is not easily offended. It's not touchy.

And so I've learned and try to teach the people that I have the privilege of teaching, the power of "Calling things that are not, as though they are," Romans 4:17. We serve a God who speaks of nonexistent things that he has foretold as if they already existed.

We can't just confess anything into our life and get it, but if we get our mouth in agreement then those things can become a reality in our life because, every time you say something, it's helping to renew your mind to that fact.

So meditation, the Bible says we're to "Meditate on the Word day and night, that you might see and do, and then have good success."

Matter of fact, I had a woman tell me one time, she said, "You talk about not being easily offended," so she said, "I decided I was going to count and keep a record," and she said, "In one week, I had 40 opportunities to be offended, and I turned every one of them down."

RICH WILKERSON: No way, so good! That's good!

JOYCE MEYER: See, there are some opportunities we wanna take, and there are some opportunities we don't wanna and so let's stop taking the opportunity to be offended. So, why not, the moment that we even begin to feel offended, why not then just start saying under your breath or thinking if you can't say it out loud, "I am not going to be offended. I am not going to ruin another day of my life being offended."

RICH WILKERSON: So good! You know, the reason why I enjoy this so much is because you weave the Scripture in so it just sounds and I think that's part about being a partaker of the word, that it's so in you that it flows. That's what's happening in this book too.

The word flows in and out of what you're writing so that you're not really sure where Joyce starts and the Bible ends and back and forth. It's beautiful. That line that you used on that whole part of "I'm difficult to offend," that just jumped out at me. There's another one here. "I love people, and I really enjoy helping them." I just thought that's great! Talk about that!

JOYCE MEYER: I used to get up in the morning and think, "I don't like people, and I hope they leave me alone today"! It's like one person said to me, "If I don't know you, I don't need to know you." But, you know, here's the thing: people are I mean, I used to just get along with everybody till somebody came home.

You know, I was very spiritual when nobody was in the house, but you do have to deal with people, and we can't just decide that we're gonna like certain ones. I mean, we're always gonna get along with some people better than other people.

You know, I don't necessarily think that you have to even like everybody to love them, but God does expect us to love them, and love is not a feeling that we have. It's a way that we choose to treat people, and so helping people is really what we're called to do.

I love Acts 10:38 , "See how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and power, who went about doing good." Take every opportunity that God puts in front of you. How many opportunities do we miss to help somebody because our mind is not even on them? We already really don't wanna do anything for them. We are hoping they do somethin' for us.

How we treat other people, all not just people we're trying to impress, not just people that can do something for us, not just people that we think are important, but all people, especially somebody, maybe, that can't do anything for us, or the disenfranchised or the ignored, instead of going into a room and looking for who looks like the most important person that I might get some favor with, why not look for the person that looks the loneliest?

What if every morning you wrote down five people, the names of five people, that were gonna be targets that day? "I'm gonna target these people for blessing." And so whether you send an encouraging e-mail, or you just say, "Hey, I appreciate everything you do for me," or you're out shopping, and you pick up a little somethin' you think that they would like or whatever, it is life-changing to purposely do things for other but our mind has to be renewed to the fact that, really, to be honest, the real us, the born-again, spiritual us, we wanna do that. It's our flesh that holds us back.