Joyce Meyer - Tests We Encounter On The Way To Promotion

I'm gonna talk to you tonight about the tests that we encounter on the way to promotion. How many of you are looking to come up higher in life? Well, everybody is.

Some of you are believing God to be used in ministry. Some of you are believing God for more financial freedom. You're just fed up with being in debt all the time. Some of you are believing God for better employment. Some of you want to go back to college and get a degree. Maybe there's somebody who really wanted to be a doctor or a nurse and you never got the opportunity to do that and you would still like to do that.

We're all praying for something. I hope to goodness that there's nobody in this building tonight that's not praying for something because prayer is an amazing thing.

Now last night we had close to 900 people give their life to the Lord and tonight at the end of the session, we're gonna have another opportunity for people to give their life to the Lord.

Now, if you don't have Christ in your life, then you have no option when it comes to temptation. You're just gonna give into it and you're going to do the wrong thing, and your life is just gonna turn out worse and worse and worse.

But when you have Christ in you, you have options, and I want to talk to you tonight about the options that you have as a believer and the good choices that you can make that will help you have the abundant life that Christ died to give you.

But I am not gonna stand here tonight and just talk to you about all the great things that God wants to give you without being fully honest with you and having full disclosure that you are going to go through things.

They're not all gonna be pleasant, and you're gonna have to learn, just like we all do, to get through them and be stable and not let your trials and tribulations control how you behave and how you treat people and what you think and how you respond to God.

We need to grow up. Amen. And, you know, I'm all about spiritual maturity. I think that's very important. It's not something you have to do to be saved. You're totally saved by the grace and the mercy of God.

If you truly believe in Jesus, then I believe you'll go to heaven even if you just squeak in the back door by the skin of your teeth. But that's not good enough because it's not about, "Can I go to heaven"? It's about, "Can I glorify God when I'm here in the earth by giving the life that He wants me to live"? So how many of you agree that we go through things? We get tested. We go through things.

Now, you know, a child doesn't get to go from say grade school to high school unless they take some tests and pass those tests. And so then every year that you go to school, you would take some tests at the end to see if you really knew what you thought you had learned.

And I find for me sometimes I think I know things and when the pressure's put on then I think, well, just 'cause I've got it underlined in my bible apparently doesn't mean that I know it.

Come on now, you know what I mean? I mean just 'cause we sit and color in our bibles, that doesn't mean that we know anything or have any kind of spiritual maturity. The way we find out what we really know is when we're tested and we stand firm.