Joyce Meyer - Why Should I Be Joyful In My Trials?

How many of you already know what James 1, verse 1 says? "Be wholly joyful, my brethren, whenever you are enveloped in or encounter trials of any sort or fall into various temptations."

How many of you have made it to that point and you don't need this message tonight? You know, it's almost not even hardly fair for God to ask a preacher to preach this message, because somebody asked me what I was gonna preach on this week, and I said, "Well, I get the extreme thrill of tryin' to get people excited about their trials".

Which is not easy. And the only way that we can actually consider them joyful, and that's about our thinking process. We don't necessarily have to be clapping and cheering about the discomfort we're going through, but if we understand what the Bible says about the value of trials. And this is a message that's under-preached.

Yes, God wants to bless us, and He wants to bless us more than we know how to handle. "He will open the windows of heaven and pour out a blessing so great that we cannot contain it. We don't even know how to take it in".

But I know from the Word of God and from experience that God cannot bless us in the natural beyond where we're at spiritually. I wanna say it again. You're not gonna give your baby that's 3 years old the keys to the car. Amen?

And you don't, because you love him. And every one of us should stop praying for God to give us all this stuff that we think we have to have to make us happy, and we should pray a new prayer, and this is the prayer that we should pray. I pray this on a regular basis. I invite you to join me: "God, please don't give me anything that I can't handle and still keep You first in my life". Amen?

And something we don't hear enough of in prayer anymore I don't think is, "Your will be done". We've gotten really good about telling God everything that we want Him to give us, but He says that difficulty and trials and tribulations and things that test our faith, that we should consider them joyful not 'cause they feel good right now, but because of what they have the ability to do in us if we won't run away from 'em. And, you know, there are some things you can't get away from, but there are a lot of things that you can get away from, amen?

I was in a church at one point, and they really didn't want me teaching' home Bible study. They were a little bit controlling and manipulative and so I wasn't really bein' treated all that great. And, man, my first impulse is, "I'm outta here. Who needs this? I'm outta here".

And I really felt that God told me that I needed to stay, but it was uncomfortable to stay. Every week when I went in the church, it was uncomfortable to stay. There was all these home Bible studies that different people had, and ours, at one point, was listed, then, all of a sudden, ours came off the list.

And things like that can hurt you, you know? When you don't get picked, when you're rejected, things like but God really dealt with me that I couldn't leave there with an attitude in my heart. Because, you see, if you leave someplace with a bad attitude, you're gonna enter the next place you go with that same bad attitude. And so, God doesn't want us to go when we wanna go. He wants us to go when He says to go.

And then I came to a situation where I was in a church that I'd worked at for 5 years and God was really dealing with me about steppin' out and starting to do what I'm doing now. And I didn't wanna go. And I stayed there for another year, maybe 2, after God started dealin' with me.

And I'm tellin' you what, things were just not gettin' good. And so, you can go when God wants you to stay, and you can stay when God wants you to go. You see, we like to be comfy. And I didn't wanna give up my friends. I was concerned about what people would think, that I was ungrateful, that I was full of myself, thought I was gonna go out and have this big ministry now, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But if I wouldn't have listened to God, then we wouldn't be here tonight. And I just wonder how many of you maybe God has told you to do or not to do something... And when I say, "Told you," I mean either through his word, which is a word from God.

It always just cracks me up when somebody comes to one of my conferences and I preach my heart out for four sessions, and then they ask me, if they happen to see me on the way out, "Do you have a word for me"?

"Yeah, did you listen to anything I said"? Because this is the main way that God is gonna speak to us and deal with us, and anything else that you think you hear better line up with that, or you're in trouble. So, we need to get about the business of spiritual maturity.