Finding Purpose Through Serving Others

Welcome to Fifteen Minutes in the Word with New York Times bestselling author Joyce Meyer. On today's program, Joyce will be teaching from her series how to succeed at Being Yourself God created each one of us to be different He knows all of our faults and weaknesses, yet still loves us exactly as we are When we begin to understand God's unconditional love and who we are in Christ, then we can stop trying so hard and just enjoy each moment as it comes Now, here's Joyce with today's teaching The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us free from the law of sin and death Jjoy God It's the high call in your life to enjoy God. I remember all the years that I always just vaguely, vaguely See, the devil likes to put vague fears on us and vague thoughts, not just things that are so blatant that we might catch them, but it's just like this vague little feeling that you're just not quite pleasing God You ever feel that? I mean, you're faithful, you're diligent, you pray every day, but somehow you just got this feeling you didn't do it right Come on, you ever feel that? No And you're faithful to read the word, but then the devil says, Well, you can't remember nothing you read anyway And you think, yeah, what did I read? I A then you're faithful to go to church on Sunday and just as sure as I'm standing here somebody says, well, you know, what the pastor preach? I they You know what I've learned? It may not be up here, but it's down here. And when I need it, it'll come out. We don't have to Be rigid spepending all of our time trying to keep man made rules being criticized by people who preach and don't practice what they preach who spend more time judging the other people that are trying to do something while they do nothing something I've been getting a little criticism in the papers. and one lady wrote in and she said If all the poor people that Joyce Myeyers's ministry have fed waited for her critics to feed them, they would have starved to death a long time ago. Well, you know, that's the truth. I may not be doing everything right, but dear God, at least I'm trying to do something But see, just like Jesus, they didn't care that Jesus was healing the sick, all they cared about was he did it on the wrong day And we still deal with that same nonsense today Well, yeah, well, you may be doing this, but this, this, this and that's not right. And you may be doing this, but you know, blah, blah, blah blah, you misquoted the scripture God loves me and I may not be where I need to be, but thank God, I'm not where I used to be. I'm okay and I'm making the journey And I me, this is it, this is what you get. No pretense, no put on, I do some things right, I do some things wrong, but I'm happy So once you receive Christ, there's a life that He wants you to live Turn the person next to you and say get a life. Now If you go with me for a minute to first Timothy, chapter five First Timothy, chapter five, verse six It says, Whereas she who lives in pleasure? And self gratification, giving herself up to luxury and self indulgence is dead even while she still lives. Now, I want to bring this out just for balance sake because it's very important that we always teach the word in a balanced way. And I'm talking to you this weekend about loving yourself, but I don't mean for you to be in love with yourself There is a difference. This scripture says plainly that the person who is self centered and self indulgent is basically no different than a walking dead person In other words, they're walking around and they may be their flesh may be enjoying everything that they're doing for themselves and the flesh enjoys getting your own way, but the bottom line is you can get your own way and still be very miserable inside. Now In order for real life to flow through you In order for the life of God to flow through you, you must be a giver. In every way, you must give compliments, you must give encouragement You must give help Pray for people who have needs that or way beyond what you could do You give smiles You don't criticize You're not judgmental. You give people a break. You give them a little room to be themselves You give money to help people You buy things for people that don't have what you have. You support the preaching of the gospel. You just become a giver. Everything about you becomes a giver. Now, that's vital if we want to enjoy our lives because God is a giver When you are giving, you're more like God than any other time in your life. For God's so love the world that He gave He gay And he gave his best And he gave his own. And he gave it freely. With no strings attached And we must learn in our society today and especially in the Christian culture that our preaching to people is doing zero good if we're not gonna walk in love. That is why the Bible said, You must love the Lord, your God with all your hearts on mind. You must love your neighbor, and you must love yourself. You start With receiving the love of God, you let that love heal you As you receive that love, you begin to accept it and you begin to love yourself. Now you have something going on in here that you can give away. You cannot give away what you don't have That's why she's downright foolish to tell somebody too walk in love If they don't have love in them I've tried for so many years to obey the messages I heard in church about loving people. and I did not know what in the world was wrong with me because I wanted to be nicer. I wanted to love people I didn't want to be angry and upset. I didn't want to be selfish and self centered, but I was. And I knew I was saved. I knew that I would go to heaven if I died, but I did not know what my problem was. And it was more than one thing. But one of the things that was wrong with me was I didn't like myself, so I couldn't love anybody else. But I was in love with myself. And what I mean by that is I was selfish and self centered, and I was trying every way in the world to make myself happy, not realizing that the way to be happy was to give myself away Is anybody home tonight You gotta give your life away You gott to give yourself away. You gotta give your money away You gotta be a giver Well, what about me? You don't have to worry. God will always take care of you. If you're a giver, you'll always have more than enough. You'll have joy unspeakable, the peace that passes understanding, your social life will be radically awesome because everybody will want to be around you Loneliness will be a total thing of the past for you. And you will so much enjoy the presence of God because now you're created in God's image, but until we become givers, we're not functioning like God. We need to get ourselves off our mind and we need to do it on purpose. And we have such bad habits that at first, we're going to have to do it on purpose So learn to love yourself, the person God created you to be, but don't be in love with yourself. Don't be selfish and self indulgent Selfishness stops up the well of life. It's like throwing dirt down a well Giving gets the flow going. Now I want to tell you a story. Well it's actually I'm gonna tell you about a movie I saw but this movie is kind of the crux of what I want to say here tonight. I'll encourage you to To get it and watch it if you'd like to. It's a movie called Five People You will Meet in Heaven Now, I'm just going kind of tell the essence of it. It's been a while ago since I watched it, so I may not get every detail right, but you'll get the point. This movie is about a man Oh He just felt like a general failure in life. He just felt like How it'll goof up A mess up A mistake, a do nothing, a know nothing, a go nowhere, a failure He was on up in yearsars by the time the movie started, let's say it was maybe in his sixties or something and He worked at an amusement park and it was the last place in the world he wanted to work because his mom and dad had once owned the amusement park And he always just felt like his dad just kind of wasted his life and the last thing he ever wanted to do was be like his dad or do what his dad did. And so he had these big illustrious plans to get away from there and go have this other great life that he had planned for himself. But just some different things happened and he never was able to to get away from there. And so his parents up ended up dying and somebody else bought the amusement park and he ended up working for these people and working at this amusement park literally all of his life. Well, he was very unhappy on the inside, but you might not have known it to be around him. He was actually a very nice man and helped a lot of people and was generous and would help different people that worked there that may were having financial troubles and things like that. But he just felt like a total absolute failure Well, something happened on one of the rides and a little girl was about to be killed and he actually in the process of trying to save her, got killed himself and died, and he went to heaven But when he got there, of course, this being in a movie, you know, it wasn't exactly along the lines of scripture. when he got there, he was told that He would meet five people in heaven and that each one of these people that he would meet would be very important in helping him make a final decision that he had to make, which was what did he want his heaven to be like Everybody that went to heaven in this movie got to choose what they wanted their own heaven to look like and be like. So if you wanted your heaven to be you know, an island in Hawaii, you could live on the beach the rest of your life, you know, or if you wanted whatever. you know whatever if you wanted to live on the mountains in the Swiss Alps, you could be there. You got to kind of just create your own Exence. And so as the movie goes on, he meets these five people and at first he didn't understand what was going on. and to be honest, it took me a while to understand it too. I almost turned it off twice because it was kind of slow moving. I'm like, this is really goofy. But then I kept thinking I needed to finish watching it. by the time I got to the end of it, it was one of those movies you think about for days and days and days because it had a real message in it And so I don't remember the order, but first he met a man that he'd been in the Vietnam War with, and it turns out that he had saved this guy's life. And so this guy proceeds to tell him what all he meant to him and you know how because he'd saved his life, what he had gone on to do and all the different, you know things. And then he met a little girl when u When she was just like about seven or eight years old He saw her in the street playing and a car was coming and he quick ran and grabbed her and got her out of the way saved her life and then showed you know what she went on to do and how she wouldn't have been alive if it wouldn't have been for him. And so they go through, you know these five different people, each one telling a story like that. and the emotions are mounting and you're beginning to get the point. and so. True joy and freedom comes from knowing we're totally loved and accepted by God. Although we'll never be perfect, we have right standing with God because of Jesus. Therefore, our confidence must be in Christ Jeremiah seventeen seven says Most Blessed is the man who believes in, trusts sin, and relies on the Lord, and whose hope and confidence the Lord is. By faith and our confidence in God, we can succeed at being all He wants us to be Emotional stability. Some people have it, and then there's the rest of us. But Joyce Meyer wants to take you on a ninety day journey to emotional health and her newest devotional, Managing Your Emotions. We have feelings, but we cannot let them have us. Experience an emotionally healthy life One day and one decision at a time managing your emotions. Visit jysmeer d. org and order your coffee today Thank you for listening to fififteen Minutes in the Word with Joyce