Ginger: Now that the “hope center” is built, Maria will have the help she needs to provide for the children. Chablili is back at school, learning the skills she needs for a good future. Albert and Simpewe have the nourishment they need to grow into healthy young men. And most importantly, these three children are all growing up with the knowledge that God loves them.

Maria: God is amazing. He can change anything. He can make things happen. Like now, we have the shelter

Ginger: We’ve also built a hope center like this one in Oakley, South Africa, providing food, education and shelter for hurting people in that area. New pleas for help around the world are constantly coming to our attention and it’s only with the support of our friends and partners that we will be able to answer those pleas with “yes, we can help.”

Joyce Meyer: Well, if you’ve been watching the programs this week, you realize that we’re in the middle of a missions campaign and you’ve probably seen a lot of pretty desperate needs. Let me tell you, your part can make a huge difference. So whether you can give a small amount or a large amount, I’m asking you to send in an offering today to help us. Thank you so much for being obedient to God and reaching out to people in need.

Ginger: Next, we’ll show you how God’s light is shining in one of South Africa’s darkest places.

David: it’s worth every bit of it.  When you see… I was thinking about in India, there’s a girl named Furene. Literally, six months ago she lived in one of the worst slums in India. Her mother was a prostitute. Every day she got up… No education — hopefully she could eat — and watched her mother do that to make a living. Now today we’ve helped build a village with you, our friends and partners, outside of Mumbai, to where she and her mother are out there living a normal life, being educated, being fed good food. The stories just go on and on. I think about the triplets in Ethiopia, which I think we’ve told that story before. Shelly and I were on our first time in Ethiopia, and literally the babies were just hours old and they gave us their babies.

Joyce Meyer: tried to, anyway.

David: tried to.  And said, “Please take care of them.” they were just hours old. One of them didn’t make it, but two have. Two are just thriving. But that prompted us to open a health clinic and a full-fledged feeding program. That’s why those other two have made it.  Not only that, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of more that would have died haven’t.

Joyce Meyer: just so people really have good understanding, our overall purpose in doing all of this is to introduce people to Jesus Christ but the thing that we have found out is that sometimes people are hurting too badly to hear a message about love. It’s easy to say, “God loves you,” but that’s not very expensive. It doesn’t take much effort, doesn’t cost any money, and doesn’t take much time. We’re very good about saying something, but we need to start backing up what we say with action where action is needed. We’ve just discovered that if somebody is starving, you need to feed him before you try to tell him anything. And if they have such pain in their body that they hardly even know what their own name is, you need to maybe give them some medical help before you try to preach to them. So we literally are having thousands and thousands of people accept Christ through these medical outreaches and feeding outreaches because we’re meeting a practical need for them first. Now, it’s also important to say this:  i know that for people watching today it’s so easy to get totally disconnected from this and think, “I’m just a stay-at-home mom or a mechanic or a gardener or whatever; that’s just so far removed from anything that i can ever think about.” but the point is it’s all around us. There are people in need all around us.  Every day, everywhere we go I’m beginning to feel like we just need to be spies for god and we need to go out just more or less saying, “god, here i am.  Use me however you want to use me.” you don’t have to go to India to find somebody in need.

Joyce Meyer: They’re in every city under the bridges, they’re in homeless shelters, they’re in nursing homes, they’re tucked away in poverty-stricken neighborhoods, widows trying to live on a little bit of social security and maybe at the end of the month having to eat cat food or dog food because they don’t have enough money.  And it really doesn’t take a lot of creativity to get involved someway in some kind of a way to help hurting people. I just think that if we don’t do that, then we are not putting a smile on god’s face. Do you have any kind of a closing comment?

Jentezen Franklin: There’s no question that God uses our circumstances. Just a practical example: if you don’t have enough resources and you’re spending more than you’re taking in, those circumstances are screaming to you: you have to get your financial house in order. The same with children; in raising children I’ve found that if I see one of my children kind of withdrawing, go into their room, not talking, I’ve just learned to read those things and then if you’ll pray about it, the Lord will begin to help you but it all begins with the circumstances.

If you don’t have a job, you don’t have to pray about, “Lord, do I need to get a job?” Of course you need to get a job! I’ve found that so many people are waiting on God to tell them everything and sometimes your circumstances will tell you that if the brook is drying up — like Elijah, the brook dried up — that’s God saying it’s time to move on! I believe one way God speaks to us is absolutely through our energy, through our bodies, and through our peace in our own minds and our own lives.

Joyce: And what it gives you the ability to do… I have two daughters that both had it in their heart to home school. My one daughter tried it for one day and she said, “I cannot do this. This will drive me crazy and I will drive my son crazy.” The other one said, “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this or not but I want to try it.” So they both tried it. One of them had no grace to do it. The other one said to me just the other day: I cannot believe the grace of God that is on my life to do this. So, grace is that ability that God gives you to arrange your mind, your body, even your circumstances in such a way that you can do what you do — I’m going to use the words “with ease” although

Joyce Meyer: I don’t want anybody to think that means you don’t have to press through things. But Jesus said his yoke is easy and light. I just don’t think life should be nothing but making yourself do all these things. My one daughter doesn’t have to home school because the other one does. We have to learn that we don’t have to be able to do what everybody else does.

Jentezen: I’ll bet if I sat down and asked you to give me your schedule, it would wear me out and kill me, and vice versa. I travel every week most of the time with my family. We were given an 88,000 square foot building in Orange County and we started a church there a year ago. And when I tell people that, they say, “you go every week?” like I’m crazy, and I get it.

Joyce: You saw me when you told me that. I’m like: wow.

Jentezen: But it’s a grace. It’s a grace, it’s a joy. I get excited about it. I really believe that’s how God speaks to us, is he gives you that grace, and he may not grace me with the same thing that he graces you with.

Joyce: I used to handle a lot of the administrative stuff here at the ministry as well as do all the traveling and stuff and about four years ago I said to my family: “you know what? If I have to keep living like this, I’m going to downsize this thing because all I do is work and I cannot do it anymore. I want to give myself to praying, teaching, preaching, writing.” When I came to that point in my life where I said, “I will not do it like this anymore,” God raised up my younger son at that point and he became the CEO of the media, and administrates all the operations here daily and my life just changed dramatically.

Joyce Meyer Ministries: But see, all those years I had done it and I was able to do it, I enjoyed it, but all of a sudden I had a couple of years where it was like… I heard myself complaining all the time about my schedule. I think if you start hearing yourself complain all the time about what you’re doing, then maybe you’d better back off and ask yourself if you should be doing it.

This passive attitude that people have: spoon feed me, give me a miracle, make something happen for me, has got to go. It’s up to you to take the word of God and work it. It’s up to you to take the book and read it. It amazes me how Christians think that somehow or another they should have this victorious life and yet never do anything. The analogy that god gave me just even in this last year is there is not one person who would decide at the age of 18 that they wanted to be a doctor who would expect to be a doctor and never study. You wouldn’t go ask somebody to lay hands on you so you could be a good doctor. You wouldn’t even go to somebody and say: would you pray for me that I’ll be a good doctor?

To be honest, a lot of times I think we just ask people to pray for us as an excuse to not have to do something. Part of the reason why people are unhappy, and I want you to be happy, but part of the reason why people are unhappy is because they’re not active. God gave you all these joints because you’re supposed to move. Think of all the joints you have in your body. I’ve got one there, I’ve got one there, I’ve got one here. I’ve got three that I can see just in this one finger. Then I’ve got one here and I’ve got one here and I’ve got one here.

Why is that? They’re all there because I’m supposed to be doing something, active and moving and doing something — not just sitting around, waiting for my miracle, waiting for my breakthrough. “I wish I was thinner. I wish I had four kids and looked like Joyce. I wish I was 64 and looked like that.” Well, let me download a revelation onto you: I work at this and I work at it hard! One of the reasons why I do it is because I feel like I have a responsibility that if I am going to stand up and talk to people about Jesus and the wonderful victorious life that they can have, then I don’t think that I should go around dragging myself around feeling like I’m half dead all the time and looking worse than I feel.

Joyce Meyer Ministries : We don’t have to do it, but we can use self-control to keep ourselves in line. You have to control yourself.

But in actual fact, I’ve seen believers whose spirit is broken, snapped. It’s like they talk about breaking the will of a horse so it becomes tame but sometimes the will can become broken. There are two kinds of brokenness: there is a good brokenness before God where we are broken and we become contrite before God but there’s another kind of brokenness that is damaging, and that’s when trust is breached. What happens is something snaps on the inside of a person and they give up. They just give up. They think, “what’s the use?” they’re hopeless, they lose vision for the future.

Joyce: Nothing’s going to change.

Pastor Phil: Yeah. If you were to say, “let me look into your future,” you’d see nothing; it’s black. Faith always has something inside. And if you were to run the ultrasound over their spirit, there’s nothing in there; no heart beating about the future.

Joyce: I think many times we think because somebody has hurt us, we are justified in feeling that way. It seems like I’m hearing the Lord say that we need to realize that our anger is sin and our bitterness is sin and that resentment is sin. And even though this other person has sinned against me, that my response to that is also sinful. So, I think we need to start by saying, “God, this attitude I have, this way I feel, these thoughts I’m having, this junk that I’m spurting out of my spirit is sin and I’m sorry. Will you forgive me? And I want to also forgive that person.”

Pastor Phil: Because we have no control over what happens to us, but we do have control over how we react to what happens to us.

Joyce: And as long as we keep justifying our bad response, then you really can’t get over it because you’re not really facing the fact that it’s a wrong thing that has to go.

Joyce Meyer Online:  I need to control myself. I need to control myself.: We stay too busy trying to control everybody else. Amen!

That means the moment we accept that I am who God says I am, that when God raised Christ from the dead, he gave me the same life that he gave to Christ, the same victory, and he raised me up with him and made me sit down together with him in heavenly places and the same life that’s in Christ is in my spirit right now.  As you find those scriptures — there are 130 of them so you can see we could be busy just talking about them — in 130, Paul uses that terminology “in Christ.” in him, we are blessed. In him, we are righteous. In him, we are always triumphant. That’s one of my favorite ones. In him, the law of the spirit of life in him has made us free from the law of sin and death.

Joyce: One of the ways I like to explain this is that god would never command you to do something and not give you what you needed to do it. I wouldn’t send my little child to the grocery store and not give them any money to get the groceries.  I wouldn’t tell them to bake a cake and not give them any ingredients. So, when the bible tells us to walk in righteousness and holiness, it would be virtually impossible if god didn’t give us what we needed to do that. So, if he expects me to behave right, then he has to give me righteousness.

He puts that in me and then in our world the way people look at things is “if you show me, then I’ll believe it,” but in god’s economy, you believe it first and then you see it. So, if you begin to believe that you are the righteousness of God in Christ, that you have been given right standing with god and you stop all this “I’m no good, I’m nothing, I’m an old worm, god’s mad at me.  I have to go around guilty and condemned and ashamed all the time.” when you take off those rags and you put on your robe of righteousness and you begin to believe “I am the righteousness of God in Christ, not because I do everything right but because the word says it,” then your behavior will start to be more right.

Joyce Meyer: If we would just concentrate more on ourselves. We’re always minding other people’s business and not taking care of our own

Joyce: That’s exactly right so it’s imperative that people renew their mind. How do you do that? If somebody’s listening today and they’re like, “I don’t really have a clue what you guys are talking about but I have some kind of feeling inside that maybe you’re right. Help me.”  how could you tell somebody what they would do to renew their mind?

Mark Hankins: The word of God is god’s thoughts so you certainly want to bring your thoughts into agreement with god’s thoughts.  Philemon 6 says “that the communication of your faith may become effectual by the acknowledging of every good thing that is in you in Christ.” in other words, your faith becomes effective. One translation says “I pray that everyone who meets you will catch your faith and learn from you how wonderful it is to live in Christ.”  that means that our faith begins to become effective by acknowledging who we are in Christ.  Years ago just as a teenager, even though I’d been saved and filled with the Holy Spirit, I really didn’t understand that I had a new identity and you see that god throughout the scriptures changes people’s identities.

He changed Abraham’s identity. Before Abraham could reach his destiny, he had to have a change of identity, so Abram has to go around for 25 years saying “I’m Abraham, father of many” and didn’t have children. You can see Sarai and you can see Jacob had to have a change of identity. You can see even Simon Peter had to have a change of identity. You can see the Apostle Paul. The power of god hit him so hard, it knocked the “s” off the front of his name and put a “p” there; he was Saul. “now I’m Paul. I’m not the same guy! I’m a whole different person!” once god does that for you and you receive it, then every day get up and acknowledge, actually find scriptures that use the two words “in Christ, in him, or in whom.” there are 130 of them. I love Ephesians 2:10 where it says “for we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus created unto good works which he has before ordained that we should walk in them. One translation says we are God’s handiwork and we taking paths that he has prepared ahead of time.

Joyce Meyer Ministries: One of my prayers was always, “Let me live a life and be consistent where people can see that, and you draw them to me, you bring them to me with questions,” because that’s where I think witnessing can be the most powerful is when somebody approaches you and says, “tell me about this.

Ginger Stache: “This is Roja and Mahesh. I want to tell you their story because they are truly miracles and you’ve had a big part in their lives. Not too long ago, their father died after suffering with aids. Their mother tried to care for them. She went to the family for help but because she also had aids, they would have nothing to do with her. Unfortunately, after not too long, their mother also died. They went to live with their uncle and their grandmother but when the children were tested and found to be hiv positive, the family sent them out of the house. And at ages nine and five, these children were completely on their own — no one to care for them. That’s when Joyce Meyer ministries found out about their need, and they came here to live at Chandrakal hospital. Here they are receiving total care — Not only medications and having their physical problems cared for, but they’re receiving love and an education, and they’re learning about the love of Jesus Christ.”

Dr. Ashok Kumar first became aware of Roja and Mahesh after reading about their tragic story in a national newspaper. The article urged someone to come forward and help the children.

Dr. Ashok Kumar: “So we went there by our ambulance. We reached the village. And at that time, Mahesh, the little boy, is so sick, and they are not allowed to enter any house of the village. They’re not allowed to drink water from the village also. They’re just sleeping in a veranda in their grandma’s house. And when they saw us, the village people were so happy because once for all these dreaded hiv kids are going out from their village.”

Ginger: “Today they have light in their eyes and smiles on their faces. Their lives have hope and it is truly because of loving wonderful people who didn’t even know them, who were willing to reach out with the love of Christ. Thank you for your help. You’re making a difference in children’s lives, not only for Roja and Mahesh, but for so many other children. You’re showing God’s love and you’re doing it through your partnership with Joyce Meyer ministries.”

This facility provides a pediatric and birthing unit, an ophthalmology unit, a pharmacy, and general exams, as well as a counseling and testing center for those who may have the aids virus. The clinic also distributes retro-viral drugs to mothers who test positive and are either pregnant or nursing. This medication prevents the transmission of the virus from mother to child. In India more than five million people are living with this disease, and those who fall victim are rejected by society. Our friends and partners made it possible to open this beautiful hospital in the village of Chandrakal, providing free medical care to a region of 100,000 people who had very little access to healthcare before. The hospital has one ward dedicated solely to the care of families with aids. Now a newly built facility meets the full needs of aids orphans where up to 50 children can receive medical care and unconditional love, like 10-year-old Anita and her little brother Rajkumar. Their mother passed away with aids and it is up to Anita to take care of her brother.

Margaret Barbour: “These children will have a great hope for their future because if Joyce Meyer had not put this idea forward of building a children’s home, these children would be ostracized by the village. If you take the average aids orphan out there, they’ll never get the treatment that they get here — never. These children would never be touched. And so we make sure that we’re always touching them, cuddling them, giving them love. So it’s the only haven of hope for these kids — really, the only haven of hope.”

Anita and Rajkumar’s story is heartbreaking but there is hope for their future thanks to our faithful friends and partners. So many children can benefit like these two little ones who were rescued from a desperate situation.