Joyce Meyer Ministries: Most of us are addicted to something in our lives and today we’re gonna learn how to break those bad habits that hold us in bondage.

Joyce Meyer Online: Addictive behaviors. Let’s start by talking about self-control because we need that. Go to Galatians 5:22. Lord, we thank you for the word this morning and we believe it’s going to impact people’s lives in a very positive way. Self-control. Obviously if it’s “self”-control then I am the one who has to do the controlling, right? I can’t sit around and wait for some outside force to come along and do it for me. Joyce Meyer Ministries said that I have to control myself through the power of the Holy Spirit. Verse 22: But the fruit of the Holy Spirit… What is the evidence that the Holy Spirit is living in us? There should be evidence. If we’re Christians, there ought to be enough evidence to convict us. We should act differently than someone who does not have the power of God in their life. Amen? Amen!: So, my dear friends in Christ, we must be very concerned about how we act. Joyce Meyer says Yes!: How we behave is very important and how we behave under pressure shows more about our character than anything else. It shows more about our spiritual maturity than anything else. Anybody can act good when they’re getting their way. I’m so grateful for self-control because Lord only knows what we’d be doing if we didn’t have some measure of that. Amen? Amen.: According to Joyce Meyer Ministries that the fruit of the Holy Spirit [the work which his presence within us accomplishes] is love, joy gladness:, peace, patience which is an even temper and forbearance: – forbearance means you have an ability to put up with stuff a long time without changing – kindness, goodness, faithfulness, v. 23: Gentleness which is meekness and humility:, and self-control. Now, I believe that all the fruit of the spirit actually are the fruit of love.

Joyce Meyer – Along that line, I think you also have to find a way to be real with people. I think sometimes when you’re handing out tracts or you’re hitting them with certain scriptures that they’ve heard a million times, it automatically puts up a defensive.

Joyce Meyer Ministries: Are you hanging on to something that you really know you need to let go of? Today we’re going to help you understand how you can let go and move on; coming up next on “enjoying everyday life.”

Joyce Meyer: We can come boldly to the throne and we can have an unreserved approach. Whoa! I don’t even have to sneak in! I could just go in. “It’s me again, father.” I’m going to teach you some things this weekend about how much we need fathers and why God tells us to call him father. So many of us didn’t have right fathering. And then some of us even went to the church to find fathering and we couldn’t find right fathers there. We need natural fathers. We need spiritual fathers. Paul said: you’ve got a lot of teachers but not many fathers. Amen? Amen!: It thrills me when somebody tells me that they look at me as their spiritual mother. I’d like to mother the whole world.

People are orphaned and they’re not supposed to be orphaned. He adopts us and brings us into fellowship with himself. We have to learn that it’s alright to feel right about yourself. It’s not godly to hate yourself. You need to like yourself. You need to accept yourself. According to Joyce Meyer Ministries that you need to embrace yourself. With all of your weirdness you need to embrace yourself! We need to stop comparing and competing. Maybe somebody here is tired of being a chameleon: Change and just you’re this if they want this and that if somebody else wants something else. I tried so hard to be like so many people for so long, one day I got so frustrated, I said, “God, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be like anymore!” I tried to be like Dave. I tried to be like my neighbor. I tried to be like my pastor’s wife.  She was real sweet and had a gift of mercy.

Joyce Meyer Online – And I think one of the keys to witnessing is finding everybody where they’re at and being able to meet them with Jesus there.

Aggressively, aggressively,: in Jesus’ name. In Jesus’ name.: Joyce Meyer Ministries says the word confidence says that it causes a person to be bold, open, and plain. Form a habit of responding to everything with confidence. It is your blood-bought right to be confident. We say we have confidence in God, but do we? What do you have your confidence in? The way you look? What if you don’t look that way someday? In case you haven’t noticed, we all change as the years go by. Do you have your confidence in your job? What if you don’t have that job someday? Do you have your confidence in your bank account? Well, what if that system caves in? Do you have your confidence in your social group? Your friends? We all know that sometimes they disappear. Joyce Meyer Online said that Is your confidence in the kind of clothes you can wear or the kind of car you drive? Do you feel good about yourself because you have a nice car and a nice house and you can wear fancy clothes? Do you feel good about yourself because you’re the exact right size or you have beautiful hair? What makes you feel good about yourself? The bible says in Philippians 3:3: put no confidence or dependence upon what you are in the flesh or on external outward advantages, but let your confidence be in Christ Jesus.

Joyce Meyer says I’m confident and the thing that’s so funny, if people could just see this: don’t ever think that everybody who is doing a lot of good stuff are all that talented. I can tell you what I have — a mouth. I can’t play an instrument. I could give you a list a mile long of the stuff I can’t do but you know what I do have? I’ve got a lot of good ol’ plain common sense. I just know there are some things you do and some things you don’t do, and a lot of that I’ve learned the hard way. I’ve learned by doing it wrong and figuring out: well, that didn’t work. I’m old enough now that I’ve tried a whole bunch of stuff and I can give you some really good advice. Amen? Amen!:

Joyce Meyer Ministries – I always love it when Paul talks about trying to become all things to all people that he may save some.

According to Joyce Meyer that they’d rather go the route of not forgiving themselves and feeling guilty than just to be free because Jesus died for us. So this is another example of how the devil will make you wallow in self- pity and feel the pain all the time; that’s the devil’s work. Remember the three r’s of spiritual warfare: recognize, refuse, resist. Recognize: This is the devil; this isn’t God. Refuse: Don’t think about it. Any guilt that God didn’t put there, refuse to think about it, and then resist — resist the devil and he will flee from you.

Joyce Meyer Ministries: It is interesting this thing about self-punishment. It all is rooted in this deep feeling that we have to pay, we have to pay, we have to pay, we have to pay, we have to pay. I owe, I owe, so I have to pay. The good news of the gospel is such good news that we just have a difficult time believing that anything could be that good. It’s like how can you just be a bad person all your life and hurt people and do all kinds of bad things and then just because you ask God to forgive you and you’re willing to turn away from that life and start a new life, how is it even possible that even God could be so good that he would do that?

R.T. Kendall: This is why we call it good news. When it’s too good to be true, that’s when you’ve really heard it. Until the gospel, when it breaks through, is too good to be true, until that happens you probably haven’t heard it. But when you are confronted with the fact that in one stroke, by transferring the trust that you had in your good works to what Jesus did for you on the cross, you’re saved, you’re forgiven, it’s over, the war is over, we think, “that’s too good to be true.” That’s why it’s good news. It’s not good news if you have to add to it and pay for this and do this and do that; God did it by his son.

Joyce Meyer – I think that is so key, especially in our business, because you have so many people, so many backgrounds, so much money, so many different things that you can’t treat everybody the same.

Lisa: And understand they’re different. My third son was such a challenge. It sounds like the same thing. I spent my whole mother career apologizing to teachers. I would even find myself saying, “my first two children are straight a’s! I don’t know what happened; I promise!” I thought maybe he didn’t crawl enough, maybe we didn’t do this enough, maybe we didn’t do that. And John sat me down and said, “you are stressing out and you are stressing this child out. And you know what?

He just looks at things differently, so we’re just going to start telling him, ‘Alexander, we love the way you think.'” So, we just started saying, “Alexander, we just love the way you think!” And the other boys were like, “you’ve got to be kidding; he doesn’t think. That’s why he has d’s and f’s, mom. What do you mean? This child doesn’t think.” But we just kept saying, “we love the way you think, Alex. You look at things differently. We love it.”

Joyce Meyer says at first my heart was afraid that he was going to stop trying, but you know what? His pieces just came together and he felt celebrated. Now he’s gone, seriously, from a child who was in special education to the vice president of the junior class in high school and he is preaching his first youth conference this summer, but we had to start celebrating his strengths instead of always pointing out his weaknesses. I think with relationships, I don’t like to spend time with people who tell me what’s wrong with me. I like people that celebrate my strengths because they build me up and that ends up displacing my weaknesses.

Joyce Meyer Ministries: And you have to learn to let each one of them be who they are and not compare them.  Especially we have to learn to not try to make them be like us.

Joyce Meyer Online – I think for the most part that we, in my opinion, I think too many people today are anti-bible teaching.

Joyce Meyer: “I set before you life and death,” the bible says in Deuteronomy 30. Choose life. We have a choice. We have a choice about how to act. We have a choice about what to think. We have a choice about what we’re going to say.

Joyce Meyer Ministries: Thank you for being with me today on “enjoying everyday life.” The bible says the power of life and death is in the tongue. That’s a really strong statement. Let’s think about that. The power of life and death is in the tongue. That means the words that we speak contain either creative or destructive power. Our words affect our present situation and they determine our future. It amazes me that the same awesome creative power in God’s word is also ours if we’ll learn how to speak it. God always does what he says he will do, so begin to line your words up with his and when you do, your present mess will become your future miracle.

Joyce Meyer Online: I’m going to talk to you tonight about your words and your future, how your words can affect your future. Some of us are living out right now what we’ve said in the past, so if we don’t like what’s going on right now, we need to make sure that we say some things that are going to help us have the life we want to have in the future. Now listen, we’ve been talking this weekend about how words are containers for power. Joyce Meyer says this glass contains water. Words contain power. They contain creative or destructive power. If we would go to Genesis 1, you would see that each thing that God created, the bible says, “and God said…” I went through Genesis 1 this afternoon and underlined each place when God created something that we now enjoy. It doesn’t say, “God thought a thought.” It doesn’t say, “God waved his hands.” It says, “and God said.”

Joyce Meyer Ministries – We as people need to be able to quote the bible in our daily speech. I find when I do that, people say, “where did you get that from?” Or “Lou Brock said…”

Joyce Meyer Ministries: Welcome back to the program. Our executive tv producer Ginger Stache is with me and I’m answering viewer questions about healing wounded emotions. Well, Ginger, what was that question you asked me that you said was going to be hard to answer?

Ginger Stache: Well, you know when we look at “ask Joyce Meyer” at joycemeyer.org where people send in their questions, I’m really overwhelmed by the amount of questions that are dealing with childhood memories and getting over huge pain in people’s lives and healing the wounded spirit.  This is one of those so many people who are coming from a background of hurt and then get into a relationship and find it so difficult to know how to make that work. The question is, “did you ever consider divorcing Dave in the earlier years of your marriage when things just weren’t so great?”

Joyce Meyer Online: Oh, maybe no more than three times every day. Everybody has those kinds of thoughts.  When things are not going well, our fleshly “out” is “I’m just going to give up. This is just absolutely not worth it. You’re never going to change. You don’t understand me,” on and on and on and on. But I think we also have to realize, and I’m very grateful that God enabled me to realize this, that I couldn’t just blame everything on him. I had to take responsibility for my behavior and my actions. You’re not going to find anybody who is perfect. Joyce Meyer Ministries said that I knew in the depths of my heart that if I couldn’t make it work with him, it wasn’t going to work with the next person, either. Now obviously, Ginger, there are situations that nobody can make work, and I believe that the word of God makes allowances for that. But we all know there are far too many divorces today, and you don’t just get a divorce because it’s hard or you’re not “compatible,” or some silly thing like that.According to Joyce Meyer Online that  when people have been really hurt, it’s amazing — it’s like when you have all this baggage, so to speak, that you’re carrying around with you and you come into a relationship with somebody else, you really can’t have a right relationship until the baggage is taken care of, because in order for the person to get to you, they have to try to unpack your baggage all the time, and that gets to be really hard work for anybody. Yes, I thought about it. I thought about it many times. Joyce Meyer Ministries says I’m sure Dave even thought about it a few times but the good news is now we’ve been married going on 42 years and we didn’t give up and I’m happy to be able to say that God’s word works; if you’re willing to stick through the hard times, you will come into the good times.

Joyce Meyer – And I can very well teach in high school and college level, the pro level, with that in mind, just speak the language.

Ginger Stache: That’s great. I believe that encouragement is going to set some people free and save some people from some real hardship.

Joyce Meyer Ministries: I can share an example with you that I’m thinking about that will take a minute but I think it will be worth it to people. Years ago, I had this thing in my brain where I thought everything was my fault, everything’s my fault. If anything goes wrong, it’s my fault. I was learning better but would still revert back to old ways. I’d been doing a lot of studying about being the righteousness of God in Christ and knowing who I was in Christ but still reverting back if Dave and I would have conflict to “everything’s my fault.” One morning he and I had an argument and he confronted me about something and corrected me about something, then he went on to work. Joyce Meyer says and I sat in my kitchen actually holding my baby at the time, who now is the CEO of our stateside ministry, and I began to say out loud, “I’m no good. That’s right, everything’s my fault. I’m just a big jerk, just a big mess.” And I actually could feel an evil presence. It was just like this heavy, awful thing coming at me. Thank God, what I had in my spirit immediately came out and I started to say, “I am the righteousness of God in Christ. I am the righteousness of God in Christ. I am the righteousness of God in Christ. God loves me!” and I felt that begin to dissipate and go away.

Ginger: You were able to see in the spirit realm what other people are experiencing all the time.

Joyce Meyer Online: I’m telling you what, that put the fear of god in me about saying negative things about myself out of my own mouth and it taught me a lesson that I will never forget. That doesn’t mean I’ve never said anything negative about myself but now when I do, I’m quick to repent because that is one way you can totally invite the enemy into your life. That’s an open door to invite him in.

I finally had to make a decision: Am I going to believe what I feel more than I believe the word of God? Am I going to believe what messed-up people told me 30 and 40 years ago in my childhood? All I have to do is look at the fruit of their lives and know they didn’t know what they were talking about. Am I going to believe them more than I believe the word of God? When you make your mind up that you’re going to base your life on this, it will heal you.

Joyce Meyer Online – So if we’re going to be a Christian, we need to know what we believe and it needs to not even necessarily come across like we’re preaching to everybody, but just be part of our daily conversation.

According to Joyce Meyer that one thing you’ve got to know is when God tells you to lay something down, he gives you the ability to lay it down. Whatever you give up for him will come back to you many times over in much better condition than it was when you laid it down. Joseph was a great man and we talk about that, but he was also in prison for 13 years for something he didn’t do. Why? Because a work needed to be done in him. Moses was 40 years on the back side of the desert. Why? Because a work needed to be done in him. Joyce Meyer Ministries said the gifts that God has given you are not going to go away. That’s not going to change but if you want to be happy, you better start using them to glorify God. You don’t have to work for a ministry to glorify God. No matter where you go to work, you can go every day with the intention of being a witness, having a great attitude, loving people, taking every opportunity that you have to be a blessing to people as God opens doors. You can lead people to Christ. Joyce Meyer Online you don’t all need to have a pulpit. Most people don’t need a pulpit. You’ve got one anyway. It may be your backyard fence or your desk at work but you’ve all got a pulpit. You’ve all got a platform where God wants you to bring the gifts that you have into the kingdom.

Joyce Meyer: I think if you will stay full of hope, that’s another way of just saying “I refuse to give up.” I’ve found out in my life that if I will just be tenacious and refuse to give up, I will have a breakthrough and see the things that God promises me in his word. The enemy wants us to give up. He’s constantly putting thoughts in our head like “you can’t do this, it’s too much, you’re not gonna make it,” but you need to open your mouth and do battle with the enemy by speaking the word of God. You need to say things like God is on my side and I’m not gonna quit, I’m not gonna give up. I’m gonna remain full of hope because God is on my side. Today we’re offering six teaching cds — that’s six hours of teaching titled “hold on!  Help is on the way!” I think it will be really encouraging to you.

Joyce Meyer Ministries – I think what I would say to the audience is to understand that we’re a witness in the good times and the bad times.

Pastor Mike Shepard: I sure know I need it! From my upbringing, I developed a lot of insecurities, I had a lot of tendencies to try to perform to feel secure, to try to get approval, even trying to perform for God. So, it was a real rat race for me until one time I felt like these words came into my conscience, “Mike, your security and identity is based on the fact that I love you and I’m proud of you.” I thought: wow! That’s a new place to put my security, is in the fact that God loves me and he’s proud of me. Joyce Meyer said that I think sometimes in Christianity we think that we come to the Lord and there’s a big party, all of heaven rejoices and then God’s ticked off at us ever since, he’s just mad the rest of the time because we don’t do it right, when the fact of the matter is God not only loves me, he enjoys me. Whoa! That’s a thought! He even likes me. Zephaniah 3:17 says God rejoices over us with joy and singing, and literally what that means is God jumps up and down and sings and shouts with a loud voice, clapping his hands over us! What an amazing thought that God actually enjoys me and likes me, even on my worst day.

Joyce Meyer Ministries: Even as you’re saying that, I already know that there are people watching the program who have a hard time with that, like, “what do you mean, God’s proud of you? What about all the stuff you do wrong? What do you mean God enjoys you? You have all these flaws in your life.” We have to get over this thinking that everything between us and God is about our performance. It’s really about our heart.

Pastor Michael Shaw: Joyce, it’s important for us to know that we’re worthy to be loved. We’re worthy to be loved because God made us worthy through Christ and when we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and savior, we’re worthy to be loved, and even before that, the scripture we always quote John 3:16 says “for God so loved the world.” That’s you before you were a Christian. He loved us in spite of this. The bible says in Romans 5:8, “but God demonstrates his own love towards us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” He loves us so much!

Joyce Meyer Online – I think one thing that… I remember when I stood on that podium and said the name of Jesus, I thought, “there’s no way I’m going to have any more impact than I am today for Jesus, standing on this podium.