God’s Proud Of You by Joyce Meyer

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.