A text says, you're on my mind. A bouquet from 1-800-Flowers says, you're my everything. Heartfelt moments belong in the real world. Not just your phone. For 50 years, 1-800-Flowers has helped millions of people make memories that'll last a lifetime, with gifts they'll cherish forever. They're expertly curated arrangements and gift baskets shipped nationwide with a 100% satisfaction guarantee. Don't wait for the next big moment. Make it. When you visit 1-800-Flowers.com slash podcast, that's 1-800-Flowers.com slash podcast. Welcome to 15 Minutes in the Word with New York Times bestselling author Joyce Meyer. On today's program, Joyce will be teaching from her series, The Fierce Some Four. When we feel discouraged, defeated, or overwhelmed by the pressures of life, chances are we're being hit by what Joyce calls The Fierce Some Four. Fear, guilt, worry, and insecurity. The devil uses these obstacles to keep us from God's calling. But with Christ, we can defeat all of them and reach God's perfect plan for our life. Be empowered with today's teaching and learn to embrace God's fearless form. Peace, confidence, love, and courage. Now, here's Joyce with today's teaching. Isaiah 54-17. Isaiah 54-17 is a wonderful scripture, but no weapon that's farmed against you shall prosper. Yeah. Yeah. And every time that shall rise against you in judgment, you shall show to be in the wrong. But now here's the part I really love, this amplification. This peace, righteousness, security, or if I say security. Yes. And triumph over opposition is the heritage of the servants of the Lord. So in other words, to be secure is part of your inherited blood bought right through your relationship with Jesus Christ. It's not something you go out and earn or get by who you know or what you own, it's something you inherit. You inherit it to your relationship with Jesus Christ. Just like some of my children have inherited brown eyes because I have brown eyes. We have a certain inheritance through our relationship with Christ. The Bible says that we are joint heirs with him. Whatever he has, we get as a free gift. But we receive it by faith. Now, if I were to say to somebody down here, here I'm going to give you a Bible. Well, they could say I have a Bible, but they would know they had a Bible because they could see the Bible. Now the thing about our relationship with God is we have to take everything by faith. He's the invisible God. We know that he's there in our heart. And we believe it in our heart. And in God's economy, you believe everything first before you see it. If you believe it, then ultimately you'll see it working in your life. That's why it's important to believe that you're secure and believe that you're confident and confess that you are. Once again, the day I have to talk to you about talking out loud. Even this morning when I was praying and having my time with God, I felt like I heard the Spirit of God say to me, I want to hear your voice. I believe there's power in our voice. And so I began to confess some scriptures out loud. I am the righteousness of God in Christ. God loves me. My value is in who I am in Him. And I have to remind myself of those things every day, just like you do, especially when I feel like I'm starting to sink our diminish in some way. Let God hear your voice. Speak out. Let the devil know that you know who you are in Christ. Amen. How many of you ever say negative things about yourself? Don't make me come down there and get you. Okay, now let me tell you something. I'm gonna sit right here until you get it through your head that that's a no-no. That is not something that you can ever do again. Don't you ever say anything negative about yourself out of your own mouth when you do that all you're doing is helping the devil. You're getting into agreement with Him. And if any two of you agree on earth, you don't ever say I'm stupid, I can't do anything right. Oh, I'm dumb. Oh, whatever it is you say about yourself. Don't ever say anything negative about yourself out of your own mouth. You say about you what God says about you. How many of you got that? Because I'm not getting up till you get that. And I'm not moving on till you get that. You know, it's one thing to say I made a mistake. It's another thing to think you are a mistake. Learn how to separate who you are from what you do. Your identity is not in what you do. Believe it or not, there's a lot more things that are more important than what you do. So remember, you can be secure even if you don't feel secure. You can be confident even if you don't feel confident. And I would venture to say that on those days when you feel the least confident, that's when you need to say the loudest, I am confident in who I am in Christ. You know, you believe more of what you hear yourself say than what you hear anybody else say anyway. Did you know that? That's a scientific fact. You will believe more of what you hear yourself say than what you hear anybody else say. We're always wanting somebody else to build us up and make us feel good about ourselves. But really the truth is that's something you've got to get between you and God. Don't give somebody else the job of keeping you propped up all the time. Philippians 3-3. Philippians chapter three, verse three. For we Christians are the true circumcision who worship God in spirit and by the spirit of God. And we exalt and glory and pride ourselves in Jesus Christ. And we put no confidence or dependence on what we are in the flesh on outward privileges, physical advantages, and external appearances. You shouldn't get your confidence from how you look. You shouldn't get your confidence from who you know, from what you own, from your level of education, from what neighborhood you live in, what car you drive, or anything else. Let's have all of that stripped away today. And let's stand before God and know who we are in him. You know, I've had to remind myself, I am not this ministry. I know that people equate Joyce Meyer and Joyce Meyer Ministries was one big conglomeration. But I'm more than this ministry. And if I'm ever not doing this, I'm still gonna be just as important to God as I am right now. Matt Redmond is more than a worship leader. He's more than a songwriter. And what happens if someday, for whatever reason, he's not doing this anymore. And things like that do happen. Sometimes God just doesn't want us doing something anymore. And that doesn't mean now that we have to suddenly look for identity. We need to keep our identity all the way through. And I remind myself on a regular basis, my worth and value is not in the fact that I'm preaching to people around the world. But my worth and value is in the fact that I'm a child of God. your worth and value needs to be in who you are in him. If you've been married for a lot of years and you've become widowed, you don't need to have an identity crisis. You're still just as valuable by who you are in him. If you were married and now you're single, you don't need to have an identity crisis. You can know who you are in him. If you know a lot of people who have kids, and you're married and you don't have kids, you don't need to have an identity crisis, you can know who you are in him. If all of your friends have three degrees behind their name and you just barely got out of high school, you don't need to have an identity crisis. You can know who you are in him. Is anybody here in me to that? I can just almost steal it all that junk that tries to hang on us all the time about what we're not. And I want you to just... Just say, I'm not taking that stuff home with me. I know who I am in Christ. The thing is, if Jesus would have needed to have died just for you, He would have done it. Just for you. Unconditional love and acceptance is what we crave. Unconditional love and acceptance gives us security. And without it, we just have serious problems in many of them. Several years ago, probably 25 years ago, a woman in a meeting gave me what I'm getting ready to read you. It was something that she wrote and she's given us permission to use it. And it's called the trickle-down theory of unconditional love and the trickle-down theory of conditional love. If we believe that God loves us based on conditions or based on something we have to do, then we can never have the kind of security that I'm talking about here today. And I know that, you know, we usually think, well, I know God loves me. I know God loves me. If I would have said to you today, how many of you know God loves you? I would have probably been no hands. It wouldn't have went up. But every time I stand before people and do any kind of a lengthy teaching on the love of God, the enemy tries to tell me that people don't need it. They know that. But I know by now that they do need it because the truth is, if we really knew how much God loved us, we'd act a whole lot different than what we do. We wouldn't have all the competition. We wouldn't have all the comparisons. We wouldn't be so afraid of our mistakes. We wouldn't be afraid to admit our weaknesses. But we do have problems with all those things. So let me just read you a little bit of this and I'll make a few comments. I think you'll see the importance of learning that God loves you unconditionally. God is not for sale. We don't buy His love with our good works. If we really know the love of God and we get that deeply rooted and embedded in us, then what's going to happen is we're going to begin to crave and strive to do more good things but not to get God to love us, but because He loves us. It's all about the perspective that we come from. There's something that we can learn from Peter and John. You know, Peter talked about how much He loved Jesus. Well, I love you, Lord. I would never do that. I'd never deny you. I love you, Lord. Yes, you know, I love you. Yes, Lord, you know, I love you. And He ended up denying Christ. John, on the other hand, always talked about how much Jesus loved Him. I'm the disciple whom Jesus loves. I bet He was hard to be around sometimes. I mean, there's several places in the Bible where John says, I'm the disciple that Jesus loves. But the message that I want to give you is that He had a revelation of how much God loves Him. And because He had that revelation of how much God loved Him, they tried to boil Him in oil and couldn't kill Him. And He was around for a long, long time. You need to know how much God loves you, you. And if you know how much God loves you, the next time you have a problem or even some kind of tragic circumstance in your life, you won't ever say, well, God, don't you love me? You should never say that when you have a problem. The fact that we have a problem does not mean that God doesn't love us. Matter of fact, even when God's correcting us, and I'm not saying He uses our problems to correct us, but if God corrects you, the Bible says that those who may love each has, you better hope that God keeps showing you everything that's wrong with you, because that's just a sign that He loves you. So just listen to a little of this and try to, just try to, try to think this through. Jesus loves me, but He loves me conditionally. Therefore, His love is based on my performance, so that means that I have to really work hard at performing right all the time. Therefore I have to earn His love by pleasing Him. When I please Him, I feel loved. When I don't please Him, I feel rejected, but it's all about the feeling. God doesn't love me anymore when I perform right, but I feel that He loves me more if I'm thinking about this conditional love. Therefore, if God who is all loving does not always love except in value me, how can I be expected to believe that I'm valuable and lovable? Therefore I'm not able to trust other people who say they love me, and I suspect their motives or figure they just don't know the real me yet. Therefore I can't accept love from other people. I deflect it. I try to prove that I'm right, that I'm not lovable, and that they will eventually reject me. Therefore, they usually do. See when I was back in the situation where I just felt like that I was unloved and unlovable and I had all this shame-based nature because of what had been done to me, the only time I ever got any kind of compliment was when I accomplished something. Therefore I thought the only way I could get God's love was to work and earn and accomplish something. So I didn't really believe that other people loved me, and I really expected them to reject me. The night that they proposed to me, I thought He was going to break up with me. I kept wanting to go home and He said, well, you know, I've got something I want to ask you before. Some I want to tell you before you go. He kept wanting to go sit somewhere and talk, and I thought, I'll just get it over with. I know you're going to break up with me, just get it over with, and they ended up asking me to marry him. Thanks for listening. Despite the challenges we may face in life, when we put our trust in God, we receive an incredible promise from Him. Second Timothy 117 says that we have not been given a spirit of fear, but a power of love and of a sound mind. This promise gives us the strength to look at our problems and know that God is on our side. He wants to give us His peace as we face whatever lies ahead. For more resources from Joyce, visit joysmire.org. We all go through hard times, and it's so easy in those moments to focus on the problem. But what if you were able to see the trials of your life, the way God sees them, and respond to them the way He teaches us in His word? Joyce Meyer wants to show you how in her new book, Blessed in the Mess, even in the middle of life's difficulties, God's kindness shines through. Blessed in the mess, order your copy today at joysmire.org. Thank you for listening to 50 Minutes in the Word with Joyce.
