Galatians – Part 2

This program is paid for by people like you, the partners of Joyce Meyer Ministries. Come on, would you make a commitment to have such a deep relationship with the Lord that you will pay attention to what's going on inside of you? And when you feel that God is convicting you not to do something, then don't do it. I'm Joyce Meyer, and I believe that God can heal you everywhere you hurt. Galatians 1, 1 through 5. Paul, an apostle, not from men, nor through man, but through Jesus Christ, and God the Father who raised him from the dead. Paul always makes a point out of the fact that he was not called by men. He didn't call himself, but he was called by God to do what he was doing. And let me tell you something, we all need to know that. Whatever you're doing, you need to know that it's what God wants you to do, not what you want to do or what somebody else wants you to do. And that works out in the work field just as well as in the church. if you became whatever a lawyer because your dad wanted you to be a lawyer and you've never wanted to be a lawyer and you hate being a lawyer and you hated law school and you have no joy chances are you're probably not doing what's really in your heart to do you're doing what somebody else wanted you to do and you know parents sometimes can be pretty good at trying to fulfill their dreams through their kids. Verse 3 says, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. They greeted each other differently in those days than we do. Grace and peace be unto you in the name of our Lord. Not like, hey bro, what's up? Hey, oh. they said something that made sense so Paul greeted the people with grace and peace be unto you because here's the thing you cannot ever have peace if you don't understand grace you'll never have peace if you don't understand grace the other side of grace the opposite end the wrong end is works of the flesh now the Bible encourages us to work but to stay out of works you know what works of the flesh are it's our energy trying to do what only God can do that's why I like that coffee cup good morning this is God I'll be handling all your problems today and I won't need your help. That's why I think having one of those would be good for you so you're looking at that every morning and realizing that what needs to be done in your life can only be done by God. So we have to be careful about works of the flesh because works of the flesh produce one thing and one thing only and this is it. Every single time you feel frustrated is because you're trying to do something that you can't do by yourself. I don't care if it's trying to open a jar of mayonnaise. And I've had times where Dave would be sitting in the next room. Now, I don't like this anymore. I've gotten smarter. but I was going to get it open. I was not, I'm opening this. And I would beat on it and pound on it and get out everything. And you get frustrated. It's like, ah. Well, we get like that about so many areas of our life. We're so frustrated because we can't change ourselves. We hear a message on the power of words and we go home and we're going to, Bless God, I'm not going to say anything wrong today. How many of you know we can have a great plan for holiness laying in bed? And it works until you get up and see a person. It is amazing how holy I can be until the people come in. You know it? And if you don't understand grace, if you don't understand that we can't do it, God's got to do it. He wants us to live by faith, to lean on him and rely on him and to trust him to do in us what needs to be done. I love what David prayed. Oh, God, put a watch over my mouth lest I sin against you with my tongue. I pray that every morning because there is no way that I am going to keep my mouth shut and not get in trouble if I need a miracle every 10 minutes to do that. Amen. The Bible does say no man can tame the tongue. or any you know you going to church can drive you crazy if you don't understand grace because everything you hear is going to make you feel worse about yourself than the way you felt when you went in because now there's another thing you've just found out you're doing wrong that you don't know how to do anything about but you're oh i'm gonna i'll try god i'm gonna try well i'll tell you i tried till i almost died i mean i i fasted till i I just didn't weigh hardly anything. And I mean, I was going to be what God wanted me to be. And God's just sitting there laughing, saying, let me know when you're done. Let me know when you're ready for some help. God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble. The just shall live by faith. Behold the proud, his soul is puffed up. This is Habakkuk 2, 4. It is not upright within him but the righteous man shall live by faith Don do things if you have a guilty conscience about doing it Hmm I heard that. Hmm. Hmm. Why sit and watch something on television if you feel condemned the whole time you're watching it? But it's so interesting. I get it. I understand. But there's so many times when we choose to do the wrong thing. And then we feel so bad about it later. And it's not worth it. It's just not worth it. Amen? Hebrews 10.38. But my righteous one shall live by faith. Galatians 2.20. Paul said, I've been crucified with Christ. It's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live, I live by faith. By faith. 2 Corinthians 5, 7. For we walk by faith and not by sight. Here's a scripture that ought to put a little reverential fear in us. Romans 14, 23. Whatever is not of faith is sin. Well, so unless you can complain by faith. that means complaining is sin unless you can gossip by faith. Come on. This is not hard. We can all understand this. There's so many things that we do that we can't, we can't say we're doing that by faith. We can't say that we're doing that with God's approval. And those are the things that if you really want to live under grace, those are the things that you got to cut out of your life because that's the Holy Spirit prompting you to live by grace means to be led by the Holy Spirit. Not the law, but the Holy Spirit. To follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Come on, would you make a commitment to have such a deep relationship with the Lord that you will pay attention to what's going on inside of you. And when you feel that God is convicting you not to do something, then don't do it. and we're saved by grace but Philippians 2 says now work out your own salvation with fear and trembling not in your own strength but all the while letting God help you what does it mean to work out your own salvation it doesn't mean to work for salvation it means that salvation is a gift and it comes to you in your spirit. Your spirit's made holy. You're sanctified. You're made right with God. Everything in your spirit couldn't get any better than what it is. That's why we can say, I am the righteousness of God in Christ. I am holy. I am sanctified because you are all those things in your spirit. God could not come to live in your spirit if he didn't totally clean the place up first. Are you with me? But now the rest of our life, The job that we have is to work with the Holy Spirit to let what God has given us, this great gift that he's given us, to let it be worked out. Work out your salvation and you do it with fear and trembling, knowing that God means business. I mean when's the last time you heard a good rip roaring sermon on the reverential fear of God I don't see any hands up and Proverbs 1 says that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord not being afraid of God. I'm not afraid he's going to hurt me. If I do something wrong, I'm not afraid that I'm going to go to hell. I'm not afraid that God's going to punish me. But I do believe that the promises of God have conditions attached to them. And I do believe that I will reap what I sow. It's a biblical law. So yes, I am afraid not to do what God tells me to do because I don't want to miss out on the best life that he has for me. I'm not afraid of him hurting me, but I am afraid that I'll miss his best for me. Joyce, all of us through life have different people and different phases that bring expectations on us. We have to meet the expectations we think of our parents, of our teachers, of our bosses, of our families, our spouses, so many people. So let's talk today very candidly about what that is like to have all of these things expected of you and how we balance all that and what we really need to do. But how do we honor what God wants and what everybody else is asking for? Well, first thing I would say is each person needs to know themselves, and they need to know how much they can do and still be healthy and comfortable and enjoy their life. And you can't compare yourself with somebody else because we all do have different limitations. But you need to honor those limitations. And I think most of us, probably not everybody, but most of us start out thinking we have to please everybody, especially if you have any kind of insecurity at all. And, you know, we want people to be happy with us. We don't want to let them down. Yeah, even though you can be very secure, but you still want people to like you and be happy with you. But I love what the Apostle Paul said. It's recorded in Galatians 1.10. He said, if I would have been trying to be popular with people, I would not now be an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so Satan, who is our enemy, will definitely work through people. They won't even know it. But he will work through people to try to keep you out of God's will, to try to put pressure on you. and we have to understand that our first responsibility is to please God. That's a great point because it's not that the people are bad. No. They often wanting what they think is the best for you But it can still be something that throws us off track for what God wants for us People sometimes want the best for you But to be honest most people want what they want That's true. Want the best for them, too. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing the things that I have people ask me to do. And it's really interesting because they want it in two days. or, you know, can you have this to me in 24 hours? It's like people think you're just sitting around waiting for them to give you a call and give you something to do. And I used to try to do all that stuff because I wanted everybody to be happy with me. And I, to be honest, I finally realized, wait a minute, because they start with, will you do me a favor? And we do want to do favors for people. We do want to be generous in doing things for people. But we have to realize that if we, I still had a responsibility to do everything I needed to do to keep the ministry going in the right direction, which is a lot. And so if I'm doing everybody else favors, then I still have all these other things that I need to do for God. And the bottom line is that I finally had to come to the point, and I think everybody does, where you're going to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit. And how many times does our hearts say no and our mouths say yes? Oh, that's such a great point. I have a great example of that. When I was graduating high school, I knew for quite a while that I wanted to go into television, that I wanted to study journalism and broadcasting. And my counselors and teachers and people at school, not my family, but a lot of people at school were saying, no, there's no future in that. No future. There's no future there. No future in TV. No. And because I had good grades in science and math, I needed to go into like the medical field or, you know, something science. And so I did. I mean, it was like, I don't want to let everybody down. And then you start to ask all these questions. Well, if God put this in me, then you get confused when you start taking all of that. And so I went to college and was majoring in this. And it wasn't even a month before I changed my major. Just because it was such a strong thing in me that the more I prayed about it and even started doing it, I just knew that it was something else that I was supposed to be doing, even if other people didn't see it for me. Right. If you don't follow your heart and the things that God puts in your heart, you will not be happy. Yeah. And I just have a strong feeling that we have people watching us today that they're not happy. And it's because they're trying to keep everybody else around them happy. And they're not doing the things that are in their own heart. Yeah. And so, you know, we could do a 20 part series on that. But what does God expect of us? If we're going to meet God's expectations instead of people's expectations. If that's our priority. If that's our priority, what does God expect of us? In John chapter 6, the people that were listening to Jesus said to him, what must we do to please God? What does he require of us? And Jesus said, you must believe in the one whom he has sent. and if I would have been there, I would have probably said, yeah, and what else? Give me the rest of the list. Give me the rest of the list. And that's the thing. God wants us to believe, and if we believe, we will obey. In the Old Testament, it says that Moses, you know, was told to strike the rock and water would come out, and he was angry, and he struck the rock twice. and the Bible says that God said to him, you didn't believe me. And I thought, well, wait a minute, he didn't obey you. But he didn't believe, so he didn't obey. He didn't really believe that what God said, strike it once, was that important or whatever. And so he did what he felt like doing. He was angry and he struck the rock twice. He was mad at the people because they were grumbling. And they were not allowed to enter God's rest because they didn't believe. And it's very hard for Christians to believe that that's all God requires is that we believe. But if you really believe, if I really believe the Word of God, and I really believe that Jesus is the Word made flesh, if I really believe the Bible is the Word of God, then I will do what it says. So I think the first thing that we have to settle is do we really believe it? Yeah. Do we really believe it? I said to somebody the other day, I said, if we were talking about somebody who was really afraid of dying and I said, if you really believe in heaven, if you really believe in heaven, why would you not want to go there? And so when we grieve over people that have died, we're really not grieving for them. We're grieving for us. And that's normal. That's natural. That's good. There's nothing wrong with it. But it's us that's had the loss. They're in a better place. Christianity does not begin with a do. It begins with a done. And it's about what Jesus has already done. Wow, yeah. And believing that and trusting that if we believe that, he will give us the strength to do whatever he has asked us to do. So that takes a lot of pressure off. I mean, so much of this, God, what do you want me to do? And what do you want from me? And how can I please you? And how can I not miss you? You know, I've been there at different times in my life. I don't want to miss something that God wants me to do. But if it really is that simple, and it doesn't mean it's simple to do, but it's simple to see a pathway. Because if I can believe, the rest will come. And it is even really simple to do if you don't try to do it on your own. Oh, yeah. That's a great point. If you lean on God, because he is not going to tell you to do something, first of all, that's impossible to do. He's not going to tell you to do things that are going to make you miserable. And he promises to help us. I can do all things through Christ, who is my strength. So we make Christianity hard Now obviously you got to be determined You got to be willing to not give up You do go through things They're not all easy. But I just finished writing a book that I won't give away too much, but it's about finding the will of God for your life. And, boy, people just struggle with that. Struggle, struggle. What does God want me to do? What does God want me to do? and I think there's two different things we need to look at. What is God's general will for my life, which is going to be the same for all of us. In other words, he wants us all to be thankful. He wants us all to forgive our enemies. The Bible says serve the Lord with gladness. So there's certain things that God wants all of us to do and I think a lot of people are looking for this very specific thing that God wants them to do. but they're not paying attention to the general things that God wants everybody to do. And I believe, I really don't believe that finding God's will, I don't even think that's something we have to go chasing after. I think if you want to do God's will and you tell him that, I'm available, I want to do your will. If you show me what to do, I'll do it. But let me tell you, when God wants to tell you something, he has many ways of making sure that you hear him. The whole thing is, is do I really have an open heart? And am I willing to do whatever God asked me to do? Yeah. Or do I want God to tell me what I want to hear? Yeah. So when it comes to all those expectations that come our way throughout life, if we can filter them down and say, what does God, what is my one thing? What does God expect of me? Right. And that releases us from some of those other expectations because we're still going to walk in love and treat those people with respect as we should. But being able to see that believing is the number one thing, it really is a huge weight lifted off. In Romans 15, 13, it says, joy and peace are found in believing. And so when you lose your peace, you lose your joy. One of the first questions to ask yourself is, have I allowed myself to get into doubt and unbelief? Am I reasoning too much? Am I trying too hard to figure something out? God wants us to follow peace. And so if we will do that, we will have to say no to people a lot. But I'll tell you something. And if people really love you and you tell them, I don't believe this is right for me right now or I have too many other things on my plate, if I'm going to keep my peace, I need to say no, they will encourage you to follow your heart. It's only when people just want you to do what they want you to do that they're going to get offended if you don't do what they want you to do. Yeah. A lot of freedom floating out there for people now, I think. Amen. Yeah. Thanks for your help. 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