Don’t Waste Your Pain – Part 1

Holding on to hurt will only drag you down. Joyce Meyer shares why making the decision to forgive is essential to your own healing, on this episode of Enjoying Everyday Life.

You and I may never fully understand everything that happens in our lives until we get to heaven (where we will fully understand), but God doesn’t ask us to understand; He asks us to trust Him.

3, 2. I Joyce Meyer, and I believe that god can heal you everywhere you hurt.
There’s people in here today that you’re hurting, and you’ve been hurting for a long, long time.
Some of you were happy most of your life because of something that happened to you and your childhood.
And it’s because you have refused to lay it down.
Today is the day to lay it down. Everybody in life is gonna get hurt.
I don’t care who you are, what your background is. You have already been hurt.
You probably will get hurt again.
But the good news is is the great healer lives on the inside of us as believers in Jesus Christ.
You know, I’ve been hurt a lot in my childhood abused with my dad and a couple of uncles and my grandfather married the first guy that came along when I was 18, I got married, and that was, like, the dumbest thing I could have ever done because he was in worse shape than I was.
And, you know, a lot of times wounded people marry other wounded people, and then they just keep wounding each other.
And I did it out of desperation. I nobody would ever want me.
So I just grabbed the first guy that came along.
How many of you know that that’s a tendency when you’re afraid of loneliness? You’ll take something.
Even if you know down deep in your heart, it’s not gonna be the thing. Amen? Yeah. Preach. Amen.
And, um, but then you find out once you got it, you got it.
And so we were married 5 years, but it was more like a joke than anything else because he constantly would run around with other women, didn’t work, and and, uh, just was a con man and a petty thief and wrote bad checks and, you know, it it I mean, it was just a mess, and he believed me all the time.
He abandoned me in Alba Turkey.
He abandoned me in Oakland, California, and I’d have to borrow money and come home on a bus. Why?
Why is it that women that have been hurt?
Will marry somebody like that, and then just keep going back to them and keep going back to them.
Come on. Is anybody hearing me? And keep going back to them. You deserve better than that.
And so did I, but you gotta stand up for yourself.
And then we usually get what we put up with in life.
Well, I had one child Dan, to that marriage, I had one miscarriage, and then I had one son We were married 5 years, and this boy was born right toward the end of our marriage, and I named him David.
That wasn’t my husband’s name.
I named him after my brother, actually, but then I met Dave, when my son, David, was nine months old.
And, David, I had 5 dates.
He asked me to marry him, I always say jokingly, but it’s probably true.
He had to ask me before he found out what he was getting. Otherwise, he would have never done it.
And, I had, I mean, a boatload of problems.
So when I stand here and tell you that the word of god works, and it will change you and it will heal you.
I’m not telling you because I read it in a book I’ve experienced God’s healing power in my life, but I am gonna tell you that it will take more than you just praying to be healed.
We pray And I think we’re we have a misconception about prayer.
We think when we pray, then god fixes everything, But you know what?
I’m finding out more and more even in the last 2 or 3 years.
When we pray, Very often, god shows us what we need to do. That’s right.
Now I’m not saying that god doesn’t move super naturally anything we cannot do, he will do for us.
If we’re gonna do nothing and expect god to do everything, then that’s not gonna happen.
And if you’ve been badly hurt by someone, you can get completely well and behold but I am not going to tell you some fabricated made up story.
It will not be easy. It will take time.
It will take you doing some things that you’d rather not do, things that you don’t feel are fair, like forgiving people and maybe even being required by god to bless those people, See, here’s the thing.
Because somebody treated you wrong, that doesn’t give you a license now I don’t know what what makes us think that.
God never tells us to give other people what they gave us, he always says, treat them the way you would like to be treated.
And sometimes you’re gonna have to treat somebody else right a long time before they begin to treat you, right?
And there’s a possibility they might not ever change. But here’s the thing.
The amount of years that we have here on this earth are so limited.
I don’t think that you realize in your 20s and thirties, how fast you’re gonna be 60, 70, and 80.
Amen? You know, my life is I’ve lived almost all of it.
And so I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna double up and I’m gonna get make the devil mad in these last years that I’ve got because I mean, what god has done in my life is absolutely amazing, and I can tell you it is actually totally impossible if it was anything other than god There’s no way that what god has done in my life could have happened, and he can and is and wants to do the exact same thing in every one of your lives, but the first thing you’ve gotta give up is all bitterness, all resentment, all hatred, all offense.
You have to let go of that stuff because even as we read earlier before I started actually the sermon, in Mark Levin, it says that whatever we ask in Jesus name, believing that we have received it, we will get it However, when you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, you have to leave it, drop it, let it go, or your heavenly father cannot forgive you.
Can somebody please hear that enough to actually believe it today?
So we realize what that’s saying.
That any prayer that I pray, if I’m praying it, with unforgiveness in my heart, god cannot and is not going to answer that prayer.
Sometimes we’re praying for god to change somebody, and we’re in the middle of hating them while we’re asking god to change them.
You know, you can’t love what you want somebody to be. You gotta love them where they’re at.
Did you hear me? We can’t love what we want somebody to be.
We have to love them where we’re they’re at, and that will help them get to where they need to be.
And I’m not suggesting that you let people abuse you or you let them take advantage of you.
That’s not what I’m talking about at all.
But I am saying that you don’t you can’t carry this stuff around in your heart.
Think about what Jesus said on the cross. Father forgive them for they know not what they do.
Stephen, when he was being stoned, said, forgive them.
We read last night how Paul, when everybody deserted him, he said, Lord, forgive them.
You know, I think a lot of times when people hurt us, they really don’t know what they’re doing.
They’re acting out of their own pain.
A lot of times people hurt They don’t even realize that they’ve hurt us.
And and I’m not saying at all that my father did not know that what he was doing to me when he was sexually abusing me was wrong.
He had to know it was wrong or he wouldn’t have gone to such extremes to hide it.
But I really don’t believe that he understood what it was doing to me.
I don’t think he and and really, when he was in his eighties, he told me that he said, I had no idea.
How bad I was hurting you?
Well, he grew up in a household of incest, and so he was acting out of a learned behavior and hurting people, hurt people.
When you learn that, it’s be it helps you to be able to get over the things that people do to you.
There’s so much stress in the world, and people today are just about to explode, and they end up hurting other people and then we keep letting them hurt us by staying bitter and miserable.
Life hurts people. So let me just ask.
Are you bitter because your life has had a little more than its normal share of bitter events?
Just to be honest, this one, how many of you had a pretty tough tough time in life. Let’s see.
I have 2. I mean, I’ve had breast cancer. I’ve had my grain headaches.
I with abuse in my childhood is, you know, on and on and on and on and on and on.
But god has more than made up. Come on. God has more than made up.
My goodness. Let me tell you something.
Life is not fair, but god is just.
Life is not fair, but god is just.
And the devil will hurt you any way that he can hurt you because let’s be honest, he hates you.
He hates anybody that loves god because he hates god.
And the moment that you decide that you’re gonna follow Jesus, the enemy is gonna be after you from that point on.
You’ll have breaks. Thank god we get breaks.
But when he was tempting Jesus in the wilderness for those 40 days 40 nights, the stories in Loop chapter 4 It says that after he had completed his cycle of temptations Come on now.
You ever feel like you’re just like one thing after another after another.
You know, his after he had completed his cycle of temptations, he went away to wait for a more opportune time.
I think that’s so interesting. We gotta get smarter, and we gotta watch and pray.
And that means we learn enough about how the enemy operates that we catch him right away.
So much of our battle is in our mind.
Life is not so bad if we learn how to look at it the right way.
How many people look all the time at what they don’t have and never bother to look at what they do have.
When I said, how many of you had a pretty rough life?
About half of the hands went up, and I’m sure you have had a very rough life.
But I can tell you that you can help yourself right now today by doing just what I’ve had to learn how to do.
I have to not look at what I don’t have and what I haven’t had and what I’ve lost and what I’ve missed and look at what I do have and what God has done for me.
I still wonder sometimes once in a while I found myself the other day wondering, wonder what it would be like to have a mom and a dad actually really loved you.
Wonder what it would be like to have a dad that you could go to for advice.
Are a mom that really stood up for you.
I wonder what I wonder what it would be like to have a a sister that I could hang out with.
I wonder what it would be like to really get to be a kid.
I my my childhood was stolen. I never got never got to be a child.
But you know what? God’s given me back my childhood in my later years in life.
God is a god of justice. And you know what that means?
He always makes wrong things right. Life may not be fair.
But now listen to what I’m gonna say because if you miss this sentence, you miss the whole thing.
If you’re willing to do things god’s way.
And that’s the long and the short of it.
If you’re willing to do things god’s way, then he will make up to you many times over for anything bad that has ever happened to you if you’re willing to do things god’s way.
And that means that you’re willing to obey god whether you want to or not, whether you think it’s fair or not, whether it feels good or not, whether you like it or not, you get committed to doing things god’s way because you act we really do believe that god is smarter than you are, and that his ways work.
Is everybody with me? Okay.
So I’m gonna beat this bush today until the time you leave here, hopefully and prayerfully by the grace and the mercy of god, not one person leaves here and takes your bitterness and anger and unforgiveness with you, but you’re gonna leave it, walk away from it, let it go, and get about the business of living and enjoying your life.
Amen? Yeah. Some 37.
The first ten verses, we’re gonna go through them.
Don’t worry because of evildoers. Nor be envious toward wrongdoers.
For they will wither quickly like the grass and fade like the green herb.
Trust, rely on, and have confidence in the lord and do good. Wow.
I don’t I I don’t even know if you know how important verse 3 is in Psalm 37.
I got ahold of this 5 or 6 years ago, and the book that I wrote on Unshakable trusts.
There’s 2 chapters in it on trust god and do good.
You know, when we’re having problems, we always hear trust god, trust god. But that’s not all the Bible says.
Trust god and while you’re trusting god, make the devil as mad as you possibly can by being as good as you possibly can to as many people as you possibly can.
Because that is the exact opposite of what a normal person would do.
Normal people when they’re hurting cranky and grouchy, and they don’t wanna be around anybody, and they take it out on everybody else.
But the Bible says the worst you’re hurting, the more good you should do for other people.
Who wants to do that?
We overcome evil with good Romans 1221.
That is the biggest, most powerful, spiritual secret in the Bible.
If evil things have been done to you, you will never overcome them or get over them by returning to somebody else what you got.
See, I spent years taking I was making trying to make my husband pay for what my dad did to me.
You know, you do that.
When you’re mad at somebody and you can’t get them back, you’ll take it out on the people in your life.
How many of you know that you do that? It wasn’t his fault.
I treated him like it was his fault because I wanted somebody to pay.
I wanted somebody to pay.
But then I found out in Matthew 18, whenever the man was being asked to forgive somebody for a small debt, He could not pay.
The guy could not pay him back. Only god can pay you back for what’s been done to you.
People can’t pay you back. Only god can pay you back, and he won’t just give you what was taken.
He’ll give you double what was taken.
If you do things his way.
Trust god and do good.
Stop worrying so much about what everybody’s done to you and do as much good as you possibly can every single day of your life.
Delight yourself and the Lord, and he’ll give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the lord. Trust also in him, and he will do it.
He will make your righteousness, your pursuit of right standing with god like the light and your judgment like the shining of the noonday sun.
Be still before the lord. Wait patiently for him and entrust yourself to him.
Don’t fret, whine, or agonize because of him who prospers in his way, because of the man who carries out wicked schemes.
Cease from anger and abandon wrath, cease from anger and abandon wrath, do not fret, it leads only to evil.
For those who do evil will be cut off, but those who wait for the lord, they will inherit land.
For yet a little while, and the wicked one will be gone forever.
Though you look carefully where he used to be, he will not be found.
God will take care of your enemies if you wait on him.
And Psalm 617 says instead of your farmer’s shame, you’ll have a double portion.
And instead of humiliation, your people will shout for joy over their portion.
Therefore, now listen to this, in their land. I’m glad that doesn’t save when you go to heaven.
Therefore, while you’re still here, In this lifetime, living your life, you will possess double what you forfeited and everlasting joy will be yours.
Somebody give god a praise.
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The mind actually is the battlefield.
That’s where we win or lose the war with Satan. He said all he gets to say Thank you.
This is a lot of it. Today’s mine. You start asking god to heal you, and he will restore.
It’s the god of all comfort, and I am so grateful that I know how to call on god.