Developing Godly Character – Pt 1

Are you ready to grow in your walk with God? Today on Enjoying Everyday Life, Joyce Meyer shares the truth about going deeper and growing up in your journey with God.

God does much of His work in secret. You can’t see Him lining up the right people. You can’t see Him arranging good breaks for you, sending the angel with the promise, putting healing, promotion, vindication on your schedule. All you can see is, “I’m praying and nothing is happening. I’m doing the right thing and nothing is improving.” You’re in the season of silence. The question is will you get discouraged and quit believing because you’re not seeing? Or will you dig your heels in and say, “God, I may not see anything happening, but I’m not moved by what I see. I’m moved by what I know. I know what You promised is on the way.”

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?
Part of the beauty of being a believer is that you can have a problem and still enjoy your life.
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I wonder how many of you every day when you say your prayers ask God, what can I do for you today?
Who can I bless? Who can I help?
Show me something I can do for you. I wanna serve you.
I do what I do because I’ve seen god’s power transform my own life, and he will do it for you.
The key to everything is found in god’s word.
I’m Joyce Meyer, and I believe that god can heal you everywhere you heard.
I am going to teach this weekend on developing the character of god.
How many of you wanna grow and become more like Christ?
Spiritual maturity.
Recently, I felt like god gave me this simple little definition of what spiritual maturity is, and I’m sure it’s much more than just this sentence, but I like this.
I want you to think about this.
Spiritual maturity is asking god what you can do for him not only asking god what he can do for I wonder how many of you every day when you say your prayers ask god, what can I do for you today?
Who can I bless? Who can I help?
Show me something I can do for you. I wanna serve you.
I started doing that on a daily basis oh, maybe 3, 4 years ago.
And it’s amazing if you listen to people.
I mean, if you just form a habit of listening to people, they’ll tell you what they need.
Where they’re hurting, what they might like to have.
You know, somebody doesn’t have to be in desperate need for you to give them something.
A lot of people just need to be blessed, and they might even have more money than you, but they still just need a a blessing.
Giving is one of the greatest things that you can become an expert at.
I mean, it really truly is.
If you want joy in your life, then become a giver.
Don’t just give when the offering time comes, but be a giver in your life.
Make giving a lifestyle. I wanna say this again.
Don’t just ask god to do things for you.
Matter of fact, you could probably give that up completely for a while, and it wouldn’t hurt anything.
God knows what you need before you ask him.
You can mention if you want to, but you don’t have to camp on top of it.
And do nothing, but just tell god over and over what you want him to do for you.
Instead of that, Try asking god every day what you can do for him and see how it changes your life.
I really believe that when we come full circle, that’s what spiritual maturity really is.
It’s getting yourself off your mind and learning what Paul meant when he said it’s no longer I that live, but Christ that live is in me and the life that I now live, I live by the faith of the son of god.
Or when he said in you, I live and move and have my being.
Or when he said I die daily, he didn’t mean that he died physically every day, He meant that he died to self every day.
You know, selfishness is inbred and every one of us.
And if you don’t believe we’re selfish, all you have to do is watch a baby, and it’s not very long until they tell you when they don’t like that you’re not giving them what they want.
Amen? We have a grandson that’s gonna be 4 in July.
And, uh, he’s quite a little character, got a little temper on him, and month or 6 weeks ago, he was having kind of a cranky rough I’m gonna have a fit every time I don’t get my way a day.
And, uh, he was out with his mother.
She was doing some shop and he wasn’t acting very nice. And she said his name is Brody.
She said Brody, we’re gonna pray about the way you’re behaving. So she wrapped her arms around him.
She’s really a great mom. She wrapped her arms around him and said, Lord, we just ask you to help Brody be a good boy today and help him feel better and not feel so clanky and help him smile and Listen to what I tell him.
And, you know, she got all finished with her prayers. Said Amen. And he said, not Amen.
He he didn’t agree with that prayer.
And I think sometimes when god tells us something that’s kind of our attitude too, not Amen.
Because a men means, yes, let it be so.
And he wasn’t about to get into agreement with that. Spiritual babies.
It’s sad when somebody has been a Christian for 30 years, and there’s still a spiritual baby.
After we’re born again, the next thing that’s supposed to happen is we’re supposed to start growing in Christ.
And it’s a process. It’s a process that goes on all of our life. We never stop growing.
God never stops showing us ways that we can improve.
And I I’m grateful that god doesn’t just leave me alone and let me stay the way I am, but that he keeps nudging me and showing me ways that I can be more like him.
Amen? So Paul was dealing with the Corinthian church, and they were born again.
Baptized in the Holy Spirit.
They were operating in the gifts of the Spirit.
You gotta remember gifts are given.
You don’t have to do anything to get a gift.
Just because you have a spiritual gift doesn’t mean that you’re spiritually mature. Amen?
And, uh, yet he said to them in 1st Corinthians 3, 1 through 3, However, brethren, I could not talk to you as to spiritual men, but as to non spiritual men of the flesh and whom the carnal nature predominates as to mere infants in the new life in Christ, unable to talk yet.
Now I’m teaching from the classic Amplified Bible. I love it.
I’ve always used it. And I like it because I don’t read or understand Greek and the amplified Bible amplifies some of the Greek and gives you a little bit more than what some of the other translations might.
And He says here, unable to talk yet. Now what does that mean? Certainly they could talk.
He meant they didn’t know how to talk the way they should talk.
And do you know if you listen to a person Well, first of all, if you listen to anybody, it doesn’t take long, and you can tell whether they’re a Christian or not.
And if you listen to Christians, it doesn’t take very long, and you can pretty much determine where they’re at spiritually.
When it comes to spiritual maturity.
If all they talk about themselves, than they’re selfish.
If they can’t receive correction, then they’re proud.
Doesn’t take long.
He said, I couldn’t talk to you like mature adults.
He said, I fed you with milk verse 2, not solid food.
For you were not yet strong enough to be ready for it.
And even yet, you’re not strong enough to be ready for it.
Oh, what’s the difference in milk and solid food? We give milk to babies, don’t we?
And then you slowly begin to integrate solid food.
Well, the milk of the word are messages that baby Christians can handle.
They’re all about what god can do for me, how much he loves me, how wonderful I am, all these good things.
And that that’s good. That’s a good place to start. It draws people in.
Somebody who’s just been saved, doesn’t really need to have anything too strong right off the bat.
They need to get established in their relationship with god and know that he loves them and that he wants to do things for them and that he answers prayer.
But if that’s all they ever have, They never grow up.
I I call them dessert messages. It’s like everybody likes dessert.
But we all know if you just live on dessert, you’re either not gonna live very long, or you’re gonna be very unhealthy.
The meat of the word are are stronger messages.
They’re messages that confront behavior. Their message is that If you receive it, they’re gonna make you change.
There are messages that make you swarm a little bit in your seat and make you want to run out of the room and wish you had never come.
But without those messages, you’ll never be strong.
So we need both.
If that’s all you ever heard, Then you might start to feel beat up a little bit.
So I try to bring a good balance of meat and dessert.
But this weekend, we’re having meat.
So I hope you Maybe you can get some dessert somewhere else this week, but I’m I figure if you’re bold enough to take a Friday night to come out here and I flew all the way here from St.
Louis that we might as well serve up some meat and see if you can handle it.
Verse 3, you’re still on spiritual, having the nature of the flesh, because you’re under the control of ordinary impulses.
Not as anybody here ever have an impulse.
You see, spiritual babies will act on their impulses, but mature Christians can control themselves.
They don’t just do what they feel like doing.
They do what they believe Jesus would have done. In the same situation. Amen?
And the more you grow, the more you do that.
Finally, you come to the point where you’re pretty much acting like Jesus all the time.
As long as there is envy and jealousy and wrangling, which is strife and arguing and bickering and factions, which is division among you, Are you not unspiritual and of the flesh behaving yourselves after a mere human standard like mere unchanged men.
So, Paul said, I can tell that you’re not mature because you’re still jealous of one another.
Uh, we don’t have any of that in the church, do we?
You’re envious of one another, You’re divided, you’re angry, unforgiving, All of these things need to go.
You don’t have to feel like forgiving somebody to do it.
Well, about half of you like that.
And the other half Unforgiveness is such a huge problem in the church.
Satan gains more ground in the lives of unbelievers through unforgiveness than anything else.
If you got unforgiveness in your heart, the Bible tells us If we’re not gonna forgive others and god can forgive us, it drives a wedge between you and god.
And I say something about unforgiveness in every just about every sermon that I preach because I know what it did to me when I was full of unforgiveness, and I know how wonderful it is to get really good at forgiving people really fast.
Amen? When somebody hurt you the quicker you forgive them, the easier it is to do, the longer you wait, the deeper the roots get.
They don’t have to deserve your forgiveness. They don’t even have to want it.
To be honest, you’re not even doing it for them. You’re doing it for yourself.
Because you could be holding unforgiveness against somebody out having a good time and couldn’t care less if you’re upset.
It’s just your feelings that are hurt.
And if we’re gonna be mature men and women of god, then we can’t live by how we feel.
We’re always gonna feel, but we can’t let those feelings rule us and control us.
We have to recognize them for what they are and say, I don’t care how I feel. I can still do the right thing.
This is gonna be here all weekend, and I hope it gets embedded in your brain.
So every decision you make, you know that there’s a right way a wrong way.
And it’s up to you which one you choose. Amen?
How many of you know it’s not right to gossip about other people? Okay.
Keep that hand up. How many of you still do it?
You don’t have to do that.
Nobody’s making you do it. You choose to do it.
And we need to start choosing the right thing.
I’ll preach myself for a minute. How may I even know it’s wrong to judge other people?
How many of you still do it?
I had a little bit of a judgy week You know, and sometimes we just get started, and then we just keep it up.
And it’s like we need a little spanking from god to get us back where we need to be.
Do you know really the bottom line is is we just need to mind our own business.
Now we’re not stupid. We can judge sin.
We can see when somebody sinning, but we do not know anybody’s heart.
We don’t know what they’ve been through. We don’t know what they’re going through.
We don’t or where they came from.
Now in order to change, we’ve gotta have correction.
God will give us his word, and he’d love it if we would just how many of you have ever said to your kids?
If you would just listen to me, then you wouldn’t have to be in this situation.
If you were to just listen to me, then I wouldn’t have to take away your computer.
If you would have just listened to me, then you wouldn’t be grounded.
Well, god wants us to listen to him too.
But if we don’t, then he’ll touch our circumstances.
And it’s for our own good.
Hebrews 513 through 6.
Everyone who continues to feed on milk were back to the baby bottles, is obviously inexperienced and unskilled in the doctrine of righteousness.
So why do people continue to need milk and they can’t take the meat of the word?
Because the meat of the word corrects your behavior And you can’t handle that if you don’t know who you are in Christ.
One person over here trying to sort of.
Got it. What do you mean who you are in Christ?
Christ took our sin and he gave us his righteousness.
That’s more wonderful than anything we can even imagine.
We are made right with god.
Even while we’re still trying to grow, and get over change.
God still sees us as right with him.
That is the your brain just can’t hardly take that in.
And, you know, from being abused in my childhood by my dad, I already felt really bad about myself.
And I’ve I I had a huge problem with guilt because I always felt like somehow I must be doing something wrong, or he wouldn’t wanna do that to me.
And so it took me years years years years years years of being in the word and meditating on righteousness before I ever finally really got when I say got it, I mean, it got from here down to here.
Are for me to believe that god loved me unconditionally, that he loved me just as much when I wasn’t being good as he did when I was.
Do you know that god will never love you any more than he does at this moment right now?
No matter how much you how much better you behave.
He’s not gonna love you anymore because you behave better. He loves you because Jesus died for you.
Amen? And we can hear that.
And it sounds good, but to, like, really believe it, You have to hear it and hear it and hear it and hear it and hear it and hear it and read it and read it and meditate on it and meditate on it and think about it.
This is why the Bible says in so many places to meditate on the word.
Which means to roll it over and over and over in your mind and to think about it.
He says if you continue to feed our milk, it’s very obvious that you’re unskilled in the doctrine of righteousness.
Being made right with god is one of the main doctrines in the Bible.
And it’s true for every single person.
If you are born again, if you have received Christ as your savior, then right now, you are right with god.
He has decided to view you as being right with him.
Well, see, when we really get to the point where we can believe that, man, how happy can we get?
Wow. Because you see anybody who’s really serious about their relationship with god, you don’t wanna sin.
You don’t you don’t go around sinning on purpose, but we do sin And as soon as we’re made aware of it, we repent.
And Jesus has already paid for that sin, You don’t have to talk him into forgiving you.
He’s actually already done it.
All you have to do is receive that forgiveness that’s already there for you.
Receive the mercy of god.
It’s available. You have to receive it. Receive the love of god. You can’t earn it.
God is not for sale. You can’t buy his love. You can’t buy his mercy, you can’t buy his forgiveness.
All you can do is with a humble attitude, No.
You don’t deserve it, but take it by faith. Amen?
This is what the world needs. They don’t need more drugs.
They don’t need another identity.
They need to know who they are in Christ.
They need to know that they are low.
Yeah.
Message is like that when can really make a squirm in our seats, can’t they?
But I love how Joyce is challenging us to grow up and mature in Christ.
We’re all spiritual babies, uh, one point in our lives and off and on probably for most of our life, but babies, we act on our feelings and emotions.
But as mature Christians, we choose to act like Jesus would have in the same situation.
And isn’t that what we all want to do? Well, did you know that you can mature in Christ?
Believe it. God helps you It’s not all on your shoulders, but you can do it.
We all can’t because let’s face it. Life is full of messy situations.
But when we grow up in Jesus and take on his characteristics, become more like he is, we can handle any mess with his help because we know that we are not alone.
God is right there with us.
And whatever your mess is right now, know that you can be blessed in the middle of that thing that you aren’t even sure you’re gonna make it through.
But with god’s help, all things are possible. Joyce has a new book. It’s great.
This is a book called blessed in The Mess, and we’re going to get you this book for any amount that you would like to give today.
And the reason for that is that this book is full of the inspiration, the encouragement, and god’s word that you need.
And we just wanna make sure that whatever you can give that you’re gonna get this and that some of you who can give a little bit more will do that to help make up for others.
But it’s all about realizing that god doesn’t turn his back when you’re in a mess.
He’s not surprised that you can trust him.
In this book, you’re gonna find out how even in those hardest times, God is right there.
Find out how to hold on to him with the tightest grip possible.
Find out what things you can do that will help him to be able to work even stronger in your life.
It’s practical. And it’s going to help you get through those messy times in your life.
So reach out today and let us know that you would like to get this book that you are ready for god’s blessings no matter what you are going through.
We love you. We appreciate you, and we pray for good things in your life today.
At the 2023 lovelife women’s conference, I’ll teach you how to trust god and find calm in the chaos.
Featuring Joyce and her guests, Bishop TD Jakes, Sadie Robertson Hoff, Lisa Bevere, Natalie Grant, and Danny Gokey.
October 19th through 21st in San Antonio, Texas. Register today at joycemeyerdot forward.
The Joyce Meyer Conference is back.
If you will start crying out to god on a regular basis, I more of you in my life.
You better put on your seat belt and get ready for the ride of your life.
Coming to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, September 15 16th with worship by Healing Place Worship.
In Hershey, Pennsylvania, November 10th 11th, with worship by Pat Barrett.
For more information and a complete conference schedule, visit joycemeyer.org or call 1866 C Joyce.
Tomorrow, unenjoying everyday life.
This is basically saying if you go the wrong way, you’re gonna get lost.
Well, all the people in the world that are lost are lost because they’ve gone the wrong way.
That you can be found and go the right way.
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