Having a Patient Attitude – Part 1

It’s easy to get impatient with yourself and others, or even with the little things in life. On this episode of Enjoying Everyday Life with Joyce Meyer, learn how to be more patient in the moment each day.

God has people He’s already lined up for you who will celebrate you, approve you, love you, think you’re awesome. But until you let the wrong people go, you’ll never meet the right people.

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There’s 2 kinds of people in the world.
There’s people who do things on purpose, And there’s people that are passive.
Now passive people are people who who want something good to happen, but they’re not gonna really do too much, if anything, to make it happen.
They have a lot of wishbone, but no backbone. And then there’s people who read the word.
They know what’s right. And they purpose with god’s help, which We can’t do anything apart from god.
Let’s establish that first, but here’s the other thing we have to remember is anything that god asks us to do, he gives us the ability to do.
Anything that you feel that god is leading you to do, God gives you the ability to do that.
All we need to do is just keep leaning on him. God, I need you. I need you.
I can’t do anything without you.
Give him the praise, give him the glory, and you’ll keep that flow of power coming into your life all the time.
And so I decided that I would talk about attitude.
Last night, we talked about just the power of an attitude, how to have a nose up attitude instead of a nose down attitude If you have a nose up attitude, then you’re always climbing in life.
You’ll have an above average life. If you have a nose down attitude, then you’ll always be below average.
We’ll always have less than what god wants us to have. Now everybody wants to have a good life.
Everybody in this place wants to have a good life.
But not everybody, even in a year, is doing what you need to be doing to have that good life.
It’s really like passivity is one of the greatest deceptions from the devil.
It’s just that I want it, but they go more by how they feel.
They wait to feel it before they do it. They wait until everybody else is doing it.
You know, there’s very few people in the world, I think, when you consider all things.
That are willing to do what’s right even if they’re the only one that they know that’s doing it.
We’re far too affected by the crowd and what everybody else is doing.
And god is looking for people that will swim upstream while everybody else is floating downstream.
It’s easy to float, but going against the current is not that easy.
So this morning in this service, I’m gonna talk about having a patient attitude.
Five areas we’re gonna mention about impatience.
There’s a lot of different things that we can be impatient with, and some are impatient with some things, but not impatient at all with others.
I’ve overcome certain degrees of impatience in my life because to be honest, being impatient probably would be my number one weakness.
I’m a strong choleric personality. I want it. I want it now.
If I tell you to do it, do it right, do it the first time.
Don’t make me tell you again. So you know, now, I mean, that’s the way I started out.
Thank god I’m not like that anymore.
I mean, I could drift back in that direction if I didn’t keep working on this attitude thing.
So if you don’t need this today, I’ll just be happy to preach to myself because I need everything that I say.
Amen? So first of all, I started out. I was very impatient with god.
Like, man, I just couldn’t understand why I could not get god to do what I wanted him to do.
And, you know, even things that god promises in the word that he will do, he doesn’t always do on our timetable.
Doesn’t it frustrate you when you know that god could do something?
And it wouldn’t be difficult for him at all, but yet he just doesn’t.
So if you could do it in 5 years, why couldn’t you do it in 1 year?
Why did I have to go through all of this stuff?
Well, eventually you learn that no matter how aggravated you get, you’re not gonna rush out.
So whatever it is that you’re waiting on right now, you might as well learn to wait well.
Because waiting is a fact of life.
We all wait, but some people do wait better than other people. So make it easy on yourself.
Say my times are in your hands. I know that you’ve got a plan for me.
No devil in hell, no person on earth can keep you from what god has for you in the perfect time when you’re prepared and ready.
There’s a lot of things that god has prepared for us, but he’s gotta get us prepared for those things that he has us ready for.
Tell you it’s tough sometimes when you’ve got a dream in your heart and you see it so clear.
Oh, man. You see it so clear. And you know it’s what god wants for you.
It’s hard to understand many times that although that is exactly right, god does have that for you.
It is his will, that he’s preparing you now for the thing he’s got prepared for you.
Not everybody is ready for everything when they think they are. We think we’re ready, but we’re not always.
Now impatience with people, how many of you sometimes get impatient with people?
You know, people who well, let let’s just think about some of the things that we could be impatient with when it comes to people.
Let’s just say, How do you act while you’re waiting in line?
What about if you have a slow clerk?
What about a clerk who’s new and doesn’t know what they’re doing?
What if the person in front of you has three items with no prices, and then they have to go on a search in the order to find the prices.
Okay. Well, I see I’ve I’ve gotten good at this.
I can do that because I just about lost my salvation over slow clerks 30 years ago.
I mean, it was like, I just I’d have my big flashy rhinestone Jesus pen on, and, you know, all my Christian jewelry and I’d be in the grocery store line.
Had 3 little kids then, and They were all driving me crazy and I had my plan.
I wanted to get those groceries, get through that line, get them in the car, get them home, put them away, and then do something else.
I had my plan. Don’t mess up my plan. Anybody like that? Alright.
And so I don’t care mean, I got to the point where I would pray about which line to get in.
I mean, I would stand by, okay, now lord, You know ahead of time what’s gonna happen.
You know, I’m in a hurry lord. Which one of these lines is gonna go the fast?
And I don’t care what I did. I’d always get in the one That was gonna be slow.
Something’s gonna be broke. There’s no prices. And I’m telling you what?
I mean, if you could have died from frustration, I would have been dead because that how aggravated it made me.
I just didn’t get it. God, what are you doing to meet?
And then I would go into the I rebuke you Satan. I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.
You are not gonna steal my joy. You are not gonna steal my peace.
I finally got it.
God was using that on me because the word patience Actually, if you study it in the Vinees Greek dictionary, now get this.
It says it is a fruit of the spirit that only grows under trial.
We can’t pray this on you.
It only grows under trial.
So, obviously, people don’t wanna get stuff on patients because they figure they start praying for patients, they’re gonna get trouble.
And, actually that is true.
However, the Bible says when you are perfect, when you when you have this perfect patience, when a man is patient, He is perfect and entire wanting nothing.
I can be in this line and not want to be through the line and somewhere else.
I can just be there and enjoy it.
So I finally managed to master the slow clerk thing, then we went to no clerks.
I mean, I’d get to the point where I’d wanna pay for something in a store and couldn’t even find anybody to take my money.
And I thought, this is escalating to something that’s not gonna be pretty How do you act when you tell somebody to do something and they don’t do it the first time, you tell them, and you have to tell them again and again.
And it’s like, can you not hear? Did you not hear me tell you that?
How do you act when you ask somebody for something?
They bring you something totally different than what you asked for?
See, then then the attitude comes up. It it doesn’t even have to be words.
It’s on your face. It’s like, don’t you love it? Just like.
So what are we saying with our facial expressions?
You are so stooped And what we do many times with our bad attitude is we make people that are really honestly truly doing their best.
Just because people don’t have the same gifts or strengths that I do or you do, doesn’t mean that they’re not valuable.
And to be honest, god does put us with people that irritate us.
And he does it on purpose.
It won’t do you any good to try to get away from the batch you’ve got now because you’ll get a new batch wherever you go.
Because the thing is is, god uses those things on us to polish the rough edges off of us, and and here’s a flash for you.
He’s using you on somebody else.
So let’s just don’t go thinking we’ve got it all together because if you think that other person’s personality bothers you, you ought to get them to tell you the truth about how they feel about you.
So god’s got a plan.
Impatience.
So I finally got that when I’m I I I really think by and large most of the time I treat people pretty good and I’ve really kinda gotten the deeper revelation from god that it really offends him when we mistreat people and so we really do need to get out there and try to be decent to people because everybody’s got a story.
We just haven’t heard it. And everybody’s hurting and everybody’s going through something and you know, even somebody who just seems to be purposely mean if they’re like that they’ve got something in their life that’s hurting them or something that has hurt them if we’re gonna represent Christ, then we we really need to develop a more patient attitude with people.
So I dare you to start praying about patience.
And then you can also be impatient with yourself, and I went through a lot of that and I I pretty much gotten over that.
I finally just told god one day, look, this is what it is.
You knew what you were getting when you got me?
If you didn’t want to put up with me, you should have picked on somebody else.
And I’m tired apologizing for myself, not that God was ever asking me to.
But the thing is you gotta learn how to enjoy where you’re at on the way to where you’re going.
You have to learn how to enjoy yourself while you’re in the process of growing in God.
Can I say this again? Learn how to enjoy yourself. Learn how to enjoy yourself.
Learn how to enjoy yourself with all of your imperfections and your weaknesses, knowing that you are no surprise to God.
He knows dumb stuff that we’re gonna do that we haven’t even done yet and he’s already pre decided to love us unconditionally and to work with us all the way through and never give up on us.
So just be patient with yourself.
Then there’s the area of being patient with objects and things. Now I’m not so good at this.
Can I have my little props there?
There is something that I have a big problem with.
I’m gonna ask you to pray for me, and that is packaging.
I just cannot I mean, I can almost lose my salvation over packaging. Okay.
This is just a bottle of eye drops. I got these out this morning went, oh, no.
Come on.
Any of you do that? And now I go, like, what is the matter with people?
They sell you this stuff and don’t expect you to get into it and use it.
Well, now Dave says, why don’t you just get a pair of scissors? Cut that off.
Well, because that would take patience for me to walk across the room and find the scissors.
And come back and do that. I don’t like that. Then you go to the mouthwash. Oh my gosh.
Not again. I just And see, I have these. Oh, well, that one’s coming.
Yay. Oh, but it’s still not working. So this year, packaging is my goal.
I’m going to get to the point where I’m free from being upset by packaging.
Now, you know, the way that you get free from something is you go through it over and over and over and over until it just don’t bother you anymore.
You finally die to it.
See, I can get in the line now where somebody’s slow, and it’s just like, Not this time.
Devil been there, done that. I’m keeping my peace. Uh-huh.
But the packaging thing I still have to master.
I also have another Lilly issue that I’ll let you in on. I have one piece of hair right here.
Now I’ll show you what it does. You see that? Okay.
I don’t care what we do to that.
It’s gonna stick out, so I’m always gonna Hey, yes, I got mad at it, and I thought I’m cutting that dude off.
So I got my scissors out now.
I’ve got it really way too short, so it just made it a whole lot worse.
How many of you have things in your life like this?
Just some little thing that you just can’t hardly stand.
And then there’s this whole area of And this is also a goal of mine.
These last two are like my things. You can’t fully enter into what you’re doing.
Because you’re mentally already on to the next thing.
I see some of you are here this morning, but you’re not here.
Because you’re already thinking about what you need to do when you get home.
And so we’re never anywhere unless we’ve got our mind where we’re at.
Just because our body’s there, that doesn’t mean that we’re there.
And I don’t know I guess it’s just part of the choleric aggressive personality, but I have trouble staying where I’m at.
I always am kinda like moving on to the next thing, because I’m purposeful. I’m aggressive. I’ve got a plan.
We’re doing this. Let’s get to that.
So I have this thing where when I’m riding in a car, when we get close to our home, And it’s in view.
I take the seat belt off and start preparing to get out of the vehicle.
Not too long ago. My daughter said to me, mother, would you let me park the car before you get out of it?
When we park at a parking lot, I am out of the car, got all my stuff, and in the store, and Davis still gathering his stuff up out of the car.
I’m like, how could anybody take that long to get out of the car? What are you doing?
How many of you are real fast, quick people? Okay.
How many of you are, like, more easy going slow and you get tired of all of us that are fast and and I can pretty much guarantee you that a fast one’s married to a slow one.
And a slow one’s married to a fast one. Come on now.
I mean, it’s like, okay, god. Are we having fun yet or what?
I don’t this is this after 47 years, this isn’t funny anymore.
I’d tell you that a whole scripture in Genesis And a man shall leave his father and mother, and he shall cleave unto his wife.
And the 2 shall become one flesh. Doesn’t that sound beautiful?
But I’ll tell you, it’s the becoming that’s the problem.
And it’s an ongoing never ending problem. Alright.
Now let’s get down to business. We’ve had some fun.
First of all, if you don’t have any patience with god, And if I don’t have any patience with god, I’m gonna get into what the Bible calls works of the flesh.
And works of the flesh are my bright ideas on how to get what I want in my timing instead of waiting on god.
And I tell you we all make some of the most ridiculous messes in our lives, getting ahead of god.
We see it in Genesis. I’m not gonna take time to tell the whole story, but surely you’ll realize that when god promised Abraham and Sarah that they would have a child and child wasn’t coming.
Child wasn’t coming. Child wasn’t coming. They’re getting tired of waiting. Sarah gets a bright idea.
Ladies, have you ever had a bright idea? K.
Well, I was very good at bright ideas, and they and they come something like this. You’re going along.
You don’t I know what God wants me to do.
Your husband is not saved, so you think or maybe you’re maybe you’re married to someone’s got a bad attitude.
You’ve already decided you’re gonna buy those five books on attitude.
And you’re gonna open those dudes up and lay them everywhere you can in the house because now you have a plan on how you can get his attitude fixed.
How many of you know, nothing works unless it originates with god.
Listen. He is the author and the finisher and he told me a long time ago, I am not obligated to finish anything I didn’t start.
If you start it, it’s your baby.
So we really need to learn how to works, work the works of god.
And not get into works of the flesh. You say, well, how can I tell the difference?
Well, works of the flesh are works that don’t work.
It’s us trying to make something happen that is just not happening, and we just don’t understand why it’s not happening, and we sound like this.
God, I’ve just done everything I know to do.
And I just don’t understand why this isn’t working.
And then sometimes we get very dramatic, which doesn’t impress god at all, and we will even fall in the Florida.
I just I give up. I just I just give up.
What do you want me to do? Come on. Sound like anybody, you know.
Well, the truth is is God is not really asking us to do anything except believe.
And then when we do get an instruction from him to obviously then do what we believe that god is telling us to do.
We have to learn how to stay out of works of the flesh.
I absolutely just about killed myself with works of the flesh. Trying to make my ministry grow.
Trying to change my husband, trying to change my kids, trying to change myself, trying not to try.
I mean, it was just like Truly, if anybody could have died from frustration, it would have been me.
And I finally realized that frustration equals works of the flesh.
Anytime that you feel frustrated now listen, anytime you feel frustrated, or I feel frustrated, it’s because I’m trying to make something happen that only god can make happen.
Did you hear me? Come on. That’s worth putting up on a sign.
I had one in my house for a long time. Works of the flesh equal frustration.
I had to put that thing on my mirror.
I had to put it on my refrigerator because I was just a very aggressive active get a plan, get an idea, go for it type person.
Well, I finally gotten over that. But some of you here probably have not.
You’re probably still in that area and you’re frustrating yourself trying to get rid of things that only god can get rid of.
Trying to change people, which is something only god can do.
Can I tell you something you can’t make one of your relatives love god?
I don’t care how much you want the right thing for them.
If they don’t want it for themselves, you are just spinning your wheels and you are gonna ruin your life and miss your joy.
And the far better thing to do is pray for them and let god work.
And and let me just tell you when you pray for somebody, don’t expect them to act better.
They’re probably gonna act worse before they act better. You say why?
Because when you pray for people, god begins to deal with them.
And when god deals with us, if we’re not ready to give in, it makes us act worse instead of better.
You ever prayed for anybody and you’re like, well, that didn’t work.
The worse than ever.
I used to pray for Dave not to love sports so much because I didn’t like him.
And so I didn’t want him to like him if I didn’t like him any.
And, uh, I mean, you know, you’ve heard me say it probably he loves anything that rolls or bounces.
I don’t care what it is. And, When I grew up, my dad never let me do anything.
I was just basically manipulated and controlled and couldn’t ever even remember being unhappy when I was in my twenties and They’ve played all these sports growing up, and he just loves it all.
I mean, anything, he loves it.
And, I mean, I started praying for him not to not to do so much of this, not to do so much of that and trying to get him to change and honestly, and this is true.
I walked in the room one night where he was sitting and he was watching a football game, listening to a baseball game, and and clean it shining his golf clubs.
And I thought, you know what? This isn’t working.
Come on.
Could somebody get a realization today that what you’re doing isn’t working? Anybody. It’s just not working.
So why not take a vacation from works of the flesh and let god be god in your life.
Amen?
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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Contact us now at joycemeyer.org or call toll free 180709289 5.
Purage is not the absence of fear.
Is going forward in the presence of fear.
The main reason that the Bible gives us for not living in fear is god is with us.
And I think that it would help us all to just stop and say, god is with me right now.
David said, what time I am afraid? I will trust in you.
He didn’t say he never had fear, but he said, I’ve got something that will help me deal with the fear.
I put my trust in you.
And the only way you’re gonna put your faith in god is if you know that you know that you know that you know that god loves you, that he loves you personally and has a good plan for your life.
Keep your eyes on god because he’s greater than any circumstance.
Help us father to be aware of what’s going on inside of us.
You have not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and love, and a sound mind.
And you have destinies and plans and dreams and goals and visions for people, and I asked you to give them great courage to stand up against fear in Jesus name.
Amen.
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Now all I need to do is share it with another woman or girl.
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We just ask you to do the very best that you can.
One thing we do ask is that you’re regular and faithful. Because that’s what really means a lot to me.
But please obey the Holy Spirit if he’s prompting you because not only will it bless us, but it’s gonna also bless you.
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