Defeating Giants – Part 3 | Joyce Meyer

The enemy attempts to sabotage our relationships and steal our joy, but we can overcome. On this episode of Enjoying Everyday Life with Joyce Meyer, learn how to fight the devil courageously in your everyday life!
“Spending time with God is the key to our strength and success in all areas of life. Be sure that you never try to work God into your schedule, but always work your schedule around Him.”
― Joyce Meyer

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I’ll see you soon. You know, maybe talking about the devil doesn’t sound like the most exciting thing in the world, but people perish for a lack of knowledge.
You know, many times you can be fighting with what you think is your enemy.
And really, that’s not your enemy at all.
For example, do you know that one of the ways that Satan attacks us is through people who actually really love us?
I mean, they really do. They love us.
They don’t, they don’t realize that maybe they’re being used by the enemy.
It’s not something they’re doing on purpose, but the enemy can actually come through people that really care about us.
And that actually happened between Jesus and Peter when Jesus was expressing to him that it was about time for him to go to Jerusalem and how much he was going to suffer there.
And Peter said, oh no, Lord, this must never happen to you. It actually says that Peter rebuked Jesus.
I don’t know what kind of dumb you have to be to rebuke Jesus, but obviously pretty high up on the dumb scale.
And, um, why did Peter do that?
Was he really, was he really concerned about Jesus that he didn’t want him to suffer?
Or did he kind of have it already figured out that since he was part of the group that if Jesus was gonna go suffer that he was probably going to get in on a little of it.
A lot of times people hurt us and they don’t even realize that they are because they’re really just trying to take care of themselves or they’re trying to get you to do what they wanna do.
You know, when God first called me to do what I’m doing, it was unheard of most unpopular, especially in the denomination that I was in at the time.
And people just thought I had lost my mind.
To be honest, I lost most of my friends was ostracized by the family, got asked to leave my church.
It was a very difficult time.
And those, you know, all those people started out by saying now we love you for, we, we want you to know we love you.

And honestly, they really truly did feel like I was wrong and that I was making a mistake for my life, but the enemy was trying to use them.
And you know, if there’s anybody that we want their approval, it’s the people that we care about.
You know, if somebody disapproves of you that you don’t care what they think, it’s easy to not listen to them.
But when it’s somebody that you really care about and you want their approval and then that’s the person that the enemy tries to use, it gets extra hard.
Well, you know, Jesus, he recognized the source of his problems a lot better than we do.
Sometimes he was a little bit quicker to get things than we are.
And he immediately turned to Peter and said, get the behind me.
Satan, you are an offense, a hindrance and you’re in my way. That’s in Matthew 16.
So what was Jesus saying? You are being used by the devil to try to prevent me from doing the will of God.
Get behind me. Now, I’m not recommending that you look at your friends face to face and say, get behind me, Satan, that might not go over too well.
But the principle is the same that we need to, we really need to hear from God and, and that doesn’t mean you never listen to people.
There’s power in Godly counsel, but when it all comes right down to it, you have to follow your heart because if you don’t, you’re gonna always wonder what would have happened if you would have done the thing that you felt like God wanted you to do.
So we were not against flesh and blood.
Your fight may not be with who you think it’s with.
We were not against flesh and blood, but Principalities and powers and wickedness in high places.
This doesn’t sound like a very pleasant subject, but there are evil spirits that are everywhere.
You can’t see them. They dwell in the atmosphere between here and heaven and they will do anything and everything.
Now listen to me, they will do anything and everything that they can possibly do to steal your joy, make you miserable.
Keep you from knowing who you truly are in Christ and keep you doesn’t keep you from fulfilling your destiny.
One of the number one tools, if not the number one tool that Satan uses against people is fear.
Feelings of fear. Satan always offers us the opposite of what God really wants us to have and God wants us to have faith.
We receive everything that we receive from God by faith, but we actually received from the devil by fear.
And so the only way to overcome fear is by faith.
And the Bible says that God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power and love and a sound mind and the amplified says, and a spirit of self control.
I love that. Now, just a little quick lesson, didn’t really intend for it to be part of my message, but we’re going to just go with the spirit today.
Fear is a feeling, it’s a spirit that creates feelings and there are feelings that something bad is gonna happen.
Uh You can shake, you can tremble, you can have wild and goofy thoughts.
And, you know, for years I kept trying to teach people not to fear.
And God finally got a message across to me that has helped me so much as well as it has helped lots of other people.
And God never really in all the places in the Bible that it says fear not, I haven’t counted them, but I heard it’s 365 1 for every day of the year.
When the Bible says fear, not, it does not mean don’t ever feel fear.
What it means is when you feel fear, don’t run stand firm and keep going forward.
Courage is actually forward motion in the presence of fear.
I was so afraid when I first started stepping out in the beginning to do what I’m doing.
I was so afraid when God told me to quit my job and trust him and start preparing for ministry.
I was accustomed to taking care of myself.
I didn’t want to have to have that much dependence on anybody.
But I look back now and I think what would I have missed if I would not have taking a chance that I was right.
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