Dealing with Doubt – Part 1 | Joyce Meyer

“You can suffer the pain of change or suffer remaining the way you are.”
― Joyce Meyer

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I’ll see you soon. Think about Thomas.
Well, I’m just not gonna believe if I don’t see the scars in your hands in your side, I just cannot believe.
And what did Jesus do? He showed them to him, he came and he met Thomas where he was at and he said now more blessed are those who believe and have not seen, But you needed to see.
So I’ve shown you and you know what Thomas went on to become a great evangelist in the nation of India.
So just because you don’t have 100% perfect faith, that doesn’t mean that God won’t use you.
And it doesn’t mean that he won’t meet you where you’re at because I’ll tell you what happens, the more experience that we have with God, the stronger our faith gets.
It’s much harder for a baby believer to get through real difficult times than it is for somebody who has had a lot of experience with God because you’ve seen God work time and time and time and time again.
And that’s why even like the psalmist, David, when he was going through rough times, he would purposely remember the other things that God had done that brought him through.
So I want to make sure you’re with me. Do you understand what I mean?
When I’m saying that we can live on the surface where all this stuff is going on or we can go deeper and we can say now what is really in my heart because I’ll tell you the truth, all this word stuff that you get, you may not remember it in your brain, but it’s doing you a lot more good than what you think it is and it’s in there and it’s, it’s food for your spirit and it’s keeping you stronger than you think that you are.
But if we’re gonna continue to just believe what our brain says and what we feel like all the time and all the lives of Satan, then we’re just gonna give up and quit.
I had a rough situation, something going on the last couple of weeks and here I’m getting ready to come and teach on trust in God.
And I felt like I didn’t have a thimble full of faith.
I kind of felt like it’s gonna be really good for me to get up and try to tell everybody else to trust God all the time when I feel like I’m gonna fall apart over this simple thing that I’m going through and you know God revealed to me later that he let me go through that on purpose because he didn’t want me to get up here and just act like, well, it’s just simple to have faith and just trust God no matter what.
Just believe God, he he wants, I want you to know that. I know what it’s like.
I know what you’re going through if you’ve got serious problems in your life.
And we’re telling you in church all the time.
Well, trust God, it’s much easier for us to stand up here and tell you to do it than it is for you to do it when your faith is being tested.
But our faith will always be tested from time to time. How many of you found that out?
Your faith is always gonna be tested from time to time.
So don’t think you’re some kind of an inferior second class believer.
Come on, which we do sometimes, don’t we?
We start thinking, well, what is my problem? I should be further along than this.
Well, I can tell you if you would have asked me how I felt three days ago, I would have told you, well, I certainly should be further along than this.
But to be honest, sometimes going through a little, something like that is actually good for us because it helps us have empathy for other people when they’re going through things, we need to be more careful about giving people these little flippant answers.
Not everybody needs you to quote them a scripture.
Sometimes they need a hug and you think you got it bad.
Sometimes you should see how I feel when somebody quotes one of my messages back to me.
Well, now, wait a minute, I think I heard him say that sometimes.
I think I heard this lady preacher say blah, blah, blah.
And I’m like, don’t start, I’m having a flesh today.
You might as well just let me have it okay.
Now, I think that sometimes we do doubt God, but I think more than we doubt God, we doubt ourselves.
So we’re gonna talk a lot tonight about self doubt.
And what I mean by that is we don’t doubt that God can do it.
But will He do it for me?
I don’t doubt that He might do it for you, but will he do it for me?
and so in James Chapter one, The Bible teaches us beginning in verse five, he’s already been talking about trials and tribulations and the problems that we have.
But then he basically says that even know even when you’re having problems of any kind, even if you don’t deserve it, you can go to God and you can ask him boldly to help you and He will help you.
And I love this in the amplified Bible without reproach or fault finding. In other words, he doesn’t.
So I’m not gonna help you. You’ve been this that or something else. Well, I’ll help you.
But let me remind you of what you’ve done. That’s what reproaches and God’s not like that.
You know, sometimes we’re like that as parents, kids will get in trouble and they come and they need mom to help her dad.
Well, all right, but I just don’t want you to forget and just make sure that, you know, how wonderful I’m being and helping you because you really don’t deserve my help.
But aren’t we glad that our heavenly Father is not like that?
He helps us without reproach and without false claim. That doesn’t, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t correct us.
That doesn’t mean that He doesn’t deal with our silliness and our foolishness.
But any time that you’re in trouble, God is going to help you.
So even when you have not been good and you don’t deserve His help, you still need to go boldly to the throne and ask God to get involved in your situation and help you and boy, if you’ve been holding back, not asking God for the help you need because you’re looking at yourself instead of Him.
That’s a big turnaround that you can make right now tonight because God does not help us because we deserve it.
He helps us because we’re pathetic and pitiful. And if He doesn’t, I don’t know what we’re gonna do.
Amen. All right now, let’s just look at a couple of situations in the Bible these are scriptures that you’re probably familiar with.
I hope, you know your bible enough that you are familiar with them.
But if not Romans 4, 18 through 21 Abraham, human reason for hope, being gone, hoped on in faith.
And you know what hope is, hope is not like some namby pamby.
Well, I hope something good happens.
No hope is an expectation that something good is gonna happen at any moment in your life.
And God is inviting you tonight to live with that kind of expectation in your life.
Something good is gonna happen to me. Something good is gonna happen through me.
And it may happen at any moment when we have that kind of hope, it allows us to live with some enthusiasm and some excitement.
So all reason for hope being gone, Abraham still hoped on in faith that he would become the father of many nations as it had been promised to him because he had been told your descendants will be so many that you will not be able to count them.
Number one problem, he didn’t have a child. He did not have an heir.
He did not weaken in faith when he considered the utter impotence of his own body.
Abraham was about 100 years old and that means that he was not physically able to have a child nor let me start over.
He did not weaken in faith when he considered the other impotence of his own body, which was as good as dead because he was about 100 years old or when he considered the baroness of Sarah’s dead and womb.
Now, you know, we’re taught sometimes we just don’t pay any attention to your circumstances.
I’m gonna tell you the truth. There’s very few people that have got that bastard.
You know, if you got a circumstance staring you in the face, it’s kind of hard to not pay any attention to it.
And I like what Abraham did.
He took a good look and he believed that God was greater. Come on.
I think sometimes we just need to look at the circumstance, call it what it is and say, I don’t care what you look like.
I don’t care how upset you’ve got my emotions.
There’s something deeper going on in me and I believe God is gonna come through for me.
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