Don’t Be Offended by Trouble-Part 1

We can be tempted to doubt God’s love for us when we’re going through hard times. But the truth is, God will never fail us! Learn the rewards of staying hopeful and positive on this episode of Enjoying Everyday Life with Joyce Meyer.

This program has been made possible by the friends and partners of Joyce Meyer ministries.
God had the audacity to tell us that trials actually are good for we should get excited about them.
It’s amazing how spiritual we can be when everything’s good.
And how we can resurrect that old man.
One thing’s aren’t so good.
This morning, I wanna talk to
you about not being offended by trouble.
Not being offended at god. Because your life hasn’t turned out
the way you thought it should, or you had a rough beginning, or you didn’t get to go to college, or you didn’t get the raise you wanted, or you’ve wanted a child, and you haven’t had one yet, or you’ve been believing to be married for twenty five years, and you’re still single, and whatever the case might be.
Trials can make us bitter, but they don’t have to.
They can actually turn up to make us better.
Because a lot of the Bible that we know is just theory until we have to put it to practice in our lives.
And when you have to put it to practice, then you really get to know god.
You don’t just know about god, but you get to know god in a deeper way than what you can ever possibly imagine.
Mark chapter four beginning in verse fourteen. Therefore, the sower sows the word.
The ones along the path are those who have the word sown in their hearts, but when they hear, satan comes at once And by force, takes away the message, which is sown in them.
It’s good to come and hear the word, but it’s even better if you take that word with and you keep it in your heart and you meditate on it and meditate on it.
But it’s very like Satan, the minute you leave to throw something at you that’s gonna distract you and get your mind off of what you just almost learned to make sure you don’t really learn it and begin to apply it to your life.
The ones along the path are those who When
they have the word sown in
their heart, Satan comes at once.
Satan is alive and well on planet earth, and he’s out there trying to make sure that we don’t grow spiritually.
Amen. He’s not happy.
You’re here, but if you’re gonna be here, he’d like for you not to get anything out of it.
And they have no real root in themselves. Everybody say root.
And so they endure for a little while.
And then when trouble or persecution arises on account of
the word, they immediately are what offended.
They become displeased indignant, resentful, and they stumble and fall away. Now every one of
those words are very interesting words. Resentment, offense. Indignate. You know,
that indignation is just a little well.
Shouldn’t be happening to me. Why is this happening to me?
It’s amazing how we’re okay if things are happening to everybody else.
They should trust god. Well, just trust god. But when
it happens to us, well, how I don’t know why this is happening to me.
And what we gotta be very careful about the thing of, well, god, I go to church every week and I tithe and I pray and I do this and that.
Can I tell you something god doesn’t owe us anything? Amen.
That’s just the truth.
If we all got what we deserved, we’d be in serious trouble.
And they stumble and they fall away. They stumble and they fall away.
You see, the definition of offense means that it’s a stumbling block and it will cause you to fall away.
In other words, if you get a fence in your heart, then you
can no longer grow spiritually.
And if you’re not growing, see, in god’s kingdom, there’s no such thing as being static.
You’re either going forward or you’re gonna drift backwards. You gotta keep going forward, or you’re gonna drift backwards.
You gotta use what you’ve learned, or pretty soon it will become dormant on the inside of you.
Love has to flow in order for it to really be love. Love comes in from god.
It’s gotta go out to other people. It comes in. It’s gotta go out. This is an active religion.
We’re to participate and be active.
The other definition of the word offense that I read in talked about a lot last night.
Very interesting. It says it’s the part of
the trap on which the bait hung
that lured the victim, the animal victim into the trap.
So let me just say that that offense, being offended, whether you’re offended at somebody else or whether you’re offended by trouble you’re having or tonight, we’re gonna talk about not offending yourself and that’s gonna be an interesting message for all of us.
Some of you think, what? Why in the world would I offend myself? Well, you gonna find out.
Resent must make such bitter.
Resentment is an inner attitude that basically says I am offended that this is happening to me.
And who are
we offended at? Well, we can either be offended at god. And you know, most people
are not gonna outright say I’m mad at god.
But I can guarantee you as sweet as you all are.
And as amazing as it is that you wanted to come to the house of god on a Friday morning, We have some people, hopefully not many, but some people sitting here today.
And when this goes on TV, a whole lot more, that are even
using trouble that you had in your life as an excuse not to believe in god.
You know, the biggest majority of people that won’t believe they won’t believe because they can’t they can’t balance out in their mind a god who loves us with the suffering that we see all around the world.
While suffering is not god’s fault, man did it, not god. God created
a world where everything would be wonderful. Didn’t last very long, but that was his goal and desire.
And he’s in the process now of trying to restore that. And so we’re gonna have issues in the world.
We’re gonna have things that we have to go through, and we can’t be getting mad at god because everything in our life doesn’t go the way that that it should.
The best time in the world to trust God is when
you have trouble. Otherwise, it’s just some sermon you hear or a few scriptures you’ve underlined in in your bible.
Trust god. I’m writing a book right now
and trusting god, and I tell you what after forty years of being in the word, I’m convinced that that simple little two word thing, trust god, is the answer to every single problem that you have.
Everything. Everything.
But in order to do that, you’ve gotta believe that god is good. The devil’s bad.
God’s good. And even if god doesn’t get us out of something that we know he could get us out of, He lets us stay in it longer than we think we should.
We trust god that he’s got a plan that’s bigger than ours and that ultimately he will not only work a good thing in us, but he will bring us to even a better place in life because we didn’t give up up on him going through problems.
Don’t get mad at god because he hasn’t given you a soft cushy,
comfortable, sweet, life.
Now sometimes too, I wanna talk about this for a minute.
Sometimes when we’re having trouble, we kinda get offended at other people who are being blessed.
And we could even get a little self righteous attitude. Well,
I’m better Christian you are.
I mean, I I do this and that and You do.
Blah blah blah. You know? Self righteous knows there’s a sneaky wicked thing.
I actually had to repent twice in the last two weeks for being self righteous.
And I just thank god for his conviction, but it was
it was over a situation that somebody that I know sinned, and it was a pretty serious thing.
And, man,
I had to sit on myself to not just keep thinking about I can’t you believe I just can’t believe that.
I mean, I would never. I would never. I would never.
And boy, that’s when you gotta back off and say, but for the grace of god, there go.
Now, that doesn’t mean that we don’t deal with things in people’s lives and help them come through to repentance and restoration, but we we dare not start thinking that we’re better than somebody else and are are like in this case of well, why why am I having trouble and you’re not?
You just need to leave all that alone. Let me ask you a question.
How do you behave when god doesn’t pick you?
You wanted to be the worship leader?
And you didn’t even get picked as a backup singer.
A matter of fact, they had the audacity to ask you
if you’d like to make sure all the worship people have water. Wow.
Well, that’s a test, isn’t it?
So you can do what? Get offended.
Get self righteous, really hurt yourself spiritually, or you can trust God.
If this is where you want me right now, God, I’m gonna serve with a smile on my face, and I know if you want to put me somewhere else, you’re the only one that can do it in the right time.
Let’s think about a few situations in the Bible that
just amazed me. You know, god made a covenant with a man named Noah.
Noah built the ark, did everything that god asked him to do.
When the earth flooded, and it was time for Noah to come out of the ark, god said, I’m gonna make a covenant with you.
This will never happen again in the earth. The the whole earth will never be destroyed again flood.
And I’m gonna set this rainbow, this beautiful rainbow in the sky as a promise to you that every time it rains you see that rainbow and you know no need to worry.
God’s not gonna destroy the earth. Well, Abraham, a few chapters later.
He’s a man who makes a covenant with god.
God said, I’m gonna take care of you. I’m gonna do this and that.
I’m gonna make you wealthy and you’re gonna have land and blah, blah, blah, and this is what I want you to do is your part.
Go circumcise yourself. Now I don’t know
about you, but when I get circumcision and somebody else gets rainbows, I’m not real happy about it.
I mean, I just say it, you know.
Well, you know, I’ll tell you what.
Don’t misunderstand this, but god hasn’t been just real easy on me.
I mean, I don’t just get a bunch of, like, miracle deliverances. No, not me.
I have to walk them out.
And I used to just aggravate me because I would see all these other people.
But I understand fully now why god made me walk the
path that he made me walk because he wants me to really understand and relate experientially
to what people are going through so I
can give them hope in their battles that they’ll make it.
So listen to me, sometimes god will let you go through something that doesn’t make any sense at all to you expressly for the purpose of using you in that area to bring other people through to freedom at a later time in your life.
There’s a lot of stuff in the world that I don’t understand, but I do.
I’ve made my mind up to this. God is good. And I trust him.
God is good, and I’m gonna trust him. Amen?
Another example in the Bible two sisters, Rachel
and Leah. Now, Rachel was the beautiful.
Wonderful desirable sister.
The Bible says it real nice. It says Leah had dull weak eyes.
That basically means that she was the ugly sister.
Well,
Leah got the man and Rachel had to watch for seven years.
Then Rachel got in on it and Jacob married her too.
They got to do multiples back then. I for the life of me can’t imagine why anybody would
want more than one of these. I
no. Thank you.
And, uh, having children was extremely important to them.
Rachel’s wound was shut up and she couldn’t get pregnant.
But Leah just had one kid after another one after another one
after another one. And so by studying that, I kind of learned something interesting.
See, Leah wasn’t the most beautiful one, but she got the guy first and she got the kids.
Rachel was gorgeous.
She got the guy second, and finally after many years of watching Leah had babies, she finally had a
child. Everybody gets something
and everybody doesn’t get something.
So you have something that somebody else doesn’t have So there’s no point in getting jealous of what they have that you don’t have because you have
something they don’t have. Amen?
And I can’t imagine what it was like for the disciples.
You know, Peter James and John seemed to be have a
little different position with Jesus than the rest of the guys. Now I don’t know
about you, but that would have probably
been annoying to me. And, you know, those are the three
that got to go up on
the mount of transfiguration. And the other guys had
to wait at the bottom of the mountain.
Now I’m quite sure that those three guys were not so spiritual that they came down and just
didn’t wanna make the other guys feel bad, so they didn’t say nothing at all about what they saw.
I bet they came down. You will
not believe You would not believe what we saw up there.
So can I just tell you if you ever wanna have any peace in your life, do not compare your blessings or your trials with other people’s blessings are their trials?
Hebrews twelve fifteen.
This is a
very good scripture that really shows us the the problem that resentment can be if we don’t catch it early.
Exercise foresight and be on the watch to look after one another.
To see that no one falls back from and fails to secure god’s grace, his unmerited favor and spiritual blessing in order that no root of resentment, rancor bitterness or hatred shoots forth and causes trouble and bitter torment and many become contaminated and defiled by it.
I love that scripture. He’s saying, look, if if you let, like, like, for
example, I was bitter and resentful and had all kinds of bad attitude because my father had sexually abused me.
Well, a lot of them were just buried down deep in me, and they were affecting my relationships, affecting my attitudes, affecting the way
I thought they were affecting every area of my life. But you see, I thought because I left home when
I was eighteen that I didn’t have the
problem anymore, the thing was I took the problem with me in my soul.
And so there’s an inner work that needs to be done in us that only Jesus can do.
Well, because I had that root of resentment in my life, that was affecting my marriage.
It was affecting my children. It was affecting all my relationships. It was affecting my daily life.
So just like this scripture says, if you don’t get it stopped, it’s gonna just spread.
And it’s gonna affect every area of your life.
And some of you If you really will take to heart what I’m saying this morning, this can be life changing for you.
Don’t live your life bitter and resentful and full of hatred and bitterness over something that happened to you that you cannot do anything about, but can
if you’ll let him do it.
Now, the Bible actually tells us God had the audacity to tell us that trials actually are good for us, and we should get excited about them.
It’s amazing how spiritual we can be when everything’s good.
And how we can resurrect that old man.
When things aren’t so good, God wants us to be stable.
Stable, stable, stable. Gonna talk about stability for a minute.
I was so unstable in
the earlier years of my life. I never knew how I was gonna behave till the devil told me.
If he said I was depressed, I was depressed.
If he said I
was mad, I was mad. I didn’t know anything at all about controlling my emotions.
I just did whatever I felt like doing. Well, you know, emotions can
be good sometimes, but they can really be dangerous because you never know when they’re gonna come and when they’re gonna go.
You have to
make sure the right ones are guiding your life. I particularly fond
of Psalm ninety four, twelve, and thirteen. So let’s take a look at that.
Bless, happy, fortunate, and to be envied, Is the man whom you discipline and instruct
o lord and teach out of your law? Okay.
So this is saying that when god is disciplining you, you are blessed. Bless, blessed, blessed.
That you may give him power to keep himself calm in the days of adversity.
Until the inevitable pit of corruption is dug for the wicked.
So this is saying, god is gonna continue to deal with
us and deal with us
and deal with us and deal with And part of that means that he is gonna let you get in some uncomfortable situations that are gonna bring hopefully the best out of you.
But I don’t know where you’re at.
I mean, the Bible says in James one, that trials bring out patience. Well, they brought a
lot of stuff out of me before
we ever got to patient.
I mean, like nasty stuff.
And it took about twenty five years for me to get stable.
Now I don’t know if any of you are as slow as me, But it took me, oh, there’s one lady, two.
Alright. Got a few out there. You know, we’re supposed to have the mind of Christ.
You’d think we could learn a little faster than what we do.
If god gives you a test and you don’t pass it, you get to take it again.
And again and again and again and again until you pass this.
God will keep letting us
deal with stuff and
deal with stuff and deal with stuff, and these are
not things that are gonna they don’t even really get into the category of real suffering.
I mean, these are just uncomfortable irritating things. Just stuff. Things have happened.
People say something hurts our feelings. We didn’t the promotion, we wanted it work.
We didn’t get to sing in the choir, you know, whatever the case might be.
My goodness, if we can’t even deal with that kind of stuff, what are we gonna do if things really difficult.
And he said this is gonna keep on,
uh, that you, that god would give us power to keep ourselves calm in
the day of adversity. Everybody said I have to learn to keep myself calm.
You didn’t sound excited. I’d like you to do it again.
I have to learn to keep myself calm.
Second Timothy chapter four beginning in verse three, these
are awesome scriptures. For the time is coming when people will not tolerate or endure sound and wholesome instruction.
But having ears itching for something pleasing and gratifying, they will gather to themselves one teacher after another to a considerable number chosen to satisfy their own liking and to foster the errors that they hold.
Verse four, and they will turn aside from hearing the truth and wander off into myths and man made fiction.
Verse five. But as for
you, now he’s talking to Timothy, who’s a preacher of the word.
As for you, be calm and cool and steady.
And suffer unflinchingly every hardship Do the work of an evangelist fully perform all the duties of your ministry.
Now here it really gets good. Verse six, Paul says, for I am already about to be sacrificed.
My life is about to be poured out as a drink offering.
The time of my spirits released from the body is at hand, and I will soon be free.
I well, I’m more excited about that than you are, I think.
But I I mean, I get what he’s saying.
He’s saying, look, being here in this earth in the times we’re living in and trying to serve god in this fleshly body, it is not always easy.
It’s not always comfortable. It doesn’t always feel good, but boy, the day is going to come.
When our job will be done.
And we’ll get a release from this body, and we will be totally and completely free.
And can I tell you something? That’s when life begins.
Life isn’t fair, but in spite of that, we don’t have to let anger and unforgiveness destroy our happiness and relationships.
Discover the freedom that comes from forgiveness and how to resolve anger in a way that truly healing.
With Joyce’s book, do yourself a favor. Forgive.
Along with the book, you’ll also receive Joyce’s four part audio teaching series, understanding your triggers and avoiding the trap of offense.
You can listen in the Joyce Meyer ministries app whenever you’d like.
With god’s help, you can find true peace and forgiveness.
These resources are available for your gift to the ministry of thirty dollars or more. Connect with us today.
Visit online at joyce meyer dot org or call one eight hundred seven two seven nine six seven three.
Let me give you example of how Project Girl works.
You see, God’s love represented here has totally changed my life.
Now, all I need to do is share it with another woman or girl.
Some people just push your buttons.
And no matter how hard you try to love them, They take you from zero to on edge in no time flat.
So how do you see the good in people when it’s really hard to find?
Joyce Meyer wants to show you in her new book, loving people who are hard to love.
A step by step survival guide help you navigate those difficult relationships and a world in need of god’s love.
Loving that difficult person may not change the world. But it could change yours and theirs.
Loving people who are hard to love. Order your copy today.
Watch episodes of enjoying everyday life. Read daily devotionals. Follow a bible study plan. Here.
Here. Here, and here.
The same great teaching from Joyce that you know and love now in the palm of your hand.
With the new Joyce Meyer ministries app, think of it as your daily dose of encouragement. Right here? Right now.
Search Joyce Meyer in your app store and download the new Joyce Meyer ministries app today.
Well, I have it on
my heart today to pray for those of you who need guidance.
You’re in the situation and you really need god to show you what to do.
So let’s pray together and believe that god is gonna speak to you.
Father, you sent the Holy Spirit to be our guide.
To show us what to do in life, rather to go to the left or the right or to say yes to something or no to something.
And You guide us by peace, by wisdom, by your word.
And you also speak to us. You speak to our hearts.
And I believe that there’s a lot of people watching today that they really desperately need an answer to something.
But maybe they’ve tried so hard to get that answer that they’ve now become so confused that they can’t even hear you.
So I pray that people will calm down, breathe, resting you, and I’m asking you to guide them and show them what they should do in the situation that they’re in.
And I pray that you will give them the courage and the boldness to believe that they can hear from you and be led and guided by you.
We don’t have to live in confusion. Thank you, father, for speaking to people in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Alright. God bless you. You have a great day and expect to hear from God.
We hope you have enjoyed today’s program.
Please contact us or visit joyce meyer dot org to share your prayer request or partner with us in sharing Christ and loving people all across the globe.
This program has been made possible by the friends and partners of Joyce Meyer ministries.