Get in the Word | Joyce Meyer

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Get in the bible.
Study, study the word. It’s great to hear preachers. I’m glad you watch my program.
I’m really glad you came to the conference.
But I want you to study and we have things to help you and don’t use the excuse.
I can’t understand the bible. There’s too many modern translations of the bible for anybody to say they can’t understand it and there’s too many other books and things to help you.
Study. Second Corinthians 3 18.
Let’s put these scriptures up real quick Second Corinthians 3 18 and all of us as with unveiled face because we continued to behold in the word of God as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord are constantly being transfigured into his very own image in ever increasing splendor from one degree of glory to another.
So how are we changed from looking into the Word of God?
We see in the word what jesus is. We see what we’re not.
We say God, I want that to change. Will you help me? Will you work in me?
And then God goes to work. Amen. James 1 21. I Love This Scripture. James 1 21.
So get rid of all unclean nous and the rampant outgrowth of wickedness and in a humble, gentle modest spirit receive and welcome.

The word which implanted and rooted in your hearts contains the power to save your soul.
That doesn’t mean the power to be born again. You’re already born again.
Your spirit is all fixed up. Honey. you got it.
It’s the soul that needs to be saved now my mind, my will, my emotions, God is working his way out of our spirit out through our soul and finally out through our body where the world can get some benefit out of what christ has done in our life.
Approach the word respectfully with a humble spirit, I need this, I need this.
Well, first let me tell you to have a very happy new year and I just believe that you’re gonna have a lot of great things happen in your life this year.
You know, God’s word is powerful, but studying his word is key to utilizing its life changing principles in our lives.
It would be nice if we could just download the bible into our hearts and it, but it doesn’t work that way, ginger and I are going to share some of our experiences with studying scriptures and so we’re gonna just have a little discussion here.
Well ginger, how do you go about it?
You know, I think a new year is a great time to think about a fresh start and what do I want to accomplish and that’s one of the things I do is every new year, I really pray, you know God, what do you have for me this year?
A lot of people talk about a word for the new year.
Maybe God will give you something to kind of focus you and that happens many years.
But not always, I have a friend that calls me every year and say what’s the word for this year?
Yeah, of course. I feel like I have to come up with, wait a minute. Let me think.
Yeah, so I think that seeing this is a great opportunity to say, okay God, what do you what do you want?
Because studying the word and I’m sure when you first said that we might have had some people that were thinking I can’t I can’t do this.
You know, I I don’t even know how to talk about this.
And so for them not to go away to listen to a lot of your suggestions.
Well first I want to say that we don’t study the word for God.
Mm it’s not something we do for him.
He likes it when we study the word, but only because of what it does for us.
And I think that’s very important because I think so many people look at it as an obligation, I have to read the word today.

And the other thing I want to say is reading is totally different than studying.
So these are very important points to me that I’ve tried to make for the last few years because uh yes, it’s great when you have time to just read a chapter in the bible but it’s always great if you can take some time, I’ll say even in your week and actually study and study means you you start reading a chapter and something catches your attention and you need to dig a little bit deeper and so like like a word or something that you need help in.
Yeah something something you need help with or something you don’t quite understand or you know, maybe even something you don’t agree with right off, you know, But it’s so easy to study the bible now because of everything that’s available on the internet.
I mean when I first began to study, it was a project, I mean I would have to have a concordance and a dictionary and I just all I mean all kinds of books and stuff around me and you’re going from this book to that book to this one to that one.
And now let’s say you read something about anxiety and you think well I have a real problem with that, you know, I wonder where else in the bible I can find more on that.
Well, all you have to do is put in your search engine, Show me all the scriptures in the bible about anxiety and you can even ask for it in a in a specific translation and they’ll give it to you.
So I think it’s really important for people to understand that you are doing yourself a favor when you study the word because you’re learning how to live the life that is going to be the best for you.
You know, it’s like, I think so many people look at everything that God tells them as an order and you know, if you don’t do this, God’s gonna be mad.
But the thing is, is his word just reveals to us the life that’s gonna work.
Yeah, if you want to get right down to it, I’m sure there was a time because you have this wonderful love for God’s word and a passion for reading it, but there was probably a time in your life that you didn’t have, that, that you didn’t understand what it would give you.
So for for everyone who’s watching right now, who’s like, I kind of want to do this, but you know, I’m not sure if I want to put the effort into it or if I have the time, how would you encourage them to get to the place where you are now?
Well, first of all, I, even from the time Dave and I got married, I always tried to read one chapter a day in the bible, but to be honest, I was doing it out of obligation and I would do it as quickly as I could and I probably couldn’t have remembered anything that I read.
But uh When I was filled with the Holy Spirit in 1976, every believer has the Holy Spirit, but that’s different than being filled with the Holy Spirit, I always say we have the Holy Spirit, but does he have us?
You know and I came to a place in my life where I was very tired of being unhappy of doing everything that I felt like I was being told to do as a christian although I really wasn’t.
Um and I just more or less came to a point, I came to the end of myself, it was like you have got to do something and to be honest at that point I didn’t really much care what it was as black as you know.
I was just tired of arguing with my husband and being unhappy and being discontent and uh God touched me filled me with the Holy Spirit and uh the Holy Spirit is our teacher and he gave me a love for the word.
But you do need to realize that the Holy Spirit is your teacher now I’m a teacher but the Holy Spirit is your teacher and so I can teach something but I need a strong anointing on my life for what I say to make sense.
I always say we don’t need information, we need revelation.
So knowing that the Holy Spirit is our teacher takes a huge I think pressure off of us well and to depend on him for that when I start I can do this because of when I start to read our study the word in the morning and I spend time in the word every morning.

I always say Holy Spirit help me understand what I read. Yeah.
Yeah because we can, there’s so many things that we read that we don’t understand and I know that there are people watching and say, but I don’t understand the bible.
So I want to throw a question at you.
You always get to ask me the questions, I’ve got one for you.
Uh what do you do when you come to something in the bible you don’t understand.
So I do much of what you said and one thing I like to do um utilize a search engine, utilize google.
And I will often start with understanding a little bit about who’s saying it or who it’s talking about.
Like if it’s something that that um paul said I’ll google tell me what was happening with paul at this time.
Because when you realize that paul was in prison when he wrote some of the things that he wrote it helps you understand it better.
And some of the things that paul said, he said them because of the customs of the day.
But you know, one of the things that I do when I don’t understand something, I’ll give it a try to understand it.
But if I still don’t understand it, I just do what I call, put it on a shelf.
I think people sometimes waste a lot of time trying to understand something they don’t understand and maybe you only have a certain amount of time.
So you’ve got 30 minutes to study the word.
Well don’t waste 20 of it trying to understand something you don’t understand. That’s great.
Set that on a shelf and say God, I really don’t understand this.
And I need you to bring me revelation. But I’m just gonna go on with my study for today.
You can always go back to things like that later.
I think that’s really wise because first of all, we are not going to understand everything.
I mean there’s things in the Bible I don’t understand. I’ve been studying it for 45 years.
I’ve studied the Bible literally as long as I could read.
And you know, not always real effectively by any means, but there are so many things that I don’t understand.
But there are many things that I do understand now that I didn’t before because of the holy spirit helping me or like you said not to allow that misunderstanding to come between me and what God wants me to learn.
Because there have been times that I’m like, you know this doesn’t make sense. I don’t get this.
You can put it down and walk away or you can do like you said and continue going and say, God show me what you want to get from it.
And then you may even have another time where you just want to spend just some special time trying to gain more understanding on that specific thing.
There are some things, especially in the old testament that I just go, it’s like yeah, definitely I just don’t, I mean I trust God, so I know he had a reason for what he told them to do, but wow there again, it was a whole different time and so it may have made a lot more sense then than it does now, but people definitely need to not let the devil convince them that they cannot understand the word because God will help us understand it and maybe you don’t understand all parts of it, but don’t let that prevent you from the parts you can understand and realize it’s okay not to understand everything, not to know all that stuff and you know, if there’s something else that I read that I really don’t quite get what it’s going and like you said, studying more about what you really need is I’ll just google that thing and that will give me more understanding of what I just read as I read other things that jesus said about it or what else what other scriptures connect and it’s also very good to read books about the
bible, like books that you know, like I’ve written, I don’t know over 100 and 50 books now and so I give a lot of explanation in those books for things in the bible and not me, but there are hundreds and thousands of people who do that and really I learned a lot, do you know that you know the first book that I read after Dave and I got married.I read. It was about this thick, it was a Children’s bible story book that is such a great idea and but it was so simple and it was it was all the stories in the bible about ruth and Esther and David and all the different things and you know Samson and Delilah and I read those stories and they really helped me have a foundation of understanding and I didn’t figure anything out.
They were written for a child and so I could get it and understand it all.
And so you don’t have to start with a book of revelation.
You know written by some genius that’s got 4°. You know start with with something simple and maybe some teaching C. D. S are things that you download.
There’s there’s so much available to people today that really to be honest there’s and I don’t mean this in the wrong way but there’s no excuse not to study the bible.
Well we’re gonna come back and ask a few questions that all of our our viewers have asked from social media.
But before we do that, let me just ask you this one thing.
Um The most important thing that anybody can do to start a new your outright is to begin investing their time spending it with the Lord.
Um how would you suggest that they start that new practice today?
Well we have things available that can give them guidance.
We’ve got a book that they can get free a hard copy of or they can uh download it online.
We also have a thing called the 30 30 Challenge where we encourage people to study the bible for 30 minutes a day for 30 days and we give them things to study.
And and and there’s other bible studies available if you want a bible bible study, there’s all kinds of people that write good bible study books or you know things that you you read a certain part and then you ask a question and you answer the question or just start with you and the Holy Spirit.
And you know, I don’t I think that everybody’s plan is individualized.
And even in even in the way that I study the bible, I may study one way for a month and then I may study another way for a while and you know, for a season I was had a goal to read six chapters every day.
And now I’m not doing that quite as much.
You know, I might like we have a study bible called the everyday life study bible.
And I even like to use it myself because it’s full of articles about what that chapter is about.
And so even that you can if you buy a good study bible and whatever translation you like and I like ours.
So you know they can get hours or if not they can get somebody else’s, but there’s you can join a small bible study group.

Getting a good good group with people where you can ask questions.
I think that’s so important for a young believer.
Especially to be able to ask a question and have a group that you can discuss that with.
So just start somewhere, start to pick up that bible and start something new, something unless you do nothing. Yeah.
Good. Well we’ll be back in just a few minutes to answer some of your questions about studying the bible.
Some really good questions. So stay with us.
The bible has a lot to teach us but knowing where to begin can feel overwhelming.
God’s word was not intended to be an obligation. It’s a handbook for living Joyce’s book.
How to study the bible. Can help you develop a personal study plan. That’s right for you.
It gives simple, straightforward keys to approaching the boy, whether you’ve been studying it for years or opened the bible for the very first time.
You’ll experience God’s Word in a fresh new way for your free copy of how to study the bible.
Contact us right now, visit online at Joyce Meyer dot org or call 1 807 092895.
Well now we’re gonna take time and answer some of your questions sent in through social media about how to study the bible.
Well ginger do you have something interesting for me?
We do and this is the best way to learn how to do anything right?
Start doing it asked people who also do it, know how so Andrea from Minnesota asked this, I struggle with staying in God’s word daily.
What would be helpful to keep me motivated to study the bible and to spend time with God?
Well I think that really understanding how important it is for you.
And once again I said this on the first half of the program, but we studied the bible for us, not for God not to get some checkmark with God that I studied the bible today.
I think that having a time I have a set of part time, I’ve done it for years and when I get up in the morning I get my coffee, I go somewhere where I can be by myself and first I pray and then I study and um it’s really just a matter of having that time like Dave used to spend his lunch hour at work studying the word because he had to get up so early in the morning.
And so he would sometimes he’d walk around the neighborhood by where he worked and pray and sometimes he would sit in his car and you know read a book, you don’t always have to read the bible.
Sometimes you can read a book that is about the bible.
I’m reading a book right now called The gentle Love of the Holy Spirit.
It’s an older book by E. B. Simpson and this is my third time to read it.
And it’s probably full of scripture.
It is it’s full of scripture and it’s got all kinds, I’ve got all kinds of stuff underlined in it.
That really meant a lot to me.
And uh you know I I read three chapters in the bible this morning and then I spent time reading that book.
I wrote a little bit in my journal. And uh lot of it’s habit is it did some praying.
A lot of it is habit.
And um I uh I was talking to the Lord this morning about maybe sometimes adding a second time during the day where I would spend some time with him.
But I’m not gonna make a law out of it as soon as you make a law out of something in your flesh just doesn’t want anything to do with it.
So it has to be something that you you want to do it first.
You may have to just do it because you know that it’s good for you. It’s not here again.
It’s not something you do for God. It’s good for you to do it.
But I think you know for her it’s like you got a set of time.
You just like you have a time you leave for work, you have a time when you eat dinner.
You need to set aside a time and that’s what you do and you have to be pretty strict about it because the devil, especially in the beginning, he will try every way that he can because that time to be interrupted and so that’s what I recommend to start farming a habit.
Yeah, that’s good. Just talking about motivation to one of the things that I have found that that motivates me is like you said writing some things down.
So when I find a scripture that God really speaks to my heart through, I’ll write it down and I can look back at it because I mean honestly, I sometimes you read through and nothing stands out quite as much.
So when God really says something that, that you just know it’s for you that it’s touching your heart.
You know, I’ll write that down and that’s really motivating and and I’ll write down answers to prayer and things that I’ve seen God do, and that is really motivating when you begin to see the impact of studying God’s word, you want more and more and when you sit and write things out in longhand, it helps you get it on the inside of you.
You know, I didn’t have a computer when I first started and I had to, yeah, I had to write everything out and I think it was helpful to me and I always encourage people, it’s good to listen to me, but look these scriptures up yourself and actually look at them, you know, I think today we’ve become far too dependent on just sitting back and letting somebody else feed us and we need to put a little effort into it.
That’s a really good point. Okay, next question, this is Margaret from new york Margaret.
Margaret says I’m currently reading a book of the bible and I’m using a study reference, but I’m still not understanding the book at all.
Are there any books of the bible that were harder for you to understand and what helped you?
Well, uh some of the old testament books like Leviticus, I was so glad when I got, let’s be honest, I made a commitment to read it, but it’s all about the intricacies of law and we don’t live under the law anymore.
But it was it was it was interesting to me to see how challenging it must have been to follow that many rules and regulations and you know, some of them were from God, but people have a tendency to add and add and add and add and add.
So yes, her for her question it is very hard and I would just say if you are trying to study a book of the bible that you just really are not grasping, then I would go to something that you can’t understand because the whole point of studying the bible is to learn something especially that is gonna help you and your practical everyday life, we all need to have a foundation of good doctrine, but jesus is very practical and he teaches us how to treat people, he teaches us how to have a right relationship with him, how to have a right relationship with ourself this morning, I was just uh reading in timothy and it talks very strongly about taking care of your parent, your elderly parents and grandparents, even if you have to do uh put aside some of your responsibilities at home in order to do that, that’s a very important thing to do.
Well, there’s probably a lot of people that don’t even understand how important that is, and it actually says that if an unbeliever does it and a believer doesn’t that the unbeliever is better off than the believer, but there’s things that I don’t understand, I figure I’ve still got a lot to learn when I get to heaven.
Yeah, absolutely, there’s so much to learn, I’ve also learned that there is a blessing in reading God’s word, even if we don’t understand it and something the holy Spirit just does.
It’s not like you said about checking things off your list, but it’s all inspired, it’s all God’s word and when we do it with the intent to get what God has for us and to grow closer to him, even if we don’t understand everything that’s happening, that’s very true, then there there is a blessing in that because God really is, he cares about our heart.
Yes. Yes. Okay. Rebecca from Australia says is it okay if I study the bible on my own and not go to church and vice versa.
Is it okay to go to church but not study the bible?
Well I think the best answer is to do both.
You know I’m not gonna tell anybody that it’s okay not to go to church.
I mean it’s not your salvation is not based on you’re going to church.
But to be honest I think a lot of times people look at it well like I don’t get anything out of it or why shouldn’t I just stay home and watch it on tv but how about looking at it a different way instead of going to church to get something for yourself.
How about going to serve and to be a blessing to somebody else?
What if you went with the intention of watching for somebody that seems like they’re hurting are lonely and you went specifically to be friendly with them or try to help somebody and so uh you know obviously we go to learn to but you you should never just pick one over the other.
Yeah I mean you one of the things you can do is if your pastor has a sermon then you can use that for your study for the next week.
Yeah so it’s not enough just to go to church and listen to other people tell you about the bible You need to crack it open yourself.
I don’t think so. I think, I mean anything is better than nothing, you know, it’s better to go to church than to do nothing.
It’s better to to go to church and listen to other people than nothing.
But I tell people all the time, if you have to choose between spending time with God personally and studying his word and come into my conference, I’d rather that you spend time with God because that’s something that is you just, you develop a relationship with him when you spend time with him.
Well, I’m excited to see what what this encouragement for people to start this new year in the word will do well, I just want to encourage you once again to make a beginning and ask the Holy Spirit to help you.
So we’re just offering you a free resource today.
It’s a little booklet called How to Study the bible by guess who Joyce Meyer.
So you can get it uh as a hard copy like this or you can get a digital copy from Joyce Meyer ministries app.
We love you and we want you to know the word because God has got a great plan for your life and you may not even know about it if you don’t study his word.
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