Journey to Maturity – Pt 1 | Joyce Meyer | Enjoying Everyday Life Teaching

Do you want to go further on your journey with God? Today on Enjoying Everyday Life, Joyce Meyer shares the truth about going deeper and growing up in your walk with the Lord!

Joyce Meyer, one of the world’s leading practical Bible teachers and New York Times best-selling author, shares encouragement and advice to help us enjoy our daily lives. With a heart to share Christ and love people, Joyce’s messages help people in all walks of life to grow in their faith, learn to study the Bible, find healing from the wounds of life, get answers to life’s questions and encounter the love of God in a powerful way.

Free too. I do what I do because I’ve seen god’s power, transform my own life, and he will do it for you.
The key to everything is found in god’s word I’m Joyce Meyer, and I believe that god can heal you everywhere you hurt.
Well, father, we thank you for the word today. I love your word.
It’s changed my life dramatically. And I know that it will keep on changing it.
And I pray that that’ll happen to people here today that their lives will be changed as they receive your word.
Everybody said, I receive the word. Okay.
Now I always tell people, don’t listen to me just to listen to me, but listen with an attitude of whatever I hear today, I’m gonna be obedient to it and I’m gonna go home and apply it to my life.
You know, just to know something doesn’t do you any good if you don’t do it.
We need to do it.
And I think a lot of times we think, well, I’d check off my winter church this week, box, but Everybody will hear something today that should and could cause at least a little bit of change in your life including me.
I wanna talk to you this morning about the journey to spiritual maturity.
And, you know, being spiritually mature is god’s will for us, not remaining baby Christians, but being spiritually mature because little babies all they care about themselves.
But god actually wants us to Get ourselves off our mind, not be selfish and reach out to other people, help them, and be willing to do whatever god wants us to do to help the kingdom grow.
There’s really nothing that makes you happier than helping other as a matter of fact, I know personally that you cannot be selfish and happy at the same time.
It just doesn’t work. And if some of you are unhappy and can’t figure out why, it might just be because you care more about what god can do for you, and what you can do for god.
Babies come in that way.
We usually have big problems, and we receive Christ because we want him to fix them.
And he’ll go along with that for a while, but after a while, he wants a transition where you say, well, now lord, I really appreciate all you’ve done in my life, and I wanna be of service to you.
Paul told the Corinthian Church Keep in mind that the Corinthians were, had all the gifts of the spirit.
They spoke in other tongues. They prophesied.
But he told them there were babies.
So, you know, you can have gifts, but not have fruit. Isn’t that interesting?
You know, people who have or operate on the gifts of the spirit, you would think, and they think we’re the mature group.
But not necessarily so. A gift is given to you, but fruit.
You gotta put a little effort into that.
You gotta work with the Holy Spirit, and everything you need is in you as a seed, but you have to grow in those areas.
Like patients, if you want patients, you gotta be willing to have a problem first.
Amen? Uh, if you want humility, well, you know how that goes, you have to be willing to do something you don’t wanna do or apologize to somebody you don’t wanna apologize to.
But first Corinthians 3, 1, 2, 3, However, brethren, I could not talk to you as to spiritual men, but as to non spiritual men of the flesh, men, and women, in whom the carnal nature predominates.
I had to talk to you like mere infants in the new life in Christ, And I’m reading from the amplified, and it says an amplified in parenthesis unable to talk yet.
And I think that’s interesting. That’s the only translation that says that, but Paul says that twice in these three verses, he says, I know that your babies, I can hear it by the way you talk.
And, you know, that is true If you wanna locate how spiritually mature somebody is, all you really have to do is listen to them for a little while.
Amen? Because amateur people complain, even though they’re blessed.
They talk about other people behind their back. They gossip. They criticize. They judge.
They very often won’t forgive people that have hurt them.
They feel justified and hang on to their anger.
Get upset over petty things that they don’t need to get upset over.
And so I think that’s interesting that you can even listen to yourself.
And locate yourself as far as how spiritually material that you’ve all.
First of all, let me ask, because there’s no point in me preaching this if you don’t think you need it.
How many of you believe that it is very important that we all grow in Christ and become spiritually mature.
K. I fed you with milk, not solid food.
And when he’s talking about he’s talking about the word of god as our food.
And some translations instead of saying solid food, same meat.
So the milk of the word would be like Paul saying I had to I had to always give you messages about what god would do for you.
Message is about how much god loves you and how blessed you’re going to be, what a great future god has planned for you.
We all love those kinds of messages, and of course, we need them. But we can’t live on them.
We have to have some of the meat of the word, which almost always brings some kind of correction in our life.
Amen? And so I am committed to I don’t teach people what they wanna hear, but I teach them what they need to hear.
And there is a difference.
They and, The Bible says in the last days, people will have itching ears.
They’ll be insecure, and they’ll run to and fro until they find somebody that’s saying what they wanna hear.
And that’s that’s not good.
Just because your pastor says something that makes you squirming your seat a little bit doesn’t mean that you don’t need to hear it.
I personally love deeper messages that confront me and make me stop and think.
Now, like I said, we all need the what I call dessert messages, but we we need to we just need a balance.
We need a balance. If somebody’s just beating you up with the word every week, that gets old.
But if all you ever hear is everything that god’s gonna do for you and how blessed you are, then, really, those messages encourage us, but we don’t grow spiritually on those messages.
I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not yet strong enough to be ready for it.
And even yet you are not strong enough to be ready for it.
For you are still unspiritual, having the nature of the flesh because you’re under the control of ordinary impulses.
I’ll just say quickly, do you let your emotions control you, or do you control them?
Do you do what you think, what you want, what you feel, or are you able to move beyond that.
We I’ve written a couple of books on emotions, and one is called managing your emotions.
I think it’s out of print now. And then another one is called living beyond your feelings.
And we all have feelings. They’re not gonna go away.
You know, if somebody insults me, I’m still gonna feel like I wanna tell them off or let them know they’re not gonna treat me that way, but a spiritually mature Christian can have emotions and yet not act on them if they know it’s not something that god would want them to do.
So I’ll just leave that with you and you can do what you want to with it.
For as long as there is envy, jealousy, wranglings, and factions among you, and wrangling, and factions are strife.
And strife is arguing, heated arguments, living in disagreement.
And the part that I like about strife that I think a lot of people don’t understand is it says it’s an angry undercurrent.
In other words, it’s one of those things where which smiling at each other, but underneath, there’s all this, you know, You you can have a church that looks good on the outside, but underneath, there’s all these goss open.
Goofiness. And what happens then is that that prevents the anointing.
And so everybody can say the right thing, but it doesn’t really do anybody any good.
When we began our ministry, which has been 40 years ago, I’ve been teaching 45 years, but I wasn’t in full time ministry until 40 years.
And god spoke to my heart, said there’s 3 things I want you to do.
And if you do, I’ll bless your ministry.
Do what you do with excellence, and that doesn’t mean perfection.
It just means to take what you have and do the best you can with it.
We should be excellent people who always go the extra mile.
We don’t sweep the dirt under the rug.
We clean things out and do things the way they’re supposed to be done.
Be a person of integrity. That means honest. That means that you keep your word.
And boy, do we have a huge problem today with people not keeping their word.
How many of you have had an appointment with a workman to come and repair something at your house?
And he didn’t show up and didn’t even bother to call you and let you know. Okay.
Well, back when I was a teenager, like in the fifties, you never heard of anything like that.
People just, I mean, even people that weren’t saved didn’t do stuff like that.
And it’s it’s just getting to be such a problem in the world today that it’s just really ridiculous.
And the thing that we all have to be careful of is that we don’t float along with the world, We don’t just kinda go with the current, but we’ll make the effort to swim upstream, so to speak.
And always do what you know is right. Keep your word.
If you tell somebody, I’ll call you back tomorrow. Call them back tomorrow.
And then he said, keep the strife out of your life, out of your marriage, and out of your ministry.
And those are 3 core values at Joyce Meyer Ministry We still teach them today.
We teach them to all new employees. And we just do not put up with strife.
And that means if there’s somebody there that’s causing trouble and we can’t get them to stop, then we just really won’t keep them because strife is like a cancer.
If you don’t stop it, it will eat away at everything until it kills it.
And you if you’re gonna go to church and you’re gonna trust god for things you need to keep the strife out of your family because Psalm 133 says where there is unity There is blessing and the anointing of god.
And I don’t know about you, but I want both of those.
He said you’re behaving yourself like unchanged men, once a person is born again, they should change, but spiritual maturity is a journey It’s not just a once and done thing.
If you still have areas where you need to grow, do not feel the least bit bad about it.
I have areas where I need to grow, god’s not concerned if we’ve not arrived, but he is concerned if we’re making no progress.
Say, we should just you shouldn’t be today like you were a year ago.
And 5 years from now, you shouldn’t be like you are right now.
We all need to be concerned about ourselves if we don’t see any growth, any spiritual growth.
In us. And the Bible says that when he returns, we will all be changed in the twinkling of an eye.
So whatever is still wrong with us when Jesus comes back, he’ll fix all that.
That’s great. That doesn’t mean you get to wait till then.
Well, then I can just put it off till then.
No. There should be nobody in here today that’s mad at anybody.
Forgiveness is the heart of the gospel.
God forgives us completely quickly, forgets our sins, removes him as far as the east is from the west.
And when somebody hurts your feelings and makes you mad on Monday, by Wednesday or Thursday, you shouldn’t even be able to remember what it was that got you upset.
You just you like gold. You said, well, they don’t deserve it.
Well, maybe they don’t, but you deserve peace. Amen?
And, I found a very interesting scripture. I mean, I’ve seen this hundreds of times.
It’s not like the first time I ever saw it, but It’s amazing how we can look at scriptures and just see new things in that that are happened to you where you just You see new things.
It’s Isaiah 4325, and god says that he forgives our sins and forgets them for his own sake.
I thought that was so interesting.
He forgives us for his own sake, and we need to forgive other people for our own sake.
So that’s just kind of an aside. Don’t wanna take time preaching on that.
But, you know, if you’re in here today and you’re mad at somebody, I really pray that you’ll lay that down and get rid of it before you leave.
It’s not it’s not gonna change the person you’re mad at.
They’re probably out having a good time and don’t care that you’re upset.
And so you’re just tormenting yourself.
Now This is a part of this message that is very important.
Now Paul tells them why they’re still spiritually immature.
And I I want you to listen to this. Hebrews 513.
For everyone who continues to feed on milk, baby Christians is obviously inexperienced, inexperienced, inexperienced, and unskilled in the doctrine of righteousness of conforming to the divine will and thought purpose and action for he is a mere infant, not able to talk yet.
Now why is righteousness so important to spiritual maturity.
Well, first of all, we are made right with god By his grace and mercy, when Jesus died for us, the Bible says in 2nd Corinthians 521, he that knew no sin became sin that we might be made the righteousness of god in him.
One thing you need to know about god is he never expects us to do anything without giving us the ability to do it.
So he’s not gonna tell you do this right, do that right, do this right, do that right, do that right, without giving you the ability to do it.
So he makes us all right with him right from the very beginning.
Right from the very start of your walk with god, you are made right with god.
And that is gosh, it took me so long to finally believe that god wasn’t mad at me.
And I’ll tell you why it is so important because you can’t unless you believe that you’re right with god, you can’t do anything right.
But if you believe that you’re righteous, then you’ll produce right behavior.
A peach tree makes peaches because it’s a peach tree. It’s very simple.
We produce what we really believe that we are.
And so you can’t really consistently produce right behavior if you’re guilty and condemned all the time and always thinking that god is mad at you.
Even when you’re doing things wrong, You still are the righteousness of God in Christ.
There’s a difference in your who and your due. Who you are is you’re you’re right with God.
What you do is another story, and god’s gonna work on that. Here’s the reason why righteousness is so important.
We cannot mature spiritually without correction.
You’re not all happy about that.
That was a pretty puny clap.
We cannot mature without correction from god, and god will try first to correct us himself.
But if we do not listen, he will then try to correct us through somebody else confronting us personally are in preaching.
Maybe there’s something god’s been dealing with you about, and you have just been being stubborn about it.
And then maybe god will bring a speaker in or your pastor will say the same thing that god’s been saying to you, and hopefully that’s enough to get us to get in line then.
How many of you are with me and you understand what I’m saying? Okay. Wow.
Correction is very hard for most people to receive.
It’s a little bit easier to receive it from god than from people But if he gets around to having a deal with us through people, it’s very hard because only a humble person can truly receive correction and say, you’re right.
Don’t make excuses for it.
The minute we make excuses, we’re just undoing the whole thing because an excuse is the reason stuff for the lie.
So what we need to do is say, you’re right.
There’s no excuse for what I did, and I want god to work with me and help me.
When Jesus ascended on high, he sent us a helper.
The Holy Spirit And the Holy Spirit is the agent.
The definition says in the Greek, he’s the agent in sanctification.
In other words, we are already made holy at the new birth, because god can’t be anywhere that’s not holy, when the bush was on fire, god said to Moses, take your shoes off your standing on holy ground.
Well, Why is a bush and a bunch of dirt holy ground? Because god was there.
So wherever god is has to be sanctified, and he lives in us So he has to do a work in us before he can come and live in us.
Do you understand me? So what you have on the inside may be very different than the way you’re behaving.
And so the work of the Holy Spirit is to help you He’s our teacher, our guide, is to help you and to help me get what’s in us to the outside of us, you know, Paul said, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.
Well, we don’t we’re not saved by our work, so he can’t mean that because he plainly taught that you’re not saved by works.
But by grace, so what in the world did he mean? Work out your own salvation.
He says, with fear and trembling, Not on your own, but with the help of god.
We can’t change just because we want to. We need god’s help.
So we, from the moment that we’re born again and god puts all this good stuff in us, then we have to, a word, a lot of people don’t like today, work, I’m still scratching my head over all these jobs that are open and they can’t get anybody to fill them.
I I don’t I do not know how people are not working and living.
I can’t I just scratch my head.
We stay in hotels all the time, and now most of them don’t even have housekeeping because they can’t get anybody to work.
No bellman, no housekeeping. She wanted to if you get too much trash in your room, if you set it out in the hall, they may come by and get it, but Nothing.
And it’s getting that way everywhere.
Half a restaurants are half of the restaurant will be closed because they don’t have enough workers.
Anyway, if if you want or I want to be what god wants me to be, I might have to put out a little effort Just praying is not enough to get the job done.
I need to study the word. I need to cooperate with God.
I need to pay attention to my spiritual life. If I sin, I need to repent.
If I hurt somebody else, I need to go back and apologize. Are you all with me?
Joyce said it earlier, There’s really nothing that makes a person happier than helping other people.
I know that it’s true. It’s true in my own life.
And basically, that’s what partnership with Joyce Meyer Ministries is all about.
You see, we can do a little bit alone But together, we can combine our efforts and do so much more.
Being a partner means that you make a commitment to pray and give on a monthly basis to join into the efforts here at Joyce Meyer Ministries to help other people right here in the United States and around the world.
Where we are, you are there too. Everywhere we go to help someone, you are a part of it.
And together, we share Christ with others through our program, our website through Joyce’s books, and audio teachings, And we show Christ love for others by meeting their physical needs.
Medical and dental outreach is disaster relief rescuing women and girls out of sex trafficking and so much more.
The need is great. We can’t do it on our own.
But when you partner with us, Together, we advance the kingdom of god on earth right now.
So please prayerfully consider becoming a partner today.
And continue to watch as we all grow in Christ and become spiritually more mature and have god do wonderful things in our lives And then for that to go through us and out into other people.
We can’t wait to hear from you today.
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The mind actually is the battlefield.
That where we went or lose the war with Satan. He said all he gets to Satan. Thank you, sir.
He uses a lot of it. Today’s mind.
You start asking god to heal you, and he will store is the god of all comfort, and I am so grateful that I know how to call on god.