What is Love? Part 1 | Joyce Meyer | Radio Podcast

What is Love? Part 1-1

A 15-minute teaching applying practical principles from God’s Word to everyday life.

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.

Welcome to enjoying everyday life with New York Times best selling author Joyce Meyer.
On today’s program, Joyce will be teaching from her series 1 is love.
Anytime we are loving someone, god is there because love is not something god does.
It’s who he is is. God is love. Whoever love is, god is. Now here’s Joyce with today’s teaching.
I wanna talk to you tonight about what is love.
I wanna talk to you about what it is because it’s a word that we throw around so much.
And, you know, we love ice cream, and we love kitty bears, and we love puppy dogs, and we love kitty cats, and we love god.
Yeah. We we have to learn what real love is, what what the god kind of love is.
And In Matthew chapter 24, it gives us signs of the end times.
And I suppose every generation ever lived, thought they were living in the last days were no different.
You know? But one of these days, a generation’s gonna be right.
And it could be us. I don’t know.
But there’s two things that it says in Matthew 24 that we really need to pay attention to.
1, it says that in the last days, many will be deceived.
And, you know, I I started thinking about that today, and I thought, my gosh, there’s never been any more deception than there is on the earth.
Right now. And I do think a lot of people are just deceived.
And I want you to pray every day that you will not be receive because deceive people don’t know they’re deceived.
And that’s one of the things that’s gonna increase in the last day is And the Bible actually says that if god did not shorten the days for the sake of the very elect, no man would be able to stand the deception coming on the earth.
So don’t get a prideful attitude. It can’t happen to me.
That’s why you need to keep your nose in the word and always learn the truth.
And the other thing it says in Matthew 24, Inversed, uh, 1012.
1 of those 2. It says that in the last days, the love of the great body of people, which is us, will grow cold.
Because of all the wickedness and lawlessness in the land.
And we have to be very careful that we don’t get so caught up in all the fighting, all the nonsense that’s going on, not that we shouldn’t stand up against it.
I don’t mean that. But We have to remember that love is the key word that describes Christianity.
And in Romans 12 21, it says we overcome evil with good.
Now please hear me. This is so simple.
But the world is full of evil, and the only thing we have to do to fight it is to just turn up the goodness and start being as good to people as we possibly can, praying for people, loving people, showing love to strangers, ran the mats of kindness.
Love never fails.
And I saw that with my own father who abused me for many, many years sexually.
My mom blessed her heart.
She knew what he was doing, but she just was too afraid of him to do anything about it, which is sad.
It’s a long story, but I’ll make it real short.
As they got older and they weren’t really able to take proper care of themselves, God put it on my heart that he wanted us to take care of them.
Well, I rebuked it. I thought it was the devil.
I thought there is no way god is asking me to do that, not after what he did to me.
Well, see, there is a little thing in the Bible that says love your enemy.
We don’t get to just love the people we like.
I have a new book coming out this fall called loving people that are hard to love.
Well, there’s a lot of porcupine people out there.
And they got all 30,000 of their quills out.
But it is time charge for us to get ourselves off our mind and all of our own little problems being more thankful for what god is doing in our lives and get busy about the business of the kingdom of god.
Hey, man. We overcome evil with good.
My goodness, what would happen if every Christian actually just did one good thing for one person every day, rather that was just encouraging somebody or pray for somebody or meet somebody’s physical need, help them with something, The more we have our mind on ourselves, the more miserable we get.
Matthew 546 says, if you only love those who love you, what reward will you get?
Even tax collectors can do that.
Now they use tax collectors because they were the most hated of all people in Jesus’ day because they were crooks.
I’m not that fond of myself today, but I tell you, I have to pray every time I see all the taxes that, well, we just we won’t go there.
I’m thankful to have a paycheck. Thank you.
So that’s that’s what to do when you wanna just go down the drain with all the negative stuff, you just gotta say, nope.
Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. I’m thankful. I find something I’m thankful for.
But he says, what what difference is there in you and anybody else?
What difference is there and and me or any unbeliever out there if I only love the people who love me back.
See, Jesus died for us while we were still yet in sin.
So if you wanna see an example of what love is, just look at Jesus because he said, if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the father, and god is love.
See, love is not something god does. It’s who he is.
And so that’s all he does.
Even when god chastises us, He only corrects those whom he loves.
Everything everything in the Bible that god says to do or not to do, it’s for our benefit.
It makes our life better if we do what god tells us to do.
If we could ever get that through our heads, quit thinking that god just trying to make it hard on us.
Well, that’s just hard to do. That’s this is hard. It’s hard.
It’s hard to love people that have been mean to you. You know what?
Maybe they don’t deserve your forgiveness, but you deserve peace. Amen?
And I’ll tell you one thing. Forgive them may be hard. But hating them is harder.
If you wanna do something hard, you just hate people all your life.
I watched my dad do it. And he did not have any kind of a life.
But we took care of them and bottom of my house, bottom of my car, you know, took them to the doctor and had their house cleaned and all the things you do.
And He took 3 years, but my dad got saved. Wow. Amen?
And I can tell you. I don’t believe that real love can fail.
I think that love softens hard hearts And I think it changes people, but sometimes you have to be willing to love somebody that’s not loving you back for a long time.
And I’m not suggesting that you stay with somebody that’s abusing you.
That’s not what I’m talking about. You you can love people from a distance.
And some people, you have to do that.
God’s not asking us to be around somebody just mistreats us all the time and downgrades us all the time, but love is not how you feel about somebody.
It’s praying for them and not talking bad about them behind their back and it’s meeting a need if they have a need.
Well, that blows him away. Why in the world would you do that?
You know what? My dad said to my husband whenever He finally apologized to me.
He looked at Dave and he said, Dave, you have never done anything, but love me.
And he said, most men in your situation would have killed me.
That you’ve never done anything but love me.
Well, I always say I thought I was buying a house, but I was actually buying a soul.
See, it costs Jesus a lot. That cost him to save us.
What we have as a free gift from god cost him, everything every person that gets help, it costs somebody else.
And I guess I’m just wanting to ask tonight Are you are you ready to start paying what it costs to take other people to heaven with you?
And I don’t intend to shut up about this.
I may just preach some version of this from now until Jesus comes back. I don’t know.
But we just can’t I mean, I’ve lived both ways, and I can tell you selfish is miserable.
You cannot be selfish and be happy.
And when you really when you really get this love thing and you understand that it’s not just something you’re gonna feel like doing.
If you’re waiting to feel like it, you can forget it. It’s something you do on purpose.
The Bible says above all that you put on, put on love.
And put on is an action word.
I have never gone in my closet to put on my clothes and had them jump off the hanger on my body.
I have to pick them out. I have to think about it.
And if I put on something, it doesn’t look good on me.
I take it off and I put on something else, and I tell you there’s a whole lot of Christians running around out there with stuff that doesn’t look good on them.
Bad attitudes and grumbling and murmuring and gossiping and complaining and going to church on sending and then going back out and doing the same thing all over again.
Love is action. It’s not just a message we preach. It’s action.
It’s not a theory. It’s not just a word, but it can only be seen and felt in deeds.
When the book that I wrote on Love is the worst selling book I ever had.
And you know what? We laugh. I laugh, but it’s really not funny.
Because the truth is, you know, why people didn’t bite, they didn’t think it was important.
Oh, yeah. I love love. I I hear I hear about that all the time. Jesus tells me this.
I know for the Bible tells me so. Jesus loves us first.
The love of god is shed or brought in our hearts by the Holy Spirit because god never expects us to give away something that he doesn’t give us first.
Amen. But everything he gives us, he expects us to grow up spiritually and let it flow through us to other people.
We are god’s hands and feet and mouth and ears and eyes on the earth.
How are people gonna see Jesus if they don’t see him through the church?
And it’s gonna take more than a bumper sticker.
If you’re not gonna act like a Christian, get that thing off your bumper.
I mean it.
It’s worse to have it on your car than to have it on your car and drive down the road speeding, yelling obscenities at somebody.
Jesus said, if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the father, and then he said in John 146, I am the way.
He’s the way to live.
It takes practice loving people on purpose, but if we keep trying, we’ll develop a it.
Today’s resource offering will help us learn how to walk in love at all times.
The loving people who are hard to now for a gift of $30 or more.
Order@joycemeyer.org or call toll free at 1807890089.
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