When God Doesn’t Pick You – Part 1 | Joyce Meyer

Have you ever struggled with jealousy? Learn how to be free of envy, on this episode of Enjoying Everyday Life with Joyce Meyer.
“Here’s one of my favorite statements: We are never going to enjoy stability, we are never going to enjoy spiritual maturity until we learn how to do what’s right when it feels wrong, and every time you do what’s right by a decision of your will using discipline and self control to go beyond how you feel, the more painful it is in your flesh, the more you’re growing spiritually at that particular moment.”
― Joyce Meyer

How do I trust God?
When I’ve been disappointed over and over and over, how can I have faith in God when I’m not seeing an improvement?
I trust God. Sometimes I have so many fear. I don’t know what to do. Tough questions.
Solid answers, discover a trust that is unshakable. Receive your copy of unshakeable trust today.
Unshakeable trust new from Joyce Meyer. Use the information on your screen or go to Joyce Meyer dot org.
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I’m gonna make a statement and I want you to remember this until you can be happy for somebody who got what you wanted.
You’re never going to get yours.
I wanna ask a question.
Um Is there anybody here who would admit that you ever have problems with jealousy?
And I’ll ask again.
So the people who wouldn’t put your hand up the first time will put it up this time.
The title of my message tonight is what do you do when God doesn’t pick you?
Hm. I heard somebody grown down here in the front.
I don’t know if this ever happened to you.
But when I was in grade school, they probably do things a little different now.
But when I was in grade school, I can remember the way that we played softball at Recess where they would take everybody that was gonna play and you’d stand over here and then they would pick two captains and then the captains would take turns picking who they wanted on their team.
And the worst nightmare in the world was to be the one that was left standing last that didn’t get picked.
I’ll tell you what, every insecurity that anybody ever had came out at that moment.
I think that was a foolish way to do it.
It could have been very traumatic for some people.
But, you know, we don’t all get picked for everything, obviously and we don’t all get picked for what we think we would like to do and sometimes God tests us and he doesn’t pick us.
At least not at that time just to see how we will respond and see if we can be a blessing to whoever was picked in the Bible.
We have an interesting analogy, I think between Noah and Abraham, Noah, of course, built the Ark and he was made fun of, nobody had ever seen rain.
What in the world does he think he’s doing?
I, I don’t know how long it took him to do it, but I can imagine that he went through a lot while he was trying to obey God.
And at the end, God really blessed him and he, he made a covenant with him and he said, it’ll never, I’ll never flood the earth again.
And he sealed that covenant with a rainbow and, you know, rainbows are beautiful.
How many, if you like to see a rainbow after a hard rain?
And so I’m sure that after all that Noah had gone through that, he needed a rainbow day.
How many of you could use a rainbow day right now in your lives?
Well, then we have another man who comes along in the Bible named Abraham.
And he also went through a lot.
God told him to take everything that he had, leave everybody that he knew and go to a place that I will show you who wouldn’t even tell him where he was going to go.
And he traveled around from place to place and wandered around.
And God also came to make a covenant with him.
And he said, told him all the things that, that he would do.
He said, um in Genesis 12, 1 through three, the Lord said to Abraham, go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land that I will show you.
I will make you a great nation. I will bless you.
I will make your name great and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you.
I will curse and all people on the earth will be blessed through you.
Now, he kept telling him what he would do, but as of yet, he hadn’t done anything.
And then he told Abraham that he was making this covenant with him and he said the thing that you have to do now to seal this covenant is circumcise.
All the males in your family, all the males that work for you.
So what happens if you need a rainbow and you get a circumcision instead, I, I, I don’t imagine that he was too popular with the guys right then.
And a circumcision is the cutting back of the flesh.
And so many times we would love to have a rainbow.
We’d love to have something that feels good. We’d love to be the one that’s picked.
We’d love to get the promotion. We’d love to be the one that’s asked to be the worship leader.
We would love to be the one that gets the new house or the new car.
And instead we get something that deals with our flesh and causes us to have to grow more in God.
Now, if Abram had any written information and he could have read about Noah.
I wonder how he felt when he got his circumcision and he read about Noah’s Rainbow.
I wonder if he thought, oh, that’s so nice.
I’m going to pray for him to be blessed more. I rather doubt that, don’t you?
God has different things for different people.
And what we need to learn how to do is be happy for those that are blessed the way God blesses them and be content to believe that what God gives us is what we need at the time that we get it.
You know, I remember one time I certainly needed a rainbow day.
I was at a place in my life where I was believing God for ministry and I had quit my full time job to study for this ministry that I thought I was gonna have some day.
You know, I was still in that place where Abraham was. I will do this, I will do this.
I will do this. I will do this.
And I had waited and waited and waited and nothing much was happening.
And I thought surely if I quit this job, this full time job that God would just pour out his blessings and we’d have more and more.
But instead, for six long years, we had to believe God for every single thing that we needed.
I did bought all my kids clothes at garage sales and bought their shoes at garage sales.
And I mean, I had a good job making good money.
And then all of a sudden, we were $40 short every month of being able to pay our bills and we had to have a $40 a month miracle just to be able to get by.
And that didn’t include having anything extra, if anything extra came along and that was an extra burden.
And so I, I really needed God to do something for me.
I desperately was at a place where I needed one of those Rainbow days and my pastor happened to stop by the house and he was a young man in ministry.
He was actually 10 years younger than I was and he was getting started in ministry and taking speaking engagement and things as well as pastor in the church.
And he had just come back from a conference that he had done.
And he was so excited and he told me about the offering that they gave him and, and he told me about how this man came up to him and said, I want to partner with you for $200 a month.
And he told me something else good that happened.
And I don’t know if I looked like I was gonna faint or what.
But he, he looked at me and he said, is it all right that I’m telling you this?
And I said, oh, yeah, praise the Lord. I am so happy for you. That’s, that’s just awesome.
And I’m telling you, I couldn’t wait till he got out of my house.
So I could have go have a, a fit somewhere and he left and I went and threw myself across my daughter’s bed and I cried and I cried and I cried and I cried and I cried, but I made a decision that day.
I said, you know, Lord, if nothing ever happens for us financially, we will always tithe and give our offerings from now until the time you bring us home.
And you know what?
From this day until that God has prospered us a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more and a little bit more.
But, you know, something, sometimes there’s a time to give your testimony and sometimes there’s a time to keep your mouth shut and we need to be sensitive to what other people are going through.
And not necessarily, you know, like if they’ve obviously got the flu and they’re coughing and hacking and, you know, that’s not the time to tell them how that almost came on you last week, but you prayed and got healed.
You know, that’s the time to just have some compassion and be, be kind to them because if you’re having a rainbow and they’re having a circumcision, it’s not very much fun.
Amen. Jealousy. The Bible says rots the bones.
It’s a terrible thing.
I was thinking a couple of days ago, you know, there’s enough pain in the world and we all have, each one of us has enough pain of our own, whether it’s physical pain or emotional pain from things you’ve been through in the past or things you’re going through now, financial burdens that you’re going through that the devil tries to bring enough stuff against us that we don’t need to help him by doing things to make ourselves miserable.
Now, I don’t want you to miss this.
I’m gonna tell you three things that we do where we make ourselves miserable.
Number one, worry, worry is totally and completely useless.
It’s like rocking in a rocking chair all day. It keeps you busy but you get nowhere.
It doesn’t solve your problems. It doesn’t move the hand of God.
All it does is torment you. The second thing is unforgiveness.
So many people in the church are harboring unforgiveness toward other people.
It’s absolutely astounding how many people come to church mad and sometimes coming to church mad at the person you’re coming to church with.
Amen. It’s the biggest open door that Satan has into the lives of Christians.
And the thing you got to realize is when God tells us to forgive other people, he’s not doing, doing it for them.
He’s doing it for us because when you hold unforgiveness against someone, it doesn’t hurt them.
They can be out having a good time and don’t even care that you’re upset.
But when you forgive you do yourself a favor now, that’s not what I’m teaching on tonight.
But I just want to encourage you if any one of you is holding unforgiveness against anyone, for anything, anyone, for anything, maybe what they did to you was unjust and unfair that God can bring justice to you and he can give you a double reward for your farmer trouble.
God is a God of justice, but you have to remember that he’s not going to do that unless you forgive them and let go of whatever it is you’re holding against them.
And so I just pray if you’re holding anything against anybody that you’ll make that decision to leave it, let it go drop it and don’t take it out of here with you.
And the third thing that came to my mind was this nonsense about jealousy.
What if you were a pastor here tonight?
And you’ve pastored a church for, I don’t know, 20 years and you have 200 people and the new guy comes to town and opens up a church a mile down the street from you and after four months, he’s got 1000 people strong.
Did you reach out to him in friendship?
You maybe give him an offering to help buy his new sound system or do you have little nasty things to say about him?
It’s amazing the things that people find wrong with you when you’re succeeding.
I said it’s amazing the things that people find wrong with you when you’re succeeding.
I mean, I know people, young, young men that are coming up in ministry and young women and God’s blessing their ministries and they’re doing so good.
And you know, some of the folks that have been around for a while, they just got to find something wrong with them, gotta find something wrong and it’s nothing but jealousy and it’s one of the worst things that we can do.
I’m gonna make a statement and I want you to remember this until you can be happy for somebody who got what you wanted.
You’re never going to get yours. Yeah.
That’s your mother’s day gift.
Let me say it again until you can be happy for somebody who got what you wanted.
You’re never going to get yours. Amen.
I tell this story often, but I’ll never forget back and I’ll call them my stupid days.
You know, I was a believer but didn’t have a whole lot of sense yet didn’t even know how to pray for the things I really needed.
I just prayed for stuff that I wanted.
And back then a lot of ladies wore fur coats and it was almost kind of like a status symbol if you had a fur coat.
And um, so I was believing God for a fur coat.
And I mean, I had, I wanted a full length black mink coat and I was praying and asking God to give me this coat and I had a neighbor that I loved with the love of the Lord, but I didn’t like her much.
Come on to any of you have any people like that in your life.
You, you, you love them with the love of the Lord in church on Sunday when your pastor makes you.
I love you with the love of the Lord still trying to figure out what that is.
But one day my doorbell rang and she said, you are not gonna believe what God gave me.
And she’s holding this giant box and she flipped the lid off and it was my fur coat.
And I swear, I honestly thought the angel brought it to the wrong house.
I thought there is no way that God gave her that coat because I am a lot more spiritual than she is.
I pray.
I fast and she just runs around has fun.
Gives $2 a week and there is no way.
Well, you see, I needed a circumcision and by the way, the Bible still talks about circumcision in the New Testament is just the circumcision of the heart.
And I had a wrong, hard attitude. My attitude needed to be changed.
First of all, I wasn’t even for pray.
I mean, I had so many desperate needs just in my attitude alone.
The last thing I needed to be praying for was a fur coat.
And so what did God do?
He gave it to somebody that he knew it was going to irritate me if he gave it to her.
And, but I, I did the Christian thing. Oh, praise the Lord. Thank you Jesus.
That’s so good. And inside, I’m thinking God, if you don’t get her out of my house, I am gonna have a screaming fit right now.
Well, she left and I tell you what the stuff that came out of me was ugly.
I know what I’m talking about and God did that to bring out of me things that were in me that were really preventing me from being blessed.
But I didn’t even know they were in there and, you know, sometimes we can have stuff in our life and stuff in our attitude that we don’t even really know is there until something happens that forces us to have to take a look at ourselves.
You know, most of the time we think that any problem we have is somebody else’s fault.
But you know what I think about 90% of our problems are just a bad attitude and I was jealous of her, just plain and simple, jealous and I was judgmental toward her because I felt like I was more spiritual than she was.
And that was really my big problem. I thought I was better than she was.
I don’t suppose any of you have a problem like that.
Yes. What about when you’ve written a book?
And your book sells four copies, Pastor Mike Mike and Penny who travel with us.
He, he wrote a book a couple of years ago and he offered on Amazon and he told me few months ago he said I got my royalty check and it was what, how much $6.79 cents and, and then you have Robert Morris sitting a few seats down here and I’ll tell you what pastor Mike is one of the most faithful men I have ever seen in my life.
I mean, he is just wonderful. He’s our staff pastor and he, he knows everybody in the building by name.
He knows their kids’ names. I mean, he visits everybody in the hospital. He is just a wonderful, wonderful blessing.
And you would think in the natural if anybody would be blessed, you know, through the writing of that book, it would be Him.
But no, that’s not what God chose for him. Robert got the rainbow.
But you know what?
They even still like each other. And that’s the good news.
What about your friend gets the promotion at work that you want one position, open, two people want the same position.
You can’t both get it. Both are praying.
We have to leave it up to God.
You know, when Judas messed up and they needed to elect a new 12th Apostle, there were two men that were being considered Mathias and Barnabus and Barnabus didn’t get picked.
Mattias did. And it’s interesting you never hear another thing about that man in the Bible.
Not one other thing but Barnabus got passed over and you know what he did.
He went home, he went to his hometown, he sold every single thing that he had and he brought all the money back and he laid it at the Apostle’s feet, including Mathias to be used in the kingdom of God.
Now, that’s a man with character that God’s going to use.
He got passed over. He didn’t get picked, but he took everything that he had and blessed the man who did get picked.
Now, what if you have a friend who loses 30 lb and you know, every time somebody loses weight, we wanna know how they did it.
And I actually had this happen one time.
The girl said, you know, I’ve been drinking a gallon of water a day and walking 30 minutes every morning.
And I thought, well, first of all, if I drank a gallon of water a day, I would drown.
But so what if, what if you have a friend that just says, well, you know, I’ve just been walking 30 minutes a day and drinking a lot of water and all this waste just falling off her and you’ve been starving yourself for two months and you’ve lost £2. Oh, it’s so hard not to be jealous of these little skinny people that can eat everything they get their hands on and your metabolism is in a coma.
You like, forget a slow metabolism. Mine is in a coma.
It doesn’t even work anymore. Come on. You know what I’m talking about?
How do I trust God when I’ve been disappointed over and over and over?
How can I have faith in God when I’m not seeing an improvement. I trust God.
Sometimes I have so many fear. I don’t know what to do.
Tough questions, solid answers, discover a trust that is unshakable. Receive your copy of unshakeable trust today.
Unshakeable trust from Joyce Meyer. Use the information on your screen or go to Joyce Meyer dot org.
People always, always, always ask me, well, what’s your vision now?
You know, and I think that I’m one of the blessed people that can say, I’m actually, I am actually doing what God put in my heart.
The vision that he gave me is being fulfilled every single day.
And I really just want to help more and more people.
I, I really want people to, I always say I want Jesus to be famous, not that he’s not, but I want to do my part to make him more famous.
And it’s just so important that we represent him right out in the world and to teach people how to do that at the 2023 Love Life Women’s Conference.
I’ll teach you how to trust God and find calm in the chaos, featuring Joyce and her guests, Bishop T D Jenks, Lisa Vere Natalie Grant and Danny go October 19th through the 21st in San Antonio, Texas register today at Joyce Meyer dot org.
Did you know that you can be completely honest with God?
David in the Bible? Certainly was he poured out his questions and pain and discovered how deeply God loved him through it all you can too.
That’s why I’m so excited about this devotional daily devotions from Psalms.
As you take time to know God in a deeper way, you will find comfort and peace every single day daily devotions from Psalms.
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