When God Doesn’t Pick You – Part 2

God wants you to be free of all insecurity. On this episode of Enjoying Everyday Life, Joyce Meyer shares stories from Scripture to help you more fully appreciate God’s plan for your life.
“Start believing the Word of God over our feelings. The truth always overrides our feelings. Find the truth in the scriptures.”
― 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.
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So if you stop looking at what you don’t have and what somebody else has that you wish you had and you let God show you what you do have, then you can begin to function in and enjoy what you do have instead of being jealous of what you don’t have.
Amen. You know, I this is just my own opinion, but I believe that I believe Peter was probably jealous of John because I know Peter’s personality and you know, it’s recorded in the Bible at least seven times.
John said, I’m the disciple whom Jesus loved.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I would have had a real hard time with that.
Yes, I’m the disciple that Jesus loved.
Now, Mike and I, Mike, Pastor Shepherd and I were talking about this coming here and probably he just had a great revelation on how much God loved him and he wasn’t trying to be a smart eic.
But nonetheless, if you got, if you had any kind of insecurity or jealousy in you at all, that was going to be irksome.
I’m the disciple whom Jesus loves.
Well, in John 21, beginning in verse 14, most of you will recognize this Jesus said to Peter Peter.
Do you love me? Yes, Lord. You know that I love you well, feed my sheep second time, Peter.
Do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know that I love you well, feed my lambs.
Third time he asked Peter Peter, do you love me by now?
It’s beginning to bother Peter that Jesus keeps asking him the same thing over and over.
And he said, yes Lord, you know that I love you well, feed my sheep.
Well, this is kind of just a little side note to that message.
But the bottom line of that whole thing is well, if you really love me, then go help somebody, let me just throw this out for free.
Has nothing to do with my message tonight.
But let me just throw this out for free and you can tuck it in your pocket and take it home with you.
What are you doing to help somebody else?
It’s just a little bit too quiet.
Every one of us should be helping other people.
There’s no way we can be selfish and happy and then was just not possible.
So he said, well, if you love me then help somebody, then he goes on to tell Peter, he said, very truly.
I tell you when you were younger, you dressed yourself and you went about wherever you wanted to go.
And I, I think he meant when you were a younger Christian, when we’re baby Christians, we kind of just do our own thing.
God puts up with it and he’s still got a lot of work to do in our life.
But he says, when you grow older or let’s just say he means when you mature more, another will lead you and take you places where you do not wish to go.
And he said, he said this to Peter to indicate to him by what kind of death he would die in order to glorify the Lord.
And we know that Peter was crucified upside down on a cross.
When they told him he was going to be crucified.
He asked to be crucified upside down because he didn’t want to be crucified like his Lord was, he thought he was not good enough for that.
But here’s the part that I love, OK. It’s just a, do you love me?
Do you love me. Do you love me? Now?
There’s going to be some harder things happen in your life and this is the kind of death you’re going to die to glorify me.
And, and what does Peter say to that?
Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved?
Well, of course, he was, there was following them.
This was the one who had leaned back against Jesus at the supper and had said, Lord, who is going to betray you?
And when Peter saw him, he asked Lord, what about Him?
You know, these were just people just like we are.
I mean, they had arguments, they’re walking down the road with Jesus arguing about which of them is the greatest.
What about this man? What’s gonna happen to him?
Now, listen, Jesus answered.
If I want him to remain alive until I come back, what is that to you?
In other words, if I could just put it plainly because I only have nine minutes left.
What God decides to do with other people is absolutely none of our business.
I mean, it just really, truly is none of our business.
What we need to do is deal with our own stuff and trust God that He knows what he’s doing.
And you know, I don’t know why God chose this message for me to preach here tonight.
I’ve got thousands of messages I could pull out and preach.
But I, I trust God that whatever message He gives me wherever I go.
It’s the message I’m supposed to bring for that particular place.
And I really do believe not everybody here, of course, but some people have an issue with this and there may even be some things stuck in you that have been stuck there for a long, long time and tonight can be your night of freedom.
And maybe you’ve been wondering where your blessings are.
Well, if you’re jealous of somebody else that’s got to go before the blessings can pour in.
You remember Rachel and Leah in the Bible? Very interesting story.
two sisters, Jacob comes along and he lays eyes on Rachel and the Bible says that she had a lovely figure and was beautiful and that he wanted to marry her.
And the Bible says of Leah, this is in Genesis 29, 16 Leah was the older sister and according to their custom, the older sister always got married first.
So by rights, Leah should have gotten married first, but he wanted Rachel and it says Leah had weak eyes.
I think that’s a nice way of saying she was the ugly sister.
Well, I could be nicer and say she was unattractive, but let’s just cut to the chase.
Maybe there’s somebody here tonight and you felt like the ugly sister in the family.
Maybe there’s a man here and you had a brother that was an all star in every sport and you couldn’t hardly bounce the ball and catch it.
Or maybe you had a sibling that was extremely smart and always got great grades and you struggled and had a hard time and I just wonder how many people are in here or watching online or in one of the other campuses and, and you have somebody in your own family, a sibling that you haven’t been able to love just because they had something you didn’t have and you were jealous of them.
And yes, I’m going to have an altar call. So get ready.
He said, well, I’ll just repent to the Lord when I get home.
Now, the Bible says, confess your faults to one another that you may be healed and restored.
There’s nothing better for us and to stand up in front of everybody else and say, yes, I have a problem with this and I’m confessing it.
Something breaks off of you when you do that a man.
And I believe that however many hundreds of thousands of people this message goes to online and in all these campuses and I mean, they gave me a pretty big number.
Surely there’s gonna be some repenting going on some tonight tonight and some restoration of some relationships in families and maybe even in churches.
Oh, yes, there’s jealousy in churches.
Well, Jacob worked seven years to get Rachel and lab and his uncle got him drunk and he woke up the next morning and had Leah with her weak eyes next to him and I’m sure he got miffed about that.
But you know what, he probably forgot, he probably forgot all the stuff that he did to Esau because what goes around comes around and a lot of times when something happens to us, we don’t understand why it’s happening to us, but we forget that we did the same thing to somebody else way back over here somewhere.
Amen. And so then he had to work another seven years and he finally got Rachel.
But you know, the thing that I find really interesting about that story is Rachel could not conceive Children and Leah had child after child, after child.
Ok. Well, Leah had, she wasn’t, maybe it’s pretty and it didn’t say anything about her having a lovely figure, but she had Children, which was very important in those days, Rachel was beautiful and had a lovely figure, but she was unable to have Children for a long, long time.
Eventually she finally did. And through studying that story, God taught me, nobody gets everything but everybody gets something.
So, so if you stop looking at what you don’t have and what somebody else has that you wish you had and you let God show you what you do have, then you can begin to function in and enjoy what you do have instead of being jealous of what you don’t have.
Amen. Can anybody say amen?
Now, let me just ask if you’re here tonight and you have, have had because tonight you’re gonna leave it a problem in this area.
There’s somebody in your family, a friend, somebody, you work with somebody in church that you’ve got this nasty jealousy stuck inside of you and you wanna leave it and get rid of it.
I wanna pray for you and every campus wherever you’re at, you’re watching from home, you can join us.
I’m gonna ask you to be bold and just stand up right now so I can pray for you.
Thank you. Thank you.
The best way to get set free is to be honest.
Well, we got all good people in the balcony.
I can’t see hardly any of you standing there. Oh, there you are all right.
We’re going to pray. Father. I pray in jesus’ name that you would break this bondage of jealousy off of these people and that they would go free from this place tonight and be able to bless those who have what they want, trusting that whatever is right for them, you will give it to them at the exact right time.
Help them see the gifts they have and enjoy them.
And if they need to go and make peace with somebody, I especially feel like there’s some siblings that they need to go and just make peace with and maybe even repent to them for being jealous of them.
So we can have a healing in the body of Christ and you’re strong anointing back and be a witness to the world.
I thank you Father for breaking these bondage and for setting these people free in Jesus name. Amen. Amen.
God bless you. Stay tuned for a candid conversation with Joyce.
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.
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It confirms for me, God’s at work, Joyce today on our candid conversation, we’re going to talk about something that everybody deals with.
We all want to fit in.
We want to feel like um we belong somewhere, but we also don’t always like to feel like we stick out.
We don’t like to be different and we all have things that our life that make us different and not always fit in and sometimes stick out.
So it’s a hard thing for people. Do you have suggestions for us? How important is it?
How much of a priority should we make it to try to fit in?
Well, I think that first of all, if you just be yourself, you do fit in because no one of us by ourself has everything that’s needed.
You know, that’s interesting. Like, you know, in a marriage, you know, you usually end up marrying somebody that’s just not like you at all.
And at first you think God, what in the world have I done?
But God very often puts you with somebody that’s not like you because they have things you don’t, you have things that they don’t like the way you say that.
Yeah. What have I done? What have I done?
And, you know, you make the mistake of trying to change the person you’re married to and then you find out that’s not gonna work.
And so when I think about like the ministry here and how in the very beginning it was just Dave and I, and a handful of people and, and we did everything but in order for the ministry to grow, we had to stop trying to do everything and we had to add more people and more people and more people.
And now we have almost 500 employees here.
And my gosh, everybody is so helpful and every person is beneficial and every person has their part and some people are more behind the scenes and maybe they don’t get as much attention as they should.
But the part that they’re doing, everybody is important and we all have different gifts and talents and in case nobody’s noticed, God really likes variety.
I mean, if you take a walk, one of the things that makes my neighborhood pretty when I walk in it is the fact that everybody has different things in their yard.
Some people don’t have any flowers. Some people have a lot of flowers.
Some people have one color mulch, some people have another color mulch.
There’s, uh, uh, a golf course across the street from my house naturally with, you know, living with Dave and uh, even weeds are not all the same, you know, trees are different, but it wouldn’t be a pretty walk if everything was the same.
But sometimes we feel like a weed and we want to be a flower and you’re right, you notice the beauty in those wild flowers in the weeds.
And so there is something that God has in mind for all of us. Yeah, you can’t.
Um, I remember seeing a beautiful flower one day growing in between two rocks and it was just way down in there.
And I thought now, Lord, why did you put something that pretty there where nobody would see it?
And, and the thing that he put in my heart is I see it.
And so maybe some things God has made just for his own pleasure, for him to see them.
And I mean, I always felt like I was so different than other women and my voice was different and I didn’t like that and I didn’t like my personality.
I felt like it was too aggressive and this and that.
And so something else, of course, now I realize that God created me the way I am for exactly what he was gonna call me to do, even my voice.
You know, I honestly think if I had a sweet, little sweet voice, I think it would be harder for men to listen to me.
And we have a large number of men that really enjoy our ministry.
And so God never intended all of us to be alike and we keep trying to be alike.
Be like thinking that’s how we’ll fit in.
But not only do we try to be like other people, other people pressure us to be like them.
That’s very true. It’s not always a desire we put on ourselves in the beginning.
It grows in us because we get that pressure from other people as well.
Or if you are different, even from the time you’re little. But what’s wrong with you?
Well, why are you doing that? Well, why don’t you do this?
And kids are hard, kids can be mean and parents can be very unwise.
Well, why can’t you be like your sister? And why?
You know, why can’t you be like your brother and well, your sister can do this.
Why can’t you do it? And you should never compare one of your Children to another one.
You can’t, you, you cannot do if anything you should encourage them.
You know, you’re, you’re not like them because you’re not supposed to be like them, you’re supposed to be yourself.
And so I think if people can realize that they should not try to be like somebody else to fit in because God is never going to help you be somebody else.
I mean, I’ve a lot of statements I use and I’ve read, you know, be yourself.
Everybody else has already taken. You know, I like to say, you know, you gotta be yourself and like yourself because everywhere you go there you are.
So if you don’t like yourself, you never get away from yourself and you’re just gonna, you know how it is to go visit a relative that you don’t like, for even 10 minutes.
Well, if you don’t like yourself and you’re living with yourself, you’re gonna be miserable all the time.
And I really believe that a lot of people’s problems, other problems that they have are created because they don’t like who they are.
And so it’s very important to accept yourself.
God created you in your mother’s womb says carefully intricately with his own hand.
I love the fact that it says carefully and intricately.
It’s not like he just threw something together and, and you’re not a mistake. God doesn’t make mistakes.
There’s nothing about you. That’s a mistake.
You’re imperfect, I’m imperfect, but even that God did so we would need him. Yeah.
What’s very concerning also are some of the things that we do to try to fit in.
We um try to act differently.
We try to hide, maybe who we really feel like God wants us to be.
Um We do things that maybe aren’t right or we, we just want to be loved.
We want people to accept us.
And there, there are some great extents that people will go to, to fit into this group or to have this particular friend or not to feel like an outsider.
There’s so much phones in the world today and I really feel like that it’s time for people to make a decision that they’re going to be authentic.
They’re not gonna put on airs, they’re not gonna pretend to be something they’re not, you know, what, what’s the problem with me saying to you?
You know, ginger, I’m just not very good at that, you know, maybe you asked me to do something.
I said, you know, I’m just, I’m just not very good at that.
I don’t have, I don’t have to try to be good at it because you want me to be good at it.
I’m much better off to say it’s just, just not me.
And I’ve told you that sometimes it’s just like, that’s just not me. I’m not, I’m not good at that.
And there’s always somebody else who is, that’s what you were saying.
That’s how we all fit together and bring those different things.
But you don’t, I, I think that when you take, when you, when you go to God, when you come into a relationship with God, this is something he’s taught me, bring me everything you are and everything you’re not.
So we don’t just offer to God the good parts of us.
We give him what we’re not too because God can work through that if we give that to God.
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s one of those things where sometimes we think even God’s not going to want this part of us because it’s not so great and he is right there wanting to help us through some of those things.
Well, you said that everybody wants to be loved and everybody wants to be accepted and the thing we have to realize is you’re never going to get that from the world, not from everybody.
There’s a statistic. There we go.
Statistics again that say 10% of people will not like you no matter what you do.
So if 10% of people are not gonna like me, no matter what I do, then I might as well follow my heart and do what I feel like God’s showing me to do instead of trying to be phony so I can fit in with, with one or two people.
This statistic is really freeing when you think about it.
And so, you know, people are mean, they judge you, they criticize you, but that doesn’t make them right?
Just because somebody is critical of you doesn’t make them right.
And a lot of times people criticize you because they’re jealous. Jealousy is a, a big problem.
And you know, I’ve never had anybody get jealous of me.
If they have what I have, people only get jealous if they don’t have what you have.
But the point is is everybody wants acceptance and everybody wants love and there’s one place where everybody can get it.
And that’s from God. The Bible says that we are made acceptable in the beloved and that God loves us, loves us, loves us, loves us all over the Bible.
It talks about how much God loves us. His love is everlasting.
It will, it will never end, it will never stop.
So we are created the way we are for a purpose and where we need to fit in, we will fit in.
That’s God will always accept us with loving arms.
So relax, just take a big breath, relax and just be who you are.
Yeah, I love that. Thank you very much. You’re welcome.
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