Abraham laughed the laugh of faith. When God came to him and told him he was going to have a son, Abraham backed off and laughed, saying, “Glory! I believe it.” Now Sarah laughed the laugh of doubt and unbelief, and God corrected her, but He didn’t jump onto Abraham. He didn’t call Abraham down for laughing because there is a laugh of faith.
When the devil comes against you and what he is trying to do seems so foolish and so ridiculous, and you know your God so well that it doesn’t scare you, you laugh in faith. You know that God loves you, and He has it covered.
So as I was laughing about my transmission, God spoke something to my heart in a still, small voice, but it was very powerful. He said to me three times, “If you operate like this with Me, Joyce, I’ll never disappoint you.” It was like it just came through the atmosphere of my house. “I’ll never disappoint you. I’ll never disappoint you.”
If you will lean on God and let God love you and you love Him, you can forget all the work of trying to operate in faith. You just let God love you, and you love Him, and He will bring it to pass. The love of God will rise up inside of you and cast out all the fear.
God loves you!
6
Love Reaches Out
“And this command (charge, order, injunction) we have from Him: that he who loves God shall love his brother [believer] also.”
1 John 4:21
You are God’s special child. He told you that in Deuteronomy 7:6. If you will start to act that way, it will begin to change the world. You will go into the supermarket with a smile on your face and grab your grocery cart and say, “Everything that I touch is blessed. Hallelujah! They’re blessed to have me in this store today. Glory!” Just go whistling through the store, singing, being special wherever you go.
When we begin to know how special we are and start acting like God loves us, we can win the world for Jesus. Love will spread like wildfire. But it is not going to do any good to go around saying you are a Christian, then growling at everyone. You say, “I’m a Christian – I’m a Christian,” but when a car cuts in front of you, you say, “Come on, dummy, get out of my way. Don’t you know I’ve got to get to church? I’m going to be late for the meeting, you nut.”
That’s the kind of stuff we do sometimes. Are you ready to grab hold of victory? Just reach out there in the spirit, and grab hold of victory and say, “Devil, you have led me around with lies and fear long enough. I am a special person, and I am going to have victory in the name of Jesus because God loves me, devil, and there is nothing you can do about it!”
God’s love inside of you will set you free from fear, and you will not be afraid to reach out to others with love. God wants you to believe it when He says He will do greater works through you because Jesus went to His Father. Do you really believe God will use you? God will give you what you believe Him for. You can’t be afraid to step out.
I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many times I have stood on the edge of a faith cliff, right on the edge of doing something scary, and God said, “Come on, Joyce, come on. I’ll do great things through you. Come on.” And I just jumped right out in the middle of it, and God has never let me down one time.
Do you know why I don’t have to worry about stepping out and being a failure? Because I know God loves me. He loves me, and He knows I love Him, and through His grace I have laid down my life for Him. If you have done that, and you love God, and He loves you, then nothing in all creation can be a problem to you that can’t be overcome.
“Who shall ever separate us from Christ’s love? Shall suffering and affliction and tribulation? Or calamity and distress? Or persecution or hunger or destitution or peril or sword?
“Even as it is written, For Thy sake we are put to death all the day long; we are regarded and counted as sheep for the slaughter.
“Yet amid all these things we are more than conquerors and gain a surpassing victory through Him Who loved us.
“For I am persuaded beyond doubt (am sure) that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things impending and threatening, nor things to come, nor powers,
“Nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Romans 8:35-39
You may have no conception of how much God wants you to be free. God hurts when you are unhappy. Sometimes you get up and you are in a bad mood all day. Do you know the kind of day I am talking about? You are kicking the cat, yelling at the kids, hating the neighbors, and you have this old grumpy, grouchy look on your face. “All I ever do is work, work, work, and nobody appreciates it.”
I know how you act because I have done that, too. When the kids come home, you think, Why don’t you stay at school fourteen hours a day instead of seven?”
Do you know that hurts God? I am not trying to make you feel bad. I am trying to get you to realize that if you can believe God loves you, you are going to begin to respond to that love, then that love will fill you up and start pouring out all over everybody else. You will be free to be a sweetheart, flowing in the fruit of kindness.
If you will grab hold of the fact that God loves you, your healing will come forth, your prosperity will come forth and your needs will be met. Why? You will just start to relax.
The main reason God can’t give us most of the things He wants to give us is that we are so busy trying to get them that He can’t catch us long enough to put them on us. God wants you to rest in Him and just love Him. He wants you to let Him love you and just receive.
The devil can’t stop the flow if you are a lover because if you are a lover, you are going to be a giver. You can’t love and not give.
The last part of the Scripture in Deuteronomy 7:6 AMP says, “…God has chosen you to be a special people.” God has called you. Right now your main job might be in your home with your family, but God has called you. If you really want to be used by God, you can be used by God. But you have to get this foundation laid first. You have to know that God loves you.
Don’t expend all of your spiritual energy concentrating on yourself and getting your needs met. Tell God what you want simply and quickly then develop your faith to meet the needs of other people. Jesus would pray and seek the face of His Father in order to get built up to go out and meet the needs of all those people who went to his faith seminars.
Then He would preach the Word to them, lay hands on them, and they would receive miracles. He was not sitting off in the corner somewhere all the time trying to believe God for things that He wanted. You need to tell God what you want, but it just needs to be a matter of fact thing. The main desire of your life, though, should be to meet the needs of other people.
True prosperity, accurately defined, is the ability to use God’s ability to meet every need that comes before you. The love of God will give you the ability to put the needs of others first. Do you think God loves you enough to make you able to reach out and love those who are not too much fun to love – the grouchy, unappreciative ones?
It doesn’t take anything to love somebody who loves you. There is no trick to that. Any old sinner can do that. But when you love the unlovable, you press in and keep loving them, and you keep loving them, and you keep loving them. Then the love of God will change them.
It may take a year. It may take five years. It may take twenty-five years, but it is worth it. How long did Jesus wait for you?
God loves you, and He loves all those people all around you, too. Saved or sinner, He loves them, and He wants to use you as a channel to pour out His love.
Don’t be afraid to step out. God’s love is setting you free from fear and condemnation, and He has given you the ability to love. Be determined to spread God’s love around. Start just being friendly with people. Make it your business to be friendly and be a blessing to people in the Body of Christ.
Ask people over for dinner and have people come and visit you. Shake hands with people, smile. God has something for y
ou to do. He wants to use you in ways that He can’t use any other creature on this earth.
There are people that only you could minister to. Nobody else could reach that person, but you. Ask God to show you ways to reach out with His love, and He will teach you.
God loves you!
7
God’s Love Will Change You
“In this is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation (the atoning sacrifice) for our sins.”
1 John 4:10
God loves us, but I don’t think many of us actually comprehend the love that God loves us with. God has shown me, through the study I have done on this, that if we really knew in our spirits how much God loved us, we would rise up and be a lot different than what we are a lot of the time.
Meditate on God’s love for you. That’s what is going to change you. If you don’t like something about yourself, “knowing that you know” that God loves you is going to change it.
How does it make you feel when you know that somebody loves you? It makes you feel good, right? Do you feel ugly? God told me that some of the people who would be reading this book hate themselves. You hate the things you do, and you have not accepted that you are a new creation – you are constantly fighting the old nature.
As long as you go around feeling badly about yourself all the time, not liking yourself, hating yourself, not realizing how special you are, you are never going to act special. The Bible says, “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he” (Prov. 23:7 AMP). It is all because you have not really grabbed hold of the fact that God loves you. It is a powerful thing to know how much He loves you.
God wants you to get with Him yourself on a daily basis. That’s what will change you. If you don’t put God first, you are putting Him in a position where He can’t do for you what He wants to do. It is the private time you spend with God, just loving Him and letting Him love you, that’s going to cause you to grow up and be strong in your spirit man.
The biggest majority of people are lazy, and they would rather not do that. They would like it much better if somebody would do it for them. Don’t make excuses. Everyone reading this who is not fellow-shipping with God and is being convicted because of what I am writing is going to have the devil coming in right behind that conviction and saying, “But you’ve got all these other things to do.”
I know how it goes – the devil gives you one excuse after another. Get serious with God, and cry out to Him. The Word of God and fellowship with Him will change you. God has made you able. Paul says in Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” In other words, there is nothing in all creation you can’t do through the power of Jesus Christ.
As fast as God points out a problem to you, you ought to rise up in power and victory and knock it off. If you will rise up and receive God’s love for you and refuse to let that dirty, lying devil tell you how rotten and no good you are, you will start acting victoriously.
You may be acting awful now, but you can act differently if you will believe that you are a new creation on the inside. You will never change or act one bit differently until you begin to rise up and say, “Praise God, I’m special. I’m holy. God chose me. He has purified me by the Blood of the Lamb. I’m going to act that way. And I don’t care, devil, how many mistakes I make. God’s big enough to pick me up and cause me to go on. He cleans up my messes!”
What problems can defeat you if you “know that you know” that God loves you? There aren’t any. You will be victorious in them all.
Would you like to be an overcomer? Answer this then – do you want to have something to overcome? That’s the only way you are going to grow up. If you never have any problems and you never have anything to overcome, what are you going to cut your faith teeth on?
Use the problems that come against you as opportunities to grow. Find out what God will do because He loves you! If you will lean on God and let God love you and you love Him, you can forget all the trying to operate in faith and enter into rest.
If you just let God love you and you love Him, then you will go around like some drunk person all the time – drunk in the spirit. That’s when the circumstances in your life will not get to you because you are just going around operating in the love of God.
When I was baptized in the Holy Spirit, for the first three weeks it was like I was drunk with God’s love. People kept saying to me, “What is wrong with you? You are so different. I can’t believe it, Joyce. What has happened to you?” These people came to me three weeks later and said, “What has happened to your life?”
I didn’t have to say one thing to convince them I had changed. They could see it. If you operate in the love of God, you are going to be smiling all the time. You are going to be beautiful. You are going to have energy and strength. You are going to be able to minister to people because you will be so charged up in the Holy Ghost all the time that any need you have is going to be met.
Say to yourself, “God loves me. Hallelujah, God loves me. I’m His special child. God loves me!” Now go ahead – take a big leap of faith and believe it.
God really does love you!
Experience a New Life
If you have never invited Jesus to be your Lord and Savior, I invite you to do so now. You can pray this prayer, and if you are really sincere about it, you will experience a new life in Christ.
Father God, I believe Jesus Christ is Your Son, the Savior of the world. I believe He died on the cross for me, and He bore all of my sins. He went to hell in my place and triumphed over death and the grave. I believe Jesus was resurrected from the dead and is now seated at Your right hand. I need You, Jesus. Forgive my sins, save me, come to live inside me. I want to be born again.
Now believe Jesus is living in your heart. You are forgiven, made righteous and you will go to heaven.
Find a good church that’s teaching God’s Word and begin to grow in Christ. Nothing will change in your life without knowledge of God’s Word. John 8:31-32 AMP says, “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed. And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
I exhort you to take hold of God’s Word, plant it deep in your heart, and according to 2 Corinthians 3:18, as you look into the Word, you will be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ.
Write and let me know you have accepted Jesus, and ask for a free booklet on how to begin your new life in Christ.
With Love,
Joyce
About the Author
Joyce Meyer has been teaching the Word of God since 1976 and in full-time ministry since 1980. As an associate pastor at Life Christian Center in St. Louis, Missouri, she developed, coordinated and taught a weekly meeting known as “Life In The Word.” After more than five years, the Lord brought it to a conclusion, directing her to establish her own ministry and call it “Life In The Word, Inc.”
Joyce’s “Life In The Word” radio and television programs are heard or seen throughout the United States and the world. Her teaching tapes are enjoyed internationally. She travels extensively conducting Life In The Word conferences.
Joyce and her husband, Dave, business administrator at Life In The Word, have been married for over 32 years and are the parents of four children. All four children are married, and along with their spouses, work with Dave and Joyce in the ministry. Joyce and Dave reside in Fenton, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb.
Joyce believes the call on her life is to establish believers in God’s Word. She says, “Jesus died to set the captives free, and far too many Christians have little or no victory in their daily lives.” Finding herself in the same situation many years ago, and having found freedom to live in victory through applying God’s Word, Joyce goes equipped to set captives free and to exchange ashes for beauty. Joyce believes that every person who walks in victory leads many others into victory.
Joyce has taught on emotional healing and related subjects in meetings all over the country,
helping multiplied thousands. She has recorded more than 191 different audiocassette albums and is the author of 34 books to help the Body of Christ on various topics.
Her “Emotional Healing Package” contains over 23 hours of teaching on the subject. Albums included in this package are: “Confidence”; “Beauty for Ashes” (includes a syllabus); “Managing Your Emotions”; “Bitterness, Resentment, and Unforgiveness”; “Root of Rejection”; and a 90-minute Scripture/music tape entitled “Healing the Brokenhearted.”
Joyce’s “Mind Package” features five different audio tape series on the subject of the mind. They include: “Mental Strongholds and Mindsets”; “Wilderness Mentality”; “The Mind of the Flesh”; “The Wandering, Wondering Mind”; and “Mind, Mouth, Moods & Attitudes.” The package also contains Joyce’s powerful 288-page book, Battlefield of the Mind. On the subject of love she has two tape series entitled, “Love Is…” and “Love: The Ultimate Power.”
Write to Joyce Meyer’s office for a resource catalog and further information on how to obtain the tapes you need to bring total healing to your life.
To contact the author write:
Joyce Meyer
Life In The Word, Inc.
P. O. Box 655
Fenton, Missouri 63026
or call:
(636) 349-0303
Internet Address:
www.jmministries.org
Please include your testimony or help