Who You Are In Christ

Joyce: Being in ministry for many years when I started out, I was a lot more insecure than I am now and I didn’t have that level of confidence that we all really need. And over the years God taught me, “if you don’t maintain a high level of confidence when you’re in the pulpit, you will give the meeting to the devil.” the minute that I would look at faces that didn’t seem happy, see people looking at their watch, or maybe if a couple of people over here would leave before the meeting was over, I would automatically assume that there was something wrong with me. That’s not always the case. Just because somebody is not making the right face at you or giving you the compliment you feel like you need or paying attention to you, the fact is sometimes people don’t even see you. They’re not paying attention to you because you’re not worth paying attention to; they honestly just have their mind off somewhere else and aren’t even seeing you but I would let all that affect me. We let how people act with us and the attention they pay to us, what they say, the faces they make, the compliments they don’t give — we let all that stuff affect our level of confidence until we learn better and really, when we do that, the devil is in control because it doesn’t take him very much effort to find somebody who will say something to you to put you down.

Mark: if you’re going to maintain that confidence, think of David in one of the favorite scriptures again, 1 Samuel 30:6, when David’s best friends were fixin’ to kill him. They were going to stone him! Before, he was their big hero and now they’re saying: you’re worthless. We’re gonna kill you. It says that David encouraged himself in the lord. Think about that! How did he do that? He must have told himself, “I’m gonna have to take you aside and talk to you right now. I’m gonna take you in the back.” and he’d look in the mirror and say, “I want to talk to you right now!” he encouraged himself because even when other people turn on you, if you turn on yourself you’re done but if you’ll just turn and encourage yourself… How do you do that? I believe David did it with the same psalm scriptures. He would take the psalms out and say, “the lord is my strength. The lord is my shepherd. O God, you are my God!” and then psalm 139 is phenomenal!  Can you imagine David saying, “I want to talk to you right now. The lord has beset you behind and before, laid his hand upon you. When you were in your mother’s womb, he framed you and he fit you and made your days. You are fearfully and wonderfully made!” that almost sounds crazy to religious people that you would dare talk to yourself that way but yet God says: this is the way you were made. I created you.  I didn’t make you to fail. Though the enemy may come against you, if you’ll dare to believe God, to believe who you are in Christ and have confidence that the same God that started this work in you, he will finish it, and if you go down and you fail, get right back up and say, “I still believe God.”

I like what Paul said in acts 27 in the middle of that storm: everybody cheer up. I believe God.  It shall be even as he told me. It doesn’t look like it right now but the story’s not over yet.  Everybody cheer up.

Joyce Meyer: you’re going to have to do some things you don’t want to do in life. One girl said: I finally got over being a people pleaser years ago but now I’ve become the kind of person who is like.