Joyce Meyer - Jealousy, Envy, and Greed - Part 2

I wonder who, in here, this morning, is jealous of somebody else. Maybe you sit out there, and you don't like one of the singers in the worship team and you think, "She ain't got no business up there. She couldn't sing her way out of a paper bag. I've got a lot better voice than she does". None of you? Okay, I must have the wrong church then. Come on, don't tell me jealousy's not in the church, it is. Greed is a very serious offense. Ephesians 5:5-7. "For be sure of this: that no person practicing sexual vice or impurity in thought or in life, or one who is covetous", that means jealous "Who has a lustful desire for the property of others and is greedy for gain, for he in effect is an idolater. Don't let him think he has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God".

Now, I spent a little time on that last sentence yesterday because we like to just slide right over those kind of things and just not talk about 'em. And it's interesting, I looked at several commentaries and not one of them dealt with that sentence. Not one. So, I finally found some information that said, you know, "This doesn't mean that if you're ever jealous that you're not gonna go to heaven". But you see, when somebody has a sin that they're purposely and consistently doing and there's no repentance and there's no making any effort to change it, that's when we need to really be careful.

Now, you know, maybe you believe once saved, always saved. I haven't totally made my mind up yet, so we won't get into that. But I do believe that if a person is truly saved, that you cannot purposely, consistently live in sin because you've got the nature of God in you and that's automatically gonna rise up and fight against those things. But part of what we do as teachers and preachers is just remind people. Paul said, "I never get tired of telling you the same things over and over and over again". And so, you know, what I'm telling you today is not anything that you don't know, but it may very well be something that you haven't thought about in a long, long time. And so, because you haven't thought about it, it slipped in.

And so, I'm just a reminder, here now, to say, "Oops, let's don't accept this one. Let's watch out for this," because satan has so many ways of trying to trap us. I mean, the Bible says, "Watch and pray". And let me tell you, that doesn't mean watch everybody else and pray for those terrible sinners. It means "Watch yourself" because Christ is coming soon. And we wanna stay ready and not just suppose we're gonna have time to get ready when he comes. I wonder how many things in our life would change if we knew that Jesus was coming back tomorrow afternoon at three. Yeah. Well, maybe we should just change them anyway. Amen? I think I'm having more fun than you guys are. I don't know.

Now, verse 6, Ephesians 5 says, "Let no one delude and deceive you with empty excuses and groundless arguments for these sins", we have to stop trying to justify sin. To be honest, no matter how somebody treats you, that does not ever give you the right to treat them the way they treat you, but the Bible tells us the exact opposite, to "Treat people the way we want to be treated". And "God is good to the just and the unjust". Let's just say the Bible, one of the commandments is, "You shall honor your father and mother, the first one with a promise that it may go well with you and you may live long in the earth".

So, let's just say you have elderly parents, and they weren't good to you at all growing up. Matter of fact, maybe they abused you, or you know, did a lot of other things that really hurt you. And so, now, they're older and you just ignore 'em because after all, "They don't deserve. They don't deserve. They don't deserve". Well, you know what? That's one of those sins that we think are acceptable because we justify it, but it's not. My dad sexually abused me, and my mother knew it and didn't do anything about it. So, she basically abandoned me to it out of fear.

And let me tell you, I have spent my life dealing with stuff that he did to me. But when they got older, God asked me, one morning, when I was praying, he said, "I want you to move your parents closer to where you live. Buy them a little house, put 'em in it and take care of 'em until they die". Well, I said, "I rebuke you, satan". I mean, I did. I thought "There is no way that God would ask me to do that. There is no way God would ask me to do that". And I really thought it was the devil. But you know, when something is God, it'll come back around another time and another time and another time. That's one of the ways you can tell when you're hearing from God is something just stays. It just stays. You think about it, then tomorrow you think about it again.

Even if it's something as little as call somebody, it'll be like they'll just stay on your mind. And anyway, it's a long story short, but we did obey God and I think it was probably one of the most powerful things against the kingdom of darkness that I ever did. There's nothing that defeats the devil more than when you're good to somebody who has not been good to you. And the first thing we say to that is, "Well, it's just so hard". Well, first of all, stop saying that because yes, there are things that's hard, but I'll tell you what's harder is disobeying God. Disobeying God is always harder than obeying God even if what he asks you to do is a difficult thing.

So, the last verse says, well, "Let no one delude and deceive you with empty excuses and groundless arguments [for these sins] For through these the wrath of God comes upon the sons of rebellion and disobedience". Verse 7, "So do not associate or be sharers with them". So, the Bible tells us, for example, and this is more believers than unbelievers, that if there's an unbeliever, if there's a believer that is in sexual immorality or is greedy, and there's other lists in the Bible that list other things, but this is one scripture I'm thinking about, "Don't even so much as eat a meal with 'em". Hmm.

Now, you could eat with a sinner that was like that in the hopes of maybe helping him. I always say, "You can be around sinners as long as you're affecting them and they're not infecting you". We can't hide from all the sinners if we ever wanna help them, but most of these things that Paul says when he says, "Don't even so much as eat a meal with 'em," he is talking about believers, brothers and sisters in Christ. You know why? Something that I call "The law of transference" or the transference of spirits. In other words, I believe that whatever you're around gets off on you. You become like what you are around if you're around it a lot.

So, if you wanna be generous, then you need to hang out with generous people. If you wanna be peaceful, you need to hang out with peaceful people that quickly forgive and are merciful. But if you wanna be a gossip, just sit at the lunch table with everybody else and gossip about everything you don't like at work. Pretty soon it'll get off on you. So, because I'm out of time, I'm going to say this, and I want you to remember this. Some of you could completely change your life if you would just change who you hang out with.

You might say, "Well, I'm not hanging out with it. I'm married to it". Well, you can't just get away from that. But you can make sure that you hang out with enough of the other right people that it will kind of override that. So, bottom line is this. If you're in here today and you're jealous of somebody else or you're envious, you're letting it steal your peace, let's go back to "You have not because you ask not". And go home with that in mind, that from now on, instead of trying to make things happen yourself, you're just gonna ask God. I wanna pray for you, okay?

Father, I pray for everybody here, this morning, no matter what their need is. If they're sick, we ask you to heal 'em. If they have financial problems: we ask you to provide. If they have strife in their home, Lord, I pray that you would show them how important it is to have peace and to do everything they can to be a peacemaker. And I pray for people that perhaps might be jealous of someone else or envious or just discontent because they want, they want, they want. And I pray that they would take this message to heart, take it home with them, pray about it more, study it more. And I ask you to completely set all of us, myself included, free from ever being jealous of what anybody else has and to trust you to give us what you want us to have. I ask it in Jesus' name, amen.

Ginger Stache: Joyce, I had a situation, in my own life, where I was shocked by something that someone did, and I had instantly broken trust in someone that I thought I was in good hands, but learned that I was not. So, today, in our candid conversation, I would love to talk about broken trust, and those things that happen to all of us.

Joyce Meyer: Right.

Ginger Stache: And yet, we don't wanna stay in that place of brokenness. How do we move forward and rebuild trust, maybe not in that person, but in our life in general, after something like that happens?

Joyce Meyer: Well, I think, one of the first things to realize is that God does not want you to go through life not trusting anybody, but neither does he want you to totally trust everybody without any reservation. I love, in John chapter 2, Jesus said, he did not trust himself to them, speaking about his disciples, because he knew the nature of all men. Now, I find that so interesting. He didn't say he didn't trust them. He said, he did not trust himself to them. So, in other words, I don't know that it's wise to trust anybody 100%.

Ginger Stache: Because we're all human.

Joyce Meyer: Because we're human beings, and we're going to let each other down, we're going to disappoint one another. And so, there is a trust that belongs only to God. And to be honest, if we start trying to give that to somebody else, God may have to let their weakness show up, just to teach you to keep your trust in him. Also, one of the things that Proverbs talks about all the time, that we need to seek and have is discernment. And the discerning of spirits is actually one of the gifts of the spirit. And I've prayed a fair amount, in my life, for discernment. And I plan to continue to do so because you can't trust everybody, you know. There are people that just aren't good people and even though they may look like it on the outside, or things may go good in the beginning, there's just that fine balance between, you can't trust everybody, but you don't want to go around not trusting anybody.

Ginger Stache: Right.

Joyce Meyer: And so, that's why we need discernment to know. You know, sometimes I'll just like, I'll get this, maybe, I meet somebody new, and I like 'em, and we're becoming friends. And you know, then I might just get this little discernment, it kind of comes like a little thing in your heart that you're not quite sure what it is that, you know, "Yeah, you better stop telling them so many things about your personal life". You know, or mmm, like, I've had my kids tell me sometimes, "You know, you really shouldn't talk about that in front of that person".

Ginger Stache: You learn to listen to those little checks.

Joyce Meyer: And so, you learn to listen to those little checks. And the thing is, is I remember, from the way I grew up, of course, I didn't trust anybody, especially, not men. And so, I had a very difficult time trusting Dave because I just didn't really believe that anybody was gonna have my best interest in mind. So, when you get married, and you're supposed to be submissive to this man that you've married and, you know, you have a difference of opinion about a decision, and it comes down to a decision's gotta be made, you need to submit to the man. I remember saying to God, "How can you expect me to trust him, after what happened to me"? And I'll never forget it. The Lord said, "I'm not asking you to trust him. I'm asking you to trust me, with him".

Ginger Stache: That's huge.

Joyce Meyer: Yeah, so, we always have to go back to God. But be wise, and you just, you're setting yourself up for just pain and failure, if you get it in your head that, "This person's never gonna hurt me".

Ginger Stache: Right, yeah. No matter who that person is. And in the situation that I was talking about, as we started this conversation, it was one where, it was very clear, this was not a person that I should continue a relationship with. In other situations, it is someone close to us that we need to heal that wound and continue a relationship. So, I think what you're saying is so important that God is not asking us to always have perfect trust in everybody else, but we can have that trust in God alone.

Joyce Meyer: Right. Over the course, of the years that we've had the ministry, we've had three different employees steal money from the ministry. They happened to be in a position where they had access to it. And they were like, in all three cases, it was like, "You have got to be kidding".

Ginger Stache: Yeah, just the shock, I'm sure.

Joyce Meyer: I mean, it was like the last person on earth that you ever thought would do something like that. And so, the first thing satan always puts in your head is, "You just can't trust anybody. You really just can't trust anybody".

Ginger Stache: Then, you build up walls, and...

Joyce Meyer: But as soon as that happens, now, I say, "No. Just because one person's bad, that doesn't mean everybody's bad". And I refuse to live my life being suspicious. I wanna be wise, but I refuse to be suspicious of everybody and expect them to do the wrong thing. So, it's really kind of, you gotta walk a little fine line with what we're talking about today. And that's why I think that discernment is so important. Tell me what you think discernment is.

Ginger Stache: Discernment is, I think, a gift. It's something that some people have more naturally than others, but it is something that the Holy Spirit can equip all of us with, and it is that ability to sense almost between a and b. It's like discerning, "Do I go this way or this way"? And some of these things God will reroute us and keep us going where we want. But sometimes, it is just a knowing of, "This is not the right thing," "This is not the right person," "This is not the right time," whatever it maybe.

Joyce Meyer: It's kinda like driving down the road and the yellow light comes on.

Ginger Stache: Yes. That's a great way to explain it.

Joyce Meyer: You know, a lot of people will stop then, which is what you're supposed to start doing, but a lot of people will try to...

Ginger Stache: Hit the gas.

Joyce Meyer: Beat that yellow light, get through before the red light comes. And I wonder how many people have had wrecks, you know, because they didn't pay attention to the caution light.

Ginger Stache: That's a great description. And I've learned to really listen to that discernment in my life, because I can be very, very trusting naturally. And so, when I get that feeling, I really have to listen to that because there's a reason that we have that.

Joyce Meyer: Well, the thing that gets me in trouble, sometimes, is part of the gift that God has given me, is openness. You know, I mean, I just, I tell everything about myself. I tell everything about Dave. Dave always tells people, "If you're gonna be joyce's friend, you better get ready to be on TV because she's gonna talk about you". Now, you know, I won't if somebody doesn't want me to. I mean, I don't behave stupidly, and just tell things that I shouldn't tell. But I am very open. I mean, I think, you can probably say that one thing I'm not is phony. I mean...

Ginger Stache: Definitely.

Joyce Meyer: I pretty much tell it the way it is. And so, because I'm so open, sometimes, I will tell things around people about my own life that maybe, it's not the wisest person to be talking about, in front of, like that. So, I'm learning, and I've had a couple of hard lessons, even recently, that there are a few things that you need to just keep to yourself. But I think that discernment, I think it just means, be careful. And I don't think it's fair to anybody if you get what you think is a caution, I don't think it's fair to write them off just because of that feeling. I think you need to wait a little bit. To me, it's saying, "Wait, watch, pray". You know, maybe there's something going on in that person's life that you need to pray about, that could keep them from doing something more serious later on. And I think a lot of times, too, we have different kinds of relationships. And some relationships are deeper than others. Sometimes, you can, I mean, I know a couple of people that I honestly believe I could tell them anything, and they would never repeat it, and I would not even have to say to them, "Be sure you don't tell anybody that". But then, there's other people that I feel like, if I tell them something private, I need to say, "I really don't want you to tell anybody that". And then, there's other people that I pretty much know, no matter what I say, they're going to talk and tell people. So, you have to kind of find out where people are at. And sometimes, that caution that you get is just a, "Hang on, and know a little bit more about what you're dealing with here". And I just, but I really, I really hope and pray that people won't spend their whole life cynical, distrusting people. I don't think that's the way God wants us to live.

Ginger Stache: Yeah, and it's definitely not a recipe for peace in our lives. The type of joy that God wants us to have.

Joyce Meyer: And if trust has been broken, you know, you've had a bad example, you've had a bad situation, especially if it was a long-term thing or, you know, say a husband cheats on a wife, or something like that, it takes time for that to be restored. And let's just put it like this. Take baby steps back in, but make a decision that you're not going to live your life, and I wanna say this firmly. Do not live your life suspicious of everybody out there, but pray for discernment. I mean, Proverbs says over, and over, and over, that discernment is so important.

Ginger Stache: Really helpful. Thank you very much.

Joyce Meyer: You're welcome.

Ginger Stache: Good talk.

Joyce Meyer: Thanks.