Joyce: So when the bible says here in 2 Corinthians 5:17 that old things have passed away and all things become new, it’s not necessarily that I receive Christ and then I look in the mirror and have a wrinkle that went away or if I was bald, I grew hair or whatever might happen.  I may not look any different but something has happened deep on the inside of me that if I now work with the Holy Spirit, he will help work out through me that good thing that god has put in me by his grace and mercy.

Mark: Actually man is made up of three parts — you’re spirit, soul and body — so what happens when you are in Christ, the part of you that’s born again — not your body; your body’s not born again, your mind is not born again but 1 Corinthians 6:17 says “he that is joined unto the lord is one spirit,” so what happens is your spirit is literally joined to Christ so that the same life that’s in Christ comes into your spirit and the same righteousness, and that’s because when you’re in Christ, god literally takes whatever’s in Christ and puts it in you. You get the same righteousness, same life, same victory, same blessing, so god sees you now in Christ and I tell people “you look a whole lot better in Christ than you do outside of him.”  many times we continue to see ourselves naturally rather than taking the word of god and finding the scriptures that use that terminology and then declaring with our mouth that I am who god says I am, that I am a new creation in Christ. I’m not just a forgiven sinner, as good as that is, but I have become a whole new person – a new creation and everything has changed.  Old things are passed away, everything’s new. In other words, in Christ is radical change. You’re a different person. You’re not even the same person so you have to almost have a class to find out your new identity.

Joyce: that’s exactly right. So many people, myself included, I was insecure, I had a poor self-image and I kept trying to do better so I’d feel better about myself and every time I’d make a mistake, I’d feel more and more guilty and blame myself and beat up on myself more and more and more, and think I didn’t deserve anything.  I don’t even begin to know how to convey to people what it’s done for me to find out who I am in Christ. The bible says here in 2 Corinthians 5:21 — I love this — he that knew no sin became sin, that we might be made the righteousness of god in Christ. I think even to get it on a more practical level, we don’t stand before god with wrongness; we now stand before god with the righteousness — his own righteousness. He has clothed us with his own righteousness and the amplified bible says that he views us, he sees us as examples of his own righteousness.  If I was god and I could do anything I wanted to, then I could see you anyway I pleased; it would be none of anybody’s business. Even though you have some gray hair, if I wanted to look at you and see your hair jet black that would be my business because i would be god and could do whatever I wanted to. Well, if god wants to view you as righteous, then that’s his business; it’s none of the devil’s business, and it’s not based on what you do or don’t do; it’s based on your faith in Christ.  So, when you receive Christ, you’re in him and you have everything that he has; you’re a joint heir with him.

Joyce Meyer Online – I think a lot of people feel that pressure to have to preach to people and to give them some kind of printed tract. And I’m not saying that that’s wrong.

Joyce: “One of the biggest problems facing our generation and the next is the aids virus. This disease is literally ravaging nations and creating hundreds of thousands of orphans in the process. However, through your support we’re able to provide help for many of those left alone with this terrible disease.”

These precious people have something in common — they’re all fighting for their lives, battling aids. And with this epidemic, everyone is fair game. The numbers are staggering, with more than 33 million people around the world living with hiv/aids, and 25 million deaths worldwide since the start of the epidemic. Nowhere has the aids virus taken a greater toll than sub-Saharan, Africa, with over 22 million people living with the disease, and 1.6 million deaths last year alone. The tiny country of Swaziland has been hardest hit, and its biggest victims are the innocent children who through no fault of their own are suffering and dying.

Dave Ohlerking: “We assume that about half of our children are hiv positive. I told one visitor: If you walk through this camp and killed every other child, your name would be aids.”

Ben Rodgers: “Swaziland has the highest hiv prevalence rate in the world — 42.6 percent of the people in Swaziland are hiv infected. There are anywhere from 80 – 120,000 orphans in this country alone. That 15 to 45 age group is going to be gone; they’ll disappear within the next five to ten years. There was an article in the paper the other day about by 2025, they won’t have enough men to govern this country any longer. They’re talking about 16 and 17-year-olds running schools and running governments because of that generation being lost.”

In the developing world, the main cause of aids is sexual activity with multiple heterosexual partners. Other causes include iv drug use and improperly performed medical procedures. Many children are already hiv positive, either passed on during childbirth or through their mother’s milk. But there’s an even more ominous reason for the growing epidemic among children: Many are forced into prostitution. Or even more horrific, some men believe in the superstition spread by witch doctors that they can cure themselves of aids by having sex with a young virgin. As a result, very young children fall victim to rape, and the epidemic grows.

I want you to look at what God said to Abraham. vs. 14: The Lord said to Abram after lot had left him, lift up now your eyes and look from the place where you are — in other words, stop looking where you’re at — and look north, south, east, and west; vs. 15: For all the land which you see I will give to you and to your posterity forever. So I just have to say to you: What can you see in the spirit for yourself? You may not see it with your natural eyes, but what do you see in the ground of your heart? Do you feel hopeless or do you believe there’s hope? Can God change your finances?

Can God change your kids? Can God change your marriage? Can God change you? Get your eyes off the way it’s always been and the way it is right now and look at how it can be. I know some people think, “I get tired of all this happy preaching!” “Happy-clappy, happy-sappy Christians. I just get tired of all this faith and believe and talk positive and all this stuff.” Well, you know what? What else are you going to do? What I’m telling you, you can enjoy your life if you never get what you want. You can enjoy your life if you never get what you want.

I can’t promise you that what you want is going to happen in your life, but I can promise you that Fod will do what’s best for you. I am not going to be sad and I am not going to be frustrated and miserable. I am not going to go around being guilty and condemned all the time! I have been given the kingdom of God and I’m going to live in it!

Many years ago I finally reached a point in my life where I was really, really tired of being controlled by my circumstances. I wanted to have stability. I wanted to enjoy the peace of God and the joy of God at all times, not just when my circumstances were going right and I believe that if we learn how to do that, then our circumstances won’t bother us nearly as much.

They’ll be jealous of your joy because then you will be a living testimony of what you say you believe. Stop giving somebody else the job of making you happy.  The price that you have to pay is obedience. The price that you have to pay is refusing to quit and give up. You have to do it and do it again and do it again and do it again and do it again and again and again and again and again, and every time you do one of those hard things, your flesh screams louder the first time, the next time a little less, the next time a little less, the next time a little less.

God never puts you in a situation where he’s not able to keep you. Stop being unhappy about where you’re at. If God has told you to stay in the situation, then God is going to give you the grace to be there and he’s not going to call you to be miserable and unhappy. Personal obedience is the only thing that will fix our lives and when we make mistakes, we have to admit it, we have to confess, if we need to apologize to a person, we need to do that. We need to swallow our stinking pride and do whatever we need to do because we need to be determined:  I am not going to live in bondage! I refuse to live in bondage one more day of my life.

Whatever it takes to be free, I’m going to find out what it is and I’m going to do it. And here’s the thing: if you make the right choice, God’s grace hooks up with you and enables you to carry it out. “but I’m just so sick and tired of doing this! I’ve done the right thing and done the right thing and done the right thing and done the right thing, and the right thing is still not happening to me. I’ve been believing God, believing God, believing God, believing God, and I’m tired of watching everybody else get their breakthroughs and nothing happening for me.”

You know what God said to me? It was a lesson for me back then. I didn’t know what I’m telling you now. God said: you think you won but really you lost again because it’s not always the one who gets their way who wins. Very often, it’s the one who’s willing to sacrifice and let the other person have what they want that I call a winner. (but see, I had a lot of stuff in my life that had to go. I had a lot of those little sucker branches down there. Aaaaaaaaah! What if this tree could feel? Those little sucker branches suck the life out of the rest of the plant. Any healthy plant has to be pruned. The bible says if you don’t bear fruit, you’ll be pruned and if you do bear fruit, you’ll be pruned so you’ll bear richer and more excellent fruit, so I figured it out: you’re pruned if you do and pruned if you don’t, so it doesn’t matter. Just go ahead and take your pruning and get it over with.

And then Romans 8:29 says we are destined to be molded into the image of Jesus Christ. We start out as just a hunk of clay. God comes along and starts to: “ow! Ow! What are you doing? Ow! Stop it! What are you doing! Aaah! That doesn’t feel good. I don’t like that. What are you doing?” Preparation. We have to let God be God in our lives. Don’t just fight one more day to get your way. Don’t just try to find 25 new ways to change the people in your house. Just worship God and pray and obey him and be happy and love God? You know what? People will start wanting what you’ve got. They’ll be jealous of the peace you’ve got

John: And there’s never been a time where we need to change our thinking — like you said, life isn’t going to change; we have to change ourselves — there’s never been a time that that’s more important than right now because life isn’t going to get simpler and it’s not going to slow down, and it’s going to become more complex. So the only thing that I can do to make the change correctly to adjust is myself. Once I take that responsibility… And what’s so great about your book is these things are just bite-size pieces. It doesn’t overwhelm anybody, and you can just take it one step at a time and say, “if I just do this better it’s going to make it better.” The process of compounding all those things, one day their life will get to the place where they’ll have a simplicity about it. I think that they’ll be very effective.

Joyce: When I first started realizing that I was a very complicated person, and because I was complicated I had a complicated life, and because of that I was frustrated all the time and had no peace and it was affecting my health and all my relationships, when I thought, “okay, I’ve got to simplify my life,” — to be honest, it was difficult to even find material on that subject. You can look up the word “simple” in the bible and you’ll only find it just a couple of times. Paul said, “I fear lest Satan will beguile you and drag you out of the simplicity of Christ.” So taking that thought — the simplicity of Christ — what does that mean? The whole gospel message is so simple that a large majority of people miss it. The bible actually says: If you won’t become like a little child and just come simply and believe what I say, then you’re never going to receive this. Because if you get in your head about it, it’s not going to make any sense.

Joyce Meyer: I mean, “Jesus loves me this I know because the bible tells me so,” — not because I feel it or don’t feel it or think he should or he shouldn’t, or I deserve it or don’t deserve it. He just does and I can either receive that and believe it and be happy or I can try to figure it out.

Tharina: That’s when my aunt, she had lived close, and Joyce Meyer stuff really started piling in. I’d listen to everything and listen to it and listen to it again. I was in my bible and just completely for the first time just got saturated in it all.

Narrator: Tharina gave her life to the Lord and over time, God helped her break free from the addictions that had a stranglehold on her life. Today, she is the manager of a church day care, she home-schools her daughter Tristin, and she is finally able to help others who are struggling with the same addictions that kept her in bondage for years.

Tharina: If it wasn’t for partners giving like they do, I might not be sitting here today like I am if they had not empowered Joyce Meyer to spread the word and make it available like they have. Where would I be without that information? Where would I be?

Joyce: Always remember that indifference makes an excuse but love finds a way.

Joyce: I hope you have enjoyed the things that we’ve shared with you today and that you feel even better about your part in reaching people with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Because of time constraints we couldn’t possibly show you everything that you enable us to do, so please take a little bit of time and go to the web site address on the bottom of your screen for a detailed report of the ministry’s finances and outreaches. God bless you and please remember to enjoy every day of your life for the glory of God.

Announcer: We appreciate you and we thank our friends and partners for making this worldwide ministry possible. Together we’re feeding the hungry, clothing the poor and presenting the gospel to the nations. Please contact us or visit joycemeyer.org today to share your prayer requests, find out more about our resources, see Joyce’s conference schedule and to join us in partnership as we share the love of Christ around the globe.

So, when I really started determining to live a simple life, it really was not a simple process to learn how to live a simple life because I had so many bad, complicated habits that I had to just keep working with God and letting him work with me to even get to the point where I know a hundred things to say about simplicity. But they all involved not my circumstance changing but me changing my approach to how I looked at things, how I talked about things, how I decided to view things.

John: They’re simple to understand but they’re not simple to apply. The application has to be intentional. Now, what the book is going to do though, Joyce, I can tell as I started looking at it yesterday, what your book is going to do is create margins in people’s lives. Our problem is we’re at such a heavy pace and we compound our life, we have no give-room, we have no margin, so that if something does go wrong, now we are underneath this rubble of stuff. And what’s going to happen is they’re going to begin — bite one of them off at a time — their margins are going to begin to increase until sometime in the future their life is going to be able to handle those tough times because they have some flexibility and a little bit of emotional margin.

Joyce: I know that I am a very, very different person. I know that you’ve had the same experience through the course of the years of your life. We really can enjoy every single day of our life if we will take the right approach to it. I just want to tell you that you have written a lot of great books and made a lot of wonderful material available for people; a lot of great stuff in leadership and a lot of real practical stuff.

Joyce Meyer: So, I just want to encourage you, our viewers, any time you see a John Maxwell book, it’s worth reading. We’re going to take a break and when we come back, I’ll have some final words of encouragement for you, so please don’t go away.

Everything’s not gonna change overnight but I promise you that god will never give up on you, so if you don’t give up on him, you are in for a big victory.  There’s no way that you can fail! Amen! No way you can fail! (applause) so I’m gonna pray with you right now and I’m gonna tell you the truth: what you’re doing when you pray this prayer is giving your life away so if you’re not ready for that, you’re kind of in the wrong line because i’m not just trying to slap a little religion on you here. I’m telling you the truth. You’re saying: that’s it. I want the exchange. I’m giving my life to you, god, and i want you to give your life to me.  You take me and do what you want to with me because the truth of the matter is you don’t belong to yourself anyway; you’ve just been living like you have. God created you and only he can make you happy, so pray this prayer with me and really mean it, then we’re gonna give you a book.  I wish I could do more for you but let me tell you something: you call my office anytime you want to and we’ll have people pray with you, answer any question you have, talk to you, tell you what material to get for what problem, but this is a beginning for you so let’s pray. Say: father god, I love you. Jesus, I believe in you. I believe you’re the savior of the world. I believe you died for me. You shed your blood for me. You paid for my sins. Thank you. I’ve been a sinner. I’m sorry for the way I’ve lived.  Please forgive me. Jesus, I receive you now, right now. Come and live inside of me. I give myself to you. Take me just the way I am. Now make me what you want me to be.

Joyce Meyer Ministries – Now I believe I’m saved, I believe you’re living in me, you love me, I have got a brand-new start, a new day. I’m excited! I’m on my way to heaven but i’m gonna enjoy the trip. Come on now, give god praise. Amen!  Whoo!  Hallelujah!

Ginger: that’s true. Sometimes we have to make tough choices. You’ve talked about the cycle of love.  Tell us about that.

Joyce Meyer: in the amplified bible in particular, over in first john it talks about completing the cycle of love. I think that’s extremely interesting because when Jesus was talking to one man who asked him, “what is the most important commandment?” he said, “you shall love the lord your god with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.  The second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” then over in 1 peter 3 it talks about having peace with god, peace with yourself and peace with your fellowman. So, really the bible is a book about relationships. Joyce Meyer Online mentioned that  it’s about my relationship with god, my relationship with myself, my relationship with people. I’ve come to understand that I can’t give away something I don’t have, so I have to receive the love of god. That’s the initial thing in my relationship with god. When I receive Christ as my savior, the bible says that the love of god is shed abroad in our heart by the holy ghost. That’s in Romans, chapter 5. So right away god floods us with his love but if you don’t receive it by faith, to you it’s as if you don’t even have it. We have to understand that what we don’t put our faith in, even though we have it legally, we don’t have it experientially because I’m forgiven but if I still want to go around feeling guilty all the time, then I’m not experiencing my forgiveness. I may have it legally but I don’t have it experientially. So we can say, “I know god loves me,” but do you really know god loves you?

Joyce Meyer Ministries – That’s the healing power that we need for our souls, that god loves us, he loves us unconditionally, his love is not based on what we do or don’t do; god just loves me. And that’s really hard for us to get through our head. Ginger:  right.  Because that love is there, it’s real, but accepting it and activating it in our life is our choice.