It’s very important that we do not compare ourselves with other people and not compete with other people, and that we don’t go by how we feel. You don’t have to feel confident to present yourself in a confident manner, to hold your head up and to boldly go and do whatever it is that you feel like you need to do.
When you talk to people, don’t mumble. When you talk to people, look at them. When you shake somebody’s hand, don’t feel like a dead, cold fish laying in somebody’s hand. We need to realize that God wants us to be bold and aggressive in a right way, not obnoxious, but bold and aggressive, and even in prayer. The Bible tells us to come boldly to the throne and that God is able to do exceedingly, abundantly, above and beyond all that we could dare to hope.
You’ve got to be daring in your prayers. And I hope by the time you read this, that you’re going to be ready to ask God for some pretty outrageous things, because He wants to do some very outrageous things in your life. But you have to know who you are in Christ to go and ask Him for that.
1) Overcome Identity Crises
We have an epidemic of insecure people in our society today, and more than at any other time, we have an identity crisis. People just don’t know who they are and they’re trying to have an identity through who they know, and what they wear, and what their position is at work, and how many degrees they have behind their name.
1 John 3:1 “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!”
2) You Are More Than What You Do
Your worth and value are not in anything that you do. I don’t care what you ever do. I don’t care what you own or how many degrees you have — that does not make you more valuable than any other person on this planet.
“The only thing that gives us value is knowing Christ, having Him as our Savior. — Joyce Meyer”
We’re created by God. We’re His children and He loves us and cares about us. And therefore, every person is equally valuable to God. And for you reading this note, if you turned yourself on today and you were feeling like you were worthless, or you had no worth and no value, and no one cares about you and nobody loves you, be rest assured Jesus would have still died if only for you. And maybe you are even contemplating suicide right now — you stop it because God has invested a lot in you. He sent His Son to die for you. He loves you. God’s got a good plan for your life; a life for you to live.
“Don’t base your value on what other people have said about you. Don’t base your worth on how other people treated you. — Joyce Meyer”
Psalm 139:14 “I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made…”
3) No One Owes You Love
It’s especially hard for people when they don’t get treated properly by their parents because they all just think, “Well, our parents ought to love us.” There’s a lot of hurting people out in the world and hurting people hurt people.
It’s amazing how people that are hurt and wounded and never get their healing can’t do anything else but just hurt the other people around them. And I don’t even think that they intentionally do that or set out to do it. It’s just that when you’re full of pain, then you end up just putting that pain off on everybody else.
The people that hurt you, just go ahead and forgive them. Just get over it today. Because I can tell you they hurt themselves even worse than they hurt you. And you holding bitterness and resentment is only going to make your life miserable and you’re going to pass that on to your kids.
You need to let it go so you can be whole and healed. Do yourself a favor today and just get rid of all of it. Just say, “I’m just letting it go.”
“If you’re going to be a new creature in Christ, be a new creature in Christ, don’t be halfway new and halfway old. — Joyce Meyer”
I never felt safe growing up. I never knew what was going to happen the next moment. I had no security. Our home was very volatile — a lot of moods flying around, a lot of emotions, a lot of anger. So, feeling safe and feeling secure is very important to me. And I think it’s very important to every single person. God created us to feel safe, taken care of, secure, confident and bold. That’s what’s in your spiritual DNA. Your soul maybe has it blocked.
But God did not create you for fear, worry, guilt, insecurity, a lack of confidence and extreme shyness and extreme timidity — always being the tail end of everything. My Bible says that we’re the head, not the tail; above and not beneath.
4) Stop Looking for Identity in Wrong Places
Too many people are looking for identity and value, and they’re looking for it in all the wrong places. They look for it in what they do, who they know, what they know, what they own, what they look like. Of course, we need to do our best to look as good as we can. All I can say is: take what God’s given you, do the best you can with it, but don’t be comparing yourself with somebody else.
Don’t be comparing yourself with somebody on the front of a magazine that’s had every little blemish airbrushed out and has zero body fat. Don’t ever look around at somebody else and say, “I wish I looked like you. I wish I had what you had. I wish I could do what you do.”
Because the fact is, you don’t and you won’t. It is what it is. So, deal with it. I don’t like to be around people that are always putting themselves down or be around people who keep saying, “Oh, you know, I wish I was this. I wish I was that. I wish I looked that good.”
5) Know Who You Are in God
Isaiah 54:17: “But no weapon that is formed against you shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against you in judgment you shall show to be in the wrong. This peace, righteousness, security and triumph over opposition is the heritage of the servants of the Lord.”
So, in other words, to be secure is part of your inherited, blood-bought right through your relationship with Jesus Christ. It’s not something you go out and earn or get by who you know or what you own. It’s something you inherit through your relationship with Jesus Christ. Just like some of my children have inherited brown eyes because I have brown eyes.
We have a certain inheritance through our relationship with Christ. The Bible says that we are joint-heirs with Him. Whatever He has, we get as a free gift. But we receive it by faith. If I held a Bible in my hand and then said to somebody, “Here, I’m going to give you a Bible,” they would believe it and come to receive it because they know I have a Bible in my hand.
But the thing about our relationship with God is we have to take everything by faith. He’s the invisible God. We know that He’s there in our heart and we believe it in our heart. In God’s economy you believe everything first before you see it. If you believe it, then ultimately, you’ll see it working in your life. That’s why it’s important to believe that you’re secure and believe that you’re confident and confess that you are.
6) Talk Out Loud of Who You Are in Christ
Once again, I have to talk to you about talking out loud. One morning, when I was praying and having my time with God, I felt like I heard the Spirit of God say to me, “I want to hear your voice.”
I believe there’s power in our voice. And so, I began to confess some scriptures out loud: “I am the righteousness of God in Christ. God loves me. My value is in who I am in Him.” And I have to remind myself of those things every day, especially when I feel like I’m starting to sink or diminish in some way.
“Let God hear your voice. Speak out. Let the devil know that you know who you are in Christ. — Joyce Meyer”
Do you ever say negative things about yourself? If that is a yes, I will say, that’s a BIG NO. That is not something that you can ever do again. Don’t you ever say anything negative about yourself out of your own mouth. When you do that, all you’re doing is helping the devil. You’re getting into agreement with him. You don’t ever say, “I’m stupid. I can’t do anything right. I’m dumb,” or whatever it is you say about yourself.
Don’t ever say anything negative about yourself again out of your own mouth. You say about you what God says about you. It’s one thing to say, “I made a mistake.” It’s another thing to think you are a mistake. Learn how to separate who you are from what you do. Your identity is not in what you do. Believe it or not, there’s a lot more things that are more important than what you do.
7) Do Not Live by How You Feel
You can be secure, even if you don’t feel secure. You can be confident, even if you don’t feel confident. And I would venture to say that on those days when you feel the least confident, that’s when you need to say the loudest, “I am confident in who I am in Christ.” You believe more of what you hear yourself say than what you hear anybody else say anyway. Did you know that? That’s a scientific fact. You will believe more of what you hear yourself say than what you hear anybody else say.
We’re always wanting somebody else to build us up, make us feel good about ourselves. But really, the truth is, that’s something you’ve got to get between you and God. Don’t give somebody else the job of keeping you propped up all the time.
Philippians 3:3: “For we Christians are the true circumcision who worship God in Spirit and by the Spirit of God. And we exalt in glory and pride ourselves in Jesus Christ. And we put no confidence or dependence on what we are in the flesh, on outward privileges, physical advantages, and external appearances.”
8) Separate Your Do’s from Your Who
You shouldn’t get your confidence from how you look. You shouldn’t get your confidence from who you know, from what you own, from your level of education, from what neighborhood you live in, what car you drive, or anything else. Let’s have all of that stripped away today and let’s stand before God and know who we are in Him.
I have a ministry which God has entrusted in my hand. I’ve had to remind myself: I am not this ministry. I know that people equate me and my ministry as one big conglomeration, but I’m more than this ministry. And if I’m ever not doing this, I’m still going to be just as important to God as I am right now. Matt Redman is more than a worship leader. He’s more than a songwriter. And what happens if someday, for whatever reason, he’s not doing this anymore? Things like that do happen.
Sometimes God just doesn’t want us doing something anymore. And that doesn’t mean now that we have to suddenly look for identity. We need to keep our identity all the way through.
“And I remind myself on a regular basis: my worth and value are not in the fact that I’m preaching to people around the world, but my worth and value is in the fact that I’m a child of God.
— Joyce Meyer”
9) Your Worth Is in Christ
Your worth and value need to be in who you are in Him (Jesus). If you’ve been married for a lot of years and you become widowed, you don’t need to have an identity crisis. You’re still just as valuable by who you are in Him. If you were married and now, you’re single, you don’t need to have an identity crisis — you can know who you are in Him.
If you know a lot of people who have kids and you’re married and you don’t have kids, you don’t need to have an identity crisis — you can know who you are in Him. If all of your friends have three degrees behind their name and you just barely got out of high school, you don’t need to have an identity crisis — you can know who you are in Him.
All that junk that tries to hang on us all the time about what we’re not, we need to drop them. And I want you to just say, “I’m not taking that junk home with me. I know who I am in Christ.”
If Jesus would have needed to have died just for you, He would have done it just for you. Unconditional love and acceptance are what we crave. We usually think, “Well, I know God loves me.” Every time I stand before people and do any kind of a lengthy teaching on the love of God, the enemy tries to tell me that people don’t need it and that they know it already. But I know now that they do need it, because the truth is — if we really knew how much God loved us, we’d act a whole lot different than what we do. We wouldn’t have all the competition, we wouldn’t have all the comparisons, and we wouldn’t be so afraid of our mistakes, we wouldn’t be afraid to admit our weaknesses.
But we do have problems with all those things. God is not for sale. We don’t buy His love with our good works. If we really know the love of God, and we get that deeply rooted and embedded in us, then what’s going to happen is — we’re going to begin to talk, to crave, and to strive to do more good things, but not to get God to love us, but because He loves us.
10) Adjusting Your Perspective
It is all about the perspective that we come from. There is something that we can learn from Peter and John. You know, Peter talked about how much he loved Jesus: “Well, I love You, Lord. And I would always do that. I’d never deny You.” And he ended up denying Christ.
John, on the other hand, always talked about how much Jesus loved him: “I’m the disciple whom Jesus loves.” I bet he was hard to be around sometimes. I mean, there are several places in the Bible where John says, “I’m the disciple that Jesus loves.” But the message that I want to give you is that he had a revelation of how much God loved him.
And because he had that revelation of how much God loved him — they tried to boil him in oil and couldn’t kill him.
“You need to know how much God loves you. And if you know how much God loves you, the next time you have a problem or even some kind of tragic circumstance in your life, you won’t ever say, “Well God, don’t You love me?” — Joyce Meyer”
You should never say that when you have a problem. The fact that we have a problem does not mean that God doesn’t love us. Matter of fact, even when God’s correcting us — and I’m not saying He uses our problems to correct us — but if God corrects you, the Bible says that those whom He loves, He chastises. You better hope that God keeps showing you everything that’s wrong with you, because that’s just a sign that He loves you.
11) Stop Looking for Approval from People
If you don’t know that God loves you unconditionally, you will use the world’s standards — money, status, clothes, etc. — to prove to yourself and others that you are valuable. So, you will begin to feel more valuable when you look better, you feel more valuable if you own the right things. Also, you will need strokes and feedback from other people to prove to yourself and to others that you are lovable. Therefore, you need a fresh fix and strokes every day just to get through the day feeling good about yourself. Sometimes you will say, “I worked hard all day and cleaned the house and you walked in and didn’t even tell me how nice it looked.”
I’m not saying that people shouldn’t compliment us, but our worth and value can’t be based on that, because we end up putting pressure on the people that we’re in relationship with to keep us fixed all the time. And you will drive them crazy trying to make them make you feel like you are loved.
Women like to be complimented, but if somebody forgets to compliment you, you don’t want your day to fall apart. I want to know enough about who I am in Christ and what my value is in Him, that if somebody forgets me, I’m still okay for the day.
It gets down to saying people like that cannot really maintain and sustain healthy, loving relationships because everything is about getting people commenting about them. Everything becomes selfish and it’s all about that person getting somebody else to make them feel good about themselves. And so, they are not able to give to other people.
“True joy only comes when you know who you are in Christ and you can, for all intents and purposes, forget about yourself and spend your days reaching out to other people, making their lives better. — Joyce Meye”
Inspired by Joyce Meyer Sermon
