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Meyer, who owns several homes and travels in a private jet currently a Gulfstream G-IV , has been criticized by some of her peers for living an excessive lifestyle. In November , the St. She now retains royalties on books sold outside the ministry through retail outlets such as Walmart, Amazon. Joyce Meyer Ministries says it has made a commitment to maintain transparency in financial dealings publish their annual reports, have a Board majority who are not Meyer relatives and submit to a voluntary annual audit.
Joyce Meyer Ministries was one of six investigated by the United States Senate inquiry into the tax-exempt status of religious organizations by Senator Chuck Grassley.
In her November 29 response to Grassley, Meyer notes that the commode is a chest of drawers. It also made commitments to future financial transparency. Neither party were found to have done any wrongdoing. Do Yourself a Favor. June 8, August 8, September 3, Your email address will not be published. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Guiding the reader through a mystical maze of themes, Shoeless: Carmelite Spirituality in a Disquieted World displays the heart of the Carmelite charism and apostolate as set forth by the religious reform of Saint Teresa of Avila in the latter half of the sixteenth century.
The reader will be introduced to the history of the Carmelite Order and its unique. Can music feel pain? Do songs possess dignity? Do symphonies have rights?
Of course not, you might say. Yet think of how we anthropomorphize music, not least when we believe it has been somehow mistreated.
An underrehearsed cover band made a mockery of Led Zeppelin's classics. An orchestra didn't quite do justice to Mozart's Requiem. Such lively language upholds music as a sentient companion susceptible to injury and. Martyr was written over a three year period between and It was begun while Kathleen was living in Algiers, Algeria with her daughter and continues through the summer of in Oran, Tlemcen, Sidi Bel Abbes, Algeria and through the fall of In , Kathleen's son Rayan Mehdi passed away and she was inconsolable.
Sow mercy and you will reap mercy; sow judgment and you will reap judgment. Start sowing forgiveness. You may need some yourself some day. L o v e D o e s N o t R e j o i c e at Injustice and Unrighteousness It does not rejoice at injustice and unrighteousness, but rejoices when right and truth prevail. It always wants what is fair and right.
It craves justice, not only for itself, but especially for others. I have been hurt a lot in my life, and I well remember how it feels. We should care about others and their pain, pray for them and do what we can to relieve their suffering.
Love is not unfeel- ing; it cannot look at unjust situations and just simply not care or do nothing. Television continually brings murder, rape, accidents, starva- tion of children and every ungodly atrocity into our living rooms. We must guard against becoming so accustomed to it that it no longer touches us in our feelings. Love does not rejoice when unrighteousness prevails.
I am grieved by our whole society today. I crave to see right actions, godly governments, excellence, integrity, craftsmanship, quality, marriages that last, children who are loved and properly cared for, etc. I pray I never get so used to the way things are that I begin to flow downstream with them. Hearing of a violent murder does not affect us the way it did thirty years ago. Dave says when he was a boy, his family heard for the first time ever of a paperboy who had been robbed.
Everyone was horrified that such a thing could happen. Is that all? Psalm states that if we love the Lord, we must hate evil. Those who love right- eousness are often persecuted for it — Jesus was, and we are not above our Master Matthew You may work in an environment that is filled with evil and unrighteousness, bad language, gossip, hatred, envy, greed, immoral relationships, etc.
If you take a stand for righteousness, you may be made fun of, talked about unkindly or even totally rejected. But love never fails. God hates sin, but He loves sinners. The favor of God is so wonderful; it cannot be compared to the favor of man. In the Bible, we read about godly people such as Daniel and Joseph, who had the favor of God on their life. Daniel was surrounded by evil and unrighteous people, but he refused to compromise. He loved righteousness, and God gave him favor, which caused him to become a powerful government official in the kingdom of Babylon Daniel 1,2,6.
Joseph was mistreated; however, he maintained his integrity. He loved righteousness. He did not hate his brothers, but he hated what they did to him. In this instance, Egypt could represent the secular world and Pharaoh the boss. Love Never Fails The God-kind of love bears up under anything and everything that comes. It endures everything without weakening. It is deter- mined not to give up on even the hardest case. The hard-core individ- ual who persists in being mean can be eventually melted by love.
It is hard to keep showing love to someone who never seems to appreciate it or even respond to it. It is difficult to keep showing love to those individuals who take from us all we are willing to give, but who never give anything back. We are not responsible for how others act, only how we act. Our reward does not come from man, but from God. If a person quits and gives up the task God has assigned him because no one is noticing him, he is not serving God from a pure heart.
For example, if a woman feels that God wants her to work in the nursery each week at church but quits two months later because not one mother has even thanked her, she was not doing the job to love God and others, but to get love for herself.
We must never give up because the demands of love are too hard. I am so glad that God did not give up on me. How could He? He is love, and love never quits. It is always right there, doing its job. Love knows that if it refuses to quit, it will ultimately win the victory: And let us not lose heart and grow weary and faint in acting nobly and doing right, for in due time and at the appointed season we shall reap, if we do not loosen and relax our courage and faint.
They treat God the same way. That does not mean that love has failed. Love upholds us. It gives us joy. It pleases God when we walk in love. Love always has more positive results than anything else. God does not require us to earn His love, and we must not require others to earn ours. We cannot turn it on and off, depending on who we want to give it to and how they are treating us. As believers in Jesus Christ, the love we are to manifest to the world is the unconditional love of God flowing through us to them.
Our love has conditions and limits; His does not. Loving people unconditionally is a very big challenge. I would be tempted to say it is impossible, but since God tells us to do it, surely He must have a way for us to do it.
He never commands us to do something and then leaves us to perform it on our own. Sometimes we pray to be able to love the unlovely, and then do our best to avoid every unlovely person God sends our way. Not only do others have rough edges, but so do we. Learning to walk in love with unlovely people and learning to be patient in trials are probably the two most important tools God uses to develop our spiritual maturity. Believe it or not, all those obnoxious people in our lives help us.
Love Is Beyond Mere Knowledge [That you may really come] to know [practically, through experience for yourselves] the love of Christ, which far surpasses mere knowledge [without experience]. As we have seen in Ephesians , it far surpasses mere knowl- edge.
Often it seems unfair. If we try to reason it out, we will surely lose it. I can find no real reason why God should love me and use me in His kingdom. If I look for reasons to love others, I will probably not find a great number of people I can love.
His love is unconditional. He looks for people who are in need of His love. Unconditional love unselfishly loves selfish people, generously gives to stingy people and continually blesses unappreciative people. It sees what people can become if only someone will love them. It is stronger than anything else; it can reach into and bring healing to places that no natural medicine could ever reach.
It was definitely the love of God that overcame the evil in my life, that changed me and drew me into a deep relationship with Him. It is that same love flowing through us to others that will change them. Loving people unconditionally is a good thing, and according to Romans , it is with good that we are to overcome evil.
Change takes time, and we must be willing to suffer with another through those difficult times of being transformed. Because Dave loved me unconditionally, he was willing to suffer with me while God was changing me.
I had never seen real love. I did not even know what it was. Everyone who ever said they loved me had hurt me and used me. I needed to see love; just hearing the words was not sufficient. Most people who are hard to love have suffered so much pain along the road of life that it has altered their personality. Outwardly they may seem hard and bitter, but inwardly they are crying out for love.
That was the case with me. Outwardly I acted as if I needed no one, yet inwardly I was starving for love. It just is! I am more than willing to admit that I have not yet arrived in this area of unconditional love, but I certainly want to learn it, and I believe you do too. As human beings it seems we are ever chang- ing, we must learn to be more stable.
Stability was a trait I began to notice in Dave after we got married. I had never really been in the presence of stable people. Dave was just the same everywhere, all the time. He was not one way when he left for work in the morning and another way when he came home from work in the evening. His circumstances did not change his behavior.
He did not come home and treat the children and me badly if others had mistreated him during the day. Being in a traffic jam for two hours did not make him grouchy. Feeling bad physically did not make him grouchy. Even when I was grouchy, it rarely made him grouchy.
He was just the same. God had worked with Dave for years prior to our marriage and had developed stability in his character. Stability must be worked in us. As we go around and around the same mountains in life, we finally learn not to let them upset us. If we have not learned to be stable during difficult circumstances, we will not be able to show stability with difficult people. If their bad behavior were rewarded, they would never learn to behave any better.
If a student does not do his classwork, refuses to study, and misses class regularly, he is not promoted to the next grade. If he were, he would keep those bad habits all of his life. Correction and discipline are not evidence of a lack of love. As a matter of fact, the willingness to correct and discipline properly is a clear sign of love.
In the beginning of our ministry when my love walk was less developed, I was not as long-suffering as I am now. By tomorrow morning that person will no longer have a job!
In fact, He would tell me that I was going to correct that person in love and give him another chance, just as He had done for me for so many years. Love works through problems with people if at all possible.
There are people on our staff right now I would have fired two months after they started had God not stopped me, especially in the early days of my ministry. Now many of those same people are some of our most valued employees. We all have possibilities; we just need someone to work with us. For this reason, love must have a long-range attitude.
It must be willing to invest, and often for long periods of time, with no visible return on the investment. Dave loved me unconditionally for many years before I even wanted to change.
Most of those years I thought everyone had a problem but me. I actually thought Dave was wimpy because he was not combative. Now I know that weak people are combative; strong people walk in love. Dave was more of a man than I would ever meet again in my life, and I almost lost him at one point in our relationship through my stupid, stubborn, ungodly ways.
God gave me exactly what I needed when He gave me Dave Meyer. It may be that you have been given exactly what you need also, but you just need to recognize it. Or you may be in a relation- ship with someone who needs you. You may be the strong one, and your mate may need to receive unconditional love from you. Do it because He has done it for you. Do it gladly and willingly.
Ask Him for strength to do it, and above all, remember that true love, unconditional love, the God-kind of love, never fails.
Love Overcomes and Transforms Do not let yourself be overcome by evil, but overcome master evil with good. Religion often gives people rules to follow and laws to keep. That is the exact opposite of true biblical teaching. It is the goodness of God that leads men to repentance Romans , not the keeping of laws and rules. Religious organizations often teach people what to do, but fail to teach them how to do it.
Many people have tried religion and discovered it did not change them or their life at all. For you give a tenth of your mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected and omitted the weightier more important matters of the Law — right and justice and mercy and fidelity.
These you ought [particularly] to have done, without neglecting the others. As a matter of fact, all of them do. Jesus did not come to give man religion; they already had that before He came.
He came to give man a deep personal relationship with the Father, through Him. People need a relationship with God, not a religion. His own father probably had many rules and regulations, but never spent enough time in relationship with the young man to teach him how to keep them. Telling people what to do is simply not enough; we must show them.
I regret to say that many of the religious people I have known in my life did not show me love. They did, however, show me rejec- tion, criticism, and judgment. Religious people love conditionally; they love those who are just like them. Anyone who is different from them frightens them. They cannot love the young boy with long hair and baggy blue jeans with holes in the knees. They tell him he must change to be part of their group.
They are all different, but rarely do any of them accept people the way they are. I hate a religious attitude because it is always full of pride, criti- cism, and judgment. As I said at the beginning of this section, many needy people have tried religion and found it to be an empty experience. Some churches are full of God, but sad to say, others are not.
It grieves me when I think of how many people are looking for worldly answers to their problems simply because they tried religion and were met with rules, laws, rejection, judgment, and no love. Unconditional love does not allow people to remain the same; instead, it loves them while they are changing. The ex-prostitute does need to learn how to dress in a godly manner, but if she feels rejected before she learns, she may well run right back to her old lifestyle.
The homosexual who desperately wants to be set free must feel loved and accepted while he is breaking out of his bondage. Unconditional love will overcome sin and transform lives. A good friend of mine, Pastor Don Clowers from Dallas, Texas, told me a sad story with an awesome ending. A young man attended one of his campmeetings several years ago and made a profession of faith at the altar. The young man was a homosexual, and even though he had accepted Christ as his Savior, he continued to fall back into his old lifestyle.
He truly wanted to be free, but his addictive lifestyle had a strong hold on his mind and emotions. People who are repentant and sincerely want to be free are totally different from those who want others just to accept them and their sinful lifestyle. Pastor Clowers began to feel that God wanted his wife and him to take this young man into their home and let him live there while he was being delivered.
They kept him for a year. They prayed with him, counseled him, loved him unconditionally, corrected him and helped him in every way they knew how.
Today that young man is married and serves as pastor of a good church — he was totally set free. Jesus said that He did not come for the well, but for the sick Matthew Our world today is sick, from head to toe, and there is no answer for what ails it except Jesus Christ and all that He stands for.
God loves all people, but many of them may never know it unless Christians everywhere begin to pray and ask the Lord to reduce them to love. ACTS If love is unconditional, then it must not show partiality. This does not mean that we cannot have special friends or that we cannot be involved with certain people more than others. It means that we cannot treat some people one way and other people a different way.
We cannot be kind to those who are good friends with us, and not care how we treat those who are of no interest or importance to us. I know many people with whom I would not be interested in having a deep personal relationship, because I know that, for one reason or another, it would not be fruitful for either of us.
That does not mean these people are bad; it just means a casual relation- ship between us would be better than a close relationship. God has given me several people like that in my life, and I appreciate them very much. But He has also taught me to treat everyone with respect, to make them feel valued, to listen to them when they are talking to me and not to judge them in a critical way.
Our love walk can readily be seen by how we treat people who cannot do us any good, people with whom we are not interested in developing a relationship. I remember an incident in which God taught me a lesson in this area. I had taken our son to the doctor to have a cast removed from his arm which he had broken. While I was waiting, an elderly man came and sat down next to me. He wanted to talk, but I wanted to read.
He kept telling me how he had fallen on the ice and hurt his leg, and how much this doctor had helped him. I must admit, I just wanted him to be quiet. I really paid no attention to him or showed him any respect. I was somewhat aware that he was lonely and probably had very few people to talk with, but I was not willing to be his blessing for that day. I immediately knew that I would hang onto every word, smile, make compliments and do all kinds of things to help me establish a relationship — in short, all the things I was not doing for this man who meant nothing to me.
At the time, I was praying about walking in love, but I really did not come close to realizing what that would mean to my life and behavior. Loving others frequently requires sacrifice. It requires that we put others first, doing what benefits them, and not just us. As we saw earlier, the Word of God tells us that He does not show partiality, that He is no respecter of persons.
It also tells us many times that we are not to be a respecter of persons be preju- diced, show partiality or practice favoritism. The same Lord is Lord over all [of us] and He gener- ously bestows His riches upon all who call upon Him [in faith]. Do not [attempt to] hold [and] practice the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ [the Lord] of glory [together with snobbery]!
Are you not discriminating among your own and becoming critics and judges with wrong motives? JAMES —4 If indeed you [really] fulfill the royal Law in accor- dance with the Scripture, You shall love your neighbor as [you love] yourself, you do well. But if you show servile regard prejudice, favoritism for people, you commit sin and are rebuked and convicted by the Law as violators and offenders.
JAMES —9 In our ministry, we sometimes give special seating to specific people attending our conferences, but not because they are either rich or poor, well dressed or poorly dressed. We may give a special seat to a pastor we know in the area, because the Bible says that we are to give honor to whom honor is due Romans Or we may set aside a special seating area for relatives of those on our travel team.
Our travel team works very hard all year, and this is one way we can show them honor and appreciation. But we may also provide special seating for those in wheelchairs, the hearing impaired or others with special needs. The flesh has tendencies toward prejudice and partiality, but God condemns such things; therefore, we must condemn them also. Love Has Pure Motives Examine and test and evaluate your own selves to see whether you are holding to your faith and showing the proper fruits of it.
People may be impressed with what we do, but God is not, unless our motives are pure. For example, if I were to give a pastor a special seat in a confer- ence to show him honor, that act would be acceptable to God. If the work which any person has built on this Foundation [any product of his efforts whatever] survives [this test], he will get his reward.
These Scriptures were made real to me by the Holy Spirit many years ago, and the principle they teach has helped me immensely in my walk with God and my dealings with other people. If we, as believers, can develop a determination to live before God with pure motives, it will save us a lot of heartache and misery in life. John — He always knew what was really in them, and that is no different today.
We may succeed in fooling people, but not God. Operating out of a pure heart also saves us a lot of time in life. I wasted a lot of years doing, doing, doing, and it seemed that most of what I did never succeeded. It took me a long time to realize that God will not bless actions done out of wrong motives. He will not answer prayers that are prayed with wrong motives: You do not have, because you do not ask. JAMES —3 If we want our work to count for something and our prayers to be effective, we must learn to walk in love, which is not exclusive, unfriendly or inhospitable.
I find that even the church is full of cliques. A couple recently told me about being part of a cell group program in a certain church for a year and having to resign due to pressing family issues.
They were leaving the church to go elsewhere because they felt that ever since they resigned their position, they were being treated differently. They said that while they once felt on the inside, now they felt on the outside. It seemed that people were not interested in associating with them now that they were no longer doing what the group was doing.
We really need to develop more sensitivity to the feelings of others. If everyone in church on Sunday morning stands and greets others, and we notice an individual sitting in the pew who does not seem to know what to do, we should make sure that person feels welcome.
When attending a party or group gathering, if everyone is talking and one individual is standing alone across the room, we should make a special effort to include that person in the group. To be honest, sometimes this is work, and when we go to church for worship or go out for entertainment, who among us really wants to work? But building relationships is work; it requires effort. As believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, you and I are instructed in the Word of God to make strangers feel welcome, to be hospitable toward them and not mistreat them in any way.
This is especially important in church. Of course, not all churches are cold and uncar- ing; many are warm, friendly and loving, and those are the ones that will flourish.
Everyone wants to be accepted, made to feel welcome and loved. God gave the Israelites specific instructions not to wrong or oppress strangers, telling them to remember that they were once strangers in the land themselves Exodus We have all been the new person at work or at school, in a neighborhood or a church.
We should remember how much we appreciated those who took the initiative to be friendly with us. We did everything together. We had lunch together after my weekly meetings, shopped together, prayed together, talked on the phone, shared secrets, etc. I did not make a secret of the fact that each of those individuals was special in my life. In all three relationships I ended up getting hurt and experi- encing major rejection. He showed me how it made others feel, and asked me to think about how I would feel if someone was doing the same thing to me.
As we have seen, we certainly can have special friends, but we should not flaunt our friendships. We should not behave in such a way that the one friend is made to feel special while all the others are made to feel they are way down at the bottom of our list.
God showed me that He had to lift His anointing off of each of those three relationships of mine because I was showing partiality, and it was hurting other people. I am glad about what God taught me in those areas, but every once in a while I need a refresher course to keep me going in the right direction.
I pray that the Lord will always let me know if my attitude or behavior is hurting other people. Name-droppers get on my nerves.
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