Making Marriage Work (3 page)

The same conditions still exist that used to bring separation and strife between us, but they no longer have the divisive effect on us. We’ve learned to be honest with our feelings without threatening each other’s security. We’ve learned to find the right time to confront each other with the issues that used to throw us into opposite corners of the ring.

Dave and I learned to love each other, and out of our love a worldwide ministry was birthed. It was never my goal to start a huge ministry; I was just loving God and trying to learn to love Dave because that was what God was asking me to do. God has made big changes in our lives.

Dave and I learned to love each other, and out of our love a worldwide ministry was birthed.

We learned to be good stewards when we were paying the sixty-five dollars a month rent we needed for our apartment. Today God provides all the funds needed each month for a world outreach. I share this with you only to show you the vast expanse of God’s ability to take plain, common, and ordinary people like Dave and me through gigantic steps of faith.

I was a housewife with a twelfth grade education, making my bed in a town nobody ever heard of, Fenton, Missouri, when God called me to do this. I was not looking for some big ministry; I was trying to survive sexual abuse, failed relationships, a messed up mind, and messed up emotions. But I loved God.

It’s amazing what God will do for you if you just love Him. We complicate Christianity to the point of losing the joy of our salvation. The primary thing we need to do is receive the love of God, learn how to love ourselves in a balanced way, love God back, and then let that love flow through us to the world full of hurting, dying people.

God will give back to us not only what we give away but will also give as a great deal of joy with it. The world is full of rich people who have “things” but are miserable. It’s good to be materially prosperous, but it’s even better to be happy and biblically blessed along with prosperity.

The doors that God has opened for us amaze us. I can’t figure it out, but I am determined that as long as I can breathe, I will keep walking through them in trying to help as many people receive God’s joy in their lives as I can. Our society today is in a major, major, major mess, and people don’t realize that they need God!

So many people have an impression of God that is just not true, and they don’t know to turn to Him to solve their problems. God called Dave and me to a ministry in which we can show the world an exciting God Who is fun, generous, wonderful, and Who can solve their problems. We receive thousands of letters confirming that our simple message of trusting God by doing what He says to do is getting through to people.

One woman who wrote me said that she’d been living with a man for fifteen years. They weren’t married; they had an eight-year-old son; they were drug addicts and they both had been abused in their childhood. She ran away from home when she was fifteen. She wrote:

God called Dave and me to a ministry in which we can show the world an exciting God Who is fun, generous, wonderful and Who can solve their problems.

We believed in God, but we lived in sin. One morning, I came across [your television program] Life In The Word. I don’t even know why I stopped to watch you. But I began to watch you every morning as I cleaned my house, and I felt like you were talking directly to me.

Now I get up every day looking forward to watching Life In The Word. I watch you first, then I read my Bible, then I pray. Me and my boyfriend and our son started attending the same church that I went to when I was young. We both got saved two weeks ago. Joyce, we gave up drugs and we are getting married next month.

I wanted to let you know that you reached me and helped me and my family turn our lives around. Please continue doing what you are doing.

When Dave and I read the next sentence, we both stood in our bedroom and cried. She said,

Now our son will be raised in church by Christians and not by drug addicts.

There are many people like her who believe in God, but live in sin. Christianity is not just a trip to the altar to say the sinner’s prayer. It is not just marching off to church on Sunday morning or having a bumper sticker, a tape recorder, and a Jesus pin. Christianity has to be walked out in a lifestyle that solves problems. We must learn to die to self and live like Christ.

Another woman wrote to us saying:

My husband had a gambling addiction. One night we had an argument because he was going to go out and gamble more of our money away. We were already in such a deep financial hole it was unbelievable.

We were arguing, and he was going to leave. He came into the bedroom to grab the keys off the dresser. I reached out and turned on the television. There you were and said, “You with the gambling addiction …” He stopped dead in his tracks.

We film these shows to be aired months later, so only God could orchestrate something like that. Isn’t God powerful? The woman said her husband it still working through some things, but he’s been attending Gambler’s Anonymous and has made a real commitment to conquer his addiction.

One woman who started watching me said she didn’t even believe in women preachers because she had been taught that it was wrong for women to teach or preach. The only reason she started watching was because she liked my clothes. (I told Dave, “You see Dave, my clothes are helping the cause of Christ. I have no choice but to shop!”)

The woman who liked my clothes was a seamstress and went out and bought a sketchpad. Every night at 11 o’clock, she sat and drew the outfit I had on. She said:

I added all the sparkles, and I’d look at the backs of your sleeves and draw them all out so I could make them. I have no idea when I started listening to you, but somewhere in the process of all that, God deeply touched my heart. I’m closer to God now than I’ve ever been in my whole life.

I’ve been a Christian thirty years, but I never had a really close relationship with God. [Your messages] drew me so close to God. My husband did not believe in women preachers, but he saw such a change in me that now if I get in a little bit of a bad mood, he says, “You’d better be sure to watch Joyce Meyer tonight.”

My favorite letter came from Rick Renner who has a ministry in Latvia. I have the privilege of being on television there, all over the former Soviet Union. The letter told how God was moving in a woman’s life in a powerful way through the ministers she saw on
TV
. In many small Russian villages where it looks as though people don’t have much of anything, most families still manage to have a television.

Rick wrote: “I think this story will bless you, Joyce.” He said a Ukrainian pastor took an evangelistic team into a little Russian village where they knew for certain there had never been a church or a gospel outreach. They believed it was brand new territory and anticipated awesome opportunities.

They knocked on the door of the first little house in the village and a little woman opened the door. When they began to share the Gospel with her, she said, “Oh, wait, wait, wait; come in. Let me tell you what’s happened to me.”

When they went in, she shared that she had been watching “Good News with Rick Renner” and was saved while watching television. She said that on the lower part of her back, she had, had a cantaloupe-sized tumor that could not be removed because it was too dangerous. The tumor, which she had, had most of her life, caused her to slump over when she walked. She wore loose fitting clothes to keep people from seeing it. The tumor was very uncomfortable and had affected her whole life.

A month after being saved, she watched a minister on
TV
who pointed at the screen and said, “Healing belongs to you.” In an instant she believed. She heard a loud pop on her back, ran to the bathroom and saw that all the stuff that had been in the tumor was running down her back and the back of her legs. By the end of the day, the thing was completely gone — not one trace of it remained.

Another month passed. She was watching a different minister who began to share about the baptism in the Holy Spirit. The Russian woman said she received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and began to pray in the Spirit right there in her little home, in that Russian village. She was born again, healed, and baptized in the Holy Ghost, but felt there was something still missing. Then she told them, “Now I’ve found ‘Life In The Word with Joyce Meyer.’ I am getting my soul healed and am maturing as a Christian.”

In 1999, we had a rare opportunity to go on a popular network in Asia called “Starworld.” It is a secular network, but it’s an English-speaking channel that reaches up to one-half billion homes of people who want to practice their English. They’ve never had any kind of religious broadcasting on that channel. This letter came from Asia where we are sharing the Good News of the Gospel every morning:

One day, at 6
A.M
., I happened to get up early and turn on the television. I saw you for the first time. I’ve been watching Starworld for ten years, and I’ve never felt any program as inspiring as the lecture you gave. I was totally amused.

I’ve been feeling depressed for many, years; sometimes I even felt like I was going to explode, although my students would never feel it. I never showed it outwardly.

Do you have any idea how many people are unhappy, but they never show it outwardly? They live phony lives, putting a plastic smile on their face every day and just trying to hide their misery from everybody. Jesus died for us to have more than a phony life.

At my work post, I think I can say I’m a qualified professor, but as a person, I always felt that I was unhappy inside. I tried to analyze myself — tried to find out what psychological problems I had — but I always failed. Really I was just very miserable.

But when I saw you, you said, “I want to share something with you that can help you come into a place of rest.” You said, “Frustration comes from works of the flesh,” and I’ll never forget your description about the seeds in your hands, which was so impressive.

Your paraphrases are so amazing I can’t even tear myself away from it. So from the first time I saw you, I’ve never missed the chance to meet you at 6
A.M
. every day for nearly two weeks now. I’m totally obsessed with your lectures. I’m sure I’ll follow your course.

I managed to borrow a Bible in English in order to follow your reading. I found no bookshops within my reach that sells the Book. When you asked us to open the Book and turn to I Peter chapter 5, I opened up the Book I borrowed. It was not the Word you were reading.
(The reason is that I read from
The Amplified Bible
.) She continued:

To tell you the truth, before listening to your lectures, I never thought that I would be interested in any religious beliefs because I knew too little about them. I think maybe the one I borrowed is not the same edition as the one you have. Mine is like this: ‘Holy Bible placed by the Gideons.’

Could you please tell me where and in which way I can get the Book that you use. Thank you very much.

Sincerely,

Your listener …

Of course, we sent her “The Book” right away, and we are believing for her salvation. It is amazing how many people have never heard godly principles to apply to their lives.

Christianity has so much to offer people. It is a lifestyle. Christianity has to be walked out in our everyday lives if we are going to affect anybody else’s life.

After I made a decision to become a Christian, I had to learn how to live like a Christian. I learned that God’s blessings cannot be enjoyed with one worldly foot stuck in stubbornness, fear, and rebellion and the other foot trying to touch the kingdom. I also learned that God’s blessings are not just for ourselves. When we do what is right, it affects the lives of others.

That is part of the miracle that God works between two people. His plan is to restore our relationship with Him, then our relationships with each other. He didn’t change our individual style or approach to life; He simply changed our hearts to be more accepting toward each other. He taught us to adapt to each other and attend to each other’s needs when at all possible. He taught us to take care of each other as well as we would take care of ourselves.

God simply changed our hearts to be more accepting toward each other. He taught us to adapt to each other and attend to each other’s needs when at all possible.

If husbands and wives could practice this ability to accept and attend to each other at home, these relational standards could spread to how we treat people at work, in our neighborhoods, and in our world. Then the mystery of relationships that God spoke of in Ephesians 5:32 would begin to unfold its secret.

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BUT WON’T THAT HURT?

For no man ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and carefully protects and cherishes it, as Christ does the church, Because we are members (parts) of His body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

Ephesians 5:29-31

What was God thinking when He designed two unique, never to be copied again, strangely wonderful individuals with their own visions, dreams, and goals, and then told them, “Now you will become one flesh”? And which one of us are we to become? Is he to become like me, or am I to become like him? What is God really asking us to do and what is His purpose in all of this?

First, we must understand that the instruction that husbands and wives would become one was given to those who fellowship with God. “Becoming one” was not something we were told to do, but was something that He said would happen to us through the process of His plan.

God wants Christian couples to be subject to one another out of a reverence for Christ. His purpose lies in the fact that we are members (parts) of His Own body. Christian couples are to become as one flesh in their goals and decisions in order to demonstrate to the world on a small scale the power that takes place from the oneness that a personal relationship with Him should reflect. Look at the verse that follows the comment that couples would become one flesh.