Meyer - Straight talk on insecurity: overcoming emotional battles with the power of Gods word!

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from The Amplified Bible (AMP). The Amplified Bible, Old Testament, copyright 1965, 1987 by The Zondervan Corporation. The Amplified Bible, New Testament, copyright 1954, 1958, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Originally published as Help Me Im Insecure

Warner Books Edition

Copyright 1998 by Joyce Meyer

Life In The Word, Inc.

P.O. Box 655

Fenton, Missouri 63026

All rights reserved.

Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

First eBook Edition: February 2003

ISBN: 978-0-446-55643-9

The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

A re you tired of playing games, wearing masks, trying to be someone other than who you are? Wouldnt you like the freedom just to be accepted as you are, without pressure to be someone you really dont know how to be?

Would you like to learn how to succeed at being yourself?

God wants us to accept ourselves, to like who we are and to learn to deal with our weaknesses because we all have plenty of them. He doesnt want us to reject ourselves because of them.

Jesus understands our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15).

The Holy Spirit bears us up in our weakness (Romans 8:26).

God chooses weak and foolish things of the world to confound the wise (1 Corinthians 1:27).

If I look at my weaknesses and tell you what I believe my value is, it will be less than nothing. But our worth is not based on anything we do but in what God has already done.

God accepts us as we are, but the devil tries very hard to keep us from really understanding that. He brings pressure on us from many different sources to try to keep us feeling we dont measure up to the standard of where we should be. He doesnt want us to find out we can accept and like ourselves just as we are because he knows if we ever do that, something wonderful will begin happening to us.

The opinion we have of ourself affects all our relationshipswith people and with God. Because it affects our relationship with God, it affects our prayer life.

We can pray and pray, basing our prayers on the promises God gives us in the Scriptures and using all the right words, without the prayer being effective. One reason the prayer may not bear fruit is if we have such bad feelings about ourselves we dont believe God ought to do for us what we are asking. We have a hard time praying and believing God will do the great thing we are praying about because we dont expect Him to do it! We base our own value on our performance, letting our weaknesses, flaws and failures negatively affect our opinion of ourselves.

People are extremely performance oriented. We learn from the time we are little, the better we perform the more love we receive. In our relationship with God, our thinking often continues in this pattern. We think God will love us and bless us more, the better we perform. But because we arent able to behave right all the time, we start working and striving, trying to overcome all our weaknesses. We think God will then love us enough to do for us what we need.

Our worth is not in what we do, but in what God has made us through what He has done. Every Christian knows this principleit is the basis of salvation. We are made righteous, or put in rightstanding with God, through what Jesus did by dying on the cross. We cannot earn salvation by what we doit is a free gift from God because of what Jesus did (1 Corinthians 1:30; Ephesians 2:8). We just need to accept it.

But even though every Christian received salvation by believing we are made right with God through what He did, usually only very mature Christians continue in this truth and learn to approach all of life on the same basis (Galatians 3:3). As we saw, this type of thinking is contrary to the way most people were brought up to think. We must change our thinking by renewing our mind with the Scriptures that teach our rightstanding with God is through Jesusnot through our own works.

Our worth is not based on how acceptable we can make ourselves to God. God is looking for people with a right heart attitude toward Him, not a perfect performance record. Second Chronicles 16:9 (KJV) says, For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him.

whose heart is perfect toward him, means to have a right heart attitude toward Godto love God as much as we know how to love Him; to want what He wants; to want His will; to want to do His will.

God has made the provision for us to be in rightstanding with Him (if we will accept it). He loves us and is looking for people who are open to His will so that He can show Himself strong in their behalf and bless them.

We dont earn Gods love; we dont earn His blessings. We can go to Him at any time and have our needs met. Hebrews 4:16 says, Let us then fearlessly and confidently and boldly draw near to the throne of grace (the throne of Gods unmerited favor to us sinners), that we may receive mercy [for our failures] and find grace to help in good time for every need [appropriate help and well-timed help, coming just when we need it].

However, the ongoing lifestyle we choose affects our ability to receive all that God has for us. A life of serving and obeying God allows Him to place us in a position for Him to open several avenues to use in consistently blessing us. Faithfulness releases blessings (Proverbs 28:20).

A lifestyle of disobedience will definitely affect what God is able to do in our lives because the Bible teaches if we plant bad seeds, we will reap a bad harvest (Galatians 6:8).

People who live and walk in intentional disobedience, but want God to bless them anyway, may think that we dont have to make an effort to overcome our weaknesses to win Gods approval. They believe if we are weak in an area, we have an excuse to sin. The truth is this: God will use us in spite of our weaknesses and will help us overcome them; we dont have to struggle to overcome them on our own, but we must be progressing toward overcoming them.

The Lord told Paul: My strength and power are made perfect (fulfilled and completed) and shows themselves most effective in [your] weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). Second Corinthians 13:4 (KJV) tells us we are weak in him, but we shall live with him by the power of God.

When Paul was teaching the Romans the message of grace he said:

Are we to remain in sin in order that Gods grace (favor and mercy) may multiply and overflow?

Certainly not! How can we who died to sin live in it any longer?

Romans 6:1, 2

In other words, should we see how much we can sin because sinning will give God an opportunity to give us grace? Pauls response in so many words was, For crying out loudhow can you sin if youre dead to sin?

Pauls point was to teach them who they were in Christ. They and we are acceptable because God made us acceptable (Romans 6:516).

God wants us to come to terms with ourselves and learn our value is not in what we do but in who we are. He wants us to be willing to be who we are, weaknesses and all.

Its wonderful not to start the day by waking up and hating yourself for half an hour before you ever get out of bed! Or wake up to hear the devil rattling in your ears a list of all the mistakes you made the day before, telling you youre a failure and cant expect God to do anything good for you. Many people are beat down before they ever get their feet on the floor in the morning!