Sunday, April 25, 2010

You can't steal MY joy....

So, I'm reading this book by Joyce Meyer titled, 'Seven Things that steal your joy.' I was intrigued by the title so I picked it up at the library last week. I had just begun the introduction and I read this:

'Satan is an expert at stealing from us, but his favorite target is not our material possessions; it is our joy. He is always out to steal our joy because he knows if we lose our joy, we lose our strength, and that gives him a powerful advantage over us. So our joy is his main concern. He wants to bring discouraging things to our lives and make us believe that all life consists of is disappointments.
We don't have to let the devil take our joy away from us. No matter what is going on in our lives, we need to stay as happy as we can because then we will have the strength to face whatever comes our way.
One way we can stay happy is not making a big deal out of little things that we should just let go. For example, maybe somebody did hurt our feelings, but getting angry will steal our joy; the answer is to get over it quickly. "But what they did wasn't right," you may say. We have all done something that wasn't right at some time in our life. When we did that, what did we need? We needed a little mercy. What did we want the person we offended to do for us? We wanted them to give us a break. That means we need to sow what we want to reap.'

Hmmmmmmmm.........

'Not only do we need to give other people a break, but we need to give ourselves a break. We need to learn not to be so hard on others or ourselves. Why? Because harshness and unforgiveness rob us of joy.'

Is this speaking to you? It's screaming at me...

1 comment:

Shelley said...

did you know you were led to write this just for me? you were a vessel and didn't even realize, did ya.