An Apology to Joyce Meyer

 

Joyce Meyer is a great teacher.

I learned a lot from her when I was a younger Christian. I watched her a great deal in my late 20's, for example. I even read her book The Battlefield of the Mind.

Her teachings on righteousness really helped me to see who I was in Christ. "I am the righteousness of God" was not some phrase I learned to claim over myself only when I started listening to Pastor Joseph Prince.

In 2008, I was learning so much about the Gift of Righteousness, and that God gives us all these blessings because of our righteous standing before God, in Christ! And I learned about this from Joyce.

I knew and believed, and spoke out the verses in 2 Corinthians 5:21, and the other verses that touch on our righteous standing in Christ.

Yet in 2008 and 2009, my life was still full of struggles. I found myself warring in my mind a great deal. Instead of feeling a sense of peace and carefree joy, I felt that I was all alone in the world. I wondered how I could live this life, and I didn't know whether God was really on my side or not.

One thing lead to another, and all the temporal blessings that I enjoyed in my life, I ended up throwing away. I was under so much stress, convinced that there was so much work that I had to do. There was no assurance of faith, and I was constantly plagued with worry about what would happen to me if I sinned, or took a wrong step, or did something amiss.

The world still centered around me, and I felt that everything depended on me.

When I was down and out in my life, during the 2009-2010 period, I became really bitter towards preachers like Joyce Meyer. My life had fallen apart, and I was writhing with guilt and shame because I could not overcome the bad habits, the harsh thoughts, the wrong believing in my life. I felt like I was in an abyss, a cycle of shame that I could not escape. What was all this talk about blessings and our righteous standing, if I was still struggling with all these problems?

Then I discovered the Gospel of Grace through Pastor Prince, I learned about the Old and New Covenants, and I realized that all our sins are forgiven--pass, present, future--because of Jesus and His Finished Work on the Cross.

At that point, I started making cutting, bitting, critical remarks against preachers and teachers of God's Word like Joyce Meyer. "She didn't teach me about this or that! She didn't explain to me about some things and others things! She's just another church lady!" And so on.

Entering into this new, grand year, fifteen years later! I have been seeing more of Jesus than I have ever seen before. Because I have been praying the Ephesians 1 and Ephesians 3 prayers at great length, Jesus has really revealed Himself to me.

And that's the whole point! I see Him more clearly, more fully, more completely as a Living Savior! All that time from 2008 to 2010, I was rooted in His love, but did not know it. All that time, I had already become the righteousness of God in Christ, but I was deceived, in bondage to the mixture of wrong believing and bad teaching of my parents and their traditions. I was still under law, struggling with the classical Galatian error.

The problem was not with what Joyce Meyer had been teaching. When she talked about the gift of righteousness, when she talked about all the blessings accorded to us because of our righteous standing in Christ, she was SPOT ON!

The problem was that I had all this junky, clunky, garbled wrong believing haunting me. That was never Joyce Meyer's fault! I was still holding onto this idea that I had to earn what God so freely gives. Huh? Yes, that was what I believed still. Sure, God had saved me, but I was on my own on this earth. Sure, I was heading for heaven, but I felt that I was still living hell on earth. How awful it is to be under mixture, under law and grace put together.

I do submit that more pastors, preachers, and teachers need to confront this fact: many Christians are hearing the Word of Christ, but they are not recognizing that they are trying to balance or mix the truth with wrong believing, the bad teachings of their past lives, or their former customs.

No wonder Paul writes:

"That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts;" (Ephesians 4:22)

We need to put off all the deceitful lusts, and those lusts are not just the desire to eat more food, or engaging in illicit sexual practices. There is also the lust for self-righteous preeminence, to make ourselves big and right in our own eyes because of our own works, i.e. "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, the pride of life." (1 John 2:16)

The problem was that in the background, I still saw God all wrong. I was trying to merge what my parents, what all the religious traditions I had grown up with had told me about God with all the great truths in God's Word that people like Joyce Meyer--and later, Pastor Prince--were revealing to me.

It wasn't that Joyce Meyere was so much church-lady Pharisee. It was that I was the Pharisee!

I can write this post as an apology to Joyce Meyer, and I encourage her to keep preaching the Gospel of Grace and let everyone know the Gospel truth that in Christ, we have become the Righteousness of God, and that in Christ we are accorded all the blessings with Him! (Ephesians 1:3)