One of those things can be guilt and shame and just a general, bad feeling about yourself. It's so wonderful to me that the first thing God wants to give us is right standing with him through Christ by faith. So, it's like all of our life the devil works to give us what I call "wrongness." I had a record playing in my head for years: What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me? We compare ourselves to other people and try to be like them, and we never get settled just in being who we are for the glory of God. I know you've had some experiences in this area, too. What about that area for you and how hard was it to overcome that?
Lisa: It was interesting -- the whole time I was a heathen, Satan did not tell me how all the things I was doing were wrong. He was like, "enjoy your wrongness! Do it! And do it to the maximum!" Then I became a Christian and there was a short period where I really experienced the forgiveness of God and the goodness of God and understood it wasn't about me. But then the religious list started for me of all the guilt and all the shame and other people saying, "you mean you did that before you were saved?" I remember I would go to bed every night with a check list of everything that I had done wrong that day, which for me was pretty big. I would feel so weighed down every single morning with what I hadn't done right the day before. I was like, "I'll just try to do better today." But I was so burdened.
Joyce Meyer Ministries remember very distinctly one morning I was coming to him and I said, "God, I did this wrong, and I yelled at John, and I didn't spank Addison, and I did this." He was like, "you know what? Stop it." He said, "you are still the focus of everything. You need to get your eyes off of you and get your eyes on me. My ways are higher. My ways are so much higher, Lisa. If you focus on you, you will never be transformed. You are looking in a mirror of yourself. And your past, your guilt and your shame will never transform you. I want you to begin to look in the mirror of my word."
