Sermon for today by Joyce Meyer : What Are You Waiting For?

Topic : What Are You Waiting For?

Are you putting off happiness untilsome other time? I am personally trying to avoid saying, “I will be happy when—” and
just being happy now. We fall into the trap of thinking, “I will be happy when it’s Friday and I get my paycheck and have the
weekend free.” Or “I will be happy when vacation time is here,” or “when I retire and don’t have to work anymore,” or

“when the kids are grown and my life is my own.” There can be a million whens that keep us from enjoying now. Make a
decision not to base your happiness on some future event, and be happy today! It would be better to say, “I will enjoy
vacation time when it comes, but I am happy right now.”

Learn to enjoy everyday ordinary life because that is what most of life is. We can’t base our happiness on the few special events that we have in the course of our life, because if we do, we will miss a lot of happiness. You don’t have to be happy just on Friday; you can also be happy on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Go ahead and
try it and you will find out that you can do it if you want to.

The only way we can avoid having regrets tomorrow is to make better choices about today. What will you do with today?

It is yours as a gift from God, and I urge you not to waste it being sad over something that your sadness won’t change
anyway.
Are you waiting for some outside force to move you to feel happy? If so, you may be waiting a long, long time.

Form the habit of deciding how you will live each day, without waiting to see how you feel. The only thing to do with life is to
enjoy it, and that won’t happen unless you form a habit of doing so. If you tend be sad and unhappy (which is also a
habit), put some smiley faces around your house to remind you to begin your happiness journey by smiling more. If you smile, it will make you feel a tiny bit happier and you might get addicted to the feeling and want more and more.

Are you waiting for some other person in your life to change his or her behavior so you can be happy? If so, that is a
huge mistake.

Why should you let someone else’s choices
determine your level of joy? Besides, nobody else can make you permanently happy—not your spouse, not your child, not
your friend.

Melanie is a sixty-year-old woman who has been married for more than forty years. Her husband, Don, is a history professor at a small Christian college. Don has always loved history and he gets tremendous satisfaction from teaching. The
Civil War is his passion, and in his free time he writes books about specific battles or key individuals of the war.

One day Melanie confided in a friend that she had been unhappy for years because Don didn’t make enough money to
provide nice vacations or things that she wanted, like beautiful furnishings for the house or a great wardrobe. Most of the time when Melanie complained her friends would commiserate with her and tell her that she deserved nice things. But this
particular friend said, “Melanie, Don is not responsible for your happiness. You are. Don loves his work, he isn’t interested in
becoming rich, and even if he was, he’s sixty years old, so you do the math.

“If you want to be happy, you’d better figure out what you can do about it, because that isn’t Don’s job.”

It is six years later, and Melanie’s friend told me that Melanie recently wrote her a letter thanking her for showing tough love. Melanie took responsibility for her own happiness, and she said that her marriage has never been better. Not only that, but she learned that she is a playwright. She has written a play that is performed in regional theaters. She is now happy
and fulfilled.

We cannot control people, and the sooner we learn that, the happier we can be. I have realized in the last couple of years that most of my “unhappy days” are caused by things other people do or don’t do. Someone might offend me or hurt my feelings.

They might be making choices that are hurting them, and because I love them, their choices hurt me.

Sometimes people are rude and disrespectful and that hurts me. We do get hurt and disappointed by people, but we don’t have to dwell on what they do.

We can realize that they are hurting themselves more than they are hurting us and let that knowledge motivate us to pray sincerely for them rather than merely feeling sorry for ourselves and losing our joy.

Take responsibility for your own joy and happiness and never again base it on what someone else does.