Free God Is Not Mad at You: You Can Experience Real Love, Acceptance & Guilt-free Living by Joyce Meyer Page A

begin to seriouslythink about what it says, the power of it will seep into your soul and bring a revelation of His love that will be life-changing.
    God decided to love us before we even arrived on planet earth. The only thing that stands between us and God’s love is our being willing to believe Him and receive it.
    In God’s love He chooses to see us as blameless and above reproach (blame), and He sets us apart for Himself and makes us His own possession.
    The apostle Paul urges us to let nothing separate us from the love of God, for it is indeed the most empowering force in the world.
    There are of course many other wonderful aspects of God’s character, but I mentioned the ones in this chapter as an aid to help my readers settle the father issues in their life once and for all. God is far above people, and His ways are perfect. Trust Him and let His love heal you.
    A staff member at Joyce Meyer Ministries recounts:
    I gave my life to Christ in 1984, however I have been through two failed marriages and lots of disappointments in my life. Although I believed in God and loved Jesus, I did not believe that God loved me personally. All through grade school and high school I was ridiculed and made fun of. My first husband ran away with a seventeen-year-old girl after just four years of marriage. Through my last marriage of twenty-three years, I had become extremely codependent. When that ended, I was hurt and angry and again I was rejected. I believed I was a failure. My self-worth was at its lowest low. I had been told most of my life that I was fat and ugly, and I felt unlovable. I was used by men and had a great distrust of them, especially any man that was in authority over me.
    It sounds so easy, “Just accept this gift of God’s love.” But I felt unlovable. I would look in the mirror and see anugly person in the reflection; in my mind I would say, “Who could love this?” Years of rejection and hurt had caused me to believe these lies. Keep in mind that I was serving God and going to church this whole time, but I still believed I was unlovable.
    In 2010 I was hired at the ministry and in the fall of that same year I started attending the ministry’s inner-city outreach church, the St. Louis Dream Center. On Tuesday nights they provided a class called Experiencing the Father’s Embrace. I yearned to understand God’s love for me but knew the journey would be painful as I relived my past hurts in order to understand why I could not grasp this concept. Many old wounds were opened and exposed. I had to forgive in order to move on with my life. The person teaching our class said, “I challenge you to stand in front of the mirror and say, ‘God loves me,’ not just once but five to ten times a day or every time you walk by a mirror.” I had to stop, look directly into my own eyes and say it. I reluctantly followed her instructions. It took several months but one day I began to believe it. I truly believed that God loved me! Me! Wow! I am loved!

CHAPTER 6
The Pain of Rejection
    He who hears and heeds you [disciples] hears and heeds Me; and he who slights and rejects you slights and rejects Me; and he who slights and rejects Me slights and rejects Him who sent Me.
    Luke 10:16
    You can escape the bondage and pain of rejection and experience the freedom of God’s acceptance. None of us experiences acceptance from everyone in our life, and although rejection hurts, we are able to look at it realistically and not be adversely affected by it, but many of us experience a type of rejection that damages our souls. It is a pain so deep that it makes us reject and dislike ourselves. We believe that we are flawed if people reject us and therefore we erroneously decide that we are worthless. That mentality is very harmful to us because God created us for love and acceptance and nothing else will ever satisfy us. Until we have it, we will hunger for it, and may sadly look for it in all the wrong places.
    Interestingly, many