The Art of Learning How to Love
This article is taken from Joyce’s audio teaching, Walking in Love.
by Joyce Meyer
No matter how long you may live, you’ll never stop learning. Every minute of every day brings new opportunities to learn something we’ve never known before. As long as we’re open to receive, God will continue to teach us every day.
I’m still learning, and I know I always will be. What God teaches me every day about love continues to change my life. I’ve come to the place where I can honestly say, “Lord, eliminate everything in my life that’s holding me back. Please take away anything that’s keeping me from walking in love and finding true fulfillment in my life.” In other words, “Lord, reduce me to love—bring me to a state or condition of walking in love completely!”
Love Adapts and Adjusts
One of the most important facets I’ve learned about love is unselfishness, which is characterized in the Bible as a willingness to sacrifice one’s own wishes for those of others. I’ve learned that true love will always adapt and adjust to the needs and desires of other people.
It’s impossible for people who’ve truly been reduced to love to be selfish. God has taught them how to be totally adaptable and adjustable to others. Selfish people, on the other hand, have hard hearts. It’s very difficult for them to learn anything—especially if it involves self-sacrifice. They expect everyone else to adjust to them and their needs. They simply don’t know how to adjust to others without becoming angry or upset.
Learning to adapt and adjust to the needs and desires of others was very difficult for me. To be honest, I wanted my way, and I got upset when I didn’t get it. I was selfish! I wanted what I wanted, when I wanted it! I couldn’t stand having to wait on someone else or bending my own wishes to accommodate someone else’s timetable.
But God began to soften my heart, and gradually I learned to see the needs of others. Then God gave me compassion—the heartfelt desire to meet the needs of others first before my own.
lovegodothers 
Compassion! That is the key. I went to a healing seminar conducted by John Wimber in Michigan over 20 years ago. He asked the question, “how do we know when God wants to heal someone we are praying with?” It is compassion. God will help us to see their sickness from their perspective. I remember John Wimber saying that in every case when someone came to Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, they were healed.
Wimber points out the famous passage where the leper comes to Jesus: (Luke 5:12-13)
“Now there was a man full of leprosy* in one of the towns where he was; and when he saw Jesus, he fell prostrate, pleaded with him, and said, “Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean.” 13Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him, and said, “I do will it. Be made clean.” And the leprosy left him immediately. Jesus’ response to healing those with sickness was “of course I want to heal you!”
At the Joyce Meyer conferance in Cleveland, Ohio about a month ago, Joyce described how other people seem to be the cause of our unhappiness. This is not possible she said, we alone control our happiness.
Then she had an insight, that most of the people in our life who care causing us problems are in need of healing themselves. We are letting these deeply hurt people, effect our happiness.
Here is where the compassion ties everything together in a bow.
If God gives us companssion for the troublemakers in our life, they no longer have power over us and we can be happy. But this approach would still be selfish.
God gives us compassion for others to help THEM to heal. I once commented that if bad people did not bother christians, so those Christians started praying for these people, how would the annoying people ever get prayed for.
The Cure De Ars, John Vianney in a book of short quotes says to say these words “Lord have mercy” for our enemies. This is because scripture says vengence is mine, vengence belongs to God. St. John concludes that God will pout hot coals on the heads of those attacking us.
I have not found it to be true, instead God begins to bring his mercy and love into these people’s lives, just like he did for us. Look at what happened to Jonah and Ninnevah. He got angry when God showed mercy to those he had prophesied doom was coming. Yet God showed Johan how selfish he was to mourn the loss of shade plant, but not the lives of those in the city.
In conclusion, God does not want us to be selfish, he wants us to trust him for our needs, and be compassionate to the needs of others. He does not want our happiness to come from others opinions of us, but rather from chooseing to be happy because he who is our brother and Fathers loves us so deeply!