Welcome to 15 Minutes in the Word with New York Times best-selling author Joyce Meyer.

On today's program, Joyce will be teaching from her series, Keeping God First.

There is much in life that competes for our attention, but there is one who wants to be first before anything else,

and when we make Jesus the sinner, everything gets better.

Be encouraged today as Joyce shares

how we can pursue God first and grow a deep,

satisfying relationship with him.

Now, here's Joyce with today's teaching.

I'd like you to go to Jeremiah chapter 17.

We're gonna keep God first, aren't we?

I like these messages.

I just preach to myself and make myself happy.

Boy, these scriptures have ministered to me so many times over the years.

And back in the days when I was still trying to break a lot of these habits of leaning on other things and being independent, I would go to these scriptures over and over and over and over again.

Verse five starts out, Jeremiah 17.5, thus says the Lord, cursed with great evil is the strong

man who trusts in and relies on frail man, making weak human flesh his arm and whose mind

and heart turn aside from the Lord. He shall be like a shrub or a person naked and destitute

in the desert, and he shall not see any good thing come to him. But he will dwell in the

parched places in the wilderness. that means everything in your life will be

dry and in an uninhabited saltland so what's god telling us we're going to get if we run to people

and put people before him a lousy life but most blessed is the man who believes in trust and relies on

the lord and whose hope and confidence the Lord is.

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