Joyce Meyer admits she was raped by her father, experience brought her guilt
Popular Christian author and speaker Joyce Meyer says that her father raped her when she was a young kid until she reached the age of 18, and that experience brought her shame and guilt. She thought that it was her own fault that this had happened to her.
Meyer was able to talk largely in the past during her sermons about being sexually abused by her father. In a video interview posted on her website last month, she shares that she thought it's no longer enough to just settle with the term "sexual abuse." Meyer thinks it's about time to be brutally honest about it and refer to what happened to her for what it was — that she was raped. She claims she was raped at least once a week until she turned 18.
During her sermon last Monday where she talked about putting God's righteousness, Meyer was reminded about this episode in her past which she referred to as her "Egypt" as she quoted Joshua 5:9: "Today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you." Meyer picked the word "reproach" as the operative word here and pointed to shame, guilt, and blame as part of reproach.
This is when Meyer mentioned that she was one of those children who grew up mistreated and ended up thinking that something was wrong with her or that it's her fault it happened. "The devil convinced me there must be something wrong with me, for him to want to do that to me," she said, referring to the sexual abuse. She also sometimes referred to the devil as the enemy or the accuser since the devil wants to plant negative things in our minds.
Meyer believes that shame, which is part of reproach, means to be doomed to failure and that it's necessary that "the reproach has to be rolled away" if one wants to succeed in life. She's convinced that to do that, one needs to hear the word of God, worship, and pray. The preacher ended her sermon by telling her audience that it's time to let go of what the other person has done to them and enjoy the life that God has given them.