During a recent conference, American Christian speaker and evangelist Joyce Meyer made a biblical case for getting tattoos and admitted she has been thinking of getting one herself just to shut the mouths of religious people.

The video clip posted by Joyce Meyer Ministries kicked off with Meyer explaining the difference between being holy and religious.

“Holiness is not legalism,” Meyer declared.

She went on to explain that religious people have made a mess of holiness by putting a bunch of rules and regulations on people. She listed drinking, dancing, wearing makeup and more among those rules.

According to Christian Post, Meyer quoted Isaiah 44:5 in defence of getting permanent markings. The scripture says,

“One will say, I am the Lord’s; and another will call himself by the name of Jacob; and another will write [even brand or tattoo] upon his hand, I am the Lord’s, and surname himself by the [honorable] name of Israel.”

She also shared the counterargument often used to discourage believers from getting tattoos found in Leviticus 19:28: “Do not cut your bodies for the dead and do not mark your skin with tattoos. I am the LORD.”

Televangelist Pat Robertson, among others, has cited Leviticus to argue that getting tattoos is a “heathen practice.”

“You look at the Bible, the people are told not to mark their bodies and cut themselves like the heathen did. Tattooing is a heathen practice, it is not a Christian practice,”Robertson said in 2016.

But Meyer rejected the argument and contended that God also tattooed those He loves to Himself.

“The Bible says in Isaiah 49 that God has a picture of you tattooed on the palm of His hand,” she maintained.

“I’m right on the verge of going and getting a tattoo,” she added, pointing to her shoulder blade. “I thought I might as well just push all the religious people right off the cliff and just get it over with.”

Meyer said her ink would say, “I belong to the Lord.” She admitted that her husband pushed back a bit on her stance but they realized it was just a religious stance stemming from legalism.

Tattoo:

A tattoo is a form of body modification where a design is made by inserting ink, dyes and pigments, either indelible or temporary, into the dermis layer of the skin to change the pigment. Tattoos fall into three broad categories: purely decorative (with no specific meaning); symbolic (with a specific meaning pertinent to the wearer); pictorial (a depiction of a specific person or item). Tattoos have historically been regarded in the West as ‘uncivilised’, and over the last 100 years the fashion has been associated mainly with sailors, working men and criminals. By the end of the 20th Century many Western stigmas of the tattoo culture had been dismissed and the practice has become more acceptable and accessible for people of all trades and levels of society.

More On Joyce Meyer:

Joyce Meyer (born Pauline Joyce Hutchison; June 4, 1943) is a Charismatic Christian author and speaker and president of Joyce Meyer Ministries. Meyer and her husband Dave have four grown children, and live outside St. Louis, Missouri. Her ministry is headquartered near the St. Louis suburb of Fenton, Missouri.

Meyer speaks humorously, sharing with her audience her own shortcomings and taking playful jabs at stereotypical church behavior. A particular crowd favorite is the “robot” routine, in which she goes into a stiff-armed imitation of a robot chanting “What about me? What about me?”

In 2016, Joyce Meyer’s website claimed that she had an earned Phd. She now states according to Joyce Meyer Ministries, Meyer was presented with an honorary doctoral degree from Life Christian University, an unaccredited institution in Tampa, Florida. Meyer has been given an Honorary Doctorate of Divinity by Oral Roberts University, an accredited institution in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Meyer, who owns several homes and travels in a private jet (currently a Gulfstream G-IV), has been criticized by some of her peers[who?] for living an excessive lifestyle. She responded that she doesn’t have to defend her spending habits because “…there’s no need for us to apologize for being blessed.”[11] Meyer commented, “You can be a businessman here in St. Louis, and people think the more you have, the more wonderful it is…but if you’re a preacher, then all of a sudden it becomes a problem.”

In November 2003, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a four-part special report detailing Meyer’s “$10 million corporate jet, her husband’s $107,000 silver-gray Mercedes sedan, her $2 million home and houses worth another $2 million for her four children,” a $20 million headquarters, furnished with “$5.7 million worth of furniture, artwork, glassware, and the latest equipment and machinery,” including a “$30,000 malachite round table, a $23,000 marble-topped antique commode, a $14,000 custom office bookcase, a $7,000 Stations of the Cross in Dresden porcelain, a $6,300 eagle sculpture on a pedestal, another eagle made of silver bought for $5,000, and numerous paintings purchased for $1,000 to $4,000 each,” among many other expensive items – all paid for by the ministry. The articles prompted Wall Watchers (a Christian nonprofit watchdog group) to call on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to investigate Meyer and her family.

Following the adverse publicity about her lifestyle and Ministry Watch’s request for an IRS probe, Meyer announced in 2004 plans to take a salary reduction from the $900,000 per year she had been receiving from Joyce Meyer Ministries (in addition to the $450,000 her husband received) and instead personally keep more of the royalties from her outside book sales which Meyer had previously donated back to Joyce Meyer Ministries. She now retains royalties on books sold outside the ministry through retail outlets such as Walmart, Amazon.com, and bookstores, while continuing to donate to her ministry royalties from books sold through her conferences, catalogues, website, and television program. “The net effect of all of this,” notes Ministry Watch, “was most likely a sizable increase in the personal compensation of Joyce Meyer and reduced revenues for JMM.” In an article in the St. Louis Business Journal, Meyer’s public relations director, Mark Sutherland, confirmed that her new income would be “way above” her previous levels. Joyce Meyer Ministries says it has made a commitment to maintain transparency in financial dealings, publish their annual reports, have a Board majority who are not Meyer relatives and submit to a voluntary annual audit. On December 18, 2008, this ministry received a “C” grade (71–80 score) for financial transparency from Ministry Watch.

Joyce Meyer Ministries was one of six investigated by the United States Senate inquiry into the tax-exempt status of religious organizations by Senator Chuck Grassley. The inquiry sought to determine if Meyer made any personal profit from financial donations, asking for a detailed accounting for such things as cosmetic surgery and foreign bank accounts and citing such expenses as the $23,000 commode mentioned earlier. Grassley also requested that Meyer’s ministry make the information available by December 6, 2007. In her November 29 response to Grassley, Meyer notes that the commode is a chest of drawers. Meyer writes that it was part of a large lot of items totaling $262,000 that were needed to furnish the ministry’s 150,000-square-foot (14,000 m2) headquarters purchased in 2001. She said the commode’s price tag was an “errant value” assigned by the selling agent and apologized for “not paying close attention to specific ‘assigned values’ placed on the pieces.” Joyce Meyer Ministries responded with a newsletter to its e-mail list subscribers on November 9, 2007. The organization

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End-time preacher!