How Genuine is Your Faith?

I recently posted an article concerning learning about the seed from drug and sin peddlers (Seed and Sowing). I have been able to have discussions with a few friends about the same and I want to post some things that came out of the discussions (you can visit the blog to read the post).

In a nutshell it may require over Ksh. 100 000 to get a person addicted to heroin or cocaine. Yet the peddler will invest many times that amount before they can get a single addict. This is because only a small fraction of the people who are exposed to the drug will get addicted. Yet a peddler will not sell any drug to their target before they are addicted. 

The same is done with any other drug. Nobody will spend money to get addicted to any drug, be it cigarettes or alcohol. The money spent will be many times what one addict will require because a bigger percentage will drop out before addiction sets in. Yet that does not discourage the peddler. Why?

He is confident about his product. He knows that taking five doses of heroin over a period of one week (my assumption) is sure to make a person addicted to the substance. He has no doubts at all about the efficacy of his product. He can therefore confidently offer free samples of this very expensive drug to whoever responds to his free offers.

Cigarettes will take even longer to addict, yet the peddler will painstakingly continue offering free cigarettes to the initiates because he is sure that a consistent intake of tobacco for one year (my guess) will make the experimenter addicted. It is his confidence about the efficacy of his product that will make him persist in pouring his money on his project. 

And saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: … (John 2:10a)

The peddler will use the purest and best of his product for leading one to addiction. One will never adulterate a product that should lead to addiction. It is to the addicts that the adulteration is applied and standards are compromised as the addict does not have the luxury of choice.

These ‘sowers’ have one thing the church should copy (and I believe it is a spiritual principle they copied from the church), assurance that what they are offering is genuine. Investing a million shillings to get a single addict therefore is not a sacrifice. It is just an extension of who they are and the confidence they have in their product.

And I will very gladly spend and be spent for you; though the more abundantly I love you, the less I be loved (2Corinthians 12:15)

So being affectionately desirous of you, we were willing to have imparted unto you, not the gospel of God only, but also our own souls, because ye were dear unto us. For ye remember, brethren, our labour and travail: for labouring night and day, because we would not be chargeable unto any of you, we preached unto you the gospel of God. (1Thesalonians 2: 8, 9)

Paul operated in that spirit. He was so confident of the gospel he preached that he refused to access the support that was his due until the church first became ‘addicted’. He did not hate receiving support from those churches, but like the drug peddler he did not want the support they gave him stand in the way of them receiving the gospel effectively.

If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we shall reap your carnal things?  If others be partakers of this power over you, are not we rather? Nevertheless we have not used this power; but suffer all things, lest we should hinder the gospel of Christ. (1Corinthians 9:11, 12)

What is my reward then? Verily that, when I preach the gospel, I may make the gospel of Christ without charge, that I abuse not my power in the gospel. (1Corinthians 9:18)

Paul was so complete in his assurance that the gospel he preached had transformational power that he could confidently refuse support of any kind from a church before it had experienced that transformation. Not only that but he was also very willing to undergo severe testing to make the availability of the same gospel to reach those not yet reached (2 Corinthians 11 and 12).

Does that speak about us?

The other person we see is David. There is no scriptural evidence that David had a dramatic encounter with God. The closest he sees of Him is an angel (not even the Angel of the Lord that Abraham and Gideon encountered). Most of his interactions were through prophets. Yet we see him committing all his wealth and creative genius to prepare for the building of God’s temple. We even see him preparing the worship aspect of the same, a task that was the duty of priests. He it is who said that he could not give to God something that cost him nothing. That was how genuine he considered his faith to be that he could even plan for and invest in the building of a temple that he would never see as he had been told it would be built after he was dead.

Abraham is another one. Though he had waited for the promised son for seventy five years, it did not seem crazy to offer the same to God, something he had waited for so long. This is the evidence that the faith he practiced was genuine. His relationship with God was so genuine that he could surrender the promise that may have started it in the first place.

Where is your heart when your mouth is speaking about God? Is your faith a marketing gimmick or it defines you? How far are you willing to go in defense of that faith you profess?

What about revelation? How genuine is it? Can you lay your life on the line for that revelation? Can people see your commitment to that revelation through the effort and resources you pour into it?

For example God has given me a ministry to raise Christian writers. Am I spending on that or harvesting from the writers God brings my way? Is that a by the way activity I do when it is convenient or is it a passion that I can forgo a meal, even sleep to pursue? Can people give a testimony about me concerning this calling? Do people see genuineness about this ministry by the way I carry it about? How many enemies fight me yet will not have any qualms referring someone who needs genuine ministry to me even when they are in the same ministry? That is the check list I should use to gauge the genuineness of what God has called me to.

What has God called you to? How genuine are you in the pursuit of the same?

Let us assume you are called to missions. Are you like Paul? Do you need to raise enough support before venturing into missions? Do you use the tithe to pursue the same? If so your calling is fake or you are a fake yourself. A passion (and a calling goes even deeper) is all consuming. When a man is in love with a girl, he will forgo lunch for a week to take her for lunch in a nice place once. And he does not even think it is a sacrifice! His love is so real that forgoing lunch for a week does not register in his mind as a sacrifice. In fact he will never even want her to know the lengths he went to take her for that lunch. He is not even proving his love for her. It simply is that his love is so genuine that it is incomparable to a week’s lunch.

Is yours discipleship? Show us the evidence. Can you confidently give us a generational reproduction of your ministry? Can you show us the materials you have produced as evidence of your involvement? Can you show us the ministries that have sprouted out of that ministry? Yet that is the shallow part.

How much have you invested in discipleship? How much time do you spend in it? How many other disciplers are you working with? How excited are you when you are outshined by someone you have discipled? Again would you be comfortable having your enemy writing your CV because you know he could never be able to distort it as the evidence is all out?

Just think of what God has called you to and use the same yardstick to gauge the genuineness of your pursuit of the same. Many times the world and the devil will try hardest to cause a disconnect between that and your genuineness in its pursuit.

Let us go back to Abraham.

And the king of Sodom said unto Abram, Give me the persons, and take the goods to thyself. And Abram said to the king of Sodom, I have lift up mine hand unto the LORD, the most high God, the possessor of heaven and earth, That I will not take from a thread even to a shoelatchet, and that I will not take any thing that is thine, lest thou shouldest say, I have made Abram rich: (Genesis 14: 21 - 23)

This is the time Abraham had conquered five kings to rescue his nephew Lot. From the declaration of the kings he had rescued, the thrust of what they were saying is, ‘you legally own us. Just take us as your subjects as all that we own legally belongs to you.’ He is not negotiating with Abraham. He is just pleading that Abraham agrees to take dominion over the four kingdoms as he had proven his ability.

Yet look at his response. He foresaw that right and offer as a compromise to his relationship to God. Though he had earned that wealth and dominion, he knew the genuineness of the God he worshipped to forgo all his rights.

Power and position were not comparable to what God had promised him, however attractive and visible they were. People kill to get into positions of power or authority. There are people who would prefer a lower paying job if it had a bigger title. Yet Abraham refused it when it was his by right.

Let me share a few things I think should demonstrate the genuineness of the professors of the gospel.
Suppose I have a transformational message about giving. I am sure it is coming from God and anyone who comes through its is sure to be transformed as God has taught me. What do I expect if I was to go the drug peddler way? I know the people need this message yet they do not know it.

A genuine minister will simply call people to attend the seminars. In fact I will expect the preacher, or teacher, or prophet to invest everything they have to organize those seminars (pearl of great price). Then he will REFUSE any payment from any other source until he is sure they have been transformed by the message. He might even need to give them some allowance to attend. That is how Paul operated. He will refuse support until he is sure that his message has sunk.

A transforming message needs to be consumed by as many people as possible, and charging turns it into a product on sale. Paying for a message lowers the messenger to a merchandiser and not a bearer of tidings from on high. I will compare it to a king’s messenger asking for money to fuel his vehicle to deliver the king’s message. And it is the King of kings we are representing! It is His message we are sharing. Peddling it is therefore demeaning to His kingdom.

Gospel crusades will stop being money minting meetings for that reason. It will require transformation before we agree to receiving any offerings from people. The same will be for anything life transforming, and for the same reason. We will invest in the lives we want transformed before asking for anything from them. This is because we can count on their support once the transformation takes place. We then will not need to constantly ‘challenge’ or remind them to remember us in support.

The Bible teaches that. There were offerings and ‘offerers’ that were rejected in the building or sustenance of worship and worship places. Remember Nehemiah refusing the willing offering of support from friends who were not part of Israel? Remember Peter refusing money from Simon, yet he was a believer, albeit a recent one?

Transformation should precede ministry support. I believe our failure in that is the reason we have been unable to confront sin in the camp. It is very difficult to confront someone for sin when you are driving their car. It is nigh impossible to confront someone for sin when you have been feeding your family on the food they gave you. It is very difficult to preach against prostitution when you are wearing the suit a prostitute bought you. 

A drug pusher is patient with their target. He knows that if he only has a 10% success rate he will be able to not only sustain his business, he will be able to flourish. This is because once a person gets addicted they are hooked for life, sometimes even generationally. 

A singer (called a worship leader nowadays) will appreciate the pirate of his music because he will take his life transforming message beyond the minister’s limits as he seeks that elusive coin. A writer like me will be more concerned that his message reaches to the uttermost ends of the earth than the few or many shillings he makes. I will pursue being a best read and transformative writer than a bestselling one; And this whether there is a shilling to be made or not. Money is an abomination when it stands between me and the ministry God has called me to.

Another thing we learn from the peddlers is that rarely will they build personal fiefdoms. They are pushing a kingdom agenda, only that they are not thinking of it along those lines. They are pushing the agenda of addiction and will not mind aiding someone who does the same thing. In fact they are not really looking for their own customer. They trust their ‘kingdom’ to provide for them as they push its agenda. People in the know are aware that drug addiction opens people to demon control and possession. It is therefore not business per se that they run. They are running the devil’s errands of making mankind lose control of their lives so that he can then pretend to offer a solution that will make the world totally subject to his agenda. Though they may fight at their level, they will be united at the point of introducing people to their kingdom. Just like we see Muslims being united outside their realms yet blowing each other up in places they control. That is the devil.

Why then do we charge to reach? Why do we sell life transforming messages? Why do we sell evangelistic books? Why do we take offerings in evangelistic meetings whose focus is the non believer?
We have a heritage where the gospel came to us free. Yet like I always say free simply means someone else bore the cost. Until very recently Christian literature was more or less free to those who needed it. It was as you sought to use them to reach out that you would be required to share the cost, though not all of it. God’s people liberally gave to have the Bibles not only translated but also available to those who have no capacity to appreciate them. To date most Bibles are highly subsidized by people who know their value. It is recently that Bibles became a business where preachers produce their versions or study aids to make you convinced to buy them from the peddlers. 

There are priceless magazines that are still sent free to those who need them, and it has been like this for a very long time. Why don’t they ask for an offering? I believe it is because they are pursuing their call which requires them to give something of great value as selling it will certainly pollute it. It is the people who have been transformed by the message who eventually take up the burden of funding the same.
Even if we leave out the drug peddler we have the cults and false religions using the same tactics. They will give you their materials free of charge. Some will give you more than that and the guiding principle is the same. Taste what I have for long enough and you are sure to start craving it. They are sure of the efficacy of what is false. Why do we seem unconvinced about the efficacy of the gospel we preach? If we are, why then are we not allowing the nations to taste it? Or why must they pay to taste it? I am yet to see someone charging you to taste their product. Why are we charging what we have received free?

The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon the LORD, and say, Is not the LORD among us? none evil can come upon us. (Micah 3:11)

I need this message as much as you do. I am listening to know what exactly He wants of me in as far as what He has called me to is concerned. This is because I feel our generation has perfected what Micah was complaining about then. But let us pray.

But I repeat, just as a drug pusher spends so much of his resources to get a single addict because he is confident of the genuineness and efficacy of his drug, so should ministers seek to establish the genuineness of the gospel we preach and spend our all to broadcast it to the nations.

What will happen when we stop peddling the gospel? I believe that the first thing is that it will flourish. I believe that the method Paul and Barnabas used was the reason we see a verse like this in the Bible.
And this continued by the space of two years; so that all they which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus, both Jews and Greeks. (Acts 19:10)

This is because we will start sharing the gospel for its own sake instead of packaging it for our profit.
The other thing is that we will stop being so wasteful in our packaging of the gospel. Many times we spread the message too thin to make sure we have bread for tomorrow. I might have a single message but will spread it so that I can run a convention or conference to convince people to ‘support’ me for teaching a simple lesson so widely. I know people who preach a single sermon for years, changing the text or something else to make it different. There are writers who will write about one topic and ten books will not be enough to fully explain it.

One time an international Christian teacher came to Kenya. He was starting a movement that I will not mention as I want to leave it to God and not the courts to determine why I want to snatch food from one’s mouth. Well, I attended the introductory meeting which was attended by who is who in Kenyan Christian circles. I paid to attend the first session and attended it. I even went home with the manual.
As I went through the manual I felt so foolish. It contained nothing but the basic discipleship lessons. It did not even adequately cover the basics. Yet it is now almost ten years and the training goes on. How do I know? They still send me mail and texts reminding me to attend one level then another. There is a whole industry that has been built on what one training lesson and the launch of enough Bible Studies could have accomplished in a year.

If we were not selling the seminars and books, I doubt that we would waste all that money and all those books to lengthen the shortcut that we are making of the discipleship process. The use of only 1% of the resources, time and personnel being expended on this waste and certification of wastefulness will be able to accomplish 100 times more impact. The only reason we are being deceived is because we are seeing the numbers being impacted (wasted is a more accurate word) by the process and we are feeling so useful.

The other day I passed by a friend. They had rented a room in a high rise building meaning they used quite some money to do so. What was the purpose? A minister had ‘hired’ them to promote his numerous books. Almost every minute was used to make a call, text or e-mail a customer. They were even looking for marketers to widen the scope of the books. He had used a tidy amount to advertise in the all the media outlets, print and electronic.

I looked at the titles of the books and I think you suspect what I saw. You can reduce them to a single running subject. I doubt it could fill one small book.

Could those millions have been spent on such a project if they were being offered for free? I doubt. Could all those people have been employed if the books were being offered free? I also doubt. Could all those books have been written if there was no expectation from the sales? What about if they were being written to give out to those needing the message?

Simply said the message that transforms will be distilled into purity so that it will pass the essential message to its intended target. We won’t need so much verbiage to say a simple thing. We won’t need so much money to package and advertise it. In fact like the drug pusher we will not even care where we are visible or not.
I suspect we will stop having great crusades and concentrate on more effective methods of sharing the gospel. We will invest in training our evangelists to package themselves in a way that will make it possible to draw the nations to Christ. A case in point is this. Why do we only have crusades where the gospel has been heard and received? Why can’t we take them in places where Christ is not known? Why can’t we take them to places opposed to the gospel? Could it be because we need the offerings we collect during the crusades?

In the past pastors were transcribing their sermons and sending them out free to whoever needed them. They even paid the postage. Churches were giving Bibles and paying for money to take them to the forbidden frontiers. In fact until very recently Bibles were more or less fully paid for from the printing to the distribution by churches. Does it mean that those who were investing in that were foolish? Did they not need the money? 

I believe they simply knew they had the only treasure worth sharing and that God had given them the resources to share it. Some companies simply dedicate their tithe to the gospel. Some have a history going back centuries where a certain percentage of their proceeds goes to facilitating ministry. They are the ones who buy the materials we trade with instead of sharing like they intended.

A case in point is the EvangeCube. I remember times we have really struggled without fail to get them to go to train churches who are crying for facilitation in that respect. All this as some were being eaten by termites because the one entrusted with giving them out is hoarding them for his purposes. We have had to literally change what we had been called to teach for that simple reason.

When we were going to Mozambique I was introduced to a long term friend who is responsible for them. He said I could have them but after answering some questions. I looked at the questions and decided (with the team) that this friend was not interested in giving us the cubes. What he wanted was to use us to send a satisfactory report to his supporters to convince them that he is actively pursuing their agenda by using our mission. He even wanted us to give him all our contacts from the beginning to the end.
Suppose we stopped looking for support and instead started doing ministry like Paul did?

I am sure we will soon start seeing the lost flocking to the church even faster than the church of Paul’s time. This is because we have now become a global village in all aspects.

The message about the seed will stop being the subject matter in any preaching where someone who is not transformed is. It will be a message for the insiders, the ministers and the radically transformed. They are the ones who should be learning the secrets of sowing into the kingdom. Preaching to the lost and the uninitiated (immature) is diluting to the gospel as they might easily be misled into thinking their giving is the reason people are hearing the gospel and therefore feel no need for the same.

Sin will also be radically dealt with in our assemblies. Once you stop depending on the untransformed for support, you will start being affected by the stench of their sins and cannot stay long in its presence without addressing it. In any case it is transformation you are preaching and therefore will not bear with people who are making a mockery of it. I believe we will start seeing miracles like of Ananias and Sapphira because transformation precedes support. If Ananias came to our church today after having done what we know, tell me one pastor who will rebuke him?

Giving will go up, radically also. You see a giver whose motivation is self will only give so much. A transformed giver will be directed by God as he is aware that all he owns is God’s anyway. He will therefore not be motivated by the preacher but by his relationship with God. Many times he will give way beyond the expectation. 

We will stop preaching about the tithe. When someone talks about the place of women in church or their dressing many people say we need the context. On some tough subjects they say it is an Old Testament doctrine. But mention the tithe and it all changes. Yet the tithe is mentioned twice in the New Testament and is negative both times. In any case we have abused the tithe as its intended purpose is never met when the tithe is administered. I have talked about that aspect in my blogpost ‘Food in God’s house’.

This is because transformation is complete. You cannot be transformed in one area of your life and have another untouched. I relate it with a chemical change. One is so changed that nobody can relate their past to their present status. And that is the kind of transformation the Bible talks about.

This is what discipleship is. And for your information that is what Christ commissioned us to be doing.

And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen. (Matthew 28:18 – 20)

We were not commissioned to sell our books or songs. We were not commissioned to earn our keep by organizing expensive seminars so that we receive honoraria. We were not commissioned to look for crafty ways to make people give and give to keep us in comfort. We were commissioned to the ministry of transformation. I repeat transformation precedes any giving in our ministry.