Short Cuts

I am sharing this from a burden pressing heavily in my heart concerning the come we stay marriages.

Young people, (and the not so young), please avoid this at all costs as it gives the devil free reign in your lives from that point on.

You see, the devil only looks for the smallest of opportunities to maximize them for his own purposes which are diametrically opposed to God’s purposes.

Let no one deceive you that there is no problem since you are planning to get married ‘properly’ later. That is the most fashionable lie the devil has created to keep believers in captivity. Why break God’s laws to impress your peers? Whose approval do you really need? And who tells you that the money you do not have to impress your peers will come after you break God’s laws? Does it even matter what people think since they will forget your impressions almost immediately or after a more impressionable wedding?

What happens if the money refuses to come in time? Will you wait until your illegitimate children finish their schooling to give you a break to impress peers who will have outgrown those childish tendencies?

Please obey God and avoid fornication, and that even if you are planning to get married.

Let me give you a few scenarios I have witnessed.

The man dies leaving a pregnant girl destitute as nobody knows her and even those who know her decide to disown her especially if the man had a job.

Probably they get a child who develops very expensive medical conditions requiring assistance from friends. People start wondering where a pregnancy came from since the girl was single and it becomes very difficult to even look for assistance because you do not know how to respond to those questions, especially from concerned friends.

Or the girl develops pregnancy complications and they are at a loss to source for prayers since they won’t be able to answer those questions.

The worst, however is when you are teaching your children to obey God and they ask you why their birthday and your wedding date are confusing yet you tell them you got saved as a youngster.

It does not pay. And it will never pay for you.

Never give the devil this opportunity. Never allow him to finish your testimony and life that easily.

And this also goes to pastors.

Why are you lowering the bar that low so that you can get worldly status approval? Why load your young people with a burden you are unable to bear had it been you? Is fornication a better bargain than a simple and ‘cheap’ wedding?

I believe anybody can get married with what they have.

I remember when I asked friends to come help me plan my wedding I encountered some of this.

They suggested that since I was famous (working in a big company, preacher, singer, guitarist), they should organize a pre wedding party to raise money to plan a wedding befitting my status.

I refused and told them that she will be my wife and the money I had was enough to have the wedding. Incidentally it was not much as there was something I had committed it to. But it was enough.

I walked my wife from her place to church yet I had enough friends I could have disturbed to give me a car to do it.

You see, as a minister I needed to set a standard. I needed to demonstrate to people that a simple wedding was a possibility. And many young people in that church in the middle of nowhere started getting married in church. My wedding was the first church wedding that community I was ministering to had witnessed.

I recently attended a wedding that was most impressive. The couple didn’t even have the money to the government to be registered. But they told their pastor that they wanted to get married right. The church therefore organized a simple but proper church wedding where they were even given a church’s marriage certificate. They will look for the government’s certificate when they have the resources.

That is what churches should be doing instead of allowing sin to thrive in the name of fashionable and trendy weddings.

Why show off success in Mammon’s affairs by sacrificing God’s revelation? Why get into fornication just so that you get time to legalize that sin much later? Shame on pastors buy into that lie from hell!

Join your young people during church services, prayer meetings and any other church meeting. Just ensure that you have spent time with them and matured them to ensure they are getting into marriage for the right and scriptural reasons. Of course it is extremely difficult for someone to decide to go for a public wedding just for the fun of getting married (or getting a resident sex partner). Yet cohabiting can result from a simple crush. Make sure they are in God’s will and support them in that decision. Stand with them against their families that insist on perpetuating sin in the name of family status. Protect them against friends who think it is normal to cohabit before getting married. And of course take a very tough stand against the ones who fall the deceit of the world and decide against scriptural counsel to get into fornication, whatever argument they may use.

You realize that this could be the greatest stronghold against infidelity and divorce. Reporting to God far outweighs reporting elsewhere first before reporting to God.

Gospel Music 2

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. (Romans 12: 1, 2)

I want to summarize my last message by pointing us to some glaring inconsistences of present day singing erroneously being called worship. And this is because it is worldlier than even the heathens.

In fact some churches are literal discos, if not nightclubs when you look at the lighting and sound systems. You will look at a concert and it is all mist and smoke and darkness. And the sound is such that you will barely hear anything being sung but the instruments and chanting. Sadly you will be told that it is a gospel concert or worship service.

The ‘worship’ leaders are also not much different from worship leaders of other gods. Their dressing and way of life are also not any different. The only difference is in the lyrics being sung.

You see, when we trashed our history in the name of avoiding motions without meaning, it can be compared to burning the temple and scrolls because the Pharisees and scribes paid lip service to the Torah. Yet Jesus challenged their worship instead of trashing it.

We were therefore left with nothing to guide us. We had nothing to compare what we had with reality. We were literally left in the darkness as there was nothing to guide or even verify our revelation, if it was revelation at all.

But we needed to sing as we knew that singing was scriptural and we couldn’t trash it. Even if we did not know of its spirituality we knew that music is a universal language.

The world’s worship is very developed, in fact extremely so. And sadly that was the only place we had left to look as we had trashed our singing history though we never thought of it that way.

That is where the choir was exchanged with the soloist as there was little need for everybody knowing songs. The choir’s purpose became to back up the star.

There also was no need for church members to know the songs as their only responsibility was chanting the choruses after the soloist and respond in line with his motions.

Yet a look at the past will show us that missionaries would translate the hymns as soon as they encountered a new language group. And I say this from having ministered to a few such without a Bible in their language. It thus meant that the community would have chunks of sound doctrine as soon as they believe as they will be singing it continuously. You will go to anybody who attends church and find that they have the basics of Biblical theology. And it serves very well as literacy would most likely be extended to children.

But choruses offer NOTHING in terms of Biblical theology, just a feel good sensation. It is no wonder that people who have attended church all their lives can treat their pastors as Samaritans treated Simon the sorcerer as the great power of God. Sadly, they know no better as not only do they not read the Bible, they have nil scriptural instruction in song. And the pastors feed from that treatment anyway.

Sadly, and very sadly so, the disease has infected even the churches that remained after the great fallout. They have started to slowly abandon hymns and embrace spiritual sawdust if I may call it that. And I do so because though one may feel well fed, they have consumed nothing nutritional for their spirits. That is why we have worship leaders (their term, not mine) going through depression, unable to tame their passions, getting into homosexuality, serial divorcees and a host of other unpleasant and shameful habits yet they continue leading people in worship and creating uplifting songs. That explains worshippers requiring deliverance (whatever that is).

A lot of modern worship is other worship, a creation of the flesh for the flesh. Sometimes it is of the evil one but I do not want the ignoramus throwing those weak pebbles at me without reading further.

You see, worship is encountering God. I want you to tell me who encountered God and remained the same. And the first thing they noticed was their sinful nature. Meaning that continuing in the presence required more than repentance. Yet you have no shame celebrating a worship leader sleeping around among other blatant sins.

But what do you expect when you look to the world to develop your singing? Yet many churches used secular musicians to develop their choirs and especially teach their instrumentalists. What spirit do you expect from that? Is God that desperate to look to the devil to train His ministers?

Those who know me know that I strongly believe that any person serving or working in church should be called, even the gateman and cleaner. I recently stopped an instrumentalist from playing in church because of his inconsistency (the star syndrome). And we continue without the instrument because it does God no service if the vessel has issues. Yet we have churches employ instrumentalists who also play in clubs.

You know that a teacher passes more than knowledge. A teacher passes the spirit he operates by. In the digital age it can be called his operating system.

The church thus, after looking to learn music from the secular success stories, picked their OS and therefore started behaving like them.

Or don’t you, like me wonder where a pastor gets his fashion sense to dress like a butterfly. Yet a preacher should direct all attention to Christ. Yet you have a preacher who by dressing draws all attention to himself. And the ‘worship leaders’ are even more so. Their songs dictate the dress code to draw attention to the singer and not Christ.

You can only understand when you remember where they got their operating system from.

That is when ministry started being a performance, and singing more so.

And did you ever ask where dance started becoming essential to worship?

We can only understand those by simply looking at the secular entertainer.

That is where we started treating numbers as success, increase in money as blessing..

That is why there is no rebuke for a successful pastor or singer whatever they may do. In fact the only sin is rocking the structure by questioning or drawing attention to those sins. We of course know that band leaders are never questioned. If you are dissatisfied with their leadership you have only one option, leave. And that is what most churches will tell you.

That is why a worldly success story is accepted in church without requiring any purging of past evils. A person who was singing vile lyrics sees the light (probably of his dwindling career) and is immediately made a worship leader. No one cares to know the kind of light he saw. A robber sees the light (probably all the police guns on him with nowhere else to run) and is accepted and given an opportunity to lead a ministry in church.

There is simply no transition process from the world to church; simply because we are operating from the same operating system (you can call it script). It actually means that the only difference between singing for the devil and singing for Christ is the lyrics. The only difference between serving in church and working in a corporation is the employer’s name.

And having worked in a corporation and served in a church I can say that. In fact you might find more ‘righteousness’ out there than you will find in church. That is the sad reality.

But it stops being surprising when you realize they are using the same operating system. And it is because they got rid of their former one by formatting (trashing their history).

This, I feel, is the reason Gospel music is so muddled.

And the solution will be painful, rebooting with our original operating system. We must by choice get rid of all this entertainment and go back to wholesome singing, however boring we may think it is. And this because however appetizing and filling sawdust might feel to our mouth and stomach, it is totally useless to our bodies. And it is the same with most of these songs we are listening to. Some are blasphemous, others encourage greed and rebellion and most, if not all, are devoid of spiritual fare.

You see, the world sings for different reasons than the church. The world sings to entertain. The church sings for God’s purposes, to teach God’s ways and remind God’s people about God’s dealings. Gospel singing should never be about entertainment. That is why it is really bad when dancing becomes an essential part of worship that a music video puts more money and effort on the dancing than anything else. And what happened to choir uniform that in those music videos we must have sexy outfits leaving nothing to imagination?

And have you like me wonder why God gave us the written word instead of a video? Or are you foolish enough to think He couldn’t have created it as the God who knows the end from the beginning?

Gospel Music

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. (Colossians 3:16)

I have been thinking about music and the believer lately, especially what most call Gospel music.

Does it not shock you when you hear of worship sessions performed by Christian ‘worshippers’ in drinking dens to drunkards?

What is Gospel music? What is a Gospel Music Concert? What is the expectation of one who attends such a concert?

Where and when did the Gospel concert start? What is the end game for the Gospel concert?

I am yet to see a concert of whatever name drawing people to repentance. And I am not saying they are not enjoyable. In fact, it is probably where the whole problem is. We sought enjoyment instead of admonition. And we got the exact fruit we sought.

I believe that is where we lost it with Gospel music. We sought to give people pleasure instead of instruction and ended up losing the God element in our music. Then people came to listen to music for music’s sake. Sadly, nowadays people also come to hear preachers for the same reason, entertainment and opportunity to feel good.

Thus, instead of such worship drawing people to holiness, it activates those feel good hormones. Instead of bringing people to repentance, it draws them to having the time of their life.

Whereas in the past people were scared of attending Gospel events if they were not ready to be confronted by God’s truth, it appears that the Gospel concert and crusade are chic places for everybody without caring whether they are right with God or not. It is not therefore surprising to see someone sponsoring their clandestine lover to a Gospel concert which will thereafter lead to another clandestine rendezvous to celebrate sin.

I think the reason is simple enough. We started celebrating instrumental and lyrical excellence instead of doctrine. No wonder there are so many songs with spurious messages yet excellent diction and instrumental arrangement. And they are the ones drawing the masses into those concerts, masses that do not care for Christ’s truth in the least.

Yet that is not our heritage.

Do you think Paul and Silas were entertaining the prisoners, even themselves at midnight when God sent the earthquake? Could it have led to none of the prisoners escaping after the doors broke open and the prison officer in charge asking for the way to salvation?

Do you think it is the kind of music David was thinking when he was playing the harp to Saul that drove demons away? Do you think it was such songs that were sung after the Lord’s Supper?

Yet I think this idea of Christians singing for the fun of it is a very recent creation. It may have found its roots in the Pentecostal rejection of hymns even as they rejected the formality of the worship service and for a good reason – most people were following the motions and mumbling recitations without reflection.

Sadly, they did not have any replacement for those spiritually laden songs and liturgy developed over centuries. They trashed tradition developed by tribulation and need; tradition developed to meet the need to reach the unreached; tradition developed over sweat and tears and blood.

Sadly, in their rejection they forgot that nature abhors a vacuum, and that is what they had just created by rejecting all that history.

Sadly, history is not created in a short time.

I think that is where this whole confusion about worship for fun began. We started creating a tradition without referring to the past. We started behaving as if all the believers of the past did not know what they had been doing. In fact we behaved as if they had all been lost and that we are the ones who had FINALLY discovered the right way to worship.

Imagine starting worship from scratch! Where does one start? And it was made worse by the fact that history was rejected; treated as unworthy, unspiritual.

Any song that therefore looked different enough and was not worldly was accepted as okay since we had no standard to gauge it.

That is where choruses became full-fledged songs; that a chorus could be sung for twenty minutes. Imagine repeating a phrase for twenty minutes? Dancing is the automatic response to senseless excitation from those danceable beats.

Songs started being a spur of the moment doctrine, making them extremely shallow and lacking in spiritual content.

That is when music became an industry, an end in itself. It stopped being an accessory to worship and spiritual instruction. It was finally converted as worship, the truest form of worship.

This is clearly unspiritual as it is unscriptural. Nowadays songs define worship. Sadly there are no scriptural standards of assessing the allegiance to scriptural revelation as emotion and how we feel is the standard we use.

But it is worse. Continuous repetition borders on Hinduism and its mantras. It is no wonder it creates those feelings resembling worship – because it is worship, but of another god. It really is releasing our spirits to another spirit different from the Holy Spirit. And we can easily mistake it with the Holy Spirit because we are chanting words mentioning Him.

That is the reason our feelings end up taking centre stage. We are really looking to the Holy Spirit to do our bidding.

That is what the hymns guarded us from.

Incidentally, I think it was very foolhardy to condemn past worship just because people had resorted to the motions. It is like what people call throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

But it is even worse; we are wholesomely condemning the past church and its leadership. We are saying that the past revival and church leaders were frauds. We are saying that our spiritual heritage was of the flesh. We are condemning all past revelation, but without offering a viable alternative.

All this because we think we have the monopoly of the Holy Spirit. We think the Holy Spirit has been dead and buried since Pentecost, or at least we behave that way.

That fallacy has gone beyond singing to preaching. That is why we have this man-centred preaching. In other words, we are preaching a gospel that pleases man. Some call it seeker sensitive gospel and many other names.

Even giving follows the same rule; self-gratification. We must be shown our profit to be convinced to give.

Christian singing must be hinged on the scriptures. That is what we see when we read the psalms as they were the spiritual songs of the past. They have given us a glimpse of spiritual songs even in pre Bible times,

Interestingly, you will find that songs prior to this Pentecostal ‘awakening’, were scriptural. And I am talking about compositions of choirs and individuals. And I say this because I sang in choirs and so interacted with very many songs. Nobody composed a song to make people comfortable. They composed songs directly from the Bible. Interesting enough is the fact that there were not many Bibles then. But they composed songs using the little Bible they knew.

Another thing you will find with hymns is their unceasing focus on Christ; His death, resurrection and soon coming return, topics that are almost completely absent from songs of today. If 300 years ago singers were longing for Christ’s return, should we not be even more so? Could this be a clear signal that what we are singing is devoid of the divine? Could it be a signal that we are singing to another god, a counterfeit who is using our ignorance to further his agenda?

Let us go back to that ‘boring’ liturgy and see what it is we have lost in discarding it. And I say this because I have been enriched even when I casually go through its writings.

Let us trash all that chanting in the name of choruses and revisit the hymns. Then the composers will start thinking wholesome when composing songs as they will discover no one appreciates their drivel cloaked in pretense.

Worship should lead to holiness, simply because it brings us to the presence of God (and not otherwise, bringing God’s presence to us). No one came in contact with God failed to see their wretchedness. And the responses to that were two; repentance or fleeing, because God is a consuming fire. It is therefore shocking that we have ‘God’s presence’ invoked and even ‘manifest’ yet the congregation goes home untouched and back to their sins. It is even worse that some invoking that presence are sunk in sin but can still endure that presence.

And Christian singing should also lead us that way. It should paint Christ in such a way that in approaching His beauty we will see and renounce sin and selfishness. And that presence is worth more than the world to anyone who approaches it. That is what Hebrews 11 talks about. Some refused to be released from bonds because they may have feared that the freedom could interfere with their worship.

Will we examine this noise we call worship with the view of trashing it?

The Culture Confusion

I have been completely engaged in writing up about the new season I feel God wants me to step in that I have not been able to make time for writing about anything else for weeks now. That includes posts that needed completion and I feel I am not in the right state to complete them appropriately.

This is the reason you may have realized that the last posts have been quite small with a simple message, different from the comprehensive nature most expect from my messages as a teacher of the word.

But I feel that what I was working on is nearing completion and will soon be resuming to my way of posting messages. And this message will not be much different. I just want it to prompt us to ask questions and look for the right answers.

In the last month or so there has been an uproar concerning deaths during the initiation process and many other related abuses.

I will start with this question, do you really know why initiation? Why not just circumcise like some tribes do? Why not do it to infants like the Jews do?

Why do we pursue culture before knowing its implications? What and who is culture answerable to?

The saddest part is that the church has joined that bandwagon instead of writing a spiritually enlightened new script in view of the new realities. The church should create culture, not modify it slightly like the Catholic Church did to heathen traditions to fit as opposed to radically following Christ. That is why we are struggling with some things whose causes we do not understand.

I have written elsewhere about initiation and so will just highlight a few factors to help us understand what is happening and why.

Blood is covenantal. That is the point at which circumcision makes the connections to the demons of the tribe (call them spirits if it will make you comfortable).

That is why some tribes have hallowed grounds for that purpose. Some will fly their children all the way from Europe and America so that the covenant is made at the right place and time. And it would be impossible to fight tribalism effectively if we do not start with those covenants.

Initiation is another thing altogether. That is why there are tribes that circumcise and others whose circumcision is different. The difference is the initiation process.

The initiation was actually military training. The tribe took advantage of (or created) the pain of circumcision to thoroughly train the initiates on what was required of them as the tribe’s defense force. And it had to be thorough because they actually took the responsibility of the security of the tribe.

It was a time to harden them. Think of what a policeman goes through in the police college so that he can rescue people from a mangled wreck in an accident and collecting the spattered remains from the road either as evidence or to take to a mortuary. Think of encountering armed thugs in a slum to rounding up almost naked harlots from dingy lodgings.

Then you may understand in a small way what the initiation process prepared the initiate to undergo.

When it is said that Meru men don’t cry, it is not because they are given treatment to dry tear buds. They are simply trained to handle pain and emotion in the initiation process.

Initiation entailed increasing one’s pain threshold. And you can’t do that without going through intense pain. Whoever told you military training is easy?

During the 2007 clashes, there were people who had Kalenjin neighbors. A pastor told me that a member of his church advised him to travel heavy and added ‘please’ weeks before the clashes. They were able to keep the secret of what they had planned for long. That is what military training brings out. Incidentally you realize that their initiation is among the toughest we have. They are therefore trained to keep secrets just like any military. The Maasai kill lions as proof that their training is satisfactory.

And that kind of training has casualties, though not from unsupervised or careless training.

You see in the past, the age group that was to be handing over the military role would be in charge of the training with an elder or two supervising to ensure compliance. They would be there, even if occasionally to ensure that the trainers do not employ too much of a heavy hand. He will be there to note the progress of the training. And there will be many trainers with one being answerable to the elders. That is why initiation is a high budget affair as the mother has to feed all the trainers.

That is what we are lacking in our headfirst rush to validate a culture we do not understand.

We release a child to give military training to another child without supervision. And then we become shocked when an initiate dies! If even in actual military training recruits die with the best in verification and health supervision, why are we shocked when an unsupervised and unprofessional trainer takes solo charge of the training?

The church MUST model a totally different initiation process.

We have a police force. We have an army. But we need mature and responsible young men and women. Let us stop training fighters. Let us train warriors valiant for the truth of the Gospel.

Whereas the world seeks to make macho men, men who must test their masculinity at every level, the church should aim at producing men who are truly spiritual, able to handle their spiritual responsibilities accordingly. Military training produces men who are dare devils as they are trained to be ready to die at any time. No wonder their mantra is war, wine and women. And that is what we see after initiation. Sadly, the ‘men’ being produced are just children. Worse still, they have no possibility of facing war in their lives, unless they will join the military after their studies. We are therefore releasing fully charged warriors for a nonexistent war, or enemy. But we are doing worse because we are insisting on that training in the name of culture.

No wonder we have issues with drugs and gambling. No wonder we have irresponsible men unable to hold on to anything.

You see, we released them to go and fight when there was no battle. And like soldiers everywhere they started looking for things to spend all that energy on, wine and women. Because there is no foreseeable war they do not have anything to hold their brakes and so will continue rioting until they have wasted all their energy.

It was the same for female circumcision. The cut was the covenant to signify a process of training a girl into womanhood. On this, we threw out the baby with the bathwater because we removed the cut and forgot to bring a replacement for the training.

That is why you see girls still opting to be circumcised secretly because in those communities it is known that only a cut woman can make a good wife. And that is due to the training after that cut and not the cut itself.

The sponsor epidemic, where men and women are paying children younger than their own children for sexual gratification is an indictment of our failed systems. These sponsors and the sponsored never learnt about boundaries. There are things I can’t even imagine, not even consider, and not just because I am a minister. I was raised to be acutely aware of those boundaries.

Let us pray that the church wakes up to handle this responsibility of transitioning children into adulthood, both girls and boys.