Motivators are False Prophets

Allow me to wade deep into another controversial topic, motivation and motivational preaching.

I do this because it has become fashionable for preachers to consistently give their hearers easily digestible spiritual diet. I compare it with spiritual fast food. Nice aroma, excellent taste and no need of tedious preparation. But nutritionists tell us that consistent intake of fast food can be equated with ingesting slow poison.

Why am I calling the motivational preacher a false prophet?

The first reason is the understanding of what prophecy is.

Prophecy is in simple terms saying what God is saying.

However, God always speaks within His revelation. What I mean is that God cannot speak contrary to who He is.

Prophecy therefore is putting in words what God is in His revelation.

It would be preposterous to expect God to speak a blessing on something that is contrary to His attributes.

Let me give an example.

Someone has stolen millions and brought their tithe or fat offering to church.

Can God speak a blessing to that person? Can God prophecy good things to that thief just because he has brought a huge fraction of his theft to God’s house?

Due to that, a prophet must as a necessity have a zeal for things God loves to be able to effectively speak for Him. He must furiously hate the things God hates.

Remember Phinehas?

He went beyond the mourning Israel was undergoing to pure murder when he saw a leader bringing a woman into his tent for sex purposes.

That for me is the prerequisite for God’s prophet.

A prophet is not only uncomfortable when God’s revelation is slighted; he is furious.

Samuel was a very old man when Saul spared Agag. He probably did not have much energy to accomplish much since that was the reason a king was sought.

Yet we are told he hacked that king to pieces.

It is zeal for God that energized him despite his age.

A prophet is God’s spokesman. This means that this person needs to be in close fellowship with God in order to be able to take God’s message to others.

And that is true for any spokesman, whether of an organization or of a kingdom.

Ambassadors fall under that category. That is why they must be changed with the change of political leadership since they exist as mouthpieces of those leaders they represent.

Stop going in circles. I know someone is shouting, especially because their favorite pastor or preacher is a motivator par excellence.

I will respond by saying that they are the ones thinking in circles.

You see, it is impossible to separate God’s nature to His proclamation.

That is why I am focusing so much on God’s nature before looking at His proclamations, or what we call prophecy.

That is why I want us to get the profile of the prophets we read in the Bible to accurately gauge the prophets, or those who call themselves prophets, of our day.

Get me a popular or favorite prophet in the Bible.

Prophets were never liked except by the people as sold out to God’s agenda as they were.

Some of their orders were beyond extreme. No wonder many times they were called insane. They looked insane to the normal person.

Can you imagine a married man with children walking completely naked for three years? Can you imagine the dress code and diet of John the Baptist? Can you imagine the fishy smelly proclamation of God’s message in Nineveh? Can you imagine marrying a known harlot?

Yet this is just a little of what we read about the prophets whose ministry has been recorded as opposed to many whose only record is their proclamations.

No prophet was killed because their prophecy had motivated people to murder. No prophet was persecuted because the message he was proclaiming was so good that they thought he should take it to their neighbors since they had benefited immensely from it.

We must understand the prophet to accurately judge prophecy.

No wonder Jesus said we will know them by their fruit since we can only produce of our essence.

Having settled that, we might now start looking at the motivational preacher, whether they are a pastor, bishop, coach or any other character provided they are using the Bible or Christian faith as the basis of their delivery, or whatever they call ministry.

Have you ever encountered an offensive motivational speaker (or preacher)? Have you ever heard one rebuking his listeners for sin?

In fact, the essence of motivation gives these conmen away. Motivation is in simple terms psyching people up for something. It is offering someone some impetus to face something they might feel inadequate for. It is giving someone some psychological glucose to help them persist a little more.

I hope you are getting my drift.

Motivation is soulish. It is not spiritual at all.

That is why a harlot can comfortably stay for years under the ‘anointing of a motivational pastor and not even have an iota of guilt, let alone conviction for the life she is leading. That is why cartels have made churches their new frontiers because there is no preaching touching their wickedness. That is why someone can be in church for decades and even get into the leadership without hearing the Gospel clearly being presented to them. That is why there are solid theologians who are shocked when the Gospel is preached to them because all that training did nothing to make the Gospel available to them. That is why we have ‘spirit filled’ believers who live despicable lives yet see nothing wrong with it.

Motivators say what people want to hear, not God wants them to hear.

The prophet, on the other hand, says only what God wants to say.

That is why the approval ratings are so high for motivators but very low for the prophets.

Prophets are for the most part hated whereas the motivators are feted wherever they go. The higher their motivational quotient, the more in demand they are and the more appreciation (payment, but assume you have not read that word) they can access for their motivation.

Though I intend to leave this post open ended, I will want us to look at Jeremiah.

Jeremiah was a lone voice amidst an oversupply of motivational preachers calling themselves prophets. And they tried their best to extinguish Jeremiah’s lone voice by trying everything, from slander to murder because nobody wanted to hear the prophet’s indictment on their lives.

You remember even towards the end of the book when the people sent the prophet to pray for them and ask for God’s direction that they were actually looking for a motivational prophet. That is the reason they trashed God’s word through Jeremiah.

Do you also remember Jehoshaphat with Ahab (and another time with Ahab’s son) when there was an overabundance of prophets, four hundred of them? Were they really prophets?

Of course not. They were motivational speakers telling the king what he wanted to hear.

That is why one of them struck the prophet when he came asking him how he came about to be a prophet and where he had passed them.

I am simply saying that motivation can never be prophetic and never has been.

Prophecy drives people God-ward and seeks to diminish human effort even as it amplifies God’s release. That is why prophecy is not popular, and never can be.

Prophecy irritates human effort. It demeans human ambition. It trashes human endeavor.

But it releases God’s power. It releases God’s revelation. It releases God’s magnificence.

That is the reason since creation prophets are ready and willing to suffer loss and even die for God’s word.

But prophecy is also not easy on the prophet. I have mentioned a few incidences where it went beyond the insane for God’s message to get through to stubborn people.

I will kill your wife but you must behave as if nothing has happened. Buy land that you know you will never use.

Have you ever seen a motivator going through such orders?

Another pointer is that the motivator receives compensation for their motivation whereas the prophet suffers for it, or must be ready to suffer depending on the reception of his message.

Or do you think Nathan knew that David would repent when he confronted him? Was he not ready to die to tell the king point blank that he was an adulterer and killer?

Or do you not remember Samuel telling God that Saul would kill him if he knew what he was going to do in Jessee’s place?

How many motivators have ever been scared of sharing their motivation? Aren’t they as comfortable in the church and elsewhere?

The truth is that a motivational preacher will be as comfortable in a secular boardroom as they are in the church. And nobody in that boardroom will be drawn to repentance by all that ministration.

I do not know whether you will now agree with me that the motivational speaker or preacher is for the most part a false prophet who always says what the people listening to him want to hear.

Otherwise, I leave it with you

Woman 3

Many have so far dismissed me as anti-women.

I will be comfortable if I was called an anti-feminist since I consider their narrative anti scripture.

Today I want us to look at an aspect I have written about quite some.

Because you listened to your wife.

I will also take that to the relationship between God and us for better clarity.

What does it mean to listen to your wife?

The first implication is willingly allowing your wife to be in charge of your decision making. It means allowing your wife to lead you. Whether from the front or behind is immaterial.

That is why it is wrong.

However, since the marital relationship is a type of the relationship between God and man, I feel it is prudent to give some scriptural examples of how it appears.

Remember Lot?

He was ordered to flee Sodom and basically disappear from sight (my words)

What then does he do?

He sees a town nearby and thinks it is a much better idea than fleeing to the mountains as God was ordering. He therefore pleads to be allowed to stop his journey there.

We know that God gave in to his plea.

What then happens?

He discovers that his was not really a good idea and even feared for his safety and goes to live in a cave with his daughters since his wife had been turned into a pillar of salt for looking back.

What then happens?

Incest. Since their idea had had no foresight as they had no idea what lay ahead.

Moab and Amon are the products of God listening to Lot. Of course we remember Balaam.

The second one (and I will not add more as I might make you tipsy turvy and dizzy as I challenge your favorite Bible heroes) is Hezekiah.

God sees that Hezekiah has completed his assignment on earth and tells him as much.

But the king is not content and asks God to revisit that decision.

Again we see God listening to him and adding him fifteen more years.

If we stopped there, it would be a most satisfactory conclusion. But it doesn’t.

We are told that he became proud. Isn’t that what happens to anyone when their boss accedes to his voice?

The worst part is that in that season he produced Manasseh, the most wicked king Judah ever had. The king who drove God to the point of exiling Judah.

Yet I am not saying that God does not listen to us or act as per our pleas.

It boils down to the reason for the same.

He will always listen to us if we are pursuing His glory. He will accede if we will be more useful tools in His scheme of things.

Joshua stopped the sun and moon for almost twenty-four hours. Samuel called on thunder and rain in the dry season. Elijah called for a famine, then a fire to consume his sacrifice. And many, many others.

Therein lies the difference.

When my request is driven by my desire to increase His visibility (for lack of a better word), He is bound to positively respond to it.

When my request is driven by my own desire, however genuine or spiritual that desire may be, He is bound to reject it. Unless I overstretch my bounds like Balaam and the two I have mentioned did.

Remember Moses was very close to God to the point that God Himself said they spoke face to face. Yet his request to get into the Promised Land was denied. In fact God told him to never mention it again. It was for Moses’ good that he was denied that request since we see him severally snatching Israel from the jaws of destruction after they sinned through his pleas.

Let us get to man now.

Adam is the first and I will not even look at it since it is evident.

Abraham listened to Sarah’s interpretation of God’s promise to him and married Hagar. Islam and the whole instability of the Middle East is one direct product of that.

Moses listened to his wife and refused to circumcise his second born and we see him almost getting killed.

Solomon listened to his wives and almost nullified David’s promise. Yet God had appeared to him twice.

Ahab listened to his wife and became the most wicked king Israel had.

What am I saying?

I am not saying that we close our ears from the voices of our wife. I am clearly saying that the man is wholly answerable to God for any decision his family makes. It therefore behooves him to make sure his wife’s voice does not in any way interfere with what God had spoken or was speaking to him.

It is illogical to agree to share decisions equally if we will not share the consequences equally. It is foolish to give someone leeway in my decisions when they will be nowhere around the scene when I am facing the music for those decisions.

And from Paul’s letters we can see it very clearly. The husband is the head while the wife is the rest of the body. That is the analogy he uses and it agrees with how Christ operates with the church.

We are not equal partners with Christ. He owns us. We do not govern with Him. We will govern under Him and through Him. We therefore cannot make any decisions outside His authority. We are not even allowed to make decisions except under His authority.

That is what Numbers 30 is saying. And it is the same thing Paul was saying when he was forbidding a woman to speak in church. That is the whole point of him and Peter addressing dressing for the woman in their letters.

A woman should be under authority.

Though a woman is not dumb, she is given authority to speak by her submission to her husband.

I know I have hit very hard on some of you.

But please interact with the scriptures and ask God for revelation concerning this since I am not the custodian of truth also. I am simply sharing what God has prompted me to share.

You are as usual allowed to disagree with me. But let us only use the scriptures in our disagreement.

God bless you

 

Why Serpents? 2

I want us to look at this topic differently, slightly, though I may repeat some things I wrote earlier.

Remember Jesus was talking about His ministers, especially those He was sending.

A snake does not waste its energy on unnecessary things.

For one, snakes move very slowly, normally. It therefore preserves its energy for the time it would need it.

Other animals will be jumping up and down exercising their limbs but unless a snake senses danger or food within reachable distance, you will never see it rushing. It always moves very slowly, flicking its tongue this way and the other to smell its environment since that tongue is what it uses as other animals use their noses.

Please keep in mind that Jesus was talking about those He was sending. It means He was talking of those who would move out of their normal environment and what we call comfort zones. Though I am convinced all believers have been sent, even those who will remain at home because He must remove our hearts from those environments before releasing us to minister His love to them.

Why am I saying this?

We must become the enemies of those structures Christ takes us from to be able to effectively share His love with them.

I am saying this as someone who grew up in church and faced enough persecution when I responded to God’s call from the same church and fellowship I had grown up.

So in some way I am addressing all believers.

I am simply saying that after responding to God’s call, Christ expects us to start acting with the shrewdness of a serpent.

I want us to look at two key things in the snake’s operations to help us appreciate this lesson.

Distance is one and its mode of operation the next.

Where was the serpent to strike the seed of the woman? The heel

This tells us that the snake does not overreach its target. Rarely, very rarely will a snake strike above the knee. And even then, it would be because it was met in an elevated place.

What am I taking about?

A snake limits its ambition to the attainable. Though striking above the knee would be far more lethal, it does not attempt the same because that will expose it to greater danger as it would then not be able to flee the scene of crime undetected or be seen before it can strike.

Snakes do not announce their intention to bite. They will hiss to warn you not to approach when their path of escape is not open. Others that will warn you about their presence are those very heavy snakes, vipers and adders because they are unable to manage any speed due to their girth. That is where puff adders and rattlesnakes fall under.

Most snake bite victims will tell you that they did not know that a snake had bitten them. They felt a prick which on investigating discovered it was a snake bite. It is telling that the snake with most bites is not the cobra or mamba which are very fast. It is the puff adder due to its lethargy. The others will sneak as you approach while the adder will strike on contact as it is unable to flee from danger.

This tells us another fact. Snakes do not look for opportunities to bite unless it is their food. They bite when the enemy becomes unavoidable that they must defend themselves with that bite.

Our efficacy as ministers depends on our proximity with our targets. We cannot bite from a distance.

On ministry terms, we cannot be effective from a distance. And I will elaborate on that further as I look at another aspect.

We do not advertise our intention to bite our ‘enemy’. He should feel the prick of our ministry and discover much later that our venom has started killing them.

I am using dangerous words because that is how our enemies look at our ministry.

Rarely will a drug addict or harlot look at you as a friend since their life is perfect. You will be throwing shackles on their otherwise perfect lives by your ministrations.

We do not throw The Four Spiritual Laws on enemies of the cross since that is what an unbeliever really is. We create an opening for that venom to be injected. We bring ourselves close enough to get an opportunity to bite them with those laws.

Let us look at constrictors (incidentally the physiology of most snakes means that they can constrict).

They also must get close enough to their prey before attempting that hug. They must get close enough to bite their prey, not with venom as with venomous snakes, but to make sure that they can’t escape that hug.

It is that hug I want us to examine.

It is the only thing that will ensure this enemy can’t escape before they become part of us.

That hug is our love.

Do you wonder that Jesus commanded us to love our enemies and pray for those who misuse and persecute us?

That is the hug He was meaning since nobody has the capacity of escaping real unadulterated love.

Christ therefore meant that we are, like serpents, meant to draw our enemies into our embrace through our love and nothing else.

Incidentally, like a serpent, we can not use that love remotely. We must get close enough for that hug to have any effect.

And that hug has the capacity to harm us for that simple reason. It can even be fatal.

Imagine a snake hugging a porcupine!

Many times a snake will die because the prey also has its defence. Many snakes are killed by birds because by the time the hug takes effect, the beak will have dismantled the serpent’s head. Other animals have teeth and horns that they will use with great effect against that hug.

What am I saying?

Though love is a conquer all weapon, it must be used with much care and wisdom. And that is where obedience to the call of God comes in.

In my previous post, I mentioned preachers who became drunks after taking that hug to drinking dens and others who became whoremongers as a result of taking that hug to brothels.

That is what I mean. The prey activated their defence, a defence that the serpent did not think existed.

Incidentally, the world knows when we have been released before we realise the same. We may think we have just visited when the other world knows we have been released with an assignment.

Let me give my example.

I moved where I am about three years ago.

I have never in my life introduced myself as a pastor anywhere. The closest I have said is that I am a preacher. I also do not pastor any church.

Yet in this whole place I meet people I have never met and they will call me a pastor in their greetings.  And it is not a small place.

This is also not the first place this has happened as I am sure is true of very many ministers.

It means they will have prepared their defence before we approach them for that hug because they already know that God has taken us to them with the purpose of making them believers.

Or haven’t you encountered somebody who in the middle of talking about things completely unrelated to the Gospel all of a sudden told you why they do not want to get saved or why the Christian life is impossible. Have you never been stopped by someone out of nowhere and asked to explain a spiritual reality?

The awareness that we cannot be hidden is the reason we should be shrewd to ensure we are close enough before attempting that hug. Not that we have any other option.

We are therefore being shrewd to maximise the power of our hug by ensuring we are not only close enough but also that we have through that hug disabled any weapons our prey may have to counter it.

Among those weapons are arguments about what we believe in.

1 Peter 3: 15 is addressing that. Once our love has started bearing fruit, people will, instead of looking for arguments, come to us asking the real questions and looking for answers. That because our hug has constricted them.

We are supposed to have both tools to be effective ministers. That is what Peter is implying here.

The venom is the presentation of the Gospel. It needs to be clear and understandable to our prey.

The constriction (what I am calling the hug) is our unfeigned love. A love so irresistible and encompassing that they have no way of escaping its hold. A love just like God’s.

Allow me to give an illustration.

A young man came looking for menial work at my place. We got talking as he continued coming for work and I discovered he was lost in drunkenness.

One day his drink is spiked and he was at the point of dying but we were able to rescue him.

We then became quite close as he started treating me like the father he never had in many ways.

I started sharing the Gospel in earnest but as you know with Catholics, it is a most difficult mission field.

But he continued to come for this and other help. He would come for counsel and comfort. He would borrow my tools to be able to get a job somewhere.

He rarely comes for work nowadays. But he comes for that hug. He can come just to greet me.

He knows I am a minister since I still share the Gospel with him. He knows he is not ready to respond to the Gospel I am always sharing with him.

But he knows I am his friend. My love for him is unquestionable, at least to him.

And that is what will finally bring him to faith in Christ.

What have I been saying with all these words?

We can never be effective as ministers remotely. We must dirty our hands to be able to get people from those sewers.

We must share the Gospel as clearly as we can. But we must follow (sometimes precede) that Gospel with God’s love.

The fangs are the presentation of the Gospel and the constriction is our unfeigned love.

I need in closing say that Christ also called on us to be as harmless as doves.

It means that our shrewdness is not that of a go getter who must have what they have targeted.

For me this means a surrender to God’s will after pursuing all the shrewdness we could.

We do not hammer someone to salvation since we are not the ones doing the saving. We do not force someone to be convicted because we are not the Holy Spirit.

We are supposed to rest after releasing the most portent of our weapons; those fangs and that mighty hug and leave the rest to God who sent us.

Woman 2

I will look at another aspect in this topic. And that is the roles we read in the New Testament.

We are looking at a complete man. Or the man who was complete before he got married as opposed to a man whose completion came about as a result of getting married.

I am in no way writing of that man who is subservient to anything or anyone else apart from God.

It is about that complete man; this man who is clear about why he was created and is living in that reality. It is about a man whose masculinity is not in question and whose leadership in any realm he is released into is evident.

Many living under the deceptions of the modern world will call such a man a male chauvinist though nothing can be farther from the truth.

A male chauvinist is an insecure male who must push his weight around to gain respect.

A complete man on the other side is a man who is safe in God to act ONLY as God through His word instructs. It is a man who unlike Adam and many other men of the Bible will constantly stop listening to his wife or giving in to her whims when it is against God’s word. It is a man who values his relationship with God way above his relationship with his wife and so puts her in her place all the time.

His love for his wife is tempered by his commitment to God.

To many this is more than a mouthful.

But you will allow me to stain some of those Bible women who have been so cherished by our modernity by calling them unsavory names.

Allow me to go to the New Testament first because that is what the modern error is presumably anchored.

The relationship between a wife and her husband is compared to the one between Christ and the church.

Let me ask the first question.

Is Christ equal to the church? Who owns who? Who is accountable to who?

Christ owns the church since He bought her with His own blood.

We love talking about the man sacrificing for his wife yet refuse to call on the woman to be unquestionably submissive to her husband. Nobody ever wants to quote the part that says a wife should submit to her husband in everything.

We are therefore placing all the responsibilities on the man without placing any on the woman. We want the woman to be a joint manager in an enterprise without placing any accountability on her.

He is supposed to co-rule with his wife yet he is the only one accountable for any mistakes that will result from that rulership.

We see that most clearly with Jezebel. She shared the seal with Ahab but not the judgment. David shared adultery with Bathsheba but not the punishment yet she was the one who ought to have been punished because she is the one who not only tempted David, she also willingly went to his palace when in the law she was supposed to scream if it had been a rape. Again, she was the one who prompted David to kill her husband.

The truth is that she was a gold digger if that term existed then. Or do we not even see her pushing him to again go against scripture in making her son, who was among the youngest of David’s sons, to ascend the throne?

I am sure I have offended some but I will not apologize. We should just deal with the facts as the Bible has presented them to us.

Another gold digger in David’s life was Abigael. That is what her story reeks of.

What was she doing with a fool all those years? Why did she submit to him until a better man came along? How did she even get hitched to him? And why was she so quick in being David’s wife? Whom did she leave the fool’s children with? Did she qualify as a suitable helper to this fool?

I am not saying Nabal was not a fool. I am simply saying that his wife was a schemer who took advantage of his folly to hatch a plan to move to a man with better prospects. She had probably moved to Nabal for his money and nothing else.

I know I am a very bad man. That explains why Christ died for me.

I therefore do not shy at talking about things people are scared to say because that is the kind of call I am walking in.

Look at what Peter is saying

Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation (behavior) of their wives; while they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear (1 Peter 3: 1, 2)

He goes on to talk about Sarah calling Abraham lord.

And this is not he Old Testament or even Paul’s writing.

Allow me to highlight something.

From the passage I have picked from, the tenor of it appears as if the wife should treat her husband like a military commander, otherwise the word fear could not have been there. Or even lord.

Incidentally Peter is first talking about a wife who seeks to win her husband to the faith she is in. That is the evangelistic tool she has at her disposal ultimate submission. That is why I mentioned Numbers 30 in the last post

And we wonder why women are all over fasting and praying and binding this or the other demon for years without it having the smallest dent on their unbelieving husbands. We wonder why we have women pastors and bishops whose husbands are never found anywhere near to their ministry base. We wonder why women are unable to lead their children to their faith.

The spiritual nature cannot be swayed by our agreements and interpretations. We either live according to it or suffer the consequences.

We love pushing the narrative of a husband surrounding his wife with love and care but willfully forget the other aspect which I think is even more important

Sanctifying her by the word.

The man should lead his wife into a more godly life; a more surrendered life to Christ’s revelation.

Why is a woman not permitted to teach or even speak in church? It is for that simple reason. She is under authority. That role belongs to her husband.

That also explains why she is instructed to ask her husband at home if she needs an answer for something.

I know I am treading very dangerous waters but I know you will allow me to continue sharing what the Bible teaches the way it teaches.

Allow me to add another aspect so that you can justifiably treat me a complete wet blanket.

The husband is called the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church.

What is the role of the head? What is the role of the body?

Do you realise that of the five human senses, only one is on the body; the sense of feeling?

Again, what is the role of the body? Is it not to respond to the leading of the head since it has all the other senses?

And since marriage is a type of the relationship between Christ and the church, can we draw parallels from the way we relate with our Lord?

A good wife should be like an obedience Christian. This in effect means that a good Christian woman must be a completely submitted wife. And I mean to her husband, not to a spiritual conman under any guise.

On the other hand, the husband must also be a man of immense spiritual growth and maturity. He must be a man totally sold out and obedient to Christ as his Lord and not to anything or anybody else, even his wife, especially his wife.

A wishy-washy man who worships the floor on which his wife treads is a great shame to the cause of Christ. A man who will not make any decision or respond to any call unless and until his wife agrees with it will face the judgment Ahab faced.

What am I saying?

Men must sharpen their craving for spiritual things. They must learn to listen and obey Christ’s voice. They must be mature in spiritual things.

It is impossible to lead unless you are being led by Christ.

Remember the centurion in Luke 8?

I am under authority. I command.

A man not completely surrendered to Christ will have problems commanding his wife because he simply does not understand what a command is.

A man who treats Christ’s commands like suggestions will not really know when his wife is obedient or not since he thinks he is also offering suggestions.

And a wife who is not completely submitted to her husband can never enjoy the cover a real husband can offer because he is one of the many voices she listens to.

As usual I will not finish this as I want you to go to the scriptures and their Author for the complete teaching. But I am open for interaction.

But allow me to repeat what I wrote in the earlier post.

A man is complete before he gets married. And he is complete when he gets married. A wife does not complete the man, at least according to scripture

Spiritual Security

Why do we lock churches? Why do we have safes and accounting departments in spiritual institutions?

I want to look at this in two different ways.

When I was growing up, I never thought someone could steal from a church. And I am sure this is true to most people of my generation

Until very recently, people left their shoes at the door of mosques for the same reason.

And have you ever noticed that in places witchcraft is rife you can drop your loaded wallet on the street in the morning and find it intact in the evening?

You may be wondering what I am aiming at with all this.

Let me drop this meagre bombshell.

Our spiritual awareness determines every single action we take. That is why I am talking about different spiritual realities yielding similar results.

Lowering the spiritual awareness of an individual disconnects them from the realities inherent in that spiritual entity, though it in no way nullifies it.

What I mean is that my ignorance of spiritual realities will not diminish their power.

Uzzah didn’t know how close he was to death until he died

The fact that he had not been instructed about the ark was no defense for his ignorance.

In the same way Nadab and Abihu also died because they had not appreciated how portent God’s fire was when they were playing with that fire.

God is powerful, infinitely more powerful than we can even imagine.

In the same way, demons are powerful, though in a limited way. They are powerful within their bounds since they are territorial as per the authority they have been handed over by the people in that territory.

I suspect you have heard that a witch or wizard cannot do much outside their domain.

The reason is simple. The demons he can control (that he is under the control of) only operate where they have been allowed to.

That is why we do not have inter-tribal witchcraft. Even with all their enmity, none has the capacity to cast any spell over the other for that single fact. Demons must be given their authority by their human hosts, whether tribal or familial.

I therefore must be under that territory to be affected by its witchcraft.

Allow me to state another controversial fact

Why must someone perform the tribal or cultural wedding to be allowed to do the church one? And why is the church powerless to fight it yet the law says nothing about those rites as a requirement for marriage under any act except the cultural one?

It is for that simple fact. It is to place the marriage on the foundation of culture and all its requirements and ceremonies even without knowing why. Then the church wedding is just a ceremony without any spiritual significance or relevance.

You see, once I have bowed to the demons controlling culture (I have never heard anyone disputing that) it would be impossible to counter them at a later time, especially as I did it willingly.

I will therefore struggle having a Christian marriage because it is built on a cultural foundation as I gave those demons legal authority over my life and marriage when I allowed those ceremonies. They are therefore operating legally in my marriage; however Christian I may want my marriage to be.

Let me also add another thing.

Do you also realise that what many call a Christian marriage is just another cultural marriage, only that the culture came by ship?

But I want to leave it there for the moment so that you can digest it slowly.

This means that there is a war of cultures and not just Christianity and culture. Christianity just adds another warfront to it.

I am sure someone is wondering what this has to do with locking churches.

Submitting to a spiritual entity gives it unrivalled control of everything I do. However, not recognizing it only limits its control over me, not its power.

But that does not include the places where it has been given unlimited authority like temples and shrines.

In those places, only a higher authority, that can only be God, or probably a principality with a domain encompassing it, can overrule its authority.

I will rule out principalities because they all operate under the rulership of the evil one and so would never really fight for domination.

Meaning only God can overthrow that dominion.

Yet He does not do that on a whim. It has to fit into His purpose. It also has to be through a surrendered servant and not an arrogant one. It has to be someone He has sent and not someone who jumped at the opportunity to deal with the other side or fill his CV with such an experience.

Back to churches and locks.

The church building is God’s domain by the fact that it is called a church.

This means that He has the authority of the people in that structure to function in His element.

He therefore allows His ministers to function as He has revealed in His word.

A deviation from that is the reason the church as we know it is powerless, yet we can be sure that God isn’t powerless.

He has simply been denied the authority to function as He would in His structure.

Remember the Ark of the Covenant that killed seventy thousand Israelites did not kill the Philistines when they captured it? Why was it?

Grace. God does not normally judge unless and until we have made an informed choice.

Yet you may also realise that the presence of the same on Philistine territory was such a huge punishment that they had to look for a way to return it. And the same in Dagon’s temple broke the idol to pieces.

This is not confusing as I know some of you are thinking.

God’s power is not limited to those who are aware of His presence and power. Though for the purposes of grace He will many times limit that power so that people will knowingly acknowledge Him.

Some time ago on a mission to the Coast we went to see probably the most powerful shrine that is actually a huge piece of shrub and bush land. I say that because during elections most politicians from all over the country must visit it.

We could not of course get beyond the entrance but we were allowed to take pictures of that place.

Interestingly all the pictures we took of that place disappeared from our phones when we left the place.

I have also heard of a place (and a media investigation confirmed it) where a witch lives just outside Nairobi. You get to the gate and any media gadget stops functioning. Yet it will start functioning once you get out of there.

Those are the spiritual forces I am talking about.

The world and its systems demonstrate their power to be able to get a following. But God does not need to demonstrate who He is or what He is capable of. Though the world is no match to His magnificence and power, He never shows off.

We are talking about locking churches if you have forgotten.

At a time of revival, God is not a mystery as everybody is able to see His power transforming cases that were beyond repair. Bars close not because anyone orders them to but because God’s transforming presence completely kills the thirst for the broth. Police stations become idle not because policemen go on strike but because the criminals that necessitated the police to work are transformed out of crime. Brothels do not close because the owners get tired of the drama but because the harlots and their customers encounter God’s transforming power and move to God-honoring pursuits.

God’s presence becomes palpable. You can sense that presence when you are approaching an evangelistic meeting as you can do when approaching a place of worship.

In such a season, sin is judged very promptly. You don’t play around spiritual items. You don’t joke around places of worship.

Or you do not remember Ananias and his wife, or even Herod who was not even a believer?

This means that the farther away we get from revival, the more remote the power of God seems. To the point that it becomes theoretical as had been Gideon’s experience prior to his own encounter.

The sad fact is that not many who have been even on the fringes of revival long enough for those days when God was revered and His power feared. The simple reason being that we are not radical enough and know that nothing short of a radical faith and obedience is safe in God’s manifest presence.

We have enough people chanting God’s presence, God’s manifestation, God’s anointing, when at the same time living lives so far removed from the kind of life that presence demands; a thing that would attract immediate judgment when a revival is present.

Being in ministry for as long as I have been (and still am), I have heard preachers openly lying to make their testimonies or sermons juicier and they attach the responses to those ‘ministrations’ to God’s favor and presence.

I have been told about converts who have been paid to add juicy and completely false and made-up experiences to demonstrate the power of God to convert.

Do you think the people they left from those faiths who have their actual story will be as awed as the ignorant believers? Will they also flock to or even respect our faith under those circumstances? Will the spiritual dominions in charge of those false faithss be threatened by such conversions? Is that not the reason many say that anybody leaving their faith was paid to do so?

We do not need to create any psych for God’s presence. He just needs to be allowed to function as He would through our obedience.

Our veering off what He has revealed through His word is the reason we are unable to experience His power.

Two reasons we lock churches.

For those like me who know (not as much as I would) God and His power, we lock to block people from getting too close to the consuming fire in judgment. Playing with God’s power is far worse than playing with exposed electrical gadgets and wiring since it has the capacity to go through generations. It is like placing a safety net for a tight rope walker.

For those far removed from the experience of God’s power, it is because they need the security those locks provide because they do not know God enough to trust Him. They must therefore provide human security since spiritual one is just in theory.

Many believers of our generation treat God as text book knowledge. They therefore preach Him as their minds have interacted with whoever taught them.

When they talk about God speaking to them, they are actually talking about a brain wave of sorts since to them God stopped speaking so long ago that there is nobody who has heard Him can be traced.

As an example, God gave me an order about the books He gives me to write. I told this senior ministry friend about the order and he plainly told me that God cannot tell me that. Another time God gave me a timeline about the first book He asked me to write and I told this other senior minister friend who looked at me as if I was out of my mind. Yet it happened exactly as God had told me.

Have I communicated something?

The Eternity Quotient

Mention eternity and most, if not all of us think about the length of the same

I do not know whether you realise that this is so one dimensional.

We think of eternal life as a life that is so long it has no end. It is millions, even billions of years long.

While it is that, I want us to look at another element, one that we are wont to forget, yet it is so pivotal to the whole idea of eternity. Otherwise, hell would be another eternal life.

I want us to move outside the quantity dimension to be able to appreciate this lesson.

Look at Isaiah 65: 20.

A death at a hundred years is treated as an untimely death or the death of a child. Yet a sinner living to a hundred years is accursed.

This simply means that a different yardstick is being used. Or simply that the yardstick is not the quantity or number of years being lived.

Let me take us to another verse.

Remember one of God’s days is equivalent to a thousand years? Yet do you realise that in the same verse one day is as a thousand years?

It amounts to the same thing.

One is looking at the quantity dimension while another is looking at a completely different dimension. I will call it the quality dimension or element.

Let us look at another verse as we progress.

Remember in Psalms where a day in God’s court is better than three years elsewhere?

I hope this is getting you thinking about this dimension even as I try to share what God’s word teaches about the same. Then we will be on the same page as we look at eternity and stop thinking is as a simply endless time of idleness. Or what do you think one can be doing for a billion years without getting extremely bored?

My grandmother lived to over a hundred years. She buried all her agemates. Then she went on to bury her children’s agemates. And she was wondering very many times why death was always overlooking her when picking on who to take.

This for me is how eternity would be if all it contained is endless time.

Yet we know that heaven, though eternal, can never be boring.

Why do we think it can’t be boring yet it is endless?

That is what I want us to examine.

Many times, we are unable to grasp the reality of God being existent from eternity to eternity because our finite minds are unable to stretch that much.

We know God was there before Genesis 1. Yet that is where our eternity begins. We simply can’t imagine anything or anybody being existent before our beginning. That is the main argument atheists and evolutionists put across, simply because the Biblical narrative leaves out what was there before the beginning apart from saying, ‘in the beginning God ...’.

The Bible also says that Christ was crucified before our beginning. It is only for our sakes that an actual crucifixion happened in our context so that we can then appreciate the enormity of God’s love.

What am I aiming at?

Time is just one element of eternity and therefore cannot be used to gauge the same.

There are other dimensions of eternity that are recorded in the scriptures. I hope to get you thinking about a few of these dimensions.

Isaac lived to 180 years and it is said he died full of days.

Moses died at 120 and was full of days.

David died at 70 and the same book says he was old and full of days.

Jeroboam’s son died in his infancy because God found something of worth in him.

How are those days counted if quantity is the yardstick?

Let me get to the first point in this.

Relationship with God is the first thing I want us to look at. And that is what the verse in Proverbs that I mentioned earlier is stressing.

God created us for a relationship with Him. How we relate with Him determines not only where we will spend our eternity but also the quality of that eternity.

Eternal life starts here. And it starts with a relationship with God.

That is why God would take an infant to heaven before he has experienced life here because that is really what matters to God. The infant’s eternity was bound to be defiled by the family he was born into, possibly being derailed by the same.

How we relate with God is the real test of eternity. And this because God and not time is the determinant of that eternity. How serious we are with God determines the quality of that eternity and not the length. We can’t equate the few days the infant lived with the 180 years Isaac lived. Or even the 70 David lived to the same 180.

Stephen died as a youth while John the revelator lived a very long time. Yet we cannot say that God favored John over Stephen. Both lived full lives because they lived it in God’s presence in obedience.

Simply saying, the mark of eternal life is obedience to God’s revelation.

Enoch is an example of what I mean.

Enoch walked with God and was not because God took him.

His relationship with God tore through the curtain separating this world and the next, between the temporal and the permanent, between the mortal and the immortal.

And he translated as a mere youngster if we compared his age to those of his father or son.

But his relationship with God was so good that death and age were completely overlooked as God needed that relationship to thrive on the other dimension.

His walk with God was so portent that it simply overshot this dimension to the next.

How to establish a relationship with God is what the Gospel is all about. How to maintain that relationship is what discipleship is all about.

At the centre of both is the revealed word of God, the Bible.

How we relate with the Bible is therefore an indicator of the level of eternal life we can experience because the God who revealed it is the only ingredient of eternity, for want of a better word.

I hope I have got you thinking

Belligerent Rebellion 2

I want to say something small about rebellion.

Rebellion seeks to intimidate people into submission. Looking at the world in our time confirms this.

Remember the most recent health ‘crisis’?

Why was it wrong to not believe the official narrative? Why was it wrong to give counter evidence or arguments? Why did almost all the presidents who differed with the narrative die mysteriously? And why did the disease die immediately Russia invaded Ukraine?

Look also at the war in Ukraine. I have been listening to the news about EU offering a lot of money for that war effort. However, Hungary had too many questions about the delivery of that much money in the way they intended to give it that they vetoed the decision.

From the news outlets, Hungary was ‘sat on’ for a month until they agreed with the rest.

Nobody outside those boardrooms knows what finally snapped Hungary into submission. But days prior to the summit where they so quickly withdrew their veto it was very clear to news outlets that the EU had threatened to bring Hungary’s economy down if they had persisted in their resistance.

I am writing this to give us a context of what rebellion is about.

Like I have written in the earlier posts about rebellion, rebellion is never content to fight alone. Though very noisy, it is not a noise of victory but a coward’s roar to intimidate.

Remember Satan roaming like a roaring lion?

It is to give whoever is around the sense that they are already defeated, that the roar indicates victory when in actual fact it indicates otherwise.

Or have you forgotten that the gates of hell (where the devil is roaring from) cannot prevail against the forward march of an obedient church. Yet many believers are made to live as if the devil is the one in charge of the world instead of God. Their focus on the evil one many times completely dwarfs God’s majesty and power.

Yet that is the reality for far too many believers. Their single focus on fighting the evil one and all his power elevates him to a position far higher than he actually is.

I listen to prayers many pray and wonder whether they know who God is.

From binding to nullifying to casting this or the other, you will realise that a good percentage of their prayer is actually not a prayer but a response to the activities of the evil one. No wonder they live defeated lives, however much they would want others to believe otherwise.

You see, real prayer is addressed to God. True petition is Godward. How the devil features in them is a mystery only the devil can unveil.

Neither Jesus nor His disciples at any time focused on the work of the devil unless he directly resisted them. Jesus never bound or cast the Sadducees or Herodians who behind the scenes were plotting His crucifixion.

He simply taught the word.

We do not take our battle to the evil one unless we are breaking those gates of hell or the devil is resisting our forward march of giving glory to God. And that is what I see God’s servants doing wherever you look in the Bible.

No servant of God looked for a confrontation with the forces of evil. The confrontations happened because the forces of evil were blocking the forward march of God’s agenda. And they will always resist us when we are living right.

It is my obedience that will attract the forces of evil

Being fixated on the evil one and his schemes is clear evidence that I am not living right, at least not according to Biblical revelation. It means that I am not reading God’s script, meaning I am reading from the evil one’s script because he has intimidated me.

Why should I focus on a defeated foe when the Bible clearly tells me that those with me are more (and of course more powerful) than those against me?

Why should I waste my time understanding the wiles of the enemy when knowing God is the greatest victory against him?

Rebellion seeks to intimidate because it knows that it has no chance of victory unless it can raise its army through deception, an especially through intimidation.

Sennacherib and his tirade against Hezekiah is one clear example of what I mean.

Do not waste any time on the evil one. Do not listen to the threats from a defeated foe.

Focus on the finished work of Christ on the cross and its implications on your life and live according to that revelation.

Otherwise rebellion will bully you into submission