Simplified Complexity

I want us to look at some terms we constantly and frequently use and break them down to their scriptural simplicity.

The purpose is to help us appreciate that God did not release a very complicated manual for us to use when He availed the Bible to us.

The first one I want us to look at is corruption.

What is the difference between a gift and a bribe? Can a gift become a bribe? When and how can a gift become a bribe?

Why am I starting here?

As a minister of the Gospel, I live on the giving of God’s people since the only thing I do for sustenance is ministry, ministry outside ecclesiastical structures.

I therefore do not have expectation for salary or appreciation outside the people God prompts to give for everything from ministry to the education of my many children.

Why do people give me? And why do I receive those gifts?

Any person who gives or sends me support does so simply, and probably only, because I am God’s servant. They do not give me because of my persona or title since I have none. They do not give me because of my position or relationship with them. All these other things are secondary since the driving force for their giving is the ministry God has entrusted to me.

Allow me to say something else.

They do not designate any money when they give. They just give as God prompts them. What I do with the money or gifts they give they leave to God whose ministry they are supporting.

They trust my connection with God. They trust my obedience to the orders God gives me. This means they do not hold me accountable for any misuse of the support they give because they actually released it to God, only that I was the object of the giving.

Now suppose with me that I lose my connection with the source of my orders. Suppose I stop listening to God for the direction those resources should be directed. Suppose I become more important than the assignment God has entrusted to me.

I will simply use the resources as I wish as opposed to as God wants.

The people God used to release the resources may not know that I am misusing God’s resources or that I am using Kingdom resources for personal gain.

That is the clearest definition of corruption.

Corruption is not about the gift or service. Corruption occurs when a gift loses the purpose for which it was given. It means that we can have one person in the exchange of the gift innocent while the other is guilty of corruption.

I know someone is getting confused and so I will give other examples.

Did the queen of Sheba bribe Solomon? I know you will emphatically say no. Yet she came with a bounty.

You see, friendship and gifts are synonymous. Relationships and gifts are also synonymous.

It becomes corruption when the foundation of the gift, the giver or receiver, gets corrupted. It becomes corruption when the object of the giving or receiving is shifted from the relationship to personal interest. I hope to later demonstrate that Solomon was a corrupt king. How much later I cannot tell for now.

Let us go to where in our country corruption thrives, traffic.

Suppose I have a faulty car for whatever reason and I encounter a traffic cop.

He sees my fault and of course finds me guilty.

I admit guilt but plead for ‘mercy’ from his office. And he pardons me, with a warning of course, saving me the tidy sum I could have paid as fine since he was within his rights to charge me.

Later at an eatery I stumble on the same officer. Would it be corruption if I bought him a meal?

Of course not.

But it would have been corruption if I had offered even a little money as I was pleading with him to forgive me. And it could have been corruption had he asked me to buy him tea to soften his heart toward me.

Assume a church sends its pastor somewhere to look for resources for a mega project they were planning.

He is given all the money he was looking for. He is also given some extra money for ‘tea’.

Is that extra money his? Of course.

But it is not exactly his because he had not gone in his person but in the name of the church that sent him.

Hiding that gift from the church is akin to stealing his own money because he had been given by virtue of his representing the church. He was given in the name of the church.

The money does not belong to the church. It belongs to the pastor. But it is his because he was sent by the church. Meaning he could not have received it if he had not gone in the name of the church.

The right thing for him is to inform the church of the presence of that gift, however big or small. Then the church would release the gift to him.

But the church would also be as corrupt if it took that gift from him.

Many minsters have delved into corruption because they feared their church boards and refused to declare the gifts they received by virtue of their positions. The cars, houses, monies, etc.

This then opened them to deeper corruption since they had already allowed the devil to lead them astray there.

It would have been safer for them if they had surrendered the gifts to the church and the board had taken them. Then it could have been the board that was corrupt.

This is something I have handled though I will not elaborate as it will be exposing people I would rather God dealt with Himself.

Treating all gifts as corruption is actually trashing friendship and relationships.

Allow me to be controversial for a moment. And I do this because the guardians of morality (those who brought the Gospel to us) have over the years sought to paint our cultures as corrupt as opposed to theirs.

What is a tip? Is it not corruption at the highest point?

This is because someone is actually paying a favor forward so that they are offered better service later or because of the service they have received.

I have of course read about tips and know quite a bit about how it operates and the fact that in many places waiters live on the tip as their pay is inadequate.

We can thus call the whole tipping thing entrenched institutional corruption.

I am of course throwing this stone to challenge us to think outside the official narrative.

A gift is as a precious stone in the eyes of him that hath it: whithersoever it turneth, it prospereth. (Proverbs 17:8)

Contrast it with this

A wicked man taketh a gift out of the bosom to pervert the ways of judgment. (Proverbs 17:23)

Both are gifts. But one is wicked while the other isn’t.

That is where I wanted us to get to.

It is the heart that determines the presence of corruption. That is why I have said that one could be receiving a gift that the other has designated as a bribe.

A man's gift maketh room for him, and bringeth him before great men. (Proverbs 18:16)

It is the purpose of the gift that makes it a bribe.

Allow me to give a scriptural example.

David loved Michal but knew he did not qualify to get a princess for a wife.

Saul, however, had other ideas.

He made it possible for David to qualify so that his daughter could be used to ensnare David.

David, therefore, graciously received a wife. Saul, on the other side, was using her as a trap.

Incidentally, it is in relationships that this type of dynamic thrives.

One partner is genuine while the other is offering a bribe or snare.

That is the reason many marriages are failing nowadays as opposed to in the past.

One partner will package themselves as a bribe to the other who is genuinely in the relationship.

Once the bribe runs its cause, the relationship becomes untenable, either because the one who had been offering the bribe gets what they were after or they discover that they would never get it and so decide to stop wasting their time on a lost cause. But the uncorrupt partner is bleeding because he had poured his all on the relationship and so will lose everything when it breaks down.

That is the same reason homosexuality is growing.

Most people want to invest as little as possible in marriage as in many other endeavors. The want a relationship with as little risk (if any) as possible and so think the same sex is more predictable since both are more or less the same and so can expect as few surprises as possible in the relationship.

That, however, is a fallacy since it goes contrary to creation. It is actually an affront to the Creator since it stands in open rebellion to the created order.

It gets worse because, not only is it a façade, it directly opens one to the demonic for the simple reason that it is trashing the Creator.

The complications inherent in homosexuality are thus greater pains than the one following God’s script could have exposed them to.

But homosexuality is also caused by some other things, among them being independence and absolute power.

Many leaders of the past had homosexual relationships with the man around them for the purposes of showing them that he was the absolute man.

Many kings are called the husband of men. This may be because of the same thing or the cause of it.

But it is corruption all the same and opens one to God’s judgment.

I do not know whether I have strayed too far from my topic but some things are better said than left out.

Those who have followed me for long know that I teach giving different from most. And I do it for the simple reason that it is only the Bible that should determine our giving.

Do we give for our relationship with God’s sake or do we do to activate His bounty?

We can very easily use similar words and phrases to teach different things.

Allow me to get into our families.

Why does a father educate his children? Why does a child buy his father a car or build him a house?

Remove the relationship and you are left with corruption all around.

A son or daughter does not buy their father a huge gift to be blessed. They do it because they are blessed. The gift therefore serves to continue the flow of that blessing and not to activate it.

I blessed my children when I gave them my name. I continue blessing them when I take care of their needs and progress.

My child cannot buy a blessing from me since I have already released it to them.

It would be impudent to imagine that they can buy my blessing yet I life a sacrificial life because of them. And I did that long before they knew who they were.

Their giving, however, has a direct bearing on the relationship I have with them. Sacrificing to visit me will enrich our relationship.

A child closest to the parents is so not because of the value the gifts he gives them. It is in the depth of relationship those gifts release. It is in the timely interventions in the parents’ lives that a child’s relationship with his parents grows.

Building a mansion to your aged parents may embitter them since they have no energy to even visit all the rooms. And the fact that they now must have servants to be able to maintain the mansion plus many other complexities brought about by a house they have no capacity of even appreciating. That mansion becomes an extra burden.

Building them a simple cottage with an ample fireside and providing enough firewood will be a better gift since their mobility is limited and their lives are simple.

If they had asked for the parents’ opinion, they would have been told to barter those millions with just some time to visit with them, preferably with their children. That would have been the gift the parents would most cherish.

It reminds me of my grandmother who died at a very advanced age.

Since I was named after her son, we had a good relationship. I therefore spent vast amounts of time with her during the holidays and so was able to witness how she lived more than most other members of the family did.

She had guests all the time. This meant that she had to have food ready all the time, food that she herself cooked. She also farmed most of her food.

It is interesting that all her food had to have maize yet she did not have any teeth to chew it.

What I want to bring our attention to, actually, is her relationship with the gifts she received.

One person would offer her a gift and she would be very grateful.

Interestingly, the same gift would be offered to the next guest who visited. And that whether it was food items or cash.

There are things she did not eat (like cakes). But she accepted them all without a murmur, because she knew that there was somebody on the way who would eat that special food.

She did not need those gifts. But the relationships prompting those gifts is what she prized.

A parent is more interested in thoughtful and relationship building gifts than over the moon expensive gifts since he was not looking for the rewards when he was sacrificing his life and comfort for his children.

That is the way it is with God.

We lose it big when we expect God to applaud us when we ‘sacrifice’ for Him. We are deceived when we expect a pat on the back from Him when we have really given to ministry.

God is not interested in our gifts. He is interested in us. He values our relationship with Him.

The only gift that He values is the one that is the product of that relationship or serves to strengthen it.

And that is because all we are and have comes from Him.

Just like a child cannot boast to his parents when he buys them a private jet, even though they be peasants, we cannot impress God with anything we do for Him.

Just as the son, however wealthy or educated, is the product of that illiterate peasant father’s upbringing, we have nothing apart from God. There is therefore nothing we can give that was produced outside Him.

But is that how we teach giving?

Let us look at look at the whole spiritual parent doctrine.

When did you ever hear a spiritual ‘dad’ or ‘mom’ releasing their spiritual child to take any offering or tithe to anybody else?

How many spiritual ‘parents’ curse or threaten to curse their ‘child’ because they are not bringing those gifts ‘home’? how many are always reminding their spiritual child of the fact that they raised him and thus was entitled for every gift coming from them?

I hope you can see the disparity between true giving and corrupt giving and receiving.

We treat God like those spoilt pretenders for spiritual parents.

A spiritual parent loves his children and releases them to thrive with no interest on self-aggrandizement. Their greatest contentment is the reality that their children grew up just fine and not that they can access their bounty.

In the same way, any right-thinking son will not forget his father.

Another thing I will say is that a father will not stop giving because his children are doing fine.

It is in the nature of a parent to give to his children, however little they may have like the example I have given about my grandmother. My late mother was also like that, looking for the slightest opportunity to bless her children with her little, because we are her children.

We do not drive God to give. We do not push God to give. We do not compete with God on giving.

It is His nature to give.

We give due to our relationship with Him. Our giving should therefore be an overflow of how much we relate with Him.

We do not support ministry because it will die if we do not. We do not support the local church so that God will release His blessings to us.

We support because we know God and are excited about what He is excited about. We give because we are already blessed and are therefore spreading the blessing around.

But it is even more important to realise that God prefers us spending time with Him since that is what builds and enriches our relationship.

It is sin to jump out of bed to run to a job so that you may get a worthy offering because that is not what God values.

It is similar to running with a cup of water to pour on a river or well.

That devotional time is more important than your giving God all your possessions. Because everything you have comes from Him.

That time of prayer and reading of the scriptures scores infinitely higher than any offering you may even dream of giving. Because that devotional time will guide your giving in the way that ultimately pleases God.

Or you do not remember the widow who outgave all those huge cheques and envelopes?

They gave from what they had when she gave her all out of her love and commitment to God.

Incidentally, that devotional time does not replace our time at work. It actually enriches the same since that time is then guided by God out of the relationship we have with Him and the communion we enjoy during that devotional time.