I need you to know that the ordinary man without Christ is powerful and can even defeat the devil in SOME areas, if he knows how to trick him, not to talk of the believer in Christ.

It is true that the unbeliever is taken captive by the enemy against his will, BUT if this same unbeliever somehow comes in contact with a knowledge that frees a part of his will from the devil, he can experience victory over the enemy in that area.

Africa is home to demonic practices, yet with our shrines and gods, the white man who had no regard for our gods conquered us and took our idols to British museums for display, and the demons did nothing.

One can argue that the demons did nothing because slavery was also part of the devil’s plan, but that argument won’t hold up in every context. And I will tell you why.

The one whom the attack was targeted at was not even aware; he or she probably just had this strong mindset that they could not be harmed, and it worked for them.

Some people believed their way out of poverty, curses, spells, etc.

Today, drugs and certain medications cure demonic madness. I mean, how can a demon be expelled by a drug?

I am going through this route to let you know that the believer does not just have power over the devil. The believer has SO MUCH power over the devil.

That is why IGNORANCE is one of the devil’s greatest weapons.

Do you realize that any time the Scriptures talk about what we have, they often use words like “exceeding”?

• Exceeding great and precious promises...

• Far above all principalities and powers...

Actually, we are not seated in creation. The believer currently does not function from within creation. He functions from WITHOUT creation, in what the scriptures often refer to as “the spirit realm.”

This verse is describing the believer. Not the believer who is diligent with Bible study, not the believer who prays fervently, not the believer who fasts often, not even the believer who never misses church. All these things are good, and every believer should do them, but primarily, the believer’s position is stated in the past tense. It has already happened.

We have been RAISED and are SEATED.

Your prayers and studies do not make you more seated, or “more spiritual,” than another believer. They help you grow in the knowledge of God, which is God’s plan for us.

The position of the believer is above ALL principalities and powers, rulers, etc.

This realm where we are seated can be said to exist in levels, so to speak.

The word “heavenly” in Ephesians 2:6 is the word “epouranios,” coined from two words: “epi” meaning “upon, on” and “ouranios” meaning “heaven.”

So, “seated in the heavenly” would mean we are seated upon, or on, heaven.

It is an adjective. Adjectives modify or describe a noun.

So we are not just in “heaven” — we are “upon” heaven.

As I said, this word can also mean “spirit realm,” and other beings exist in this same realm.

So, principalities and powers are also found in this realm. But where believers are seated is differentiated here:

“Far above” places us at a higher level than all the other beings existing in creation. So, our position as believers is so much higher than that of the devil.

Not only that, we have all that God has.

God did not give us SOME but ALL spiritual blessings. This means there is no power or gift or blessing that God has that we do not have. If you’re asking how come God did such a thing, then you’d understand better why he described his power toward us this way:

• And WHY did he do this?

• God did it because he is RICH in mercy, love, and kindness towards us.

This is beyond what we can understand, though.

You will also realise why it pains the Father’s heart when we are waging war against the devil as if he’s our mate. You’re literally throwing away his RICH mercy and love. You’re calling his EXCEEDING great power in us nonsense.

• We were not told to fight the devil. We were told to STAND against him.

• We were not told to stand against him so that we will now be fighting together. No.

• We were told to STAND against him because the only thing he really knows how to use is TRICKS.

He feeds off our ignorance.

It is against the WILES of the devil that you’re standing, not against his supposed power.

Actually, this is already written elsewhere in a different way.

Notice the tenses.

“spoiled”
“made a show of”
“triumphed”

Not “will spoil,” not “is in the process of triumphing.”

Whatever confrontation needed to happen between Christ and the powers of darkness already happened, and it ended in a public parade of their defeat, not a negotiation, not a truce.

That’s why Jesus, sending out the seventy, didn’t tell them to prepare for a long war of attrition.

“Tread,” not “battle.”

To “flee” is the Greek word “pheugō,” and this is what it means:

“seek safety by flight, to be saved by flight, to escape safely out of danger.”

So, when you resist the devil, he runs away to safety!!

He is terrified and quickly runs to escape danger. And YOU are that danger!

Think about that for a second. Go back to the beginning of everything I said. An ordinary man, with no covenant, no Spirit, no righteousness, nothing but sheer willpower and a confession he half-believed, could still make poison fail and charms fall flat. If ignorance of the truth still let an ordinary man stumble into that much resistance by accident, what exactly do you think happens when a believer who actually KNOWS what Ephesians says about him opens his mouth on purpose?

You were never handed a sword to go looking for a fight. You were handed a position to simply stand in.

My dearly beloved, garnish your heart and soul with these words.

Put them to practice, and the Lord will keep you always in his love.

Answering questions around why God withheld information about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil from Adam and drove him out of the garden.

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A way to overcome your fears is to go right through them. It’s like walking through a thicket. You’ll get terribly scarred. But those scars are what we call “collateral damage.” They are the cost of the freedom you seek.

Freedom exists because of the presence of bondage and slavery.

There is the concept of freedom today because things, realities, and the world as we had it before have changed, and what we see as reality keeps telling us that all is not well.

There is nothing that looks normal in this life currently. At every turn, you are faced with different levels of bondage.

The bondage to survive
The bondage to impress
The bondage to be excellent and exceptional
The bondage to be courageous
The bondage to be strong and unsentimental.

All careers are bondages, no matter how you see them or try to explain them away.

The fact that we need to painstakingly study to know, or eat to stay alive, or work to earn is a sign that we are enslaved, one way or another, to something.

Now you can understand why Jesus said that you would know the truth, and the truth would make you free.

On the flip side, if you remain ignorant of the truth, you’re in bondage. To “not know” is to be “at the mercy” of that which you do not know. To be “at the mercy” of something is to be a slave of that thing.

All forms of ignorance are forms of bondage, be it academic, mental, scientific, financial, etc. We are all voluntary or involuntary slaves to whatever we do not have perfect knowledge of.

But Jesus said that if we know the truth, we will be free.

The word “truth” here is translated from the Greek “alētheia,” which comes from two root words: “a” and “lanthanō.”

• “a” used before a word negates the word.

• “lanthanō” means “to be hidden or concealed.”

When “a” negates “lanthanō,” we have the word “alētheia,” meaning “not concealed.”

When you know that which is CONCEALED, you’re FREE. To unlock your freedom, seek to know that which is hidden or concealed. This is why you realize that the more you learn about God, the freer you become. Freer from the ignorance that keeps people in bondage.

And fear is mostly a sign of ignorance.

Haven’t you observed that people who have experienced something before do not get afraid when they encounter it again?

But when you’re doing something for the first time, because you don’t have the knowledge of the experience of that thing, you’re ignorant about the outcome. That’s why people are afraid of life, the future, marriage, work, etc. We all haven’t encountered these things before. This is our first time in existence, so we become afraid because we don’t KNOW what this is all about.

• This ignorance makes you uncertain about what would happen or not happen, and that’s what is interpreted as fear.

Peter didn’t know what would happen if he stepped out of the boat. That’s precisely why he sank the moment he saw the crazy winds. But notice, he had already walked several steps on water before the doubt caught up with him. The steps he took before the fear arrived are proof that the water could carry him. His problem was the gap between what his feet had already proven and what his mind was still afraid to accept.

Think about what “collateral damage” actually costs different people.

For one person, it’s the friendship that quietly ends because they finally stopped shrinking themselves to keep the peace. For another, it’s the salary they walk away from because staying any longer would have cost them their sanity. For someone else, it’s the family gathering where they’re suddenly the outsider, simply because they stopped performing a version of themselves everyone else had grown comfortable with. None of these scars show up on an X-ray. They still hurt the same.

You will get scarred.

Let me be sincere with you: you’d get terribly scarred. But as I mentioned earlier, those scars are what we call “collateral damage”; they are the cost of the freedom that you seek.

Again,

The thicket doesn’t get smaller the longer you stand outside it staring. It only gets thicker in your imagination. The only way it ever actually shrinks is behind you, once you’ve already walked through, scars and all, and you turn around to realize it never had the size you gave it in your head.

Some scars might even literally take you out of this physical world, but how will you know if you never tried?

As long as you did it for freedom, it will be worth it in the end.

There are different routes to awakening.

Moses did not live under the law, but he gave the law to the Israelites in hopes that they would understand what God desires of them and become awakened.

The law was to school them till the coming of Christ. The law wouldn’t have been used if they were righteous already, and if they knew and understood sin.

But did you know that the law didn’t altogether fulfil its purpose?

The Bible says, the law was weak, and rather than showing them Christ, it further blinded their hearts.

The law was supposed to trigger a level of awakeness in their hearts, a hollow feeling, a feeling of helplessness, and thus point them to a saviour.

But at the time Jesus came, the law had not sufficiently brought them to the level of faith needed to receive him, so they killed him.

Saul was a zealot.

He was so passionate about the law that he spent his time eliminating anyone who preached against it.

And even after Jesus died and resurrected, Saul wasn’t convicted yet. He still went around killing those of The Way. What changed him was a direct encounter from the Lord.

I have come to see that HOW men become awakened is often diverse.

You can have someone saved and in a sound local church, hearing God’s word, and for years he doesn’t even understand what is going on.

I had always thought pain could crack someone’s soul and help them become awakened to the reality of life, but I’ve seen people go through immense pain and suffering, and they don’t even know that they needed to be awakened.

Some people need to walk through fire and actually be burnt. Some need to walk through the valley of the shadow of death and experience a torrential amount of evil, because they need it to jolt them back to reality.

Who would have gotten Saul to sit down and listen to a nobody like Ananias preach to him?

For some others, they needed to see blood and water gush out of the saviour’s side for them to believe. Some needed to see mighty signs and wonders. Some simply heard him speak and called him Lord; others needed to feel his wounds and touch the holes in his hands.

Some will even leave this world before they believe. While for others it is the simple preaching and consistent teaching of the word that would get them saved and discipled.

I think of the woman at the well,

Who wasn’t awakened by a sermon or a law, but by someone naming, plainly and without shame, the exact thing she had spent years avoiding.

She didn’t come to that well looking for God. She came at an odd hour, alone, trying to avoid people. But Jesus met her precisely where her defences were down, and that was enough to send her running into the same town she had been hiding from.

Then there’s Nicodemus,

A teacher of Israel who came at night, still cautious, still hedging, and didn’t get awakened in that one conversation at all.

He simply carried the seed of it. It wasn’t until much later, at the foot of a cross, that we see him show up again, this time openly, this time unafraid, bringing spices for a body everyone else had abandoned. Some awakenings take that long. Years between the seed and the harvest.

Zacchaeus needed nothing but curiosity and a tree.

He wasn’t chasing conviction. He was chasing a glimpse. And Jesus turned that glimpse into a dinner invitation that undid a man’s entire way of making a living.

And then there’s the son in the parable who had to run out of money, out of friends, and out of food before he “came to himself” in a pig pen far from home. Nobody preached him into that awakening. Hunger did. Sometimes the mercy of God looks like letting a person run completely out of road, because that’s the only place some hearts finally stop and look up.

Even the rich man in Luke 16, in torment after death, begged that someone be sent to warn his brothers before it was too late for them too, and was told, plainly, that if they wouldn’t be persuaded by Moses and the prophets, they wouldn’t be persuaded even if someone rose from the dead. Which tells you something sobering:

Awakening and consciousness of the gospel message and growth in God will meet people at different stages and phases of their lives.

So, don’t be discouraged when that loved one isn’t yielding or understanding the seriousness of life.

You don’t get to choose what wakes another person up. Neither do I. Some will be awakened by a sermon, others by silence. Some by blessing, others by ashes. Some by a stranger’s one sentence, others only by their own ruin. That’s not evidence that God has forgotten them. It’s evidence that God knows exactly what kind of key fits that particular lock, even when we don’t.

Keep loving them. Keep praying. Keep speaking the truth when you get the chance. But hold the timeline loosely, because it was never yours to control in the first place.

It was always his.

As I end this piece, I must stress this caveat: being truly awakened is not the same thing as being born again or saved.

A lot of Christians think they are awakened because they said the sinner’s prayers, but this is far from the truth. Being awakened is being intentionally conscious of WHO you are. You can be born again but unconscious of your actual identity as Christ.

This is what has given rise to traditional Christianity that has peddled the errors of hell, heaven, suffering, God, etc., for years. The unawakened Christian does not want to KNOW God, understand life, or realities beyond earth. Rather, they simply want to live normal lives, try to avoid going to hell, get married, have kids, and die.

The realities in the Father’s kingdom do not necessarily matter to them, for they think and feel that esotericism is not the believer’s calling.

They feel that the study of the world around us, the skies, plants, plains of existence, possibilities, origins of concepts, science, etc., are not things the believer needs to bother themselves with, and thus they have limited their sights to the transient things of earth. Forgetting that ALL things were made by Him, and there is nothing that exists that God didn’t create.

This type of Christian is not awakened.

It is fit only for the earth, so it is not truth.

And with the passage of time, it will fade away and be forgotten.

Read my “Musings about science, spirituality, and the future of A.I.” to understand where true spirituality is headed.

One mistake some of us make when we encounter unconventional knowledge is to start talking down on others who don’t have it. The scriptures are clear on HOW we should share knowledge that others do not possess.

Whether this knowledge concerns controversial topics like

• “once saved, always saved,”

• “no heaven, no hell,”

• “no rapture,”

• “no need to ask for forgiveness,” or beliefs like

• “you are God” or

• “you are Christ,”

Paul teaches something important about how that knowledge should be handled.

At first glance, it might seem like Paul is saying,

“Don’t start committing sin because of the liberty you have in Christ.”

While that can be implied, it’s not exactly what he’s teaching in that verse.

The first statement in verse 13 might suggest something else when read in isolation, but when you read the verses that follow, you realize he’s not talking about sinning only but rather about helping weaker believers in the faith.

And this, he says, can only be done in love.

The second part of verse 13 says,

This clarifies what he meant by not using your liberty to satisfy your sinful nature.

So, what Paul refers to as “satisfying your sinful nature” is that you are not walking in love with others because you know more than them.

It’s the same instruction he gave in

Before Paul even gets to that warning, he lays down the principle underneath it in

He’s not saying knowledge is bad. He’s saying knowledge, on its own, without love attached to it, tends to inflate the person who has it rather than build up the person who doesn’t. Two people can carry the same correct doctrine. One uses it to puff himself up. The other uses it to edify. The difference is not what they know. The difference is love.

This is serious, because using this same line of reasoning, Paul goes on to contrast the sins of the flesh with the fruit of the Spirit.

Before listing the degenerate sins of the flesh, he warns the believers in

The biting and devouring we see in the body of Christ today will lead to degenerate sins like hatred and envy, as listed in verses 19 and 20. When the church reaches a point where we are constantly at each other’s throats, Paul warns that we would have consumed one another. In other words, biting and devouring each other within the body of Christ will lead to the destruction of that part of the body.

This is the same idea he expresses in

How counterproductive it would be to destroy your brother because of your knowledge, rather than building him up!

Paul makes almost the identical argument again in Romans 14, and it’s worth sitting here for a moment, because this chapter is where he gets most practical about what this looks like in real church life.

Notice the instruction isn’t “correct him immediately” or “argue him out of his position.” It’s “receive him.” Before you fix anyone’s theology, you’re first told to welcome the person. Not welcome them conditionally, pending their agreement with you. Welcome them as they are, mid-journey, still working things out.

Then a few verses later, Paul says something that should stop most of us in our tracks:

He takes the word “judge” and redirects it. Instead of using your discernment to judge your brother’s position, use that same discernment to judge whether your own behavior is setting a trap in front of him.

That’s a complete reversal of how most of us handle disagreement. Our instinct, the moment we spot an error in someone else’s understanding, is to correct the error out loud, publicly, and quickly, sometimes before we’ve even considered what that correction will cost the person hearing it. Paul’s instinct runs the other way. Guard the weak, not just the doctrine.

And Paul isn’t finished. He goes even further in

“Bear,” not broadcast. If you have grown to a place of understanding someone else hasn’t reached yet, Scripture doesn’t ask you to announce that gap. It asks you to carry them through it.

So what does all this actually look like in practice, especially with the kind of divisive topics named at the start?

Someone believes “once saved, always saved.” Someone else doesn’t believe in a literal hell. Someone else says there’s no rapture. Someone else has drifted into saying “you are God” or “you are Christ.”

You may have knowledge that directly contradicts what they believe. That’s not the problem. Having knowledge was never the problem. The problem starts the moment that knowledge becomes a weapon instead of a bridge.

Ask yourself before you speak:

Am I trying to win, or am I trying to help this person grow?
Am I saying this because I love them, or because I want to be seen as the one who knows better?
Would I say this the same way if I truly believed I was talking to someone Christ died for, someone whose faith is genuinely fragile in this particular area?

That last question matters most, because 1 Corinthians 8:11 doesn’t say the weak brother might merely be embarrassed by your knowledge. It says he might perish. That’s not a small stake.

This is why “speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15) isn’t a soft, watered-down compromise between truth and love. It’s the only way truth was ever designed to travel.

• Truth without love arrives as an attack.

• Love without truth becomes empty sentiment.

But truth carried by love actually reaches its destination and does what it was meant to do, which is build the person up, not just prove you right.

So the next time you come across someone still holding a belief you’ve long since outgrown, remember what you’re actually holding in your hands.

Not a weapon to correct them into silence.

Not a badge to separate yourself from them.

A tool meant to serve them, in love, the same way it once served you when someone else chose patience over pride and helped you grow instead of making you feel small for not knowing yet.

That’s the difference between knowledge that puffs up and knowledge that builds up. And it’s a difference every one of us gets to choose, every single time we open our mouths to correct someone.

One of the things I did while refining my mind and visualization some years back was to see things from their original, pure state.

For instance, I woke up one day and thought, “Why do we call sex dirty?”

I remember playing out a scenario back then in my mind.

I said, “If I think about a naked woman, for instance, and have sexual arousal, and because of that I say my mind has become dirty, then why is it different if I am married and I think of my wife that way?”

Of course, the random answer someone might give without thinking is, “That’s because she’s your wife and the other person is not your wife.”

So, I reasoned, “Then that means it isn’t a woman’s naked body that I see that’s dirty; it is my relationship with her.”

In other words, “the naked body is not the problem here; my mind is.”

Because if NUDITY made a mind dirty, then everyone who’s married should all have dirty minds. So, nudity is holy and pure, but what’s dirty and shameful is my relationship with the person whose nudity I’m staring at. In other words, the bone of contention is morality—what is right and what is wrong.

This is, of course, a discussion with loose ends, and the subject of focus here isn’t sex; nor am I writing this to fuel your passions, whatever they may be. The focus here is seeing things without lenses or stereotypes.

Another example,

There was a period I also told myself that my default mindset about anyone I meet for the first time must be negative. Well, it was a defense mechanism back then, but it worked while it lasted, lol.

So, I developed this theory and practiced it because I figured that humans are uncertain and highly unreliable. We have thousands of different behaviors and characteristics in people, and meeting people for the first time is like you running blind into a forest; you don’t know what to expect.

But when you expect the worst from anyone, you put yourself in a place where disappointment is impossible.

During those years, this mechanism worked like magic. I would meet people and have absolutely NO good expectations from them. By default, I expected them to be brutal, dishonest, wicked, etc. So, when anyone showed contrary behavior, I would go, “Oh wow, that’s...that’s something...”

But it was a wrong mindset I had to erase. I then thought that a healthy balance to this mindset is to expect NOTHING from people. But you see, in the kingdom, it doesn’t work that way. If you expect NOTHING from your brother and sister, it means you’re indifferent to their way of life.

So, NO, in the kingdom, once I meet you, I hella expect A LOT from you, and I’ll definitely be disappointed when I don’t see it. I care so much about you to expect the WORST, no!

So, when I see you do things contrary to the Spirit you carry, I am heartbroken, and if I am able, I will do anything within my power to “fix you.”

And even if you act otherwise, I will still see you from that pure sight, but I’ll acknowledge that you’re as much a human growing unto perfection as I am.

Paul used the body to illustrate Christ and the church. There is always something worth paying attention to with WHAT was used to illustrate another thing. It means if you study the allegory or metaphor very well, you can understand the real thing better.

The way the whole of your biological body is interconnected and wired to function together simultaneously; that’s how the body of Christ is wired to function.

That means if I’m unperturbed about a sore on my left foot, that sore can grow and kill the entire body.

Remember what Mordecai said to Esther when she thought she could become indifferent to the suffering and impending doom of her people.

Mordecai said to Esther, “Who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”

He was basically telling her, “Esther, this isn’t just about you.”

And that is one of the things I think we miss when we don’t learn to see things from their original pure state. We begin to see people through their mistakes, their weaknesses, their past, their behavior, their reputation, and everything else that has happened to them, and eventually, we stop seeing the person and only see the problem.

But if you can learn to see things as they truly are, you can discern what is wrong without allowing what is wrong to redefine what you see.

That is how I want to see people.

I want to see them from the purity of what God intended them to be, while also being honest enough to recognize where they have departed from that reality. Because seeing someone purely does not mean being blind to their faults. It means your perception of the person is not controlled by their faults. And perhaps that is what it means to truly discern the body.

I don’t look at the sore on your foot and conclude that the foot is the whole body. I understand that something is wrong with one part of something much bigger, and because I understand that, I cannot be indifferent to it. Your pain affects me.

Because we are not independent bodies walking around pretending that what happens to one person has nothing to do with another. We are one body.

And most importantly, you can keep seeing people as people who are still becoming. Because that is how God sees us. We are not finished.

And neither are they.

A call to believers to awaken to the urgency of our kingdom responsibilities

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One of the biggest significances of the Old Testament stories is that they help us understand what we have in Christ today. I dare say God played out physically (in the story of Israel) what he had prepared for us spiritually in Christ. In fact, if you study the Old Testament writings VERY WELL, you will understand more of the New Testament.

Starting from Abraham’s call.

Abraham was a native of Ur of the Chaldeans. He came from a world with its own gods, culture, and way of understanding reality. And then God called him to leave his native land for what would become the land of promise.

God told him he would give his descendants the land and bless him.

And from that moment, Abraham’s life became part of a much bigger story.

His descendants would eventually speak the languages of the places they inhabited. They would live in Canaan, Egypt, and other lands, carrying with them the story of a God who had called their father out of one world and into another.

I like to see that as a little picture of what happens to us spiritually.

Anyway, God’s promise to Abraham was ultimately about more than physical land. Paul tells us that the promise had Christ at its centre. God taught Abraham (and through Abraham, all of us) about his ultimate plan in Christ through physical experiences, people, places and events.

That is one of the beautiful things about the Old Testament.

Physical stories were carrying spiritual realities.

Take Isaac, for instance.

The couple waited for years until every natural expectation seemed to suggest that Sarah could not have a child. And then Isaac came. The story itself became a testimony that God’s promise does not depend merely on human ability.

Sarah was already barren before God called Abraham (Genesis 11:30). But God worked within that reality and used their experience to reveal something greater. God did not need to create the problem to teach through it. And that is something we should remember.

So, while Abraham waited for the promise, his understanding of God’s promise was also being developed. And Sarah, too, entered into that faith.

Hebrews says:

Sarah received strength because she came to trust the One who had promised.

And what was that promise ultimately connected to? The promise of blessing that would reach the nations.

The promise that Paul says was, in advance, the preaching of the gospel to Abraham:

Note that.

The gospel was preached to Abraham. And Abraham believed.

Jesus himself said:

So Abraham’s life was not merely about a man looking for a piece of land. He was seeing something beyond himself.

His life was becoming a classroom.

Abraham and Isaac

We see God “testing” Abraham’s faith. But I don’t think we should read this as though God were sitting somewhere wondering:

• “Hmm. Let me see if Abraham will obey me today.”

God knows the heart. So he doesn’t need to do that.

So, what exactly was happening here?

Again, Abraham’s life was becoming a lesson. God was revealing something through the experience. The story of Isaac would paint a picture of Christ.

Look at it:

1. A beloved son is given.

2. The son is offered up.

3. A substitute is provided.

4. Isaac is received back, figuratively speaking, from death.

The writer of Hebrews tells us:

And again, remember Abraham’s faith was connected to what God had promised him. He knew Isaac was the son through whom the promise would continue. So, if God was asking him to offer Isaac, Abraham reasoned that God was able to do something Abraham had never seen before.

Hebrews tells us exactly what he thought:

This is why I don’t imagine Abraham as merely standing there, paralysed by uncertainty. The man had come to a conclusion about God. He believed the promise. And because he believed the promise, he believed that death could not have the final word over Isaac.

• Did you read how this dude was ready to cut off his son’s head?

Nahhh ...

That guy was not just going through a random “test”. His mind was already made up. Guy drew out his knife. There was absolutely no doubt in his mind that Isaac would not simply be dead and gone. God had promised. And Abraham had come to trust the Promiser. So, perhaps this experience was doing more than measuring Abraham’s faith.

It was also revealing the content of that faith.

After the ordeal where God provided an animal for the sacrifice, Abraham didn’t simply say:

“Oh God, thank you for sparing my son. Ahhh, I almost died of fear.”

No!

Rather, look at what he called the place.

What was the revelation Abraham had caught earlier on?

• God will provide.

Earlier in the story, Abraham had told Isaac:

And there, on the mountain, God provided a substitute. Isaac would not pay with his life. A ram took his place.

Can you see the picture?

• And that is what Christ is. God’s provision.

‘Jehovah-jireh’ comes from the Hebrew idea connected with seeing or seeing to something; hence the sense that ‘the Lord will see to it’ or ‘the Lord will provide’.

And this truth was carried from generation to generation.

Genesis says:

This was how generations learned to hope. The promise of God’s provision became ingrained into the consciousness of Israel. Their history carried it. Their sacrifices carried it. Their festivals carried it. Their stories carried it.

Something, or Someone: was coming.

That is why they lived hoping for the consolation of Israel.

And you can see why many were disappointed when Jesus came. They expected power. They expected political liberation. They expected a king who would overthrow Rome and restore visible national glory.

Instead, Jesus came as a servant. Born in humble circumstances. And he began talking about a kingdom that could not simply be reduced to physical territory.

They had the shadows. But many missed the substance. They had become so focused on what God had done physically that they struggled to recognise what God was doing spiritually.

But even Abraham and the other patriarchs understood that the promise stretched beyond the physical.

The writer of Hebrews says:

They understood that they were looking for something greater. The physical journey was telling a bigger story.

And that brings me to another point I really want to make.

God can use your experiences

God can use the tests we encounter in this world to teach us.

• He can use failure to teach humility.

• He can use disappointment to teach us where we placed our trust.

• He can use loss to reveal what truly matters.

• He can use difficult people to expose parts of ourselves we never knew were there.

• He can use circumstances we would never have chosen to produce wisdom we may never have gained otherwise.

And sometimes, the lesson is not simply about the circumstance. Sometimes the circumstance reveals something happening within us.

• How do we respond when things don’t go our way?

• What does our pain reveal about what we believe?

• What does our fear reveal about what we trust?

• What does our anger reveal about what we expected?

Life is more complex than that.

Channel your hurts and circumstances into daring soul-growth projects.

• Read.

• Think.

• Pray.

• Learn.

• Heal.

• Ask difficult questions.

Become more aware of yourself.

Let what happened to you become material for the person you are becoming. The Old Testament teaches us that God can take ordinary human experiences and make them point to something eternal. Perhaps we should learn to look at our lives with the same openness.

Not every painful experience is God’s doing. But no experience is beyond his ability to teach through. So, when you’re troubled, look beyond the physical challenge. There may be wisdom waiting beneath the pain.

You’re graced continually.

Zealous believers sometimes do not act from a place of knowledge.

I’d rather not be fanatically zealous and focus my mind on the Word and the knowledge that works than be everywhere, “shouting” down things that I do not have a proper understanding of.

There is this tendency to mistake religiosity for zeal.

What some believers have is a religious character, not pure zeal for God and the church.

I chose to call it “character” to strip it of its “spirituality” and actually see it for what it is. It is often more of a mind thing than a “spiritual” thing. The religious character relies heavily on what makes sense and would fight, almost by default, what does not appeal to the senses. The religious character can be heavily dependent on logic, even when the person does not realise it. And although many people don’t see it this way, there can sometimes be a thin line between the religious heart and the person who relies solely on logic to explain everything.

Both can become trapped by the limits of their own minds. And that is the problem.

Human beings were not created merely to argue about whether God exists or does not exist. There is something within humanity that constantly reaches beyond itself.

We ask where we came from.
We ask why we are here.
We ask what happens after death.

We look at creation and wonder whether there is something—or Someone—behind it.

For me, the question is not simply whether there is a God.

And what does he want with us?

That is where Jesus Christ comes into the picture.

Jesus is the perfect representation of the One who made us. He is the clearest revelation of what God is like. And as Jesus Christ comes into the picture, we move ahead to realise that our relationship with our Creator has been restored through him. And from that point, we learn to trust him enough to live for him.

It will try. And try. And try.

And when it cannot sustain the life it thinks God demands, it falls into guilt. But the guilt does not always lead to genuine repentance and transformation. So, the person returns to the same methods that produced the failure in the first place.

More effort. More promises. More rules. More self-hatred.

And eventually, another failure.

Then the cycle begins again.

This person can remain in that cycle for a very long time until they learn to trust in the grace that saved them. Our partnership with God in living his life is very organic. By that, I mean it is both rooted in truth and personally lived.

Some things are clear. The Scriptures teach them.

• Love.

• Forgiveness.

• Integrity.

• Faith.

• Grace.

• The character of Christ.

These are not things we need to invent. They are laid out for us.

But then there is the personal journey of learning to walk with God.

How do you apply wisdom to this relationship?
How do you respond to this decision?
What do you do when you have two good options in front of you?
How do you navigate a situation that Scripture does not address word for word?

This is where maturity becomes personal. Sometimes the instruction will not come to you as a verse written verbatim on a page. Sometimes it comes as wisdom or conviction, through counselling or by experience.

As believers, we must trust that God’s Spirit can lead us. But we also learn to discern that not every thought in our mind is an instruction from God.

Sometimes God’s leading may not be convenient or conventional. It may not be popular. It may even seem strange to the people around you. But when you trust the One who is leading you, you learn to follow him without needing to control every detail before you take the next step.

Many of the things you struggle with may not be solved by finding one clearly written verse that addresses your exact situation. But as you grow, you can receive wisdom and direction that, almost “miraculously,” puts an end to struggles that once seemed impossible to overcome.

But many are AFRAID.

FEAR is one of the believer’s strongest opponents to that life of personalised dealings with God. Because fear always wants guarantees. Fear wants to know everything before it takes a step. Fear wants the entire map before beginning the journey.

But if you can dare to trust the Lord, you will realise that the absence—or rather, the overcoming—of fear is where the journey truly begins.

Paul wrote:

We often easily understand and quote the first part of that verse:

But we often do not pay enough attention to what follows:

The Christian life is not simply a life you are trying to perform. It is a life you are learning to live in dependence on Christ. The idea of faith here carries the sense of trusting and relying upon him.

So, you could understand the thought this way:

How then do you live for God?

By TRYING?

No. By TRUSTING.

• You obey.

• You learn.

• You repent.

• You grow.

• You discipline yourself.

But you do not imagine that your efforts are what made you alive in the first place.

You are responding to grace, not trying to replace it.

You see why fear can be deadly?

You cannot fully trust someone while constantly believing they are going to abandon you. You cannot rest in grace while constantly trying to save yourself.

Trusting does not mean NOT DOING ANYTHING.

It means NOT COMING UP WITH YOUR OWN WAY OF SAVING YOURSELF.

In trusting, you obey. You don’t invent another thing.

Paul goes on to say:

The word translated “frustrate” carries the sense of setting aside, nullifying, or treating something as ineffective.

So, in essence, Paul is saying:

That is the heart of it.

The religious mind will take you from the land of slavery but ensure you’re still a slave; even when you’re standing in your own free land. You may have left Egypt, but Egypt has not left your mind.

Jesus is the author and finisher of our faith. He began the work. He sustains the work. And he will bring it to completion.

So, did you think such a person would leave you alone to figure everything out by yourself?

I don’t think so.

Don’t be quick to rid people of the consequences of their actions and decisions.

The universe is designed in such a way that wrong choices eventually produce unpleasant effects. The goal, ideally, is that when wrongdoing is confronted by its consequences, the person learns from their folly and turns over a new leaf.

If you constantly deny people the opportunity to face the “consequences” of their decisions and grow from them, you may actually be interrupting a process that was designed to teach them.

And eventually, that same dysfunction may come back to you.

Everyone will receive the result of the things they did in the body (2 Corinthians 5:10).

The aspect of eternal justification that we sometimes stress is the part that concerns our relationship with the Father. That is settled. No dispute about that.

But justification does not mean that wrong living has no consequences.

There are consequences for wrong living. There are consequences for a lack of growth. There are consequences for ignorance. There are consequences for irresponsibility. Some of these consequences have been ingrained into the fabric of human existence. These consequences do not simply disappear because you have been justified.

For instance, if you don’t work, you may not have food to eat.

Paul says:

That’s cause and effect.

That’s cause and effect.

Ignorance is often the consequence of refusing to learn.

If you refuse to prepare for an examination, academic failure should not surprise you. If you consistently mishandle your marriage, marital problems should not surprise you. If you continually neglect your emotional development, emotional problems may eventually expose what you refused to deal with.

The same principle applies to money, relationships, health, character, business, leadership, and almost every other area of human existence.

These realisations may never have happened if someone had constantly shielded us from the consequences of our actions.

If you married wrongly, for instance, the painful experience of that union may teach you not to be rash with lifelong decisions.

Your lesson may eventually go beyond you. You may help other unmarried people make better marital choices. You suffered for your mistake, but you learned from it. And because you learned from it, you may help another person avoid the same mistake. The system becomes balanced.

It became instruction. And instruction became wisdom. This is one of the reasons I don’t believe we should always rush to rescue people from the consequences of their choices. Sometimes, rescue delays maturity. Every wrong we do creates some form of imbalance—not necessarily in some mystical sense, but in the very real web of human relationships and consequences.

Our individual actions affect other people. Our collective actions affect societies. Our societies affect the earth and the whole of creation.

This is part of what Scripture is getting at when it says:

One man’s action had consequences beyond that man. That’s how interconnected human existence is. What one generation normalises, another generation can inherit. What one generation refuses to confront, another may have to fight.

A friend once told me of a child who exhibited strange levels of worry and anxiety.

What is a little child of seven or eight so afraid of?
Who taught him to worry so much?

I was later told that he had picked it up from his grandmother, who was a chronic worrier.

Now, we don’t know exactly how it began. But behaviours can certainly be learned, modelled and transmitted through families. A child watches an adult respond to uncertainty with fear, and that response can become normal to the child. Then the child grows. The child has children. And suddenly, what began as one person’s unresolved pattern becomes a family pattern.

Now, salvation does not automatically erase every learned behaviour, emotional pattern, or character deficiency.

A person can be saved and still need to unlearn things. The believer can be justified and still need transformation. The fact that Christ has saved you does not mean you no longer have anything to learn. That worrying pattern will need to be confronted.

And I don’t necessarily mean starting to cast and bind the “spirit of worry.” Sometimes the problem is not a demon. Sometimes the problem is a pattern. Sometimes it is ignorance. Sometimes it is a worldview. Sometimes it is an emotional response learned over many years.

And sometimes it is simply a person who has never been forced to confront the consequences of their way of thinking.

Now imagine this young man grows with this character, and every time he worries himself sick, someone immediately comes to calm him down. Someone fixes every problem for him. Someone removes every consequence. Someone constantly reassures him without ever teaching him how to deal with uncertainty.

What happens?

He may never develop the capacity to confront the underlying problem.

The goal should not be to make him suffer. The goal should be to stop making his dysfunction comfortable. There is a difference.

His worry may lead him into decisions that have serious consequences for his life. His anxiety may cost him opportunities. His inability to make decisions may cost him relationships. His constant fear may prevent him from becoming the person he could have become. And when he finally sees the consequences clearly, something may happen inside him.

He may finally say: “I cannot continue like this.”

That moment is powerful. Because now, he is no longer being forced to change by someone else. He has become willing to change himself. He will read books. He will study God’s Word. He will take counselling sessions. He will seek wisdom. He will confront his patterns. He will do the difficult inner work. And eventually, he may become free from what once controlled him.

Then something beautiful happens.

His family may become different. The thing that travelled through generations can stop with him. That’s how transformation works. One person confronts what previous generations tolerated, and an entire lineage can experience something different.

This is why judgment is necessary.

But we have misunderstood judgment.

A judge identifies what is out of order. A mirror reveals what is wrong with your appearance. Pain reveals that something in the body needs attention. Consequences reveal that something in our behaviour needs attention.

Judgment, properly understood, brings things into the light. And what is brought into the light can finally be dealt with.

If you continually rescue a lazy person from the consequences of laziness, you may not be helping them. You may be teaching them that laziness has no cost. If you continually cover the irresponsible person, you may be making irresponsibility sustainable. If you constantly pay the debts of someone who refuses to learn financial responsibility, you may be protecting the very behaviour that keeps them poor.

Sometimes love says: “I will help you.”

And sometimes love says: “I cannot keep protecting you from this consequence.”

Both can be love. The difference is wisdom. Don’t be so quick to remove every discomfort from people’s lives that you remove every opportunity for them to grow.

• Let the lazy person experience the cost of laziness.

• Let the irresponsible person encounter the consequences of irresponsibility.

• Let the immature person discover that immaturity has a price.

Not because you hate them. Not because you want them to suffer. But because sometimes the consequence is the very thing that wakes a person up. The goal is not punishment for punishment’s sake. The goal is transformation. The goal is that they learn from their folly, turn a new leaf, and become better.

And when they become better, their children may become better. And when their children become better, another generation may inherit something healthier. This is how one person’s judgment can become another generation’s freedom.

So, don’t be quick to rid people of the consequences of their actions and decisions.

You may think you’re saving them from pain when you’re actually saving them from the lesson that could have changed their life.

No early apostle spoke about himself, defended his authority, and proved he was called as much as the Apostle Paul.

If you were looking for an early apostle who gave “stories” about himself just to pass across a message, it was Paul. Read 1 and 2 Corinthians, and you’d find tons of this.

• Paul spoke about his conversion.

• He spoke about his sufferings.

• He spoke about his revelations.

• He spoke about his work.

• He defended his apostleship.

Now, we excuse Paul’s behaviour of speaking about himself, what he had done, or who he was because he was one of the early apostles who had direct contact with the apostles of Jesus. But it’s not written anywhere that those were the criteria for anyone to speak about themselves.

This is not even scriptural.

Jesus being worthy does not require you to become worthless. God being great does not mean you have to hate what he made. In fact, there is something strange about constantly insulting what God has created in an attempt to worship God.

I once read of a mystic who consistently cried and called himself all sorts of names just to show how spineless he was and how great God is. One other Christian ascetic, Saint Simeon, would literally inflict pain on himself as a form of devotion to God. He lived for many years on a small platform atop a pillar.

That’s not all.

It is said that Saint Simeon would lie in very uncomfortable positions for long periods. These positions produced excruciating pain, but Simeon believed that this kind of suffering helped separate a person from base desires and set them apart for the service of God.

During periods of sickness, he reportedly subjected himself to further discomfort rather than seeking relief. He took asceticism to an extreme. Of course, many people were drawn to his lifestyle and sought spiritual guidance and counselling from him.

But why would someone think that afflicting themselves was a form of worship to God?

Just the same way someone once told me that fasting was a form of worship, and it didn’t quite sit well with me. I understand the importance of fasting and self-denial. I understand why we need discipline. I understand why we sometimes need to bring our bodies and appetites under control. But if we are not careful, we will begin to equate God’s benevolence with our works.

Have you ever imagined that if God didn’t want to do anything for you, he wouldn’t do it simply because you afflicted yourself?

If he didn’t want to answer your prayers, for instance, no amount of suffering would force him to answer. If fasting could manipulate God, then God would no longer be God.

No, faith is not the hand that moves God.

Faith is believing in what God has already done and receiving the same.

But here is the caveat: most times, the journey towards appropriating all that God has given us can be rigorous and tough for our fickle minds.

This is why discipline matters. Not because discipline purchases God’s goodness. But because undisciplined people can struggle to walk in what has already been given to them. So, God led them through the wilderness rather than the cities.

Why?

Because they would see battles in the cities, become afraid, and turn back to Egypt. Their minds were not yet ready for certain battles. In that same manner, you fast, discipline yourself, and sometimes deny yourself things to bring your body under obedience.

You beat your body because you’re on a race to obtain something, and anything that stands in your way, you deal with it.

Paul himself used the imagery of an athlete who disciplines his body to avoid being disqualified (1 Corinthians 9:24–27).

The discipline is not the prize. The discipline helps you run the race.

So, how then does an extreme form of asceticism please God simply because you are going through unimaginable pain?

How does it make God happier that you’re suffering because you think suffering itself is a form of worship? And how then do you think seeing no worth in yourself is God’s plan for you?

• Humility is not self-hatred.

• Humility is not pretending you have no gift when you do.

• Humility is not denying what God has done in you because you’re afraid someone might think you’re proud.

• Humility is simply seeing yourself truthfully.

No more. No less.

How do you think you cannot use your stories and life to draw men closer to God? Paul did. The Scriptures are filled with people whose lives became part of the testimony. Their failures were recorded. Their victories were recorded. Their doubts were recorded. Their encounters with God were recorded.

• So, the next time you hear people say, “preach Christ, not yourself,” first, check to be sure they are not speaking from a glorified form of asceticism. Of course, there is wisdom in that statement. Christ must remain the message.

You are not worthless.

Paul called his teaching about Christ, “my gospel.” (Romans 2:16; 16:25). And that’s what we read today. Paul did not invent the gospel. But he had encountered it. He had received it. He had preached it. It had become part of his life. So he could call it “my gospel” without replacing Christ with himself.

If your stories perfectly portray Christ, draw people closer to God, and are not void of the message of the gospel, then by all means, infuse them into your teachings. Don’t be afraid to talk about what God has done for you.

But don’t replace the gospel with stories.

Let’s hear the power of the gospel, and let’s also hear the good things that Christ has done through your life. Your story is not the gospel. But your story can be a testimony to the gospel. Stop thinking that when you speak of experiences that are biblical, you’re automatically “praising” yourself.

Well, if you still think this way, you probably should not be telling us your stories then. Because if you intend to praise yourself, people will eventually hear it. But if your intention is to testify about what God has done, don’t hide the testimony because you are afraid of looking proud. After all, what we read in the Old Testament are the lives and stories of men and women who walked with God.

Abraham’s journey.
Joseph’s story.
Moses’ encounters.
David’s failures and victories.

The stories are human.

But through those human stories, we see God. And this is also applicable to young people who are called but are not bold enough to abide by their “titles”.

If you only listen to and read sincere men of God who, in a bid to curb errors, constantly talk down on young people who are called, making mockery of “apostles”, “prophets”, and every other title, you’d never be bold enough to assume your office and do the Lord’s work.

My brother, you’re not obeying the one who called you. The title is not necessarily an honourific. At its best, it is a description of your role and office. And if that is genuinely the office God has entrusted to you, denying it does not make you humble. It can simply make you afraid of people.

How do you think Paul would have felt after persecuting the church and then calling himself an apostle? Imagine the irony. The man who once persecuted the followers of Christ is now standing before people and saying, “I am an apostle.”

That couldn’t have been easy.

He knew his calling was not a popularity contest. And he would rather please God than men. If you’re called as a prophet, no matter how much the office of the prophet is being ridiculed, wear your office with “pride.” Not pride in yourself. Pride in the sense of refusing to be ashamed of what God has called you to do. You’re honouring the Lord. You’re not serving man. You don’t need to exaggerate your title. You don’t need to force people to call you anything. You don’t need to use an office to control people. But neither should you shrink from your responsibility because humility has been wrongly defined for you.

There is a humility that makes a man kneel before God. And there is a false humility that makes a man hide from the assignment God gave him. Learn the difference.

Because Jesus being everything does not mean you are nothing.

You are what you are because of him.

And there is no humility in denying what grace has made you.

A man can remain wretched for years even though he never once verbally spoke wretchedness. A man can walk in great possibilities even though he never once said or typed, “I am going to be great!” on his wall.

You see, many times people think “words” are only words when they are spoken. Well, it’s because of the limitations of our minds and the fact that we often only consider something tangible when we can see, hear, or touch it.

But words are deeper than sounds.

Greatness does not start with your verbal confession. Greatness starts in your mind. Even if you were dumb and could not speak, if your mind were speaking it, you could still walk in greatness. This is why I have a problem with the teaching that an unbeliever must verbally confess the Lord Jesus with the mouth before they can be saved.

How then will a person who is unable to speak get saved?

Someone might say, “He should first get healed before he can get saved.”

But we all know there may be cases where the person does not receive healing. Does that mean salvation is therefore not available to them? Of course not.

This imbalanced teaching often comes from a misunderstanding of what the Bible means by “confess.”

Confession is not first verbal.

In fact, verbal confession should come as an expression of what has already been registered in the heart.

Paul says:

Notice the order.

Heart first. Mouth second.

Something happens within before something is expressed without. The mouth gives expression to what has already found agreement in the heart. Words are not only spoken verbally. The first place words are formed is in the consciousness or mind of a person. This means knowledge must precede meaningful words.

That’s why someone can be verbally confessing good things while their life is still a mess. They are saying something their inner consciousness has not yet understood, embraced, or become aligned with.

Speaking can reinforce what you believe. Speaking can remind you of what you know. Speaking can help you give language to something that has already begun to take shape within you. But if you want to understand the power of confession, you must first understand that the mouth is not the origin of the word. The heart is.

The truth is, for someone to know or realize the power in speaking out their words to birth mental conformity, they must also understand what I’m actually saying right now.

Things may be hard for you this period. If your verbal confessions have changed because of the circumstances around you, perhaps you should ask yourself whether those previous confessions were ever truly rooted in knowledge.

You used to say, “I have joy in chaos.”

But now that chaos has become more intense, the confession has disappeared.

Why?

Perhaps it was merely an empty statement, void of the understanding behind it. That’s why it is self-sabotaging to jump on clichés without understanding the knowledge behind them. You can repeat a biblical phrase a thousand times and still not know what you are saying.

You can say,

“I have peace.”
“I am favoured.”
“I am blessed.”
“I am victorious.”
“I have joy.”
“I am more than a conqueror.”

And religious vocabulary does not automatically produce transformation. If you do not know the revelation behind a word, you can say it all your life, and it would be empty. And even if you never said a word verbally but you have the understanding of it, you would still walk in the light of that knowledge.

Why?

Because even if your mouth never uttered the syllables, your heart spoke. And that is the real place where verbal words come from, or should come from.

Now, what exactly does the word “confession” mean in terms of “confessing” a truth of God’s Word in your life?

The word translated “confess” in Romans 10:10 is the Greek word ὁμολογέω (homologeō).

It carries the idea of acknowledging, confessing, declaring, or agreeing with something. The word is commonly discussed in relation to homos, meaning “same,” and logos, meaning “word,” “message,” or “account.”

The idea is useful:

The key thought is SAME.

So confession is not merely producing sounds with your mouth. It is agreeing with and acknowledging what has been revealed to you. This is why biblical confession is based on saying what God says. But what God says must first become understood.

I mean, intellectual understanding must become revelational understanding. Otherwise, you may know the words without knowing the reality those words are pointing towards.

This is why professors can teach divinity and Bible doctrines in schools, be Bible scholars, understand Greek and Hebrew, and yet not necessarily have a living relationship with the reality they are teaching. They can understand the language of Scripture while remaining closed to the Spirit behind the Scripture.

The Scriptures themselves say:

The words of Scripture are spiritual. You must be spiritually discerning to fully understand them. This is why knowing Greek and Hebrew alone does not guarantee revelation. You can dissect a verse grammatically and still miss what the Spirit is revealing through it. You can know the vocabulary without knowing the life. You can know the text without knowing the truth. So, you can only truly say the same things God has said (confession) when you have come into an understanding of what God has said.

You see why many people confess peace, joy, favor, etc., and yet their lives seem to be the total opposite of their confessions?

They thought confession meant verbally and intellectually repeating a series of words from the Bible. They were saying words because they were told that words have power. But they had not yet received the knowledge that gives those words substance. That’s why people from other religions, atheists, agnostics, and even religious Christians can read the Bible and still not understand its message.

It is not simply head knowledge.

It must birth light in you before you truly grasp its meaning. The things you have been confessing from God’s Word—do you truly know them?

Do you know peace?
Do you know joy?
Do you know what it means to be accepted in Christ?
Do you know what it means to be loved by God?
Do you know what it means to have authority in Christ?
Do you know what it means to be a new creation?
Or have you simply memorized the words?

Because there is a difference between knowing a statement and knowing the reality behind the statement.

Now you know why your words may have seemed empty all these years. You were trying to make your mouth say what your heart had not yet learned.

Not:

“As a man speaketh with his mouth, so is he.”

• The mouth reveals.

• The heart conceives.

• The mind processes.

And the life eventually demonstrates what has been established within.

This is why the pattern should be:

Notice it again.

• BELIEVED → SPOKE.

Not:

• SPOKE → HOPED TO BELIEVE.

Your confession is powerful, but its power is not in the mere vibration of your vocal cords. Its power is in the reality you have come to believe, understand, and agree with. So don’t merely learn to speak better words. Learn to know better things.

Because when the heart truly knows, the mouth will eventually find something to say.

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Giving does not come from the balance you have in your accounts or the number of notes spread out in your wallet or purse.

It is easy to think this is a casual statement because the believer has often heard so much about the “popular” sins they should avoid, but they don’t know that they can sin because of HOW they gave.

I am of the opinion that the believer sins more unconsciously than consciously. So, you see why the teaching that you lose your salvation once you sin will not help anyone? Because all we think about when we hear the word “sin” is sexual and moral sins. But do you know how many things you can do wrong without even realizing you have done them wrong?

If God counts sins in the way some people imagine he does, no one will stand; not even the person teaching that every sin can take the believer to hell.

When God says, “Do this,” and you do something else, that’s sin. It’s that simple.

So, if God has instructed from his word HOW a believer must give, and he gives wrongly, he has missed the mark. You can give your offering in church, for example, and walk away as someone who has sinned, simply because you didn’t do it as God’s word instructs.

For instance, here is one instruction about giving:

This instruction concerning giving is not limited to giving in the church.

Even when you sent that brother or sister that ₦5,000, if you had grumbled and complained and hissed before giving, your heart was not aligned with the kind of giving Paul describes.

You may have transferred the money, but your heart was resisting the act. And that matters.

That is why giving is not simply a financial transaction. It is a spiritual expression. If you do what God instructs you not to do, that is sin. So, rather than send that money grumbling and complaining, if you genuinely cannot afford to help, kindly say so.

There is nothing wrong with saying, “I don’t have it right now.”

You don’t have to give resentfully just to appear generous. And if you have given in the past from such a state of heart, what you’re reading right now is your repentance and deliverance. You are learning to give differently. You are learning that God is interested in the giver before he is interested in the gift.

See an interesting passage:

There is so much to unpack here.

• First, they were passing through great troubles.

• Second, they had great joy in the midst of their troubles.

• Third, their joy made them give generously.

• Fourth, they gave out of their deep poverty.

What a people!
What a mindset!
Who was their teacher?!

They collapsed and obeyed several scriptures all at once!

Well, I’ll leave you to pick out your lessons.

What I wanted to point out here is that these people didn’t give according to their pocket alone. They gave according to their joy. Whatever came out of their pockets was measured by something much deeper than the amount they had. Their circumstances were poor, but their hearts were rich. Their resources were limited, but their joy was not. And this is important because sometimes we think giving is simply about having enough. But the Macedonians show us that generosity is not always the product of abundance. Sometimes, it is the product of gratitude. So, your giving, many times, is a reflection of how much joy you have and how much gratitude you have.

This reminds me of Jesus’ words in Luke 7.

There is something about experiencing mercy that makes you want to respond with your whole heart. When you know what you have been forgiven of, gratitude becomes difficult to hide. And that’s why there is a tendency for someone who got born again as a pastor’s child not to take their walk very seriously.

They’ve been around “church.”
They’ve heard the songs.
They’ve heard the prayers.
They’ve watched people give offerings.
They’ve heard the Scriptures.
They’ve seen pastors pray.
They’ve watched people fall under the power of God.

They have seen all of it.

Familiarity can make what should be sacred feel ordinary. So they know the language of Christianity without necessarily having the heart of Christianity. Especially if they haven’t been exposed to sound teaching.

But you see the ones who got converted from another religion or were once chronic sinners, and there is often this initial zeal and fire around their newfound faith. They give themselves RECKLESSLY to God. Not necessarily because they understand everything. But because they have encountered something they didn’t have before. They know where they came from. They know what they were. And they know what they believe they have now received.

Gratitude has a way of producing generosity.

This is why familiarity is dangerous.

Not because familiarity itself is evil, but because you can become so accustomed to a thing that you stop appreciating what it actually means.

The Israelites were used to the commandments and the law. They were the ones who had the promises and the covenant. They had the prophets. They had the Scriptures. They had the temple. They had the traditions. They had heard about the coming Messiah. And then the Messiah actually came. But because they had become so familiar with the things of God, many of them could not recognize the One those things were pointing towards.

Jesus said:

And the context is striking because Jesus was responding to the faith of a Gentile. The people who thought they were closest were sometimes the ones who had become least responsive.

It’s the same thing, most times, with some of our giving.

Don’t let the offering basket become so familiar that you throw money into it without even thinking about the God who gave you the ability to earn it.

Don’t let transferring money to someone become so ordinary that you forget that you are participating in the goodness of God towards another human being.

And remember, you don’t have to murmur or complain with your mouth only. Your heart can murmur and complain even if your face is all smiles and laughter. Your lips can say, “God bless you,” while your heart is saying, “I can’t believe I had to give this money.” Your hand can release the money while your heart is holding on to it. And perhaps that is why giving is such a beautiful spiritual discipline.

Because sometimes, God is not simply trying to get something from you. He is trying to develop something in you.

• Gratitude.

• Generosity.

• Contentment.

• Freedom from the love of money.

• Freedom from the fear of lack.

• Freedom from the need to hold everything tightly because you are afraid there won’t be enough tomorrow.

It becomes an expression of the heart.

What we sometimes see in the body of Christ as it relates to leaders and money issues is why I believe someone like Apostle Paul would say he would rather labour with his hands than be chargeable to any man. (Acts 20:34–35; 1 Thessalonians 2:9).

You see the “mess” money issues bring, and I’m like, that man is wise though. The same man told ministers that those who preach the gospel should live by the gospel, that those who serve at the altar have a right to partake of the altar. (1 Corinthians 9:13–14)

He was not against ministers being supported. He was against his support becoming a stumbling block to the gospel. And I think there is something profoundly wise about that.

You see, I grew up hating the very idea that ministers have to depend on congregants to feed. Ewww. It was like a stench when I had to see my dad wait for the board to approve this money and that money for the family. And some would tell me, as I ran the errands with my small legs, “Take this letter back to Pastor. Tell him we will get in touch.” “Full-time, half-time, quarter-time.” I hated all of them.

I know this may be a sensitive piece; however, I just want to share some of my thoughts and experiences as a full-time and part-time pastor’s child who had to deal with lots and lots of money issues with different church boards and committees.

At some points, we lived entirely at the sheer mercy of a white-haired elder with a wrinkled face, stiff smile, and protruding stomach. I used to think, why exactly do churches have these things, but I think they’re supposed to.

Things have changed real fast. Churches are now very structured organisations with different responsibilities and varying levels of accountability. But at least, we should put people who fear the Lord in these positions. If they fear the Lord, they will fear their pastors. And, yes, they do need to actually fear their pastors.

Not because pastors are gods. Not because pastors should be above accountability. But because if someone has been entrusted with the spiritual care of people, there should be a healthy reverence for that office and for the person carrying that responsibility. There should be accountability, but there should also be honour.

I’m in a group of pastors where questions regarding how church boards treat pastors were asked. The tales are sorry. Very sorry.

The truth is, I don’t know who’s deceiving who. The pastor who’s always pissed with the elders in his church and is always at loggerheads with them, but still manages to stand and preach every Sunday, smile at them, and act all good until service is over and he needs part of his salary to pay his kid’s fees. Or the grey-haired elders and deacons who swing their waists from side to side in rhythmic sync to the hymns and raise their hands in worship when the pastor starts speaking into their lives, but become bitter once service closes because their pastor is living in a flat and the church can’t afford the rent.

I mean, what are we even doing? Or what do we even do? Or what were we even doing?

As a pastor’s child, there’s no way you won’t harbour hatred, and sometimes fear, for those old men who always stood up to your father—the supposed head of the church!

An elder and some members of the council once visited us. We were living in a—I don’t quite remember, bless the Lord—two- or three-bedroom flat. This was many years ago when I was still just a little puzzled boy. We had fancy bulbs in the sitting room. It had a dining section. The house was painted. There was a gate. It was fenced. It was very quiet, peaceful, and lovely.

At the back of the building was a river. Oh my, I used to go and take a cold bath there sometimes after school. The water was very clean. Sand lorries often came to dig out white sand from the bottom of the river. That meant we always had fresh water with neat bottoms all year round.

That home was home indeed. Well, not until the church’s elders came visiting.

We were sad. But we moved. You no go move keh?

If I describe where we moved to, you won’t believe me. You would think I was making it up. Just so you can have a little picture, the soak-away pit was broken, and anytime you heard the sound of the toilet flushing, you were sure to find what left your body right beside your bedroom window. The back of the house had a pavement that was almost falling away. It was a mess. The house was literally haunted.

Of course, the ones who called the shots loved it. Or did they now? I don’t remember again.

I kid myself sometimes and think perhaps God wanted to rid me of the painful memories of my family’s escapades in the hands of “church,” and that’s why he made me forget things easily.

I am looking at how badly I am telling this story, and I’m mad at myself. I don’t have very good or clear childhood memories. If I did, I probably would have had a very hard time being in church.

Yes, everyone has their fair share of life’s troubles. But I’m not talking about life’s troubles here. I’m talking about church elders and leadership versus pastor troubles. So the story is very different here. Or at least, I try to think so.

I mean, what is the offence in saying you want to serve God and you answered God’s call for your life? Should you not be rewarded handsomely for that?

Well, Apostle Paul said,

As I said before, that man is smart. He knew early how to do ministry without being dependent on anyone. This dude is wise. He didn’t even get married. This man was a tentmaker, right? (Acts 18:3).

How would he have fared with a family, kids, and all, when he was always pissing off the authorities and sleeping in cells?!

Tentmaking wasn’t a very lucrative trade in the time of the Apostle. It was somewhat in the middle-income or lower-middle-income range. To put things in perspective, he was something like today’s carpenter, electrical worker, or plumber.

When last did you hear that someone was a millionaire from working those crafts, unless he had some good business structure around it? Well, Paul couldn’t have had the time to build such a structure around his business.

This was a man who travelled extensively, preached, taught, reasoned in synagogues, planted churches, trained people, wrote letters, was beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, and endured all kinds of hardship for the gospel. (2 Corinthians 11:23–28). And yet, he told us that he had learned to be content both in times of plenty and in times of lack. (Philippians 4:11–12)

Does a millionaire say that? Maybe.

But you get what I mean.

Paul knew what it meant to have plenty. He also knew what it meant to have nothing. Those times when he said, “in fastings often,” he wasn’t necessarily talking only about voluntary abstinence from food to seek the Lord. He was also describing seasons of deprivation and hunger as part of the hardships he endured. (2 Corinthians 11:27).

That’s why he listed it alongside other perils and difficulties he faced. You don’t normally describe your voluntary fasting as a peril. There is a difference between saying, “I chose not to eat because I was seeking God,” and saying, “I was hungry because I had no food.” Paul knew both.

And this is where I think the conversation about money and ministry becomes important.

What’s my point?

I’m saying money issues have a way of messing up the work of ministry for pastors. Money can make a pastor resent his church. Money can make a church resent its pastor. Money can turn a relationship that should be built around service, love, and trust into a negotiation.

The pastor begins wondering, “Will they pay me?”
The church leadership begin wondering, “What exactly are we paying this man for?”
The congregation begins wondering, “Why does the pastor need this?”

And before you know it, the gospel is being preached in the middle of a financial tension that nobody wants to address. So, both the person saying, “Don’t depend on the church for your livelihood,” and the one saying, “The church should cater to your needs,” are not necessarily wrong.

Scripture actually gives room for both ideas.

• Paul defended the right of those who preach the gospel to receive material support from the gospel. (1 Corinthians 9:7–14)

• At the same time, Paul deliberately chose not to make use of that right in certain circumstances. (1 Corinthians 9:12, 15)

So the issue is not as simplistic as, “Pastors should never receive money from the church.” Neither is it, “If God called you, the church must fund your entire life.”

There is a balance.

But the safest place is to depend on God.

That’s what Apostle Paul did. He could receive from people without making people his source. People can be channels. They must never become your source.

To venture into “ministry” while having the members constantly in mind for your physical sustenance can become dangerous, especially in this century. You will be so frustrated that you will start wondering if you actually heard God.

• “How did God call me into something that is making me this miserable?”

• “How can I serve these people when I’m constantly angry with them because they don’t pay me?”

• “How can I preach faith to people when I’m privately afraid that I won’t be able to pay my own bills?”

How do I know all this?

Well, over 400 pastors on that WhatsApp group cannot all be wrong on this matter at the same time. That is, if my childhood experience doesn’t count. Our dependence is on God, not man. God cares for me, not man. He uses men—very well. But don’t make the mistake of trying to use men yourself. Let him do the using. You focus on the receiving.

If God wants to use a church, let him use the church. If he wants to use a stranger, let him use a stranger. If he wants to use a business, let him use a business. If he wants to give you wisdom to create something with your own hands, let him give you the wisdom. But never make the channel your source.

You may start preaching what they want to hear. You may become afraid to correct them. You may tolerate things you should confront. Or, on the other side, you may become bitter when they don’t give you what you think they should give you. And then money has quietly entered the pulpit.

That is why settling the matter of FINANCE is a phase everyone MUST fix in life, whether they are pastors or not. You need to know how you will live. You need to know how you will earn. You need to know how you will manage what comes into your hands. You need to know what you can afford and what you cannot. You need to remove as much unnecessary financial pressure as possible so that money does not become the invisible hand controlling your decisions.

Because when money is unsettled, it can follow you everywhere.

Into your marriage.
Into your friendships.
Into your business.
Into your ministry.
Into your relationship with God.

And sometimes, the greatest financial freedom is not having a lot of money. It is simply reaching the point where money no longer controls your obedience.

Paul had learned contentment.

He knew abundance.
He knew lack.
He knew how to receive.
He knew how to work.
He knew how to give.

And through it all, he learned that his sufficiency was not ultimately in people.

That is the lesson I’m sharing here for everyone, but especially pastors and church leaders:

People may be the channel.

But never confuse the channel with the source.

• The first man, Adam, wasn’t created perfect.

He was created sinless and innocent, and he was also meant to grow into maturity, just as we are doing today. But he looked at all the stress of the journey and decided to quit. That is why the Bible says Adam was not deceived. He knew what he was doing. He intentionally truncated the process, formed an alliance with the devil, and led humanity into a new race of sin and death.

• Jesus was also not an afterthought.

That’s the seed of everything I want to lay out in this article. I am not writing this as just an idea, but I want to build a case, because I think this touches something bigger than Adam. It touches on how the church understands concepts like the rapture, death, and what we’re actually doing on earth.

Was Adam created finished or created first?

Genesis 1:31 says that when God looked at everything He had made, it was “very good.” Not perfect. Very good. That’s a description of the design of a thing, not a description of the arrival of the fully designed product. A newly planted seed can be exactly what it was designed to be (good) and still not yet be a tree (fully formed).

This idea is not novel to Christian theology. It’s actually one of the oldest interpretations in church history. Irenaeus of Lyon, writing in the second century, argued that,

Irenaeus pictured Adam and Eve less like finished adults and more like children: capable, innocent, free, but not yet fully formed by experience.

God didn’t build a finished man and then watch him break and spiral into ruin. In fact, one of the characteristics of perfection is the inability to be lost, because perfection points to a fullness of knowledge, just like God. To be perfect in knowledge and yet become lost is to suggest that God himself can “fall.”

God built a man with the capacity for maturity, and maturity itself was always meant to be something Adam walked into, not something he woke up already carrying.

However, here’s where I am careful and part ways slightly with Irenaeus:

But Scripture doesn’t let Adam off that easily.

Adam was not deceived

Paul writes plainly:

Compare that to how Paul describes Eve in 2 Corinthians 11:3, worried that believers’ minds might be corrupted the same way “the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety.”

Two different verbs for two different experiences. Eve was deceived. Adam was not. Whatever happened to Eve at that “tree,” something else that was different happened with Adam. He wasn’t tricked into “eating.” He watched the whole exchange, understood exactly what was on the table, and chose the “fruit” anyway, with his eyes fully open. (Of course, we know that the use of the words “tree,” “fruit,” “eating,” etc., was symbolic and not literal, even though they might have literal representations).

Adam didn’t fail because he was too young to know better, as some scholars or schools of thought would want to make us believe. He failed because, knowing better, he decided the process wasn’t worth finishing. He looked at the road ahead of him, the choosing, the learning, the waiting, and the becoming, and he opted out. Not out of ignorance. Out of impatience and arrogance.

That single distinction changes everything about how we read what happened in Eden. This wasn’t a story about a fragile creature getting overwhelmed. It was a story about a capable creature abandoning a process he was fully equipped to walk through.

Jesus was never an afterthought

If Adam’s problem was that he quit the process, then it makes sense that God’s answer wasn’t to cancel the process. It was to send someone who would actually finish it.

Romans 5:14 calls Adam, “the figure of him that was to come,” meaning Adam was never the finished pattern; he was a rough sketch pointing toward someone else. He had always been.

1 Corinthians 15:45 calls Jesus, “the last Adam,” language that only makes sense if the first Adam left a job undone that needed to be picked back up and completed.

Jesus wasn’t a rescue plan improvised after the fact. He was, in the language of Colossians 1:15-20, the one all things were created through and for in the first place.

Now watch what the writer of Hebrews says about how Jesus Himself walked this out:

Sit with that for a second, because it’s one of the most striking verses in the entire New Testament. The Son of God “learned” obedience. He was “made perfect,” using the Greek word “teleioo,” the verb form of “teleios,” meaning:

brought to completeness, brought to the intended goal, not made sinless (He never sinned to begin with), but matured through actual lived experience.

If the sinless Son of God walked through a real process of learning and being perfected through suffering, then maturity was never meant to bypass process for anyone, including Him.

Jesus didn’t come to hand us a shortcut around growth. He came to walk the process Adam abandoned, all the way to its finish, and then to make it possible for us to walk it too, empowered by His Spirit instead of by our own effort.

Milk, meat, and what growth actually requires

The writer of Hebrews takes the same picture Peter was painting and pushes it further, in a passage worth sitting in on fully.

Notice the phrase “by reason of use.”

That’s not a small detail. The difference between the believer who is still on milk and the believer who has moved on to solid food isn’t how much information they’ve absorbed. It’s how much they’ve used.

Their “senses” are described as “exercised,” a Greek term (gymnazo) that literally describes athletic training, the same root we get “gymnasium” from. Maturity, in this text, is described as a trained reflex, not as a downloaded file.

Scripture doesn’t just support this claim; it defines maturity that way. Full age, or “teleios,” in Hebrews 5:14, belongs specifically to those who, through repeated use, have trained themselves to tell good from evil. Not those who were simply told the difference once.

What “perfect” actually means in the bible

A lot of confusion about growth comes from what people assume the word “perfect” means. In modern English, perfect means flawless, without error. But that’s not primarily what the biblical word “teleios” is doing.

Something is teleios when it has reached the purpose it was made for, when nothing necessary to its completion is missing.

• A seed that has become a full tree is teleios.

• A child who has become a full-grown adult is teleios.

It’s a word about arrival at an intended destination, not about the absence of flaws along the way. That’s why James can say,

and mean something you grow into over time through endurance, not something you either have or don’t have from birth.

It’s why Paul, writing to the Philippians, can say in one breath,

and then a few verses later,

Paul isn’t contradicting himself. He’s saying maturity has stages. You can be teleios relative to where you started and still not yet be teleios relative to where you’re going.

This matters for this whole argument, because it means the rapture cannot be the thing that makes anyone teleios in the character sense. Teleios, biblically, describes a process brought to completion through use, through practice, through endurance. Not a switch that is merely flipped.

The rapture concept as a change of body, not a change of character

So let’s deal directly with the concept of rapture a little here.

Paul describes it this way:

Read carefully what’s actually being transformed there.

• Corruptible becomes incorruptible.

• Mortal becomes immortal.

This is bodily language, describing a resurrection body no longer subject to decay, sickness, or death. Philippians 3:20-21 says the same thing in different words: our “vile body” will be “fashioned like unto his glorious body.” Again, body. Not character. Not knowledge. Not maturity of understanding.

Compare that with how Scripture describes the process of Christlike transformation happening now:

This verb is present tense, ongoing, happening as we behold, not as we wait.

Romans 12:2 tells believers, already saved and already indwelt by the Spirit, to “be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” a command that would make no sense if transformation of the mind were something reserved for a future instantaneous event.

There is one text worth engaging honestly here, because a thorough case has to deal with its hardest verse, not avoid it.

At first glance, that sounds like instant, total transformation of character at Christ’s appearing. But look at the very next verse:

John doesn’t follow up a promise of automatic future perfection with a command to purify yourself now. That instruction only makes sense if the “like him” of verse 2 is doing something more specific than “instantly matured in every dimension.”

Read in its fuller context, John is most naturally describing what happens when we finally see Christ face to face and are conformed, at last, to His glorified, resurrected likeness, the same bodily transformation Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 15 and Philippians 3. The purifying of the heart, John says in the very next breath, is something you do now, in anticipation, not something you passively wait to receive later.

So the rapture, or the resurrection more broadly, addresses not just the renewing of the mind but more specifically, a body still bound to decay.

Does death make you mature?

Hebrews 12:23 speaks of coming to “the spirits of just men made perfect.” On the surface, this looks like it says the dead are instantly matured the moment they die. But look again at the verb.

“Made perfect,” here, most naturally describes their position being brought to completion, entering fully into what Christ’s finished work secured for them, not a claim that death itself functions as a maturity-generating event that character development never required in the first place.

Nothing in the passage suggests dying retroactively grants someone the wisdom, discernment, or Christlike character that Hebrews 5:14 says only comes “by reason of use.”

If dying instantly produced full spiritual maturity, Scripture would have no reason to command living believers to grow, to be renewed, to be transformed, to be established, or to press on. It commands all of those things precisely because the process happens only in our lifetime or the afterlife if we transition. Death doesn’t end your opportunity to keep growing. Neither does it retroactively complete the growing you skipped.

Why the process at all?

Because a maturity that was never chosen isn’t really maturity; it’s programming. God wasn’t interested in manufacturing beings who happened to behave correctly. He was after sons and daughters who freely become like Him through relationship, obedience, and lived experience. That’s the whole shape of the gospel. Not compliance installed in us, but character formed from the inside, through a real relationship with a real God, walked out in real time.

Notice what’s doing the perfecting here:

• teaching,

• ministry,

• relationships,

• and “time” (kairos, not chronos).

Not a future event. A present process, staffed by people God specifically appointed for the job.

What this means for the life you’re actually living

If maturity isn’t automatic, then a few things follow, plainly, without needing to be watered down.

• Salvation gets you into the family.

It does not, by itself, make you a mature son or daughter. That’s what the son-scrubbing-floors picture in the earlier piece was already pointing to: sonship and maturity are not the same category, and Scripture treats them as two separate things throughout.

• The rapture

describes a culmination of the end of our maturity but beams the light specifically on our renewed bodies. It will not retroactively finish the character work you avoided. And death, similarly, doesn’t substitute for it.

The goal was never a place

Adam wasn’t handed a finished character. He was handed a real choice, real capacity, and a real process, and he abandoned all three the moment the process demanded something costly of him.

Jesus didn’t skip that process. He learned obedience. He was, in the fullest and most careful sense of that Greek word, made teleios through what He suffered and only then became the source of salvation for everyone willing to walk the same road behind Him, this time by His Spirit.

So no, the rapture doesn’t get you out of becoming someone. Death doesn’t either. Only the process does that, the one God designed on purpose, the one Adam quit, and the one Christ finished so that you wouldn’t have an excuse to quit yours.

The goal was never simply to arrive somewhere.

The goal has always been to become someone.

To become like Christ.

Understanding the different expressions, intensities and purposes of prayer in the life of the believer

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As good as our positional realities in Christ are, it is not what we have in Christ that makes us walk in these realities; it is what we know and have believed about the same that makes these realities work for us.

A son who is unaware of his position in his family can be made to scrub the floor, pack the dirt, feed the dogs, etc., while the servants do nothing. His position as a son is not in question. The ignorance of his position is what’s in question.

If he doesn’t know, he doesn’t “have” it.

Take, for example, this popular notion of generational curses and family patterns. Definitely these things exist. It would be dishonest for anyone to say otherwise. But these things have no power. Paul said, “We know that an idol is nothing” (1 Corinthians 8:4).

But he was speaking to believers who knew, because he must have taught them exhaustively about idols, demons, and whatnot. So that statement showed us there was knowledge he was referring to, and he wouldn’t be so careless as to tell believers coming out of deep idol worship that an idol was nothing if he hadn’t already taught them.

For a believer who doesn’t know, definitely, an idol is something.

I have seen family patterns at work in believers, not because they were not saved, but because they were not taught that “generational curses” were nothing. The curse didn’t lose its grip because they got saved. It lost its grip the day someone finally told them it had already been broken, and they believed it.

Just the same way some believers see scary visions of the rapture and start confessing sins and trying to make their way right. Why? Because they weren’t taught that the rapture wasn’t supposed to scare the believer. So, based on their level of knowledge, they would go as far as to get very frightening revelations of hell and the antichrist. That’s the same way believers who have not been taught about their authority over things like family patterns go about having dreams and revelations of someone chasing them. To discard what they’re seeing without teaching them why they’re seeing it is careless.

“Have I not said ye are gods, but you will die like ordinary men because you know not?”

That’s why we have pastors, teachers, and apostles over the flock. Hosea said it plainly long before any of this: God’s people are destroyed for lack of knowledge, not for lack of standing (Hosea 4:6). Position was never the issue. Understanding was.

And guess what?

You live by your knowledge and understanding of your present reality. You don’t live by your potential realities.

I remember someone once saying in a meeting, “Don’t marry potential character.” Everyone has the potential of being good, saved, etc. But if you are considering marrying someone who is of questionable character because there is the potential or possibility of a change in the future, you’re setting yourself up for trouble. Would you wait till this potential for good behavior materializes in some distant future? Before they change, you’re going to be sharing the same home; they will be in your face, talking to you, eating with you, etc. How long will you bear it before they start changing?

The same way, although the believer is delivered from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God, if he doesn’t know this as a conviction, he doesn’t “have” it. Deliverance is a fact of record. It only becomes a fact of experience once you know it.

Now the funny question is, If someone claims to be saved, and he doesn’t understand something as basic as his authority over demons, what then was he taught about justification?

Well, I leave you to unravel that question.

But this is it: Believers struggling with family patterns and curses need to be taught about their believer’s authority, and how to stand in their authority in Christ.

There is the position, but there is also the standing. A soldier can hold a rank on paper and still freeze the first time he’s under fire if nobody trained him to actually use it. Rank without training doesn’t win a battle. Position without understanding doesn’t win a fight either.

The devil has no authority over the believer, but Paul still told believers to stand against the tricks of the devil. And how to stand properly does not begin with launching three days of warfare prayers, casting, and binding. It starts first with accurate teaching.

This is how to actually start

Start with the curse itself, since that’s what we’ve been using as the example.

Read what that’s actually saying.

It’s not saying Christ is fighting the curse on your behalf in the present tense, ongoing.

It’s saying He already became the curse, in your place, at the cross, past tense, finished.

That’s exactly why Romans 10:17 says faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

• not by hearing prayers,

• not by hearing testimonies,

• not by hearing warfare declarations,

… by hearing the word.

So the faith to stop fearing a family pattern doesn’t come from binding it harder. It comes from hearing, over and over, that Galatians 3:13 already happened.

Once you’ve heard it, the next thing is what Romans 12:2 calls being “transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

It’s simple. Your mind currently holds one piece of information: “this runs in my family.”

Renewing your mind means you replace that piece of information with another one: “Christ already became the curse so it wouldn’t have to run in me.”

Now here’s the part people often misunderstand.

Paul prayed for people who were already saved, already in the family, that God would give them “the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened” (Ephesians 1:17-18).

He wasn’t praying for them to get saved. He was praying for them to see what was already theirs. That tells you knowing isn’t automatic, even after salvation. So don’t stop at reading a verse. Ask God, plainly, to open your eyes to what Galatians 3:13 means for you specifically.

Say it like that.

“Open my eyes to see that this curse or this issue or this problem already left when Christ took it.”

That’s a prayer He answers, because it’s a prayer for sight, not a prayer for rescue you’ve already been given.

Then keep looking, because a mind renewed once doesn’t stay renewed. James compares the word to a mirror and says a man who hears it and walks away is like someone who glances at his reflection and forgets what he looks like a minute later (James 1:23-25). So this isn’t a one-time verse you read and move on from. You go back to “Christ became a curse for us” the way you’d go back to a mirror, again and again, until it’s the first thing you see when the old fear tries to show up.

And once you actually know it, the way you respond changes completely.

You stop trying to fight the pattern off and simply say what’s now true.

Ephesians 6:14 tells believers to “stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth.” Not volume. Not three days of fasting. Truth. When the fear of a family pattern (or any other issue) comes knocking again, you don’t need to launch a warfare session emotionally; you say, plainly, “Christ already became a curse for me, so this one doesn’t get to sit on me.” Say it like a fact, because it is one. That’s what standing looks like.

So again, here’s how to obtain your victory in Christ over any issue.

• The curse is already broken (Galatians 3:13.)

• You come to believe it by hearing it repeatedly (Romans 10:17).

• You keep it by meditating and feeding your mind that truth instead of the old fear (Romans 12:2).

• You ask God to make it real to you, not just known to you (Ephesians 1:17-18).

• You keep confessing it and standing your ground, irrespective of the situation (James 1:23-25, Ephesians 6:14)

Curses are below you, not because you think so, but because God’s word says so. You only have to keep speaking and confessing what you have already read and understood through sound teaching and in the place of deep meditations. This is how you get your victory in Christ!

• For further teaching in this regard, you can reach out here: meshackignatius@gmail.com.

• Also listen to this podcast: Ask a Question Series (Podcast): How to break free from evil family patterns

How to receive Christ’s forgiveness, overcome guilt, and keep moving forward

Ask a Question Series is a space where you can ask questions about life, faith, spirituality, existence, consciousness, the world around us, and everything in between.

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The gifts of the Spirit were shared, or given, to believers to help one another.

If there were no weaknesses, there would be no room left for the gifts to operate. They would have nothing left to do.

It is good to have gifts so that you are able to supply help to one another. Gifts exist because need exists. That’s the whole reason they were given in the first place.

But the plan for the body of Christ is not to keep having believers who will always need help.

This is God’s mind and plan for everyone.

At that point, the gifts of the Spirit will have done their work. They will simply have nothing left to attend to, because what they were sent to fix will no longer be there.

If I don’t need help, why would I need someone to use a gift on me?

So, when Apostle Paul was addressing the Corinthian church, he told them the gifts are good, but he also told them the gifts are not the climax or apex of Christian living.

Then he goes on to tell them about love.

That means Paul ranked love as a higher experience for the believer than gifts of the Spirit. Gifts show what you can do for someone. Love shows who you are becoming.

He also brought in love to help them use the gifts well, because it seemed some were abusing them. He wanted to set decorum, or order, in their use of the gifts. Without love guiding how a gift is used, a gift can easily become a performance, a display, or worse, a weapon.

Note that all the time he contrasted love with a gift of the Spirit, the consequences of the lack of love were directed at himself, not at the recipients.

This is in contrast to gifts. With gifts, others are the recipients of the consequences. For instance, if you didn’t give a word of prophecy, the consequence is felt among those the word was meant for. You’re building others up, not exclusively yourself. But if you didn’t have love, even if your actions were targeted at other people, it’s your own self that becomes nothing, empty, and hollow, not others.

I’m saying the actions of love are targeted at other people, but the rewards are targeted at you.

And what is this reward? Transformation. To be conformed to the image of the person of Christ.

So Paul placed love above spiritual gifts. This is not to say don’t have gifts. This is to say, have gifts, but don’t build your identity around them. Focus on growth. You already have gifts, by the way. As you grow in love, you’ll help others better, because you’ll be learning to help the way God helps, not just doing what a gift enables you to do.

But here is the thing.

You must strive to take others from being gift-dependent to being grown and no longer needing gifts to get by.

Apostle Paul himself said gifts will fade away, but love does not fail.

What does that tell you?

It means gifts are temporary. They’re for “babies.” Sons and daughters have inheritances. They have everything, including what was once given to them as gifts. They have the kingdom itself, not just pieces handed to them along the way.

In fact, Paul called gifts “part” and called love “perfect.”

So he was contrasting “part” versus “perfect.”

He said gifts were a part. That is, gifts only show us a part of the big picture. The big picture is perfection, or maturity, where you no longer need a part. You will see the whole picture of the body of Christ and understand what God’s mind is and what He is doing.

The gifts were never the focus. They were the scaffolding put up around something being built unto perfection. This perfection is shrouded in love. God is love. Knowing God fully is having love fully. So when perfection comes, that’s when we become fully mature in the person of Christ. At that point, gifts, which only reveal a part of God’s goodness and might, will be done away with. Not because they were bad, but because you’ll no longer need a piece when you have the whole.

So, why would anyone leave the substance to chase shadows?

Every time you disregard study, you’re leaving the substance. And every time you talk down on knowledge and exalt gifts and manifestations beyond what is necessary, you’re chasing shadows.

Paul said it himself: when he was a child, he talked, reasoned, and thought as a child, but when he grew, he put away childish things.

A gathering where prophecies, miracles, and healings are the core activity day in and day out, without sound teaching, is only breeding believers who will remain babies forever. Activity is not the same thing as growth. A church can be busy and still be weak.

That sounds better to me, not gonna lie, and that looks like the picture Paul was pointing to all along.