Saturday 13 March 2010

GOD IS BEST WORSHIPPED IN SILENCE

I stand I stand in awe of You
I stand I stand in awe of You
Holy God unto You all praise is due
I stand in awe of You.


What does one say about a God one has never seen? How does one describe in worship a glory beyond the context of man’s highest experience? Worship is a description of the qualities of the Godhead…, but then, how does one express the qualities of a God beyond and without any terms of reference of man?
At best worship is silence, stunned silence, awe-inspiring silence. Marvel. Speechlessness before the Presence, rendered bereft of all eloquence or even the smallest trace of expressiveness.
God the maker of all things dwells outside all spheres of time and laws of nature without and outside which all creation cease to exist… What does it mean to exist without having yesterday, today and tomorrow as terms of reference? How does it feel? How do we describe it? It isn’t amorphousness but a state best described as… indescribable! And this only using time to try to understand who God is, every other points and aspects of contemplation we may choose to turn to we always find Him much infinitely loftier than our best and most reverential thoughts. Is it His mercy you’ll think about? It should be enough revealing to understand that His mercies cause the living to live and give the dead-in-Christ a certain hope. Without it none, I mean not one person out of the many trillions that have passed and will yet pass the face of the earth, would ever qualify to either be or remain a Christian. Not one! Or yet will you consider the marvel call creation?
Set thyself on a mount most tall
Or yet on the Ocean and call
To know the beasts and waters
And rocks and sky and Sun
The roll call shall turn thy heart
To know a glory beyond thee.


How then do we worship Him Whom our words do not know? For every little splinter of divine knowledge we glean with imperfect fingers from an imperfect vine that nature is cannot even in any ambitious extrapolation be considered sufficient in describing Him. This little splinter overwhelms, how much more the whole tree. His holiness is so loftily high it’s more than an absence of sin: for ever before transgression came God was holy. His holiness is living, and breathing. It predates the world and it becomes rather presumptuous to start to see the Lord only in the context of sinlessness whenever His holiness is mentioned. So also His faithfulness, glory, majesty, power,… and love. They all cannot be conceived of with regards to what men understand them to be, and neither should they be understood against their contrasts that we very well know (e.g., unfaithfulness, and hatred). God, and so all His attributes-anything we could worship Him by, predates men and their languages and their understanding and their recognition of attributes by which they describe God. The holy angels worship God night and day without ceasing not because they are paid to do it, not because they are creations by nature lacking in the will not to. No. But they are fully rational and conscious and will-having beings that at every gaze they have of the Ancient of Days they are struck with wonder and awe and marvel. These themselves are holy by what men commonly know holiness to be. Otherwise they wouldn’t stand a second in His presence of fiery holiness. The glory they see each time they behold Him surpasses everything that ever was seen in all the ageless time they had lived in His presence. Glory so high they are struck with such lack of words they could only utter the near speechless word: Holy! Holy! Holy! At each instant they behold His glory all the archive and memory of who He used to be vanished.
“Holy!” will suffice for all days for the worship of our Eternal God. Anything more wordy and creative and eloquent will easily mean we have not come face to face with His glory and majesty. While I do not disdain or disapprove of worshipping God with worthy words crafted by reverent hearts-for then I would have to also concede that the Psalms are worthless- I only try to observe that at the highest of worship when suddenly confronted by the Lord’s glory all eloquence shrinks into awe-inspired speechlessness.
When we come to worship with abundance of words not of sweet reflex, then most likely than not we haven’t encountered the Shekinah, the glory of fear and awe and dread and worship, the glory that left Ezekiel and John the Beloved as dead before Him. The glory that Peter saw at Transfiguration and could do no more than say words he never intended to utter. The glory Isaiah saw and couldn’t but consider himself in trouble: he beheld God’s holiness and with his experience as a prophet he couldn’t see any man in the history of the world as possessing a tittle holiness,
“Woe is me! For I am lost: for I am a man of unclean lips,
and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for
my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”- Isaiah 6:5

Job beheld His glory and could only say:
“I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees You; therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes.”- Job 42:5-6

Here was a man that our God Himself considered most blameless on the earth! (Job 1:8) If Earth’s most holy repented in dust and ashes and became speechless before God I wonder what we demonstrate when we come with volumes and volumes of words which often mean nothing to us. Words we picked up from men that also picked them up in certain cold religious ritual. We have so much grown cold and estranged from the life of God that the basic duty, yet blessing, of our faith-worship- has been lost. I would rather become silent and muse upon the lofty holiness of God than utter words that are meaningless to Him. For worship is highest when the tongue goes dumb. I do not encourage that men hold all form of public worship in contempt, but this I do, I urge that the eye strives to see what the mouth utters in worship. That we begin to attend our confessions, during worship, with the holiest intentions, with a sacrifice of willingness and love and reverence.
The sum of all is this: when we are faced in worship with the glory of our God, the response left to us as unto all mortal is that blessed dumbness, or then its inherent reflex incoherence of Peter. Either way the Lord delights in and accepts it. No human experience has ever, neither will ever be, sufficiently equipped and programmed to express the Lord’s worship, and not with our limiting languages that have in fact failed to accurately express human feelings. How much less divine worship. (With the language of the Holy Spirit, I believe never in the history of the world has men been so favored to express the beauty of God's worship- but in an heavenly language. What a grief it must be to God’s heart that the sons of the dispensation of grace when He has so generously equipped them have fallen so dismally low in His worship- John 4:24)
May we learn to worship in silence and with worthy Holy! Amen in Jesus' name.
Written 2009.

And you shall be witnesses unto Me

“And while staying with them He ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, He said, “you heard from Me; for John baptised with water, but you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit not many days from now... But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be witnesses unto Me in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth”
Acts1:4-5,8


Just like many of us believers I had stumbled over this and similar verses of the Bible without realising the full import of its message. However while praying this evening I felt the Lord open my heart to understand it more and realise the error in which many of us have walked into. I will attempt to set this forth in the form of a question. Why did the Lord put so much emphasis in the ministry of the Holy Ghost that was to be given after His glorification, so much so that He ordered the apostles not togo away from Jerusalem until they were baptised in the Holy Spirit? From the emphasis He put into the giving of the Holy Ghost one might have wanted to ask if He, the Lord, had come to fore-run Him, the Holy Spirit. However, it is enough for us to know that the ministry of the Holy Spirit was meant to be the bricks and mortal, that finishes the building whose chief cornerstone and foundation are the Lord Jesus Christ. Our error, and that to our detriment, commences the moment we accord less importance to ministry of the Holy Spirit than the Lord did.
It is clear from the above passage that believers are not meant to witness Christ to unbelievers outside of the ministry of the Holy Ghost. It was a direct order (vs 4)! The work of salvation is wholly to be embarked upon in the strength and wisdom of the Holy Ghost; that is when you can be confident that the seed is divine and it comes from God. It was a divine principle upon which the whole christian structure rests. In I Corinthians 2:4 Paul related how he brought the gospel to the Corinthians “...in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power”. That's when the issue of such divine service can be Gods. And that's when the new convert can be energised with Holy Spirit right from birth.
We only have to look around, and that not for too long, when we start to see how we have allowed overzealousness to twist the work of God in our hands. That's why in a country like mine (Nigeria) the 'quantity' of christianity bears no correlation whatsoever with the moral structure of the society. Why? Because we are in such unscriptural haste that we draft the new converts into the field and tell them to start witnessing Christ to the unsaved. That is wrong! (And here I do not in any way suggest that new converts are inexperienced when it comes to witnessing Christ. Instead I use the word new converts as a blanket description for every believer engages in soul winning but is either not baptised in the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in other tongues or that does not daily continue in walking in the Spirit especially by praying in other tongues.) Every such work leads to a situation where the converts' faith stands in the wisdom of men and rather than in the power of God. Simply put, those converts are products of our ability to join verses from the Bible together while throwing in some philosophical statements and communication skills. We often end up giving birth to our own children, not God's. Apart from the religious air and the name of the Lord that we often call at such time, such exercises are little different from the process of decamping from one political party to another.
We will notice that at new birth the believer already has a 'portion' of the Holy Ghost in him, which the apostles to whom the Lord was speaking too had. In spite of this they were mandated to wait until they're endued with power from on high by the baptism in the Holy Ghost. That's the only time they could be called and become witnesses of Christ. That's the only time they could convert sinners to Christ. And when it comes to us of this age this commandment is essentially the same and it's in two folds. First, before we can be witnesses of Christ we must be filled with the Holy Ghost. And two for those that are already filled with the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in tongues we need to live continually in the habit and strength of God's Spirit, praying daily with all prayers and supplications in the Holy Ghost (which partly entails praying in other tongues, for what will it benefit you if you're baptised in the Holy Spirit but you do not daily pray in the Spirit?). This alone has great impact in birthing Christ in our spirit and ensuring that the converts proceeding from our witnessing are indeed products of the Spirit of God. I pray that the Lord will re-visit all such children born in haste outside of the power of God's Spirit; that He will re-order their christian life after His will. And that the Lord will remind us of this order of the Lord so that we can ensure that conversions coming through us bear fruits from God.
Amen in Jesus' name.
14.03.2010

Sunday 7 March 2010

Life of Purpose


Now in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver but of also wood and clay, some for honourable use, some for dishonourable. Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from what is dishonourable, he will be a vessel for honourable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work.
So flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart.
-2 Timothy 2: 20-22
We often believe the purpose of God in a believer’s life is one big effort, one big activity he will do that will define his entire life and history. Some sort of climax in his Christian race. But the calling of God in a man’s life begins like a waterflow which the Lord opens in a man as a gentle flowing spring, which consistently increases in strength until it is big. Most times to him it is an ordinary thing, an everyday thing. It doesn’t have to be big before men. The calling is often a set of everyday work of love, obedience and faith that men will see in us and glorify our Father in Heaven. It is therefore good for us to begin to see every little opportunity the Lord brings our way to prove our love to Him as the requisite components that at the end will sum up as our calling.
Everything in a man’s life is a tool, a potential tool for the fulfilment of the calling of God upon him. For it is not consistent with the character of God to waste resources. Every talent we notice in us is a deposit of divine grace to accomplish a particular purpose(s) in the grand scheme of God on earth. For every good and perfect gift comes from God… Esther was so greatly endowed with physical beauty she could easily have missed the purpose of it: the Lord would later save a whole race by it. Her beauty-what we can safely call a talent-was thus a door that placed her on a platform to fulfil a purpose of God.
Has the Lord given you ten talents, you should know that each is a tool in the scheme of Heaven to fulfil a desire of God. And that you will account for each of them. Happy is that man that when knows perfectly the grace Heaven has bestowed upon him; and happier still is he that when called to give account will have the expected fruit to show for each.
A wise man once said that when the purpose of a thing is unknown abuse is inevitable. The danger in not knowing the graces upon us doesn’t end at the giving of account for them, but much more imminent is the danger of utilizing them against the very God that bestowed them. Talents are strengths, quarks of energy that must somehow manifest in us. When manifested in the spirit, they add up to the building of the Kingdom of God; in the flesh as vividly typified by the life of brother Paul, they actually work in the favour of Satan to pull down the Kingdom of God. Often you’ll notice that a teaching grace in a purposeless life will often manifest as talkativeness, or as a strong spirit of antagonism and criticism against the ways of God.
Let a man therefore be sensitive and diligent to identify those talents and natural inclinations within him and by developing a strong character after Christ submit them to the obedience of Heaven. And then he shall have taken a big step towards the fulfilling of his destiny in Christ.
 We often err and complicate things sometimes when we begin to identify and tag our calling by specific words. If not done by the Spirit this could constitute a great injury against us. One of the dangers in tagging our calling by human wisdom is that we immediately set an unscriptural limit to it. We begin to mentally compartmentalize and favour certain work above others. In the scripture above the Holy Spirit makes us understand that the vessel the Lord will use should be “ready for every good work.” Tagging callings often opens the door for pride and soon someone who sees himself as called to be a teacher will begin to have mental objections when called to serve the table in the house of God. But a wise man will direct his affairs by the word of God, will allow the Lord to call his calling as He wills, and if the Lord so chooses to make it unknown, the better he will be for it. He will be wise to know that the Lord has called us unto meekness, and that it is not what you do that matters but why you do it. Some who have done nothing more than wash the feet of a faceless believer-we shouldn’t be shocked-may end up receiving better commendation than a prophet that preached in Nineveh and the whole inhabitants of the land, man and brute, repented. Two mites from our widow’s effort often weighs more in the scale of God than giving up our bodies to be burned at the stake. What matters is who (God or us) our service serves.
We take a big step towards fulfilling our calling and destiny when we come into sincere personal consecration. There are no two ways about. Any man that seems to be fulfilling the calling of God upon his life without consecration is an accident about to happen; the very nature of God won’t suffer him to complete his purpose. Just like Samson such a one is programmed to self-destruct!
 Consecration means holiness and yet more, it goes on to mean holiness unto the Lord, “sacrificed unto God.” Just like an unprofitable servant, a consecrated man does not decide what he is called to do per time. When it is washing the most objectionable toilet he doesn’t shrink back; and when sent to meet with kings he doesn’t become over-modest about it. He has come to settle it within himself that only the Lord is his motivation and His obedience his motive. The seven chosen among the believers for to serve the table might have had cause to reject the call only if they had been mindful of the flesh. Or at best they would have done it grudgingly, if they had earlier confined themselves to a particular notion as to what their callings were. But because they were faithful and allowed “this mind to be in them as it was in Christ Jesus…who humbled Himself to the death on the cross”, God then brought the likes of Stephen and Philip to function in other dimensions as prophet and evangelist. Our concern thus should be what we do with the opportunity the Lord is giving us to wash the feet of the brethren rather than some other ‘higher’ and showy work. The truth is that we may never begin to work in the dimensions God predestined for us until we become consecrated to the point of humility and readiness to be whatever He wants us to be per time. It is the soul that bowed to lowly duties when divine necessity so requires that will later serve at the throne. There are no two ways about it.
To cap this section, it’s good to remember that every little and lowly and mundane act becomes great and noble and sublime when these three words qualify them: for Thy sake. This song captures it well: 
When it’s all been said and done                    When it’s all been said and done
There is just one thing that matters               All my treasures will mean nothing
Did I do my best to live for truth                    Only what I did for love’s reward
Did I live my life for You                                 Will stand the test of time

Lord Your mercy is so great                          And I will always sing Your praise
That You looked beyond our weakness         Here on earth and heaven after
And found purest gold in miry clay               'Cos You've shown me heaven's 
Making sinners into saints                                                       my true home

                                                                        When it’s all been said and done 
                                                                        You’re my light when light is gone.
So, the Lord looks for those that are ready to reach into fetid miry clay in service of Him. Only those are permitted to bring forth and present to Him the purest gold that had lied underneath the cesspit.
Talents in a man’s life often are no more than pointers to a deeper calling that lies in Christ for him. They are a guide, ensigns to get his attention riveted on God. He will never know talk less of fulfill this destiny until he becomes wholly yielded to God through Christ Jesus, for callings are properties of God; and it is written that the things of God know no man except the Spirit of God. Quoting this scripture more extensively, 
These things God reveals to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things that are freely given to us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.
-1 Corinthians 2: 10-13.
It’s only those who are yielded to Him, the spiritual, that will be taught this dimension of the gospel called calling. This is why the Lord uses the man that has abandoned himself, his quest, and his world. For He said we cannot follow Him if we cannot deny ourselves first. The calling of a believer are hid in Christ and only revealed to those that are ready to walk the length of the road with Him. Be not deceived, it’s only these that He has promised to reveal Himself to. The destiny of a man, his calling, is the revelation-the manifestation- of the person of Christ in him and inside him to the world; 
Whoever has My commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.
-John 14: 21
So talents are only the marsh that surrounds a river, you enter the river only through consecration and discipleship.
The Lord doesn’t trust a man that doesn’t have a copy of His Son on the inside of him. He that is not for Him is against Him and it’s pertinent that only those that are for Him are those allowed to labor in their calling with Him. The scheme of Heaven on earth is all about the souls of men; whether from darkness to light, or from light to worship. These souls are too precious to Him to allow just any unserious self-motivated individual to handle them. If He would leave ninety-nine sheep to recover one, then it becomes easy for us to see why He won’t entrust His children to those who have not been crucified unto self. Until you are so crucified that you are ready to stay and fight, even die, when wolves come against the fold you are not permitted to shepherd His children.
We also should know that we don’t just decide and walk into this deep calling, He is the One who brings calling to us and us to calling. Moses tried it, his utter failure is an eloquent testimony to this truth. It would later take God, after He has led him away into a wilderness and equipped him, to bring him into his destiny. As a leader in Egypt he had noticed his leadership qualities, the talent in him, and concluded that his destiny was to deliver Israel physically from slavery. But that talent was only a pointer to a deeper purpose of God. He could never have known that he would be the one to bring Israel into the covenant of God; that he would be the one to receive the testimony; that he would be a prototype of Jesus Christ as the lawgiver until the ransomed possession was brought unto the perfect law of liberty. He never had an inkling of these strong destinies from the knowledge of his talents. Until he came and submitted in total consecration to God he never walked in these dimensions.
Moses.
You and I.
We might as well start today to be wholly yielded to Him. There’s no way that a man will be so faithfully yielded to God that he won’t know and fulfill his calling.
Everyday live for Him. Let your life daily be a holy sacrifice offered gladly to God in spirit and in truth. That is purpose. That is calling. That is the whole essence of the life of a man. He is looking for veterans of consecration, obedience, and faith to accomplish His purpose and not just anybody. He is not desperate that He’d begin to use the Canaanites to do the service of the Levites. If needs be, He will wait until He finds a man after His heart. And until then, every service rendered in the arms of flesh will be no more than cinder and fuel for the fire that shall try all works of the sons of men.
The proof of your sincerity and commitment to fulfilling purpose is seen in your personal consecration and daily living a life that honors God.
May we have great joy when we stand before Him to give account for the gifts and the deeper callings that we have in Him in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Written 6th July, 2008.
(All scriptures taken from the English Standard Version)


Wednesday 3 March 2010

Take Note, We Are At A Climax

I read a newspiece in today's Guardian and, like most Nigerians, felt betrayed, insulted and robbed. Why? The politicians elected to be voice of the people that put them in office, from whose very account their often expensive lifestyles are sustained, appeared to have found a different voice. Theirs.
I love the majority, you know why? We represent the true spirit and emotions of the nation. But also because we have become kinsmen and fellow recipients of political rape. We never joined PDP, but now its constitution has surplanted that of Nigeria...
I felt sad, mad...I have to be careful and not feel helpless (for that's what fuels the strength of the undesired). But then I remembered there's something unique about the time, this time, in which we have found ourselves. We stand at a climax, on the height of infamy...Not base, but the very height of power and trust usurpation which cannot but change. We are at a place where a little more thrust and push against the weakened forces of political corruption is all we need to send us rolling in the direction we have always wished and prayed for. It is at such time as this that a change must take place, for us or against us.
Now we have two forces pushing our fate on the cliff: some PDP members confusing our combined heritage with their regional portion, against the true Nigerians who have shared in the tears and the joys of our communal history, who have retained service and conscience toward God and man in praying ceaselessly with all goodwill for the recovery and full restoration of our incapacitated president.
This is the tug on the summit. That's the battle in which we are caught.
If we do no more than read about the events of out state we should remember that the opposing camp has not relented in their own efforts. They smuggled the president out of the country without an explanation. His stay abroad, the state of which has been curiously kept till now from ALL Nigerians, was funded by Nigerians. And while he was in this recuperating or worsening state [who knows] on foreign shores untold insults happened to us both from within and without:
*his wife became more than his wife, she became the Queen of Niger-area;
*on the account of Farouk external insults and assaults were made acceptable against travelling Nigerians [I never told you how I was touched and searched in sensitive body parts at a Nigerian port; in my own country!];
*a stranger appended the national budget;
*we were forcefully prevented from having proper leadership for months; *thousands of lives were lost in sectarian violence in parts of the country; *projects already running behind schedule were altogether stopped;
*the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria was again smuggled back into the country without the knowledge of the Acting leadership...
All these and more, Nigerians have paid for both in cash and in kind. All these represent the unrelenting forces and efforts of a cabal of PDP leadership.

They have insisted the North should have the presidency until 2015, and I said to them, "I didn't find that in the Nigerian constitution". They also said, our president is recovering, to which I said, "How do you define recover? I never knew coma to be sign of increasing life. And, on whose authority do you say such? Medical genius in Saudi Arabia have hit a wall in his case and sent him home via the diplomatic pouch, why should medically ignorant PDPites have a better opinion?" Now, they are getting frantic and desperate, they blurted out, "Just pray for him to recover, that's your duty as Nigerians, and leave governance to us!". I smiled knowing they are at their wit's end. They are at the proverbial place when stubborn drum hide must break down. I replied them saying,"I have prayed for him, and do hope you pray for us. Our duty is not a mindless followership of pseudo-religious appeals. What if he dies (or is already dead, you know, we don't) how long shall we be lead by him...or is it now you who is leading? And by the way, the last time I checked I didn't see it mentioned that it's my duty to leave governance to you. The last time we did, you shared all our heritage among yourselves, you'd run pipes to the North and drain the oil to your shores, you also made sure we live lower than a british pig. No decent water and food, no oil [lol], no job, ASUU strike continua, and worst of all no dignity for anyone bearing the name Nigerian".
I tell you, I deserve to be proud as a Nigerian.
We deserve to have all, including you, respect the constitution of our nation.
We deserve to have you honour the state of the nation and not just the affairs of a party.
Parties come and go, so must PDP, but Nigeria and Nigerians will remain.

This is the time wherein we find ourselves. Let us not just read and whine in the righteous yards of our minds. Let's all use our platform to tilt and push and roll us in the direction we deserve. You've got a voice somewhere, let's use it. You've got some muscle somewhere, let's flex it. Remember, ill fortune begins with silence.
Jide Olubiyi, 03.02.2010