WHY I SAY RELIGION IS NOT NIGERIA'S PROBLEM BUT A LAZY, FEARFUL INTELLECTUAL CLASS.

 WHY I SAY RELIGION IS NOT NIGERIA'S PROBLEM BUT A LAZY, FEARFUL INTELLECTUAL CLASS.

By Felix Nyerhovwo Jarikre. 

...Until Nigerian Christians organize themselves with an objective to capture political power and form government over Nigeria, they can never realise the power of the Holy Spirit. We should quit the arresting illusion that the Holy Spirit is ever going to back or facilitate our self-serving aspirations or agendas with His power. Never. That's not going to happen.  

It's only by exercising political power to form a central government that Nigerian Christians can prepare themselves to receive the divine personage, Christ, whom they call their Lord at His anticipated Last Coming to judge and cast the children of perdition including the False Prophet along with their father, Satan, into the Lake of fire and  brimstone. 

Right now, Nigerian Christians are bumbling neophytes, confused, conflicted, ignorant  and irresolute when it comes to political engagement of national affairs. 

As 'salt of the earth, and light of the world,' Nigerian Christians should never deny or apologise for their divine responsibility of providing political leadership for the country.  

Asking that Christians sponsor and vote only political leaders with shared  Christian values is not bigotry, but godly wisdom and spiritual discipline...

The above is extracted from one of my unpublished articles. It's articulated from my reading of the same Bible available to you and I. 

If eventually it is published, I would not be surprised if you, my dear brother,  join the ranks of those trashing it as unreasonable and unrealistic. They would not hesitate to call it the ranting of a fanatic.  

Having become a Christian convert, it didn't take long for me to realise that many of the things we regarded as fundamental Christian practices were dead wrong, conflicting with inexorable scriptures. So what do I do? Backing away from my faith as a Christian was never an option. I had seen enough to realise it was folly to question my understanding of the awesome personage of Jesus Christ. 

Biblical scriptures are divinely inspired. This is not debatable. Mine is not blind conviction but enlightened understanding. Some Christians think they can cherry pick their way through the Bible, or parse the scriptures to fit their modern philosophical conveniences. I have no time for these lots. 

Why this preamble? Because I'm a Christian. That's my spiritual constituency as a member of the body of Christ.  An Urhobo nationalist,  citizen of Nigeria. 

As a Christian, I'm trained to look out for only solutions, and avoid complaining or blame games.  

So constantly I asked how my adversity as a Nigerian face up to my scriptural revelations. How can my revelations wipe out my adversity as a Nigerian? 

I say Nigerian intellectuals are lazy and fearful because they fail to realise the POWER OF IDEAS, and the FIGHT IT TAKES TO IMPLEMENT IDEAS.

Historically, the men who bear rule in human society are always terrified and suspicious of new ideas. Expectedly, to implement any new idea entails a change of the status quo. An old order will die, a new one will emerge.  

 So it's not surprising that squelching new ideas can be a preoccupation with those who hold power.  

A university professor who belongs to a church is never prevented from exploring and expanding his understanding of his discipline. Nobody stops him from coming out with a new invention  or publishing a barrier-breaking book on thought-leadership.

A Nigerian professor who is a Christian running for a political office is more likely to adopt  Machiavelli as playbook instead of his Bible. Is religion his problem and not his hypocrisy? 

A Nigerian Christian would prefer to castigate me for saying we must bring our Christian leadership values into politics because he is afraid that would alienate Muslim voters. 

He forgets that Muslims are greatly politically organized to entrench their religious persuasion, having captured political office. I say that's all well and good. 

Christians should do same, or perish in hypocrisy.  

Let atheists organize politically too, and stop trying to deceive Christians to remove the "religious card" from the political game.

Before you know it, they would come up with a bogeyman of someone trying to establish a "THEOCRACY". 

Yet in the Bible that I know, the Master of Creation, God, is only interested in PROMOTING DEMOCRACY as a means of godly people providing political leadership for the nations. 

Why do I know this while others are blind to it? 

Is it religion that is preventing people from searching the Bible in order to come into precise knowledge of the truth ? No, people are simply caught up by their selfish ambitions. 

America is a deeply religious society.  It doesn't stop the Steve Jobs or Bill Gates of this world from doing their thing.  

Let Nigerians stop being busy bodies, and concentrate on their assignments. No more excuses.  People should stay on their lanes, and work their fields.

LESSONS FROM A MOVIE, COURAGE TO LOVE. (Part Five) By Felix Nyerhovwo Jarikre.

 

Truth has no controversy. It's the people with thin or zero connection to integrity and commitment that has controversy with truth.
'What is truth?' Pontius Pilate famously asked.
Truth, simply from the New Testament  perspective, is the state or character of being true, genuine or authentic. Truth is a settled SPIRITUAL REALITY or CONSCIOUSNESS. 
Learning the truth is required to establish the freedom of man.

Truth has long been targeted for assaults by religious falsifiers and speculators. Yet truth cannot be demolished or revoked. Truth is inexorable. For the Word of God is truth.

Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.
John 17:17.
Sanctify means to make someone inviolable, separate, protected, preserved and sustained. The prayer of Jesus Christ for His followers is that the heavenly Father should prevent them from being violated, abused and diminished by *dictatorial* strong men.
But you can't disclaim the authority of truth and hope to escape being violated, abused and diminished by reptilian entities opposed to your productivity and profitability.

Truth is the sanctifier. Without truth guarding your heart, you are naked and compromised. You can pray and fast round the clock for hundred days. If you neglect the authority of truth in your religious fasting and prayers, you lack protection and security from the Holy Spirit.  You can preach up a storm from the height of eloquence. If you see truth as something to be discounted or discarded at the least inconvenient time, your words remain powerless, empty and unhelpful to those who hear you. As a matter of fact, by your negligence of truth in your words, you have added another round of ammunition to the arsenals of deception. 

The religion of eternal life is founded on the authority of truth. Without the authority of truth, your religious practice or loyalty of any hue is a farce.
Unfortunately, the Christianity we learn and practice today is a cruel divergence from the religion of eternal life introduced by Jesus Christ. And I say that without apology or equivocation. What we practise today in the name of Christianity is largely dismissive and derelict of objective truth. If you consider that to be too harsh an assessment, perhaps we can settle for the proposition that our religious practice pays a lip service to the authority of truth.

Make no mistake. Eternal life is not the same thing as afterlife. Eternal life is URGENT and KNOWN by the authority of truth. Eternal life has zero tolerance for delay of good things.

Eternal life is a life that is divorced from shame, guilt and fear. Eternal life is the life man would have inherited had they not been overthrown by Satan in the arena of temptation back in the Garden of Eden.
Any religious attention or preoccupation with  afterlife, on the other hand, is speculative and pretentious, loaded with uncertainty. It gives room for complacency, and a lack of willingness to urgently push for the manifestation of the glory of God on earth. Any religious attention to the afterlife signals a proclivity to flee and avoid tribulations.

Truth is communicated through language. That's why the Holy Spirit places a high premium on the ability of man to exercise his free speech and freedom of conscience. 

 Truth is established  by the vehicle of hope, not experience.
It takes information  to alter your perception. And your behaviour is controlled by your perception.

To be continued.

LESSONS FROM A MOVIE, COURAGE TO LOVE. (Part Four)

There is another positive objective we learned from Israel being allowed to experience the iron furnace of slavery in Egypt. That when they regained their freedom eventually, they would urgently learn to treat their brethren and strangers with respect and compassion. A feat they would have achieved by abandoning or forgetting every habit they acquired under oppression and tyranny.

But Israel failed to learn this lesson. As they were eventually sold into Babylonian captivity when Nebuchadnezzer invaded and sacked Jerusalem. Why? Because the ruling princes of Judah were taking as slaves their less fortunate brethren who failed to pay off their debts. And God was angry at the recalcitrance of the princes who refused to forgive their debtors. (see Jeremiah 34:8-17)

Needless to say, the institution of slavery is evil. Slaves are treated by their masters with contempt and disdain. Because they are seen as non-persons or sub-humans. To break the fighting spirit of Israel, and destroy their spirit of determination, Pharaoh enslaved and afflicted Israel.

Not satisfied, and to intensify his depopulation of Isreal slaves, the Pharaoh ordered every male child born to a Hebrew woman to be killed upon delivery.

It's the duty of every freedom-lover to resist being treated  as a slave. You have a responsibility to urgently scale down any attempt from any quarter or power to treat you as slave.
Forget their diplomatic facade or hypocritical smile: they are people all around you that want to enslave you. There are pastors who treat their followers  as slaves. There are husbands who want to enslave their wives. There are rulers who want to enslave their subjects...

Freedom is not negotiated but seized. You don't require another man's permission to be free. As true freedom doesn't come by human legislation.  When Nigeria gained independence from Great Britain on October 1960, were the citizens of Nigeria free? No, they only gained the illusion of freedom.  When Abraham Lincoln gave the Emancipation Proclamation in 1891 to free the black slaves, were African Americans truly free? While it'd be uncharitable to treat the Emancipation Proclamation with contempt, African Americans only gained the illusion of freedom.

Freedom comes into place when a person embraces the authority of truth, having abandoned or forgotten the fear of death permanently.
This is realised when a person cultivates and develops new habits capacitated by eternal life to replace the old habits acquired through fear of death.

To be continued.

LESSONS FROM A MOVIE, COURAGE TO LOVE.(Part Three)

Learning about yourself can only throw up a false and flawed picture of yourself. Your true identity can only be mirrored by truth. Self-analysis can never reveal your true identity.

Man's failure to look away from his inadequacies, his limitations or mediocrity has kept him handicapped in any match or contest against strong men. His antidote is to embrace the authority of truth.

Yet strong men over the centuries have used organized religion to discourage and derail the ability of human beings to connect with the authority of truth.
Through mass hypnotism, Christians have been lulled over the ages to abandon the sense of urgency required to prod the nations to observe the *commanded* teachings of Christ Jesus. 

This mass hypnotism is given traction through censorship, coercion, intimidation and downright persecution of truth-warriors. 
It's easy for complacency to take over because people basically are afraid of tribulations.

The death and resurrection of Christ Jesus forever brought about the resolutions and answers to the deepest questions of the human heart.
The issues that left man  traumatized and terrorized were not left unattended. They were resolved  so that man could stand straight on his feet on the ground of freedom and responsibility.
Anything that would make man to function below his capacity was destroyed and taken out of the way.

To be continued.

LESSONS FROM A MOVIE, COURAGE TO LOVE.(Part Two) By Felix Nyerhovwo Jarikre.

From Jeremiah 17:9, the heart of man was deceitful and desperately wicked because he allowed his heart to be oppressed by the physical environment. The deceit and desperate wickedness of man's heart came because his heart was enslaved and afflicted by the hostile physical environment.
Since man was overthrown back in the Garden of Eden, his physical environment had no consideration whatsoever for how the man felt. It could be cruel and callous, leaving the man panic-stricken and anxious. Indeed the man felt  powerless against the vagaries of his physical environment.

If he was not caught in the throes of perplexity by the warning of hurricane that could destroy the house he managed to build for shelter, he was facing the dire prospect of strange pests destroying his crops without remedy. If he was able to survive a famine, he wasn't spared the attack of disease that snatched away his son or wife through  death. If prosperity smiled on him, his bounty was eyed by merciless robbers.

Weakened and vulnerable, he was uncomfortable  that his life was laced with uncertainty. Was there a meaning to his precarious existence other than having to adjust to anxiety and fear as lifetime  companions?
Faced with scarce resources like water and land, strong men emerged through wars and plunder to seize the rich, productive lands for themselves. The men without bravery or smarts, or others who were too weakened and handicapped to engage a fight were abandoned to scrounge their way through poverty. Not to starve to death, many were forced to hire themselves out for bread under the callous mastership of strong men.

Truly, there's a meaning to man's existence. His life need not be precarious. And it's certainly not compulsory that he should embrace anxiety and fear as even temporary companions. And yes, he need not feel powerless before the hostility of his physical environment.

As I have written before, ancient Israel was enslaved by the Pharaoh of Egypt to demonstrate that man was a slave of his physical environment. Having rejected the authority of truth, his slavery to his physical environment was inevitable. Pharaoh represented Satan who ruled the physical environment. Just as the cult of the globalists ruling the world today represents man's adversary.

To be continued.

LESSONS FROM A MOVIE, COURAGE TO LOVE! By Felix Nyerhovwo Jarikre.

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a movie on YouTube starred by Vanessa Williams, ex-Miss America beauty queen. It was titled,  Courage To Love.
Vanessa Williams's character played the smart, intelligent but inquisitive daughter of a beautiful black mother, played by late Dianne Caroll. The mother was the long-standing mistress of a white man played by Stacey Keach.

The white man provided well for his black mistress. The two daughters she bore for him were not excluded from his generosity. They lived in a big beautiful house. The Ms Williams' character was being prepared well to marry a certain rich young white male.
The setting of the movie was New Orleans in an era when the city was more of a French-speaking territory than American.  The black citizens were maltreated as no better than slaves. They were expected to know their place. To remain obsequious. And not create waves.

In this society of that era, we saw white men from France, with their idea of egalitarianism, having open affairs with black women who gave birth to mixed breed children i.e. creating a relatively  affluent and educated Creole class.
In the midst of all this, we saw Ms Williams' character treating people, black and white, with compassion and respect. Through a Catholic church mission, she secretly taught  black children to read and write. And activity that was considered criminal. As it was illegal to teach black children to read and write.  (Black children here meant children without a white father)
So she became marked as a troublemaker when  she was discovered in a classroom teaching some black children how to read and write. But she was protected by her background as a Creole. As they could do nothing to her.

Not long into the movie, it was discovered that Ms williams' father had married a white woman.  When he was confronted by her mother, his weak defence was that he needed to have ' legitimate' children also! Her mother was not pacified. She threw the father of her children out of their  home. But this Creole mistress was not able to recover from the betrayal of her man  whom she had loved and raised well-bred children for without any sense of trouble in her paradise. She went insane, and was admitted into an asylum. 

As she, Ms Williams' character was trying to move on with her life, she learned that one of her black female students, a twelve year old, was raped by a prominent white citizen. The black father of the violated child was enraged but felt impotent to avenge  the injustice. The rapist was his master whom he had diligently served. His faith faltered. He was convinced the ' the Christianity and God'  preached by Ms Williams had failed him! Incensed, she courageously went to the house of the rapist, and confronted him with the violation in the presence of the man's wife and guests. As she was going out to fearlessly confront the rapist, her white  boyfriend, a medical doctor from France, gently  and fearfully pleaded for her caution in these words: ' Don't make it worse' That phrase struck my attention. Because it was exactly the same phrase she used to restrain the father of the twelve-year-old from killing the rapist in raw anger: ' Don't make it worse'
This phrase was eloquently raw in the sense of the realization of all concerned that justice was not going to be served in that society for the violation of the young child.
As far as the scornful rapist was concerned, this girl child was a sub-human, a thing, a mere property to be raped, impregnated  and even discarded.

Before that painful scene, I silently wondered what would have happened if the father of the sexually violated child had given vent to his inner revolt and gone ahead to kill the rapist. The authorities certainly would have framed the black man for the murder of an 'innocent prominent' white citizen, and sentenced him to die by hanging!
So I asked myself again: supposing the black man had privately studied the Bible under the teaching ministry of the Holy Ghost, and acquired the knowledge of the truth for himself, would his story be different?
The trajectory of his story would have been different, even though his knowledge wouldn't have prevented him from facing tribulations.

By the way, before the movie ended, a mysterious plague in the family of COVID-19 swept through the city, and one of its prominent victims was the rapist of the twelve-year-old. His life ended on a hospital bed on a very miserable note.

So that we ourselves glory in you in the churches of God for your patience and faith in all your persecutions and tribulations that ye endure:  Which is a manifest token of the righteous judgment of God, that ye may be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which ye also suffer:  Seeing it is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you;
2 Thessalonians 1:4‭-‬6

To be continued.

FAULT LINES OF SELF-ANALYSIS By Felix Nyerhovwo Jarikre.

Man does not struggle to be evil. He struggles to be good. His self-analysis can only amplify his fault lines, and leave him feeling helpless and hopeless. To overcome his sense of inadequacy, he will become manipulative and grasping as he relates to others. In  this process, his authenticity as a person becomes the first casualty.
A writer like Tim Lahaye will quarrel with my position. But of what help does it make for someone to realise  whether he is phlegmatic, extroverted or introverted? The prospect is dubious.

Most times, in desperation, as a self-defense mechanism, we invent a bogeyman to blame for our misfortunes, lack of progress, our distress and disappointments. In short, a religious industrial complex had sprang up to cater for man's predilection to look for scapegoats to carry his blames.
And there are priests on this altar of falsehood ready to minister to our willingness to abdicate responsibility for our lives, as we look for others to blame. They tell you the reason you are not progressing  in life can be traced  directly to your father-in-law's witchcraft. That he had sworn in their coven for your wife to progress and prosper faster and better than you so that she can dominate you. So every day, you glower at your wife in silent hostility and frustration.  You are trapped...
They tell you the reason you crash at the edge of success is because  of angry ancestral spirits who are concerted that nothing good should come from your lineage. They suggest the remedy is for you to take some priests to your village to do family liberation/cleansing rituals on your behalf...
They tell you the wasting disease you are wrestling with, and draining your money can be traced to familiar spirits of your father's house. That they had sworn for you to go to your grave in misery and shame...
The list goes on endlessly!