I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me

The context in which that popular scripture was written is important if we must adequately understand it.
So many people have been disappointed by being motivated by scriptures understood out of context.

Some use 'I can'
These people end up trying their hands on just anything either trained for or not. To be pushed by 'I can'  without definition has the potential of daring what's not necessary. They can do what they don't have to do. They can do what's not theirs to be done. They can do whatever comes to their minds. Before we can allow 'I can' you need focus. When we have discovered what we have no choice but to do, then 'I can' mentality must kick in.

Some say 'I can do all things'.

No one can do all things in the real sense of it. These people lack direction and purpose. They want to do whatever they see others doing or whatever comes to their mind. They believe they too can join the race even when they weren't built for it. And when they can't they call their experience failure. God doesn't create failure, men do.
You weren't created to do all things. Isn't that the reason others too were created? You were created for a purpose and that's where vision comes from. Vision in turn gives focus and focus blinds you from other things that aren't in the path of the light streaming into your focal point. People who don't focus on the particular fruit and life's product to bear for the benefit of people end up not doing anything. This is the pain of most multi talented people, they find it difficult to pin down one thing to focus on and so keep trying their hands on different things while time flitters away. There is a reason why a person is multi talented and that purpose is paramount above the purposes of each of the talents. That purpose helps to manage the talents, here the talents can't direct what to do, the purpose does. This saves from frustration that makes it difficult to relate life's position with inherent abilities.

Some say 'I can do all things through Christ'

These people want to hang whatever they want to do on Christ even if He didn't command it. As mentioned before wanting to do all things in the first place is a manifestation of lack of purpose and vision. Every good eye has a blind spot. If your vision is a good quality one, it must be blind to some things. But now, with it not being blind to anything they would want to hang their pursuit on Christ. You can't use the name of Jesus to establish what's not His will. You can't use the name of the presidency of a country, as a minister appointed by the president and backed up by the Constitution to do something unconstitutional. The same thing here. God isn't an author of confusion. He is a God of purpose. He only releases His power to accomplish His pleasure and you can't armrest Him to do what's not within His purpose.

The correct scriptures says
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

We see in context that apostle Paul was giving a testimony of what his experience walking with God through various situations had made of him. He had such experiences that taught him contentment and how to maintain his virtues in every circumstance he found himself.
Both in his sufferings and in enjoyments, in being honored and in being dishonored he learned to be same person being in control of his life. He attributed that to the strength Christ gives.

Now if we have to borrow that to be used more broadly, we can see that the strength Christ gives is what determines what we can do. It gives direction and purpose. It shows what the Master's expectations and hope from us are. The strength is perfected in our weaknesses and that's grace according to what Christ told Paul in 1 Corinthians 12:9.

Grace is what determines apostleship. The empowerment you have received is a signal to what you can do. When Peter and John perceived that the same God who did greatly in the apostleship of the Jews through Peter was doing same to the apostleship of the gentiles through Paul, they gave Paul the right hand of fellowship. Galatians 2

What's God's strength helping you to do in meeting needs? Christ strengthens us to be like Him and we can do all things around the demands of holiness and righteousness. We can by the strength He gives.

In service and in the pursuit of destiny there is always an area we are strengthened to perform. Discovering that and staying there pursuing the purpose of God releases omnipotence that makes nothing impossible to us in that area. There is always enough power to prosecute divine plan and no one's destiny is to high for his or her attainment through the power working within us. The potentials are enormous if we can discover the strength of Christ given to us to do His will. We can do incredible things though the strength Christ releases and the gifts He gracefully endows.

None of us is called to do all things. We have been called to pursue a purpose and Christ strengthens us to do it with omnipotence. Whatever the demands and challenges of the pursuit of that purpose may be, we have enough strength and resources from heaven to accomplish it and we can always join apostle Paul to say...

[My Offline Bible] Philippians 4
11 Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. 12 I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. 13 I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me.

Good Morning

Your Joseph is Alive

Your Joseph is Alive

For some few days since my friend and brother Pastor Martins Fatola posted on his Facebook wall the word '... Your Joseph is not dead...' my mind and spirit have been reverberating with those words.

Jacob was brought the message that his brightest, most promising dynamic son who he loved so much was dead. The evidences were too obvious. 10 well groomed men can't all tell a lie, after all, only two or three are enough witnesses to establish a fact. The beautifully colored cloth he bought for him, that was the talk of the town was there to show that he has been mauled and fed upon by some wild beasts. His sorrow was unconsolable. To him that was it, he was going to his grave with that pain and broken heart. His begotten son among many was gone. His dreamer boy was gone. His expectations were dashed. He was the beacon of hope, he had dreams of greatness which he gleefully shared with anyone who cared to listen. He was different and was someone to look ahead for what he was going to become with his dreams...both for good expectations and for scorn... He was the audacious son of Jacob's bosom, though younger and sissy, always around daddy and mummy, yet had great dreams that had no respect for his elders opinions about his dreams either out of naivety or just plain lack of intimidation which put everyone on edge. But now, he's gone forever. Jacob could hold the cloth that once covered him and gave him pride throughout the neighborhood.

Though the brothers knew he was only sold off to slavery, they never betrayed emotions for almost twenty years. They never gave anything away to make Jacob doubt their initial claims until they themselves began to accept their own lies as true that he was dead. That rested the case with everyone. Joseph was dead! Their Joseph was dead!

So everyone moved on without Joseph not expecting that he could show up forever. That dream was gone!

Maybe you share that same sense of loss...and to you it's going to ever be like this disappointment you are currently experiencing and nothing is betraying any emotions to even make you doubt the loss....then you need to read this to the end, this is your story!

But it's not true! He's alive! And going through all that he went through, he became prime minister in the then super power.

He also carried his father and home in his heart even as he was preoccupied with pharaohs job. He longed for his father and brothers.

God also working to bring them back together.
Then one day, they showed up! He recognized them instantly but they couldn't. How could they have known it was him with the dead mindset they had concerning him? Even if the thought of him being alive ever crossed their minds, it's not that he'll be the head of the Egyptian economy, how can..?

He recognized them and wept. The pain of betrayal of trust and the joy of reconnection were overwhelming...his tears flowed.

After all the pranks he played with them, he revealed himself and they wept too in guilt but hid their fears and apprehension.

The part where he demanded they brought Benjamin was quite scary with the mindset of having lost Joseph. Jacob was devastated at such a request. "How would you do this to me, I'm yet to get over the loss of Joseph, now you want to take Benjamin from me". If he had never suspected them before concerning Joseph's 'death', now he's beginning to wonder if they had not being accomplices...they were the harbingers of sorrow!

And they could feel it even from the time that 'wicked Egyptian' asked them to bring their remaining brother and they had protested but he wouldn't bulge... So they had to vow to their father to bring him back...

Eventually, Jacob got the news that his beloved son, Joseph was alive...and would want to see him.... The rest is history!

We often believe we have lost the most precious of our past opportunities, something good that pointed to a great future. We often think we can't ever recover. We often think some of the things we gave birth to are forever gone never to add any value anymore. Maybe like Joseph's brothers, we had made a mistake to sell the greatest thing we had to strangers and we have come to think they are gone forever, dead, rotten and forgotten!

We often think only our bad past has relevance to our future. We believe God doesn't remember the good we did, they are dead but our errors, mistakes and bad decisions are the only things waiting for us in the future. We can even hardly remember the good we did, but our mistakes are ever before us... The Josephs are dead and only the scoundrels are present ever with the bad news breaking daily in pains and regrets.

But it isn't so. God forgives our past errors when we bring them to the blood fount of Jesus Christ. What remains are the good we did and most importantly the good He did and is doing.

Joseph was a divine gift. A mystery to parents and to brothers. Irrespective of the good or the bad of Jacob, there was a destiny working for him, he was loved, chosen above his brother Esau and Joseph had a role to play in a destiny revealed to Abraham, Jacob's grandfather. They must go to Egypt to sojourn for four generations and someone must be there to go ahead and to preserve their lives and that has to be Joseph.

Joseph was God's marvelous doing to fulfill His plan.

God's plan for our lives are beyond us. Yet we rate our outcomes not even on the good we did but on the errors of our past and worse off on the powers of our enemies, while we leave God out of it all.

We believe our Joseph's are dead. We think God had abandoned us because of our sins. We face a future less than what God told us at the beginning and that because our sins are more powerful than God in our own sights but it isn't so.

God had gone ahead to prepare a place in our future. And someday that Joseph gone ahead will be revealed if we don't give up believing.

The gifts and the calling of God are without repentance. God hasn't changed His mind concerning His purpose and plan. He is working towards the fulfilment and we need to be hopeful to see. We need to believe in hope against hope.

Jacob would have saved himself some sorrow if he had known his Joseph wasn't dead and that he had only gone by prophesy to prepare for their preservation.

I hope you too would be able to rev up your joy today, knowing your Joseph isn't dead, knowing your God given dreams are not manifesting yet not because they are dead but because the time is not yet. Knowing that soon you and your long lost Joseph will meet again and he'll bring you to divine prophetic destiny in Goshen!

Folks, rejoice and be glad, let your hope come alive, know that God's power is working out a great future for you. You are a person of destiny. God's bringing you to the place prepared. Cheer up! Just wait and get ready! This is your story... It's unfolding marvelously in our eyes...

Good Morning!

A Call for Change in Marital Ethics

A Call for Change in Marital Ethics
(In honor of a succeeding marriage of my friends Ndidi Olamide Adekunle and Olamide Sunny Adekunle, it's their wedding anniversary)

God led us at Grace Missions International Teaching Centre to give priority attention to ministering to marriages this year 2016. It's been a glorious ongoing journey.

We can't sincerely accurately say the number of families and homes we have been able to reach and help but we have tried by the grace given and through the available platforms to reach as many as care as faithfully as we can.

It's of great joy to also know that fathers in the Lord are being moved to do same. It's a sign of  confirmation of the heart cry of God at the moment and we all must take heed.

The attack on the home is enormous. We can mildly put it by saying Jerusalem is on fire. When armies attack walled cities, one strategy is to lay ambush. This often involves two lines of attack. One is frontal, which pulls out the army of the city. The other is the ambush which sneaked behind the opposing army into the city to set it on fire. The fire distracts the army and are turned between two fronts. When the strategy succeeds, the victory is always swift and devastating.

More and more issues of life are drawing people away from paying attention to the home front. The quest for money, enjoyments of life and pleasure seeking are producing that sense of selfish ambitions in people driving them to put their marriages far below the top on their priority lists.

This is opening the back door for the devil to hit at the home from behind.

When the institution of marriage fails, the home scatters. Marriage is the binding factor of the home. When it's not ok, the vehicle of the home won't move as expected. Children suffer. While I have no blame for single parenting which may be none of the fault of the single parent, I believe nature teaches us that it takes a man and a woman to make a child and it should take the two to also bring the child up perfectly. Which is one reason why we need to give all the support possible to single parents and the children they are raising instead of adding salt to injury by vilifying, judging and stigmatizing them.

Failed and irresponsible marital structure is a major cause of single parenting, a situation that can be helped by proper and practical marriage education. When there is no peace in the home, especially when physical and psychological abuses aggravate, common sense require that while peace is being sought, security of the victim is priority. This makes separation inevitable no matter what we believe concerning divorce. The most non yielding conservative beliefs against divorce hasn't been able to stop separations, it is something we daily have to deal with and to manage properly and pragmatically. But if we so hate divorce which is fast becoming a necessary evil, we will have to invest more time, effort and resources to making available the education and understanding needed to keep peace at home.

This marital ethical education would have to start long before the decisions about marriage are made and not after. And they have to be as  practical and relevant as possible. Education about who to marry, how to make choices, what works and what doesn't, blending, cooperation, oneness, team building, purpose synchronization, conflict management, communication, romance, children upbringing and so on...will have to be researched and taught with vigor and lots of zest on all platforms as cheaply as possible no matter the cost.

It is unfortunate that we all have to go into marriage without experience and the burden of choice is always on the young man and woman who hasn't learned much in life but often think they had known it all...until experience began to teach life's lessons without giving a second chance to remake past faulty not-well-thought-about decisions.

But those lessons are always available from those who had gone ahead and young men and women can access them. By observation, tutelage and mentoring we normally have access to those materials from other people's experiences and research from where we glean answers to our own mysteries.

The problem most times is that we don't often see reasons in those observations without discipline. It takes discipline to read, listen, take advice that don't look like normal or convenient, it takes discipline to agree with an experience of others that don't make relevant sense at present. Without that discipline, the young man and woman go their ways with unguided expectations from their vain fairy tale imaginations and would have to painfully experience what others had wanted to teach him and her to avoid. He and her may in future have to try to teach the younger generation the same things with the same results.

A young man and woman planning to Wed these days would spend more time, money and resources on preparation for the wedding day without any investment in preparing for the marriage. Even before then, they spend long hours in prayer asking for a marriage partner without studying and praying to prepare themselves for the marriage itself. It takes discipline to think outside the box. And so they get who to marry, work towards the wedding day, make a huge success of the wedding event but enter into marriage unprepared with problems beyond what they'd imagined popping up as soon as the euphoria of the event wears out, making a huge failure of the marriage, the main essence of it all.

We need to change that. And you, able to read this write up to this point is already part of that change. That's part of the price for peace in marriage we are paying. Many won't read. They haven't attended a marriage seminar beyond the advises of parents and in-laws at the traditional wedding ceremony and the twenty minutes admonitions during the church service none of which he or she paid any serious attention to, we hardly remember even the topic of the message after the wedding.

Yet we have materials, cheap but of good quality that can make a difference but they aren't in nuggets, they are long and would require discipline to read and learn.

We have ministries hosting seminars where we can go and glean some wisdom to help us develop great marriages and home but it takes discipline to suspend partying for a weekend to attend a session or two...

We had a poll recently that showed clearly that people won't go for marriage counselling even if their marriages are in serious distress. Ordinary counselling to help out in time of trouble is difficult for people to attend but it's easier to go drinking and shopping with heavy marital burdens on the heart. And of course it's easier to turn aggressive and stage a show for neighbors to watch in home conflicts. That shouldn't be.

We need an ethical change to help the marriage institutions and reduce the stress people go into trying to find fulfilment in marriage.

And we can by God's grace and it starts with you. You can do something about it. Make it a cause to follow by helping a young man or woman to rethink.

You can share this or recommend someone to attend a seminar read a book or materials which are many online in preparation for marriage.

Encourage someone going through marital distress to visit someone who can counsel without bias, help is available somewhere and we can help someone get it right!

Good Morning.

Join us tomorrow Friday 5th August 10am
@GMI Teaching Centre Ministers' Conference

Paying the Price of Peace in Marriage

@ Havila Place
#46 DF Street
Mosan Road
Opposite Bobcat hotel
By D Mama's Pride supermarket
Shagari Federal Estate
Iyana Ipaja
Lagos

Pray along for homes, refer someone to come  and support in any way possible. God's blessings to you.

If you need personal counselling you are welcome to my inbox. It's free!

Dealing with Marital Conflicts: Rule of Engagement

Dealing with Marital Conflicts: Rule of Engagement

Prosecuting wars has always had its rules. You aren't just permitted to fight any how. Both parties already must have agreed to some laid out rules of fighting. Remember David, when Joab killed Abner. He said he shed the blood of war in the time of peace and he mourned the death of an enemy. Even as crude as warfares were at such times, they still had some rules. Today, those rules have become elaborate. For instance, it might amount to a war crime if civilians are killed in a war.

Most disagreements at the home front degenerate into serious conflicts because we assumed the war won't ever come and aren't prepared as to what are permitted and aren't before the day of battle and when the day finally comes, everything is thrown into it to inflict the greatest pain, many which are irreparable even after the war.

To combat conflicts and maintain peace, we must set rules for ourselves that are both agreed upon.

These rules must be those that recognize and protect the place of God in the marriage. His word must be law and authority.

These rules must seek to protect the other person from any harm, physical, emotional or spiritual.

These rules must weaken negative emotions. We must not allow anger to dictate during engagement, we must not use abusive words in disagreements, we must not use physical force during engagement, we must not destroy anything. We must allow the other person express and explain himself or herself, we must talk one by one. We must not raise our voices against one another. We must not gossip one another. We must protect the children. Conflicts must be settled within 24hrs, no animosity, no malice. No murmuring.

Rules must encourage communication and expression in freedom without nagging or incessant complaints or insensitivity to issues. It must encourage quick resolutions. It must avoid disunity. It must work to make conflicts a temporary, extraneous issue but encourage friendship and quick resolution.

Aftermath rules must encourage anti-stress and antidepressant allowances like a dinner or lunch out. A gift exchange, a romantic rendezvous, sex or something to calm the stress of the 'war'.

These are just suggestions as to how to handle such issues. Of course, we will sometimes flaunt the rules but they help us focus and to maintain peace and won't permit us do a permanent damage through a temporal feeling to harm a life-long relationship.

The rules must not make resolutions impossible. They must help us engage the best traits and qualities in us in relating with one another to protect the love we share.

Rules would be couple specific, written or oral, something we both agree to. For instance, people argue and say things like 'don't raise your voice at me!' well, we really never agreed to the decibels of noise we can shout at each other, how would you then ask me not to shout? Sometimes, it's a matter of 'don't abuse me!' Why would you dictate the rules in the middle of the fight?

We need to agree on some things and those agreement should make conflicts difficult buy must protect both parties' rights, protect the future and work towards quick resolution.

For example it may have to include rules of reference. Dead situations should remain dead. Referring to situations already forgiven escalates hostilities. But if we have to revisit in the light of new issues then we should know how to use such without causing more calamities.

Third party rules must be set out which must give room to openness to certain people. Rules that permit one to secretly abuse the other will be dangerous. If I'm abusing you, you should tell people if I won't stop when you raise it...we must agree to that for instance... But to report every little argument over the saltiness of the ogbono soup that's already eaten to mummy, should be discouraged!

Prayer to God is a third party issue. How about making a rule that takes us to our knees every time we are tempted to fight? Wouldn't that be awesome! Once the anger and the offense start brewing, let there be a call to prayer...and let's hand over the discussion to God and see how it turns out.

To live happily ever after doesn't happen just behaving anyhow without constraints and restraints, only where there is no vision do we have people throwing away restraints but if we have a vision for our homes and marriages we'll take time to set things in order to help us conquer self before the self-destruct mode is activated unconsciously!

Set the rules first! Let peace reign!

A suggestion worth thinking about!

Good Morning!

Join us this Friday 5th, 10am...@
Grace Missions International Teaching Center
August 2016 Minister's Conference...

Paying the Price of Peace in Marriage

Havila Place
#46, DF Street
Opposite Bobcat Hotels
By D' Mama's Pride Supermarket
Shagari Federal Estate
Iyana Ipaja
Lagos.

Learn how to put a permanent lid of peace on the boiling pot of marital conflicts by the grace that's in Jesus... The Prince of Peace!

Share this, Refer people, it'll be a seed of peace sown into people's lives and homes. Endeavor to be there too...