There are battles that we fight in the realm of the Spirit.
There are battles that we fight in the realm of the soul.
There are battles that we fight in the realm of the body.
We do not apply the same weapon across the three realms.
A liar has to stop lying. A thief has to stop stealing.
A coward has to stop being cowardly.
A covetous person has to stop being covetous.
A jealous person has to stop being jealous.
A lazy person has to stop being lazy.
A procrastinator has to stop procrastinating.
A cheat has to stop cheating.
A termagant has to stop being a termagant.
A rude person has to stop being rude.
A killer has to stop killing.

The reason we have carnal weapons to curb some things is because those things can be curbed carnally.
It is futile to say “I am praying to God that He will stop me from lying,” or for a mother to say “Pastor help me pray to God that my daughter will stop lying”.
I discovered that many of us have decided to mortgage all our responsibilities over to God. We do not want to be responsible for our own conduct, so we say “I am praying about it and God is helping me”. Such an attitude is a mockery of our faith. A cop-out of our reality and responsibility as believers.

There are things that the Spirit gives us. There are things that we must equip ourselves with through the engagement of our soul. There are things that we must do also with our bodies. Someone is abusing his body, what he or she needs to do is stop, not pray!

I met a young lady in Magodo once, she was a member of the church I was attending in Magodo at the time. She was very fat and she was quite young. I was driving into Magodo and I saw her walking as if she was going to drop dead. I parked and gave her a ride.
“Where are you going?” I asked
“Home” she replied
“Why are you not in a car?” I asked
“I left my wallet at home and my phone is dead, so I had no option but to walk home. Thank you Sir, for stopping to pick me up, I was about to faint.
She was wickedly fat, I wondered in my mind what her parents were looking at. I am not against people growing normally and I agree that sometimes the fatness is in the genes but I totally disagree with her kind of fatness.

To be candid, it is an abuse of the body. The people around her have been economical with the truth and that in itself is an offence. When we claim to love one another, we are duty-bound to share the truth in love. It is a duty, not an option.

I asked her how old she was.
She said 19.
I asked her if she was not worried that at 19, she was that obese.
She said “I am praying about it Sir”.
I kept quiet.
I got to my office, and I wanted to park.
She said “Sir, my mum wanted me to pick up some things at the grocery store down the street on my way home. Could you please help me? Take me there and I will hop in and hop out, i won’t keep you waiting.

This is characteristic of obese people. They like sending others on errands because they are too big to lift their own bodies so they take advantage of others and make them do things for them.

I know this firsthand, I had a friend who was obese but liked to play football. Whenever we played, he liked me to be on his side so that I could do all the running around while he stood close to the post, waiting for the perfect pass, when he gets it, he would score a beautiful goal and people would say “Wow, Tokunbo has football sense, see how he controlled the ball before sending the goalkeeper reeling.” They always forget his teammate who would have ran the length of the field while tackling and dribbling to get the ball to him.
One day, I decided not to play on his side.
I played with other agile guys against his team and we beat his team 15 goals to nothing. Everybody laughed at him. His teammate blamed him for standing in one spot while my team ran his team ragged. He left the football field fuming. Later that day, he came to my house and called me selfish. He said I was a bad friend who delighted in humiliating my friend.
I didn’t say anything to him in response. I could have made the sacrifice again as I have always done to make him look good but he was beginning to believe that he was one special player because I enabled him. Enabling bad behavior is wickedness. We should learn to say things as they are.

Now, back to the young lady with me. I drove her to the grocery store. Guess what?
She emerged a few minutes later with a big bowl of Ice cream, a box of chocolate and some biscuits. I locked my car door when she tried to open it. Then I wound down the windshield and laughed.
I said “So you lied to me that you were praying about your obesity, then lured me here so you can buy some more poisons that you will use to kill your body. I refuse to contribute to your slow suicide,
Please walk home”
Then i drove off.

I know I sounded mean, I wish there was another way to express my displeasure. The following Sunday, her mother came to accuse me in church for hurting the feelings of her daughter.
She said “My daughter has been dealing with this thing since childhood. We are praying as a family that God will heal her. Obesity is a disease, she cannot help it. ”
I said “Okay, I am sorry”.
That same month, this woman’s husband died. He left her with three fat children ages 19, 16 and 12. Within a year, all of them were lean and healthy. The fat 19-year-old I berated gained admission into UNILAG as a plump and pretty young lady, her younger ones also trimmed up. I didn’t know that what the woman meant when she said she had been praying about her daughter’s gluttony issues was for God to take her husband. If I had known, i would have told her that there is a better approach to solving that problem than the loss of her husband.

A little bit of determination and discipline does not hurt anyone. I agree that some cases become demonic after a while. Any habit we indulge in as men could take a demonic dimension without discipline. A white lie here and a white lie there could make one become a pathological liar who simply couldn’t stop lying after some time.

The same thing to stealing; one can only be light-fingered for a while before one becomes a full-fledged pilferer. The same goes for gluttony, gambling, drunkenness, laziness, procrastination, and every other vice. The challenge is that when you cast out the demon, the habit does not automatically stop. The individual will have to stop the habit himself or herself.
I know many drug addicts who went into rehabilitation centers and got purged of the poisons in their system but as soon as they leave the rehabilitation center, they go back to the old habit.
You can remove the disease from the patient, but removing the patient from the disease may turn out to be a herculean task.

God will not do for a man what a man must do for himself. We cannot push every responsibility on God and take all the blessings. The same applies to the soulish realm.
If you have a bad dream, the response is not to start fasting and praying. The response is to take charge of your metaphysical atmosphere.

A born again Christian has been given the power to control and prove (DOKIMAZO) what goes into his atmosphere and what leaves. When I am asleep, my Spirit does not sleep. My Spirit is alert and active. I cannot see a masquerade chasing me or someone coming to have sex with me in my sleep. I will rather be the one chasing masquerades so that they can receive Christ. I will rather be the one conducting deliverance sessions on the demon posessed in the dream. It is a function of mind renewal and my mind has been thoroughly trained not to accommodate thrash and unheavenly realities.

PS: The Christianity of God “come and do” this and that for me, which then renders the believer impotent in the determination of his or her own destiny is the bane of many Africans.
I know a man who is at the moment tied down in a spiritualist’s house because the parents believe that the drug addiction he is dealing with is spiritual. The young man just got discharged from a rehab center. The doctors said they had purged him of all the drugs in his system but he must develop the will to stop taking hard drugs. Parents are looking for where to buy hard drugs at the moment because the spiritualist told them it is the hard drug he will use to do the juju that will make the young man stop taking hard drugs. Of course, the spiritualist is lying. He will collect their ram and palm oil and the hard drugs and charge them a good fee.

The young man will either go back to hard drugs or not, but it will be based on the strength of his own character, conviction, and determination to turn a new leaf. I said the same thing to a mother whose daughter had taken to lining up in Lekki to pick customers every evening. The mother is a Christian and she weeps daily asking Jesus to take her daughter off the street. Jesus did his part.
The daughter was caught in a midnight raid at a club and she had nobody to bail her for two weeks. She was arrested as a member of a romance scam fraud by the EFCC. A Christian society went to the prison and arranged for a lawyer to handle her case. She was set free recently. Her mother said she wanted Jesus to take the desire to prostitute away from the young lady’s heart.

I told her that is up to the lady. We have helped her out of her predicament, led her to Christ, filled her with the Holy Spirit, established her in a tailoring apprenticeship programme, gotten an accommodation for her, and made sure she got a weekly stipend to live on. Not going back to the street is now absolutely up to her!

–GSW–

Announcement

• We are coming to Port Harcourt this weekend, make sure you find your way to the event.
• PSSBC school 25 is now open, this will be my first official invitation to you to join our free classes for the next few days so you can decide if the school is for you or not.
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