Tag: rat race

Retirement (the Series): Finding True Rest

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In the last edition, we noticed that the caliber of people who do the rat race are the labourers, the ‘ordinary’ people. We also saw God’s unique Kingdom Dominion plan, played out in the lives of the Levites, priests and prophets, and how it played out in the life of Kings David, through whom the second Adam was to come.

 Fast forward to today, a new breed is on the scene, a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, recreated after the image and likeness of Christ, born not of blood or the will of a parent but of God. A people whose destinies were sealed before their birth – A kingdom of KINGS and PRIESTS!

So they as kings adequately describe God when He is called King of kings! And just like the kings of Israel, the believer is born a king and is called a priest unto God. As we know, Kings don’t retire, prophets don’t quit, so we as believers are called to forever minister to God as the High priest and to forever have dominion over our world as the kings did, enforcing the rule and reign of Christ in our world today.

What does this all mean? It means simply that as a believer you have been called as a king and as a priest, with the Ministry of the word and prayer. You’re a minister! You’re called and anointed, and there’s no leave, no vacation, no retirement from the Christian life, it’s an all-day everyday life. We never stop praying, we never stop studying, we never stop giving, we never stop loving, we never stop sharing the good news, we never stop shinning the light. This is ministry, declaring and demonstrating Jesus to all our world. From this, we never retire.

Be careful not to worship Mammon, magnifying money and what it can buy over the press for alignment. Be violent about alignment because only the violent will take the Kingdom by force. It is even risky to be lazy about alignment. It might mean missing the wedding feast, honestly speaking. I’d find time to write about this.

Do not worry about how you’ll get your needs. Jesus says that the Father knows how important they are. By the way, money is but a decorative accessory. It’s not the main outfit. Solomon said this as well:

Proverbs 14 vs 24.

The crown of the wise is their riches: but the foolishness of fools is folly.

God called the man in the Luke 12 passage a fool. A fool says in his heart that there’s no God. In other words, a fool is that man who takes his cares into his hands because he doesn’t really believe that God lives to fulfill his word. A fool is faithless. This man in Luke pursued “the American dream” as most do, until he retired (won the rat race). He felt that he finally had time to relax and take life easy, enjoying family and making seeking God. God condemned him for putting the cart before the horse.

What am I saying? The order of life is not retirement followed by God and family. It is Word plus prayer all the way. Retirement is a by-product. I am imagining you say, how about I pursue God and my retirement alongside each other. I know you like to multitask but maybe you should study Luke 8:14. So my answer would be, cares choke the word of alignment when they are left in the same place.

My final words: don’t even let things that are supposed to be God’s business become cares for you. Be careful about that. Learn to let God worry about funding his business. You can’t love God’s projects more than God himself. If you find yourself panicking about funding your ministry then it might mean that you want to look good before people as an achiever or that you are secretly hoping that you can earn a living from ministry. It would mean that cares are creeping up on you. And that wouldn’t be healthy for the word of alignment in your heart.

Shalom.

 

Williams Udousoro,

Favour Omeje;

© 2019.

Retirement (the Series): A Better Way

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Before we get into today’s message, let’s chew on the last cud for a bit:

 The whole idea of retirement defeats the heart of who we are and what we do before God.

In ancient Israel, there lay a variety of professions: Shepherds, blacksmiths, wine pressers, soldiers, maidservants, embroiders, carpenters, etc. As long as humans had needs, anyone with a bit of natural talent and a determined hard working spirit could take up one of those professions and be great at it.

However, there was an exception to this rule of work, a particular kind of role one couldn’t choose, one could only be born or called there: the office of the King & the office of the High priest/Prophet.

These vocations were especially important; God literally handpicked people a number of times for these positions. They share many commonalities, the oddest one being that none of them ever retired. They literally went to their graves as kings, priests, and prophets. A new king was installed after the previous king had passed on, a new high priest came on the scene after the death of the previous high priest, a prophet was still a prophet into his old age (the dry bones of one such prophet even brought back to life a corpse).

Like wine they became sweeter in their old age, time was given to make the prophet even more prophetic, the great king even greater, the serving high priest to serve, even more, this was a general function, though some abused it.

Would you like to know why these people retire or work to retire somehow? Good; because they are labourers and labour isn’t funny. There’s another reason: they have been worn out by the noise of the labour market. And would you have me tell you what the labour market is? It is the rat race. Priests/Prophets and Kings need not retire because they don’t play by the same rules on which regular people play.

If we take a peek into the life of priests, we see how God designed the rules by which they played: They didn’t have to keep jobs because every single thing that was brought to the house of God was theirs to keep. The meat of God’s house was primarily for them. They didn’t leave where ordinary people lived; they lived in the God Reserved Area of the land. They wore a special kind of cloth, beautiful not being word enough for it.

Don’t you find these priests a perfect representation of the birds that don’t sow, don’t reap and never gather into barns? From the details of the Aaronic priestly dressing in Exodus 39, you would immediately be reminded of the flowers of the field which don’t toil and don’t spin. In the same vein, Prophets such as Elijah and Elisha received provisions from God in ways too wonderful to behold.

On the other hand, if we look into the life of Kings especially David from whom Christ was to be revealed, we see something interesting: priesthood, kingship, prophecy all revealed. David went into the temple and fed himself food meant for priests, priesthood; he made deep utterances by the Spirit of God of the Christ, prophecy and he ruled his kingdom as a great king, kingship.

Do you see why jobs like these cannot be retired from? They’re a lifetime thing. You can’t retire because that would mean dying, right?

I hope you enjoyed all that we have shared on retirement. The final installment in this series will be rolling out next week.

Shalom.

 

Williams Udousoro,
Favour Omeje;
© 2019.

Retirement (the Series): The Rat Race

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Oftentimes, I hear a bunch of well-meaning Christian folk say, “It is the will of God for His children to have all the money they need so that they can give full attention to the word of God and prayer”.

Here’s how we would say this, in secular terms: “I need to make it big or at least well enough so that I can concentrate on my family better”.

Or we could say something like,  ” I need to have a steady source of income before I get married, I don’t want my fair lady suffering because of me”.

I used to say some of these things myself.

This is what I think: Every single person on this earth was born into a rat race, one won by only the fittest. People from the Igbo ethnic group in Nigeria believe that the baby’s first cry which sounds like ‘waa, waaa, waaaa is a baby’s way of screaming, ‘ uwa, uwaa, uwaaa’ which translates to, ‘ this world, this world, this world’.

The cry is a lament about the world’s difficulties. Life is not fair, they say, and there’s no free lunch anywhere.

For this reason, parents teach their children to survive and when they have the wherewithal, they provide them education early enough to either survive or thrive in the struggles of life. One nation calls this thriving “The American Dream”. This dream is the ecstasy of freedom, of liberty which in itself consists mostly of financial freedom -after all, money answers all things. Nigerians call this emancipation, ‘ blowing’, and when they hit it big, they sing ‘ God win, I don make am‘. The English man would simply call it retirement.

Money experts, seeing the need for people to ‘make it’, have crafted strategies for achieving this. You have probably come across books that contain material like this. For instance, Robert Kiyosaki teaches his rich dad’s method of winning the rat race as opposed to things his poor dad taught him growing up. His rich dad taught him that the way to win the race was to do everything to get into the fast lane, decide what part of the BI quadrant to deploy to achieve that as soon as possible. And that meant making passive income and creating systems (assets) that fund liabilities ( things that take out money from the wallet) having known the difference between assets and liabilities.

This makes a lot of sense. But I am going to share with you an even better kind of wisdom, the wisdom taught by the greatest man who ever lived, employed by the wisest man who ever lived and one time wealthiest man of his time: Quit the race!

We will tell you just how to do this next week..

Shalom.

Williams Udousoro,
Favour Omeje;
© 2019.