Daily Devotionals

Someone once said, “Do not marry for money. Relocate to a community of rich people, and then marry for love”. On the surface, this looks like some mean, evil advice. However, if you think about it, you will see the light. It takes commitment and growth to renegotiate your station in life, to a state whereby you can build relationships with the people you desire to live, work and play with. No matter what you aim to achieve in your life, you will need the ability to draw upon relationships. It will be too late to start digging a well when the house is already on fire. You must be conscious about building relationships with the right people, right now. You will need them later on.

A great mistake people make is that they approach relationship building like a farm overrun by weeds. They have not given any thought to the kinds and quality of relationships they would need for the kind of future they want to build. If you want a rich and satisfactory life, be conscious about building relationships with people leading a rich and fulfilling life. You should be consciously building relationships relevant to your current station in life. You should decide which direction you want to go, and which communities would be most suitable for enabling those kinds of outcomes. Approach relationship building like a farmer that is out to cultivate the best farm ever.

When you approach relationship building (including falling in love) consciously, you will see the need to prune your relationships from time to time. Relationships need to be evaluated. You must evaluate which direction these relationships are pulling you towards. Remember that your time and energy is limited. You will not be able to build a relationship with all the good people that are a good fit for you. You will not be able to keep up with all the great people out there with shared interests. Your time and attention is valuable, you cannot hand it to people at random. As you pay the price for growth and upward mobility, approach relationship building consciously.

Deep down, you want to become your most creative and productive self. You want your soul to journey to a higher plane of existence. Away from the mundane things that dominate the consciousness at a lower level. You want to do your best work that glorifies God. Your journey to the higher life requires a kind of spiritual transformation. You will not find it through physical or material things. The pursuit of this kind of spiritual thing could be confusing. Most people have settled for mediocrity, and cannot understand your hunger and thirst for something higher.

A higher life is a richer and more satisfactory life. There is no satisfaction to be found in food, alcohol, clothing and housing, but some people will never sit down to listen to you while dealing with hunger pangs. They ignore that inner voice calling them to go higher. Jesus taught on this, explaining that it was useless to worry about tomorrow, or things like food and clothing. Your energy should rather be focused upon seeking the Kingdom of God and its righteousness. However, some people will insist they need their basic needs met, before they can join you on your crusade to transform your world.

Whoever finds his [lower] life will lose it [the higher life], and whoever loses his [lower] life on My account will find it [the higher life] (Matthew 10:39 AMPC). Your journey towards something higher is not enhanced by your physical possessions. True spirituality begins when one understands emotional detachment from physical possessions. So, as long as you hold on to your lower life and its values of mundane, greed, corruption, selfishness and materialism. You are not going to follow through on your quest for something higher. The higher requires you to understand love, selflessness, and taking responsibility for others. You cannot buy your way into the higher life, but you can begin to embrace the discipline.

There are a lot of great things you could accomplish for God in the land of the living. However, there is a chance you feel you are not rich enough or powerful enough to make a difference. So, here is a reminder that having faith is the key thing. When you live right, you will grow in grace. By your faith, and through the grace of God, there is nothing you cannot accomplish. A vision is God’s redemptive plan for a group of people. It will require more than your personal resources to execute. The only way to increase your chances of success is to have faith that you will be able to attract everything you need to get the job done.

When you step up and take responsibility to steer the world towards where God wants. God responds by granting you the might to get the job done. As it is written, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble”. A commitment to the greater, selfless good, done in the spirit of service will attract to you the resources required. On the other hand, the person that operates without a regard for God will be opposed by God. You can have faith that if you live right, you will receive the might you need. Your faith in God can, and will generate everything you need.

You start with what you have, and where you are right now. You are able to move with full confidence because as long as you are in alignment with what God wants, your trajectory is upwards. The mission is to be a salt and light of your world by taking a long, thoughtful look at the state of your world. Then, you can prayerfully consider which direction things need to go. This is not a conversation about the resources you have or lack. The initial conversation should center around what needs to be done, and why it needs to be done. As you pray, think, and make plans, you receive the grace to do even more.

If you want to help people, give them jobs. A normal human being in their right senses would rather work for a thousand dollars, rather than be handed ten thousand dollars for doing nothing. People don’t want someone to solve their problems for them, they actually want someone (or an institution) to empower them to better take charge of their own affairs. When someone has decent work, with some discipline, they will be able to solve their basic needs and can then begin to turn their attention upwards. You should not join the bandwagon that thinks job creation is the exclusive domain of the government. You can create jobs.

The best way you can help people is by creating jobs for them. Gainful employment is the single most powerful tool for sustainable poverty elimination. It is easier to create jobs for 1,000 people than to teach 1,000 people how to become entrepreneurs via skill acquisition. When you create jobs for 1,000 people, all of them get paid. When you try to teach 1,000 people to become entrepreneurs, the statistics say that we expect around 90% of them to fail within two years. So, this is not about skill acquisition schemes. People lack the discipline and capacity to make anything tangible from the skills you give them. They need a place, where they must turn up for work every single day.

Your ability to create jobs is not dependent upon your personal wealth. It depends on how passionate you are about your world. If you are serious about being a salt and light of your world, you will find out that you need people to be economically empowered. You need to remember that if you do not engage the people in your world productively, something else will get their attention. When the disciples of Jesus wanted to shift the responsibility of providing for the crowd that had gathered around. Jesus commanded “you feed them” (Mark 6:30-44). In the same spirit, stop thinking a government or rich man is coming to create jobs. You can create jobs. Embrace the responsibility, and you will see a way.

The people sent by God to watch over the world and steer it towards where he wants, do not do it for fame and attention. There is a big problem if becoming popular and taking the credit is more important to you than anything else. First of all, it is not christian to seek attention in that manner. A real Christian wants to give God all the glory. Secondly, it detracts from your effectiveness and overall productivity. The best you will ever get from fame and attention is a false sense of accomplishment. Courting media attention will deceive you into thinking you have achieved something. When in reality, you have not even gotten started.

God is not calling you for fame and to make you a celebrity. Jesus instructed, “when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3 ESV). Your role as a watchman tasked with steering us towards a better future is sensitive, and requires discretion. There is a toxic celebrity culture that is choking your world right now, and this must be resisted and destroyed. A prosperous society is driven by values and institutions that represent those values. Your society will not work if all that matters are people hugging the limelight, and trying to become celebrities at all cost.

Jesus made it clear that he came to glorify the father, and to point people towards the father. Your number one goal is to do the will of your Father in heaven. To do so while trying to attract attention from people, will corrupt your mission. When becoming popular is more important to you than pleasing God, you will compromise your principles. You have to remember that it is God’s vision. You are called to labour in his vineyard, to play a role in the plan he has for his world. A true watchman and visionary is more interested in seeing the work done, even if it’s by someone else, than trying to get credit for their own role.

Whenever you feel stressed out or overwhelmed by what lies ahead, always remember that you didn’t choose this. God chose you. Remember the words of Christ, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you” (John 15:16 ESV). Something greater than yourself is calling you to rise above average. You are called upon to rise above mediocrity, and to grow into the most productive version of yourself.

God knows you are not smart enough, rich enough or powerful enough to get the job done. However, he chose you, and you can be sure that he knows what he is doing. When you consider how imperfect and poor the heroes of faith were in the bible, you will realize that you are in a better place than most of them. David, the little shepherd boy, was called to raise an army, train them and overthrow the government of the day without risking the breakout of a civil war. It took him decades to grow into his new role as king over the entire kingdom. God chose him, and confirmed the calling over time.

You are not better off without a sense of calling or election. You will not find any sense of fulfillment or wholeness outside your life’s task. Stop feeding the idea that you can quit this and return to the life you used to have. You can’t. The day you face your new reality, and embrace it, you will begin to make better progress. When you abandon your thoughts of quitting, you will begin to do the needful, which is to pray. Make a habit of praying about the things that trouble you. And concentrate on the divine over the physical. You might not have a complete picture in your mind. However, you can trust that as you pray and act on the intelligence you receive in your heart, you will get everything done right.

Your end goal is to change the world, and that is non negotiable, but you need to consider something. There is a chance that right now, you lack the knowledge, skills and resources required to make an impact on the world. If you are not powerful enough right now to change the whole world, think about your world, a sphere of human activities where you are powerful enough to make a difference. Then get started there. It does not have to be big, perfect or even beautiful. You just need to get started with your mission to beautify the world with your talents.

Do not sit idly, waiting for the grand project that will make you a superstar. You will never qualify yourself for that with an empty resume. You need to take the advice of the Ecclesiastes, “whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might”. The goal right now is to put your single talent to work, get a return on it. Then the Master will increase you, and grant you two talents. You take those two talents, and work with it, using all your might. One day, he will hand you cities to govern (Luke 19:11-27). Think about your life as a series of projects. You start small, with whatever your hands find to do.

As you do the little things within your reach, and do them well. God will empower you some more, so that you can do greater things. Your goal right now is to build momentum by making something. Sit down, pray, study and meditate. You will identify a simple project you can execute right now, something you have enough knowledge, skills and resources to do. You might have to start in private to build confidence. David defeated the bear and the lion in private before taking on Goliath publicly. What you create is not as important as the fact that you are creating something. It is not about what you are building right now, it is the mindset behind it that we need to encourage.

At the center of all human relationships should be God, and a devotion to divine principles of righteousness, mercy and justice. You want to love, associate or do things with people who consider God to be the center of their lives. When you do business with a God-fearing person, you can go to sleep with full confidence that you will get a fair deal. When you build a home with a God-fearing person, you know you will experience heaven on earth. Everything human gets corrupted over time, and decays. However, if your relationships are centered on God and his timeless principles, you will avoid that corruption and decay.

Take a second to think about what Jesus meant when he pointed at his disciples and declared that they were his mother, brothers and sisters (Matthew 12: 46 – 50). As far as he was concerned, his family connections began with doing the will of the Father in heaven. When the relationships in your life are centered around family ties, it will lead to sentiments. Over time, sentiments evolve into mediocrity, rot and decay. It does not inspire us towards our best. When we love ourselves without any regard for God, we will lose our sense of fidelity to God. Any relationship worth having must have God at the center.

Our coming together must be first and foremost unto God. Then human beings that share in the love and principles of the same God. There is always going to be some skepticism when you are yoked with someone that does not share your faith or enthusiasm for God, and his timeless principles. The original sin of the people building the tower of Babel was that their project had no place for God. So much energy and potential were coming together to do great things, but it was for the vanity of men. Relationships that will keep standing over generations must be centered on God.

In your quest to live a God-centered life, you must avoid the aimlessness that comes with a religious pursuit that ignores the practical. A religion that ignores the practical, day-to-day living will mold people that are irrelevant to the socio-economic sphere of their world. You should not be so fixated on the afterlife that you do not have a life on earth. That mindset is not consistent with the teachings of Jesus. It is not consistent with the ancient, sacred scriptures. A call to serve God and make him the center of your life is not a call to mediocrity, irrelevance and underachievement.

Consider this passage: Peter began to say to him, “See, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life” (Mark 10:28‭-‬30 ESV). We see Jesus making promises on both sides of eternity. He did not insist that earthly life did not matter.

Avoid the trap of bland religion. A religion that emphasises a glorious afterlife without offering a pathway to maximise your life on earth is not consistent with the teachings of Jesus. A religion that confines women to house chores and child-bearing is not of God. A watchman must combine spirituality with rationality and practicality. The goal of spirituality is the intelligence to achieve superior results in life. This never happens when you practise a religion that is not practical. A God-centered life will maximize your spiritual gift in a way that enriches your life on earth. Your service to God will help others enjoy their life, and improve their lives here on earth.

It seems ridiculous to articulate that if you had a wish granting spirit that gave you everything you wanted, you will never find happiness and fulfillment. This seems counterintuitive, but think about it. When you are driven by a selfish agenda, you will seek to maximise profits for yourself in everything. This will lead down the path towards greed and wickedness. You will no longer find happiness in the simple things. (The Ecclesiastes wrote that “the full stomach (greed) of the rich [who hungers for even more] will not let him sleep”). And your relationships will suffer as you become incapable of attracting real friends or even enemies that respect you. A god that is at your service and grants your selfish requests will kill you.

Never forget that the complete counsel of the sacred, holy writings admonishes us to pray according to the will of God. Asking for things we know is in line with what God wants. The Lord did say, “In that day you will ask nothing of me. Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you” (John 16:23 ESV). However, we are also taught that, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (James 4:3 ESV).

Ego is the enemy. There is a part of you that wants everything to be about you. This part of you wants attention and instant gratification. Your ego pushes you towards acquiring more stuff. You want more riches, more honour and more fame. However, if you are honest with yourself, you already know that you can never find fulfillment and satisfaction from following the promptings of your ego. This is the reason you must reject any religion or spirituality that exalts you and your ego. The first call from Jesus is not a call to riches, fame or power. It is a call to discipline and learning. It will bring you to that place of brokenness and alignment with the Almighty God’s counsel for your life.