Daily Devotionals

Let us recall the words of Winston Churchill; “If you are going through Hell, keep going”. It is a no-brainer. When things get tough, the best course of action is to continue the march forwards. The Psalmist wrote, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me” (Psalm 23:4 ESV). This passage raises all kinds of questions. How does someone devoted to God end up in the valley of the shadow of death? How does one keep the faith when one has hit rock bottom?

As a watchman tasked with steering us towards a better future. You must commit to keep marching forward. In rainfall or sunshine, no matter what happens. You must keep the faith. It will not all be rainbow and sunshine on this path you have chosen. The Bible does not teach a life without troubles or tribulations. Jesus was quite explicit, “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33 ESV). If you go out into the world to steer it towards where God wants, expect tribulations. You do not get to declare a victory without fighting a battle. You do not get a crown of the overcomer, if you have not fought for a cause and won. Your mission will not be as simple as you are thinking it is. Things will get bad before they get better.

When you realize that you are going through hell, or that you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Never doubt your mission. Never for a second doubt the commitment of heaven towards you. The right course of action begins with an honest evaluation of your situation. You are in the valley of the shadow of death. Own it, do not sugar-coat it. You cannot wish it away or ignore it, hoping it disappears. It won’t. When the British turned to Winston Churchill to lead them through troubled times, he was honest about their situation, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”. Honesty will make you re-strategize, evolve and grow your spirit to overcome the task at hand. Do not crawl back to your safety zone, keep going forward.

You are either a part of the problem or a part of the solution to the economic issues plaguing your world. The economy does not improve by advocacy and delivery of big speeches. Economic matters are productivity matters. If you are not happy with the economic conditions of your world, approach it as a productivity problem. Don’t join the blame game. Certain people in third world countries like Nigeria have convinced themselves that their poverty is none of their fault. They blame others and refuse to take responsibility. If you want your economy to improve, increase the productivity of your people. That’s how economies grow – through higher productivity.

It is a problem when people feel they can talk, debate, pray or legislate a better economy. Worse, some feel that you can grow your economy by simply issuing an executive order. It does not work. You can do much more if you rolled up your sleeves and got to work. Think about all the good you would be doing for the economy of your town or city if you created a company or companies that employs 100 people locally, and serves at least 1,000 clients globally. You need to realize that you are not helping matters by playing small. A lot of social vices that keep you up at night would disappear if you had created more jobs through your businesses.

You cannot have an effect on the economy of your world unless you develop capacity for big things. If west Africans desire a better economy, the solution is to create companies that make a difference at that level. We should plant at least 10 innovative companies headquartered in West Africa worth at least $1 billion. 100 innovative companies headquartered in West Africa worth between $100 million to $800 million. 1,000 innovative companies headquartered in West Africa and worth at least $10 million. This is the thinking required for economic advancement. You have to develop the capacity to build economic entities that operate at this level.

The Holy Bible makes it clear that God wants the best of us to take care, and look after the rest of us. You think of Prophet Samuel who said, “Moreover, as for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you, and I will instruct you in the good and the right way” (1 Samuel 12:23 ESV). You think about the Psalmist that wrote, “Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked” (Psalm 82:3‭-‬4 ESV). Spiritual growth and maturity is reflected by the extent of your stewardship. Your business is a platform for your stewardship. Your business is your outreach to take responsibility for the growth and fulfillment of others. Making money from it is just a side effect.

If you aspire to become your best possible, the secret is to take responsibility for others. When you live with a burden that the failure and success of others depends upon your ability to do better. You will tap into a deeper source of motivation. When you take responsibility for others, and embrace your watch; your stewardship over people. You will experience God in a new dimension. God begins to empower you spiritually, making resources available to you. This will make you even more productive. Remember: He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength (Isaiah 40:29 ESV).

Money follows value created. When you focus on serving people in your business, and empowering them to become the very best they can be. You will end up creating a tremendous amount of value. Think about your favourite businesses for example, you like them because they are impacting you and delivering so much value to your life. It becomes more than a financial transaction. It is a relationship. An obsession with making money will compromise how you watch over your world. Be obsessed with delivering more value than anyone else, and you will see God blessing you more than anyone else. You start by identifying the people God wants you to serve. Serve them through business. You will be fulfilled.

The idea that starting a business is a quick way to make a lot of money is false. You can confirm this fact from anyone that has run their own business for at least 3 years. In the short term, you are going to make more money by getting a job than by running your own business. The reason you want to start a business is because your business is a vehicle through which you advance your God-given mission. Your business is a vehicle for change, it provides the opportunity for you to steer the people in your world towards a better future.

What separates businesses that fail within the first 2 or 3 years, and businesses that continue to grow and strive is a sense of mission. Your mission gives you an incentive to keep going. It gives your business a spiritual purpose. We need businesses with a mission to eradicate illiteracy by building high quality schools. Media businesses on a mission to champion positive values through their entertaining programming. Think about technology companies that are able to scale globally due to the need to take their mission across borders and boundaries. If a company like Google was only interested in making money, there would be no need to operate outside North America and Europe.

You should approach your business as a mission from God. God has given you stewardship over some people and people-groups. You now have to figure out how best to serve them. This is your sacred calling. You would work harder and be more passionate about your business when you realize that this is more than just trying to make money. This is your opportunity to change the lives of people. You have to embrace this mindset. When you do, you will begin to notice superior results in your business. And this is the mindset that unlocks wealth.

If you find an idea you believe in. Do the thinking. Figure out what it would take to make the vision a reality and commit to the process. Buckminster Fuller once said, “faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking”. Stop pretending that the great technologies you want to invent, the companies you want to create will become a reality, just because you believe it. You must be ready to do the thinking. Noah did not only predict the world would end in a flood, he also found out what could be a solution. Then he developed his mind enough to invent the ark. Noah is a complete man of faith.

A spiritual leader once declared to his followers that he had a vision that someday, his events would be beamed live across the world. After some decades, the vision became a reality. By 2021, their flagship event was watched live in more than 100 countries around the world. Beamed through internet technologies, cable television, and radio. He believed it, his followers believed it. However, they allowed someone else to do the thinking. Someone else developed all the technology that powers their outreach, even though they had the vision. Take Nigerians as an example. They believe that their country has great potential and that the future is bright. The problem is that very few Nigerians are ready to do the thinking and act in faith.

You have to stop thinking great things happen through random, unexplainable series of events. Great things do not happen by accident. They require decades of planning and execution. You must be ready to do the thinking. If you have ever thought about the future, and become convinced about certain things. You should consider committing to the process required to make it a reality. It would have been a tragedy if Noah predicted a flood, but never acted in faith by doing the thinking. Faith is intelligent, faith requires you to think about how these different pieces of the puzzle fit together. Apostle James made it clear that our beliefs are not enough, we must act in faith (James 2:14-22).

When you develop the knowledge, discipline, and capacity required to do great things. You become strong enough to get things done without requiring help. There comes a temptation to write off people and relationships. There are the dumb people that cannot understand your lofty goals. The undisciplined ones that will frustrate you with their indiscipline. People will cheat. They will steal. They will constitute the biggest weakness in your projects. Nevertheless, you must not think you are good enough or powerful enough, that you will side step the need for relationships.

The purpose of any enterprise is to serve people. Even if you run a for-profit company. Your company makes money by catering for the wants or needs of enough customers to stay afloat. If you lead your life, your watch or your business with a sense of superiority, you will lose touch with the people you wanted to serve in the first place. You need to understand that your main goal is to serve as many people as you can. And that humans are first and foremost illogical, emotional and complicated beings. You will have to work for people that are not as gifted as you are. You will have to live and play with family members that do not understand your strict regimen. There is no scenario in which you will always have your way.

It is healthy to maintain gratitude for the chance to develop knowledge and skills above the average human. It is a good idea to develop your potential to its maximum. However, you must make relationship building a priority. The god-level knowledge and capacity you have is useless without the necessary access and authorization to act. You will have to deal with people. And the best way to deal with people is building relationships with them. If your mission is to steer your world towards a better future, you want to increase your social intelligence. You must be able to build and maintain the relationships you need to deliver your mandate.

We like to think that we are thoughtful, original thinkers blazing a new trail with our lives. However, the reality is that thinking is hard. Our day-to-day living is only possible because of conventions. It is very hard, if not outright impossible to get through your day without following established conventions. The only reason you can read this, and it makes sense to you, is because we have established symbols and syntax that make up the English language. You cannot make up your own symbols and insist that is what you would use to engage the world. To survive in life, you must copy and imitate ideas, lifestyle and customs.

You will start out in life by imitating others. You take a look at what they are doing, and then you copy the same into your own situation. It is impossible to live without imitating and copying others. If you have to copy, then you might as well choose where you copy from wisely. Apostle Paul wrote, “imitate me, just as I imitate Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1 AMP). This timeless truth of the Bible deserves your attention; imitate those who have obtained the promise. Imitate me as I imitate Christ. You should be imitating somebody.

You need to prayerfully develop a list of 3 to 6 people that represent the kind of future you dream about and use them as a model to order your own life. They should be a mix of living masters and those who have transitioned to glory as well. You have to use them as a guide to order your life. You are able to save time, decades of your life by giving yourself the permission to imitate people who have accomplished great things in their life. Without such discipline and order in your life, you will not be able to settle down on time to begin your life’s work. The biggest irony of it all is that when you imitate your role models, you do not become their carbon copy. You rather begin to manifest your own uniqueness. Which is what you wanted all along.

Things are so much better when you have a roadmap to follow. It becomes easier to accomplish your goals. Having a map does not make your undertaking easy. You still have to put in the work. There are still risks involved. However, when you have a map, your journey is easier because it saves you a lot of time trying to find out what might work. The success and fulfillment you want from your life will only come, when you understand how to channel the energy of your youth into long-term projects. To do this, you must find models; people who have done something similar to this in their lives.

As it is written in the Book of Hebrews, “so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises” (Hebrews 6:12 ESV). You want to imitate, mimic people who have already accomplished what you are currently dreaming about. You want to read everything you can about them. How did they patiently pursue their goals for decades while keeping hope and faith alive? It is important to understand that you are to follow and imitate those who have already achieved something you want to achieve.

We see now that social media platforms are not a safe place to pick up instructions to order your life by. A lot of well meaning, but incorrect philosophies are peddled about on social media. In the passing of time, the poster learns more and returns to update their viewpoint. However, this would have led some astray in the first place. You want to imitate people who have already accomplished what you are dreaming about, not someone that is optimistic, but as naive and confused as you are. Therefore, you want to look for at least 3 to 6 people that have already achieved the results you dream about. Set aside your laziness and get to work by imitating them.

One way to think about the economy of a country is to think about the economy as the collective productivity of the people. One can argue that the economy is more complicated than that. However, it is useful to approach economic matters as a productivity problem. If you could increase the productivity of the people in your world, economic prosperity will take care of itself. You must focus on how you, and the people around you can increase the scale at which value is created. We need to understand that the prosperity of the nations is generated by the productivity of the individuals.

Economic prosperity will not happen due to external help, the people have to decide they want to become more productive. Economic conditions do not improve until one begins to understand the role of productive labour in the scheme of things. You cannot claim to be a millionaire because someone gave you ten million dollars. A millionaire (in USD) is someone that has created value worth at least a million US dollars. The Bible teaches us that God expects us to be productive. The first instruction God gives to mankind, is to be fruitful. Fruitfulness is bible-speak for productivity.

Take a look around you and determine ways by which you can increase your productivity. Think about how you can increase the productivity of your family members, staff and everybody that lives in your world. You must understand that your watch is incomplete without a concern for their economic affairs. People must be reminded that their prosperity is tied to their productivity. And that they must pick up the slack. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, once admonished his staff, saying, “there are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the headcount we have”. Every member of a community, organization or corporate entity must be made to understand their own role towards contributing to the economic betterment of their world.

It is a blessing to be human; so much raw power and potential. With the capacity to become anything you want, the problem is finding out what you should be doing. You have unlimited potential, but you are limited by your time and energy. Your time is short. Your energy is limited. You will not always have the energy of the youth. You cannot try out every idea, every creed, every philosophy, every business or every discipline in the world. It is your duty to find out the best of what others have already figured out, and model that into your own life.

You model people when you use them as an example to imitate. You pattern yourself after them. The goal is to copy and mimic them as you journey through life. Without such guidance and a framework to work with, becoming successful is more difficult. For example, anyone that desires to be successful would realize that education plays a great role. You are more likely to succeed by getting an education than without one. You reach this conclusion because every mover and shaker of the world was educated. So, when someone claims that education is not important to accomplish great things, you can refute that claim by reminding everyone that your models are educated. And you desire to become like them.

The strength, power and enthusiasm of the youth should not be wasted on the folly often associated with youth. You want to find guidelines, ethics, or ideas that represent the most efficient or prudent course of action guaranteed to take you closer to your goals. Therefore, you want to look for at least 3 to 6 people that represent the kind of future you dream about. You can then use them as a model to order your own life. You have to study and dig deep, learning all you can about them. Read about their praises and criticisms. Their highs and lows. Study their failures and successes. You want to know their story so well, that when faced with a similar situation, you would know exactly what to do.