Things That Provoke God To Anger

COMPLAINT

 Now when the people complained, it displeased the LORD; for the LORD heard it, and His anger was aroused. So the fire of LORD burned among them and consumed some in the outskirts of the camp. Numbers 11:1 Often times when we are embattled with challenges, or do not get what we desire, or what we have been praying for, we tend to resort to complaining in a bid to arm-twist/blackmail God to look at our side and consider our petition. We whine and gripe endlessly bemoaning our lot. But instead of achieving our objective, what we usually do by so doing is to provoke God to anger. Complaint is one thing that is highly detestable to God. It is a sure way of displeasing Him, arousing His wrath, and unwittingly attracting His consuming fire. Fire? Yes, Fire. Even if the LORD does not send a fire, the fact that He is angry is enough to provoke fire to burn! A grateful attitude is what God expects us to have in all situations. Why? Because even when it doesn’t look like it, He is actually working all things out for our good! That may be very difficult to believe. But the truth is that God genuinely loves and cares about every one of His children, both the obedient and the wayward. His love is as constant as the rising of the Sun to its setting, even more so. You can imagine how you would feel if you were planning a surprise package for your loved one only for that person to start acting up by complaining and picking faults in your conducts. How would you feel? Hurt? Disappointed? Frustrated? That is the same way God usually feels whenever we complain about our status quo, which is but a process to Him toward getting to where He is taking us. In the case of the Israelites, God was taking them to the Promised Land. But their constant cries, as they passed through the wilderness on the way to ‘the land flowing with milk and honey,’ was their undoing. They did it to a point that God did not even bother to inform Moses, as He was wont to do, before He dealt with them by pouring down a consuming fire upon them. These days, fire may not come down from heaven to consume, but the feeling of being burned will nonetheless be there, with the same intensity as if one is really under a scathing fire. In order to avoid this kind of divine retribution, let us start to praise more and cry less; thank more and gripe less; sing more and groan less. In other words, let us imbibe the spirit of the passage of the bible that says, “IN EVERYTHING, give thanks. For this is the will of the LORD for you…” God bless you.

BE FREE, MANIFEST AND SUCCEED! (PART 2)

   

Launch out: to the extent that you have gone out and reached out, you also need to launch out with the idea and initiative you have been nursing, or those that occur to you as you become. A popular maxim holds that “people will not celebrate you for your intentions, but your actions.” To succeed, you need to have a sizable action quotient per day. And the key to doing that is making every hour count. Input substance into your hours and you will have a productive day. Never let an hour pass by without a substantial investment of rigorous thinking or effort with short, medium or long-term yield in it. Even the chunk of time you take to rest or spend with your family constitutes a judicious investment of time that will produce positives. So, don’t think it’s all about working alone.

So, dare the odds and discouragements to launch out and start that business, NGO, product/service line, and whatever it is that you have tucked in the recess of your mind for so long. Don’t fall victim of the paralysis that develops from over-analysis. You will never know all there is to know, have all you need to start, nor have a panoramic view of all there is to see about the idea anyway. So start where you are.

I conclude with a saying I heard some years ago, “instead of waiting for a perfect time, make the present time perfect.”

BE FREE, MANIFEST AND SUCCEED! (PART 1)

I got this insight after watching a movie entitled “Bubble Boy.”

Humans, when caged by self, dogma or fellow humans cannot be free, neither can they manifest their full potential nor succeed in their endeavours. The very thought of freedom, manifestation, and success suggests an image of outward flow of activities rather than an inward blossom.

However, freedom, manifestation and success do not happen without some degrees of internal and external struggles. These restrictions usually come in form of limitations imposed by the self, others or the environment; and it is to the extent that you overcome them that you will be free, become and succeed.

Therefore, to be free, to manifest or to succeed, here are three keys you may find very helpful:

1.    Go out: you cannot reach your full potential unless you go out of your comfort zone. Have you seen a tortoise moving before? No matter how big or small it is, it cannot move anywhere until it juts its head out of the shell. Humans are no different; there is no progress unless you go out of your shell. You cannot succeed unless you discard the limiting beliefs and self-doubts that have held you down for whatever length of time. To grow, you need to proceed from one level of reasoning or operation to the next. To succeed, you have to go out of the miry of nonchalance and average performance.

2.    Reach out: as you go out of your comfort zone or bland level to pursue your dreams and ideals, you also need to reach out to people and resources that will help you to achieve your objectives along the way. Fortune most often does not favour the taciturn. You need to identify the persons or association that can enhance you as a person as well as enable you to accomplish your aim, and then reach out to them. This is not limited to humans alone; as you are “going out” you will also encounter books, events and other resources that will be helpful to you. Reach out to them, subscribe to them, engage them and assimilate them.

The Spirit, The Soul, And The Body: My Submission

CULTIVATION & ENHANCEMENT

 Cultivating the Spirit Because the spirit is from God, it takes the things of God to cultivate and enhance it to optimal performance. The first way to cultivate the spirit of man is by the infusion of the Holy Spirit with the spirit of man. And this can only be made possible if one accepts Jesus Christ into one’s life. There is no other way to having the fellowship of the Holy Spirit with one’s spirit than by aligning oneself with Jesus. This is because the essence of the Holy Spirit is to confirm the Messiahship of Jesus, as well as to enlighten man further about His ways. Toward the end of His ministry on earth, Jesus began to prepare His disciples for His departure by telling them some profound things about what would happen afterward, but all these they found difficult to understand then because the Person (the Holy Spirit) that would ‘guide them into all truth’ had not yet come. Let us consider some of them that pertain to the Holy Spirit below: But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me: John 15:26 Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come. John 16:13 And I fell at his feet to worship him. And he said unto me, See thou do it not: I am thy fellow servant, and of thy brethren that have the testimony of Jesus: worship God: for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. Rev 19:10 These are indications to the utmost importance of the Holy Spirit in the scheme of things as well as in the cultivation of the spirit of man. He is the very Spirit of God Himself, and He can only align with the spirit of a man if that man is ‘reconciled’ with God through Jesus Christ, the final Mediator between God and man, and ‘the way, the truth, and the life’, without Whom NO ONE can come to God. So a man who wants his spirit to function at a supernatural level has but to get it into partnership with the Spirit of God. and the Spirit of God can only come into one who has accepted Jesus as Lord and Master. Another important way the spirit can be cultivated is by feeding it on the word of God. In fact, the word of God is the food of the spirit. A man’s spirit is as mature and alert to the extent that it is fed with and exercised on the word of God. A person who does not read the Holy Bible, the codification of the Word of God, will have a malnourished spirit. A spirit that is not regularly fed will not be active, though the person in whom it is may be a bundle of activities physically, his spiritual content – which is really his life capacity – will be very low. It is such people that usually give up or give in easily when the vicissitudes of life come calling. Cultivating the Soul As the spirit feeds on the word of God, so does the soul feeds on knowledge. In other words, the food of the soul is information or knowledge. The activeness, enrichment and vibrancy of the soul are determined by the level of qualitative knowledge which the owner of that soul has availed himself, be it in learning or in life experiences. And this in turn, to a large extent, influences the colouration of his beliefs, his ideals, his ideology, as well as his actions and reactions. Meanwhile, as the saying goes, ‘garbage in, garbage out’, a man who chooses to feed his mind with junks will have his soul smudged with same. And let not that man blame anybody for his woes when the abundance of his rotten inputs start to overflow in his action and the results he gets back from life. Therefore, to nourish and enrich the soul, you need to feed it with good and quality information. This will not only make the person to come out healthy, but will also help him to adjust very well in his own world and the outer environment. And the better adjusted a person is within and without, the better his performance shall be. Cultivating the Body The body needs a balanced diet to be healthy and functional. It also requires regular physical exercises to be active. The better it is fed with the right food at the right time, the more healthy and radiant it will come out. In addition, the more it is exercised, the livelier and more attractive it will be in form; and the better it will adjust to garments and other forms of physical adornment. Information also plays a vital role in the nourishment of the body, as one needs to know what to eat at what time, and what not to eat in order to keep the body in a sound state. The same applies to physical exercises as well, knowing the appropriate exercise to do to attune certain parts of the body and going ahead to do them will prove beneficial to the person who takes the pain. THEIR FINAL DESTINATION AT DEATH To be continued…

The Spirit, The Soul, And The Body: My Submission

DEFINITION?

The Spirit The Spirit is the breath of God that supplies life to every living being. It is invisible and cannot be seen. But it is there all the same like a generator plant or the engine of a car transmitting life to the body. The truth is that all living beings, humans, animals, and plants posses the life-giving force call ‘spirit’. For without the spirit, there is no life. Death occurs only when the spirit departs from the body. It is the spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life. John 6:63 (NKJV) …for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life. 2 Corinthians 3:6 Another truth about the spirit is that it is the means through which God accesses man; it is also the means through which man can relate to God. This is because God is Spirit, He cannot relate with the flesh and soul of man due to their sinful inclination, as God cannot behold sin. Therefore, the spirit is the means through which God monitors the activities of man and relates with him. The Bible is replete with passages that lend credence to this postulation. I will cite just two of them: The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD, searching all the inward parts of the belly. Proverbs 20:27 For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. 1 Corinthians 2:11 The Soul The Soul is the total sum of a person, comprising of his mind, his personality, his emotions, his habits (inborn and acquired), his experiences, his learning etc. It is a vast and complex bank of many things. But the three major components of the soul are the mind/mental faculty, the personality and the emotions of an individual. The soul is the total sum of man. It is who you really are, and it is “he” that influences most of the things you do at every point in time. It is a common knowledge that animals and plants don’t have soul. They only have the life-giving spirit that enables them to live, which when snuffed out, they cease to exist. Therefore, the reason man is superior to every other being is because of the soul he has, which affords him the privilege of reasoning and intelligent action. The Body The body, on its own part, is the container that houses both the spirit and the soul. The spirit is invisible and so cannot operate on the earth in its intangible state. That is why it must be housed in a body for it to be active. The soul, on the other hand, cannot express itself except through a body, because it is also invisible and intangible. Therefore, the body actually derives its life and importance from the power of the spirit and in the expression of the soul.