Responsibility, Replication, and Reward

Several times when I go to church and I hear, “If you shout the loudest amen, you get the biggest miracle“, I’m always amazed at the level of ignorance of the basic principles of the Kingdom amongst Christians. There are keys and mysteries of the kingdom we, Christians, tend to ignore.

The pictures below show me holding a massive sugarcane stem. The sugarcane stem started as gift from my neighbour, then, Pastor Gospel Shokare, now, Bishop Gospel Shokare.

He gave me a stem of sugarcane from his petrol station and I took it back home, ate part of it, and planted the rest. This sugarcane in the pictures above is a product of several generations of that same sugarcane after close to about 7 to 10 years.

In the Parable of Talents, the Bible says that the Master was about to go on a journey and he gave talents to his servants. He gave 5 to one, 2 to another, and 1 to the third; he gave them according to their abilities. This means that the master had observed them replicating resources and talents. It might surprise you to know that a lot of issues in life involves replication and multiplication of what you are given. The football coach transfers his skills, knowledge, strategies to Ronaldo, to Messi, and they then manifest it on the football pitch to produce results. The more results they produce, the more they are priced in the market; the more results they replicate, the more the coach is valued.

The Bible says, “Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth“. That was the first commandment man received, and that is the basic commandment that most people in Africa break and that’s what makes us poor and backward.

Being fruitful is bringing out the potentials—the deposit of God—trapped within you. When a child is born, if you take an x-ray of the child after some years, all the dentition the child is supposed to have throughout his/her life are there as deposits, the testes are there as deposits, the ovaries are there as deposits. It is up to these ovaries, testes, and dentition to bring out what is trapped in them. It’s like a palm tree embedded in a palm fruit; the ability of that palm tree to come out is fruitfulness.

Fruitfulness is meeting generational expectations. The poor translated it to getting pregnant and having more children. If you read through the Bible, a lot of the Parables—The Parable of Talents, The Parable of the Sower—involved reproduction, multiplication, productivity, replication. The fig tree that was cursed was because it had great potentials, it was leafy for photosynthesis, but it had no fruit.

I planted the sugarcane that was given to me and multiplied it. At one time, I even practiced grafting with it. I had a lot of sugarcane and I even sold sugarcane. When he gave me the sugarcane, it had to multiply in my hands, it had to bring out the potential in it, it had to be fruitful. The inability of you to multiply whatever (the little seeds) you have in your hands is very displeasing to God.

In the Parable of the Talents, the Master saw the capacity to multiply potentials in the one he gave 5 talents; he saw less in the one he gave 2 talents; he saw very minimally in the one he gave 1 talent. For the one he gave 5 talents, the Bible says, “straightaway he went . . .” He had fore-planned, he had prepared, he had anticipated, he had seen opportunities he was wishing he had money to invest it. The reason why the potentials in a lot of people are not released is because they don’t think about productivity as a responsibility. The African is spending so much time and energy praying and shouting, while the white man has understood this principle of the Kingdom to be productive, to improve on, and to multiply. And so, straightaway he went, because he had planned.

One of the things you must know is that productivity and your life is your personal responsibility. That was one of the things I learnt very early.

The message continues in the next post.

God Bless You.