In all my sojourning around YouTube looking for interesting stuff to alarm and delight me, I lost several hours listening to a person who I believe is very famous—she’s one of Oprah’s go-to people—sharing with the wide world an important discovery she made.
In brief, her testimony goes something like this: She was very busy, over-busy, because she is a person who knows how to get things done. She is terrible at saying no because she’s super competent and also likes to make people happy. But then one day it was just too much and she couldn’t do it all anymore. A friend gave her permission to take back her life, which she did by realigning everything. She went through all the components of her identity and figured out which of them were essential for her. No one else could be a mother to her children, so that was obviously important, or a wife to her husband, or a best friend to her best friend. All the other things that she does are not crucial and so now she feels free to let them be secondary. You only have this one life, she concluded as so many do, and you don’t have that many times that you can reset it. In all the snatches of interviews I watched, this person was always billed as a Christian. I was, therefore, interested to see what she had to say about the Christian life, so I watched half an hour of something that was called a “Bible Study” wherein she—sitting outside of some cozy woodsy cabin—explained that we all have a “besetting sin” or a “shadow side,” for her its pride and gluttony, that we have to battle against because whatever it is will keep us from being our best selves for all the important people in our lives, and for our own happiness.
So anyway, this is the old testament reading for this morning and I think it is pretty great:
“The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen—just as you desired of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God or see this great fire any more, lest I die.’ And the Lord said to me, ‘They are right in what they have spoken. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him. But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.’And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word that the Lord has not spoken?’—when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously.
You need not be afraid of him.
About The Author
Harrison Okafor
editor
Judith is a believer, a lover of Christ and a Gospel freak person. A passionate gospel blogger and press writer. I work with GospelHitsNaija.net Media, no 1 Gospel music platform.
