Life As I See It by Apostle Femi Lazarus: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

What is reality?

Reality isn't only what can be seen, felt, and touched — emotions are real, yet unseen. What you see as reality is shaped by your micro experiences: your family, your church, your school. None of us sees reality. We interpret reality based on our lens. That lens has the tendency to cast limitations on our interpretation.

Christianity is not a religion

Religion gives men forms of worship to reach a deity they cannot see. Christianity is a lifestyle, far deeper than a facade of worship.

Genesis 1:1-3 — "the earth was without form and void... darkness upon the face of the deep... God said, let there be light."

Genesis 1:26 — "let us make man in our own image." Man was put here so that whatever protocols stop darkness from invading heaven is what he was created to do here. When man lost the garden, darkness filled the place again, and Christ came to deal with the problem of sin, which was the permission given to darkness.

Isaiah 60:1-3 — "arise, shine, for thy light is come... for behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people; but the Lord shall arise upon thee." We have an enemy whose goal has not changed, and a God whose objective has not changed.

We must know what we're dealing with

Revelation 5 — John wept because no one was found worthy to open the scroll. He wept because something was about to unfold on the earth that must not catch us unaware.

2 Corinthians 10:4 (MSG) — "the world is unprincipled, it is dog eat dog out there."

The purpose of light is not in the midst of light. The purpose of light is in the midst of darkness. The last-day church must learn to have difficult conversations instead of sweeping everything under the carpet — including honest answers for people questioning their faith, and honesty about ministers who have used God's name to abuse others. Separate the fallacies from the truth without changing who God is.

Ministry beyond the church walls

2 Corinthians 5 — the ministry of reconciliation. We're not reconciling those who are already in church, we're reconciling those who are in the world.

• Christianity should shape culture, taste, and the way people think, not stay locked inside church walls
• Some pastors in politics have stolen just like anyone else — the difference isn't the badge of Christianity, it's whether the kingdom is formed in someone's mind

John 8 — the woman caught in adultery. The Pharisees used religion as a weapon against her. Jesus wrote on the ground and said, "if anyone among you have not sinned, let him be the first to cast the stone." One by one they left.

Hebrews 4:16 — our high priest can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, tempted in all points as we are, yet without sin. Only Christ, the one without sin, stood there to condemn her — and he said, "I condemn you neither, go and sin no more."

What the practicality of a life of faith actually looks like

• Daniel was head of the sorcerers and enchanters in Babylon — not a churchy office
• Joseph had formerly been imprisoned for allegedly trying to sleep with his boss's wife
• Esther was elected queen through a program that wasn't a prayer meeting
• Deborah stood as wife and mother in Israel, and led men to war

The practicality of these lives confronts our religious bias and societal constructs. We rarely picture what these figures actually looked like in practice.

Matthew 5:14 — "ye are the light of the world, a city that is set on a hill cannot be hid."

Testimonies of changed lives

• A woman on a bridge about to jump switched her phone off flight mode so her family could be reached, saw a notification, watched a message on pain and trauma, and gave her life to Christ the next day. Christians criticized the message as "preaching psychology"
• A young woman who used to sleep around said she has not done so in three years since sitting under this teaching
• A mentee compared herself to the woman caught in adultery, saying she had been covered and helped to rebuild her life

Over 300 people who hadn't been to church in years are now solid, standing Christians.

On Nigeria and Africa

The works of Frantz Fanon and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o describe colonization as a psychological wound — an injury to identity and to history itself. A people without an accurate sense of history cannot properly perceive the future, and will repeat the mistakes of the past. Colonization is both internal and external — some insiders have proven worse to their own people than outsiders were.

Nigeria's deepest problem is a dangerous blend of pain and innocence about what is really going on. Pain makes people irrational; innocence means they don't know who to fight. Good people have been intimidated into silence, while louder, less informed voices have drowned out those who could help.

We got here through decades of not being sincere with ourselves and lowering the standard of whose voice gets heard. Nigeria is a giant that has been kept a dwarf, intentionally and systematically. Healing has to begin with individual change before it can accumulate into national transformation.