There has been an inordinate growth of religion in Nigeria. While I have no empirical evidence, I am inclined to believe that Nigeria
is one of the most religious countries in the world. Everywhere,
villages and cities are studded with churches. Believers are in their
churches on Wednesdays, Thursday, Fridays, and of course, Sundays. There
are morning devotions, mid-night vigils, Sunday services, fellowship
meetings, and one revival and crusade after another. Ostensibly, the
pastors are laboring in God’s vine yard; preaching the word of God,
winning souls for Christ, etc.
In addition, these men of God
strive to bring the word of God into our workplaces and homes. They
flood the airwaves and televisions with their messages. The TVs are
filled with pastors, evangelists, apostles and bishops preaching and
evangelizing. They come in different forms. Some look cultivated and
cultured and others look coarse and crude. Some look sophisticated and
Sauvé and others look uncouth and unkempt. Some are erudite and elitist
and, even affect American and British accents and some sound as though
they can barely manage a conversation in English. In all, they all have
one mission, to bring to us the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Unfortunately,
all these sermonizing and exhortations have not in any way improved
the Nigerian society. It has neither elevated our social ethics nor
enhanced our moral standards. Why are these pastors working so hard to
teach us the doctrine of Jesus Christ which is based on love, humility,
compassion, lawfulness, etc but our society remains full of hate,
arrogance, cruelty, lawlessness, etc? In spite of all the preaching,
why are the churches still suffused with wickedness, selfishness,
dishonesty, intolerance and other attributes that the Bible repeatedly
stated are not Christ-like, and therefore, should not exist among
Christians?
This is because the lives of these
preachers do not always exemplify what they preach; they are yet to
lead their flock by example. They are yet to demonstrate that only law
of Jesus Christ (which is love) in their thought, words and deeds. They
left the central theme of the gospel and dwelt on secondary issues,
and sometimes trivial issues.
The Christianity faith is grounded
on the Bible, a composite of the Old and the New Testaments. The laws
of the Old Testament as given by Moses and the laws of the New
Testament as given by Jesus Christ are essentially the same laws stated
in two different ways.
The Ten Commandments set rules to
regulate our relationship with God and man. Jesus Christ gave us only
two laws established on love: love God with all your mind and heart and
love your neighbor as yourself. This law of love transcends every
other law. If you love God with all your heart and mind, you will
invariably uphold the laws of Moses as they concern your relationship
with God. Secondly, if you love your neighbor as yourself, you will not
murder him, or do to him anything that the laws of Moses forbid.
Therefore the laws of Jesus Christ are both the encapsulation and
refinement of the laws of Moses.
Jesus Christ did not only preach love, his life personified and exemplified it. At Calvary,
he dramatized his unconditional love; he prayed for the forgiveness of
those who humiliated and crucified him. The essence of Christianity is
love for others. All the exegeses, analysis and homiletics of the
gospel are secondary and sometimes unimportant factors. They are only
relevant to the extent they teach us how to love one another. St Paul
made the same point in 1Corinthians Chapter 13 when he wrote that of
all the attributes of Christianity, love is the greatest. And that
without love everything else we do with our Christian life profits us
nothing. The first epistle of John Chapter 4 verse 7 and 8, wrote
“Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one
that loves is born of God, and knows God. He that loves not knows not
God; for God is love”
It is not possible to love God
without loving man. We can only love God by loving our fellow human
beings. Jesus Christ made that point in Matthew 25 verse 34 to 40,
“Then shall the King say…Come you bless of my Father, inherit the
kingdom prepared for you…For I was hungry, and ye gave me meat: I was
thirsty, and you gave drink: Naked, and ye clothe me…”And the righteous
will ask “Lord, when saw we thee hungry and fed thee, thirsty, and gave
thee drink, or naked and clothe thee?” And the King shall answer,
inasmuch as ye have done it unto any of my brethren; ye have done it
unto me”.
That is, as we respect man, we are
respecting God; as we care for man, we are caring for God; and as we
love man, we love God. There is absolutely nothing we can do for God.
God does not need our money. Our praises are wonderful but can neither
substitute nor compare with the praises emanating from the millions of
angels whose duty is to praise and worship God continually. The best we
can therefore do for God is to respect, care and love man.
It will be interesting to imagine
how magnificent the Nigerian society will become when the lives of
Christians led by their pastors are governed by love for others, loving
their neighbors as themselves. There will be an automatic
transformation of the society, as we will seize to be lawlessness,
wicked, selfish, rude and intolerant in our dealings with others. And
there will be no more falsehood, theft, murder, or any act of wickedness
or violence, by Christians. Nigeria will be so reformed to the point that all these endless preaching by these men of God will be rendered redundant.
As the saying goes, “an ounce of
example is worth more than a ton of precepts”. We have been inundated
for years with Christian precepts by these pastors and bishops. It is
high time they started setting us examples by their own Christ-like
ways of life. They will do this country a lot of good if they just
endeavor to live in accordance to that transcendental law of Jesus
Christ, “love your neighbor as thyself”. Let them live it in their
thinking, actions and utterances. And that will be much more effective
in making Nigeria a better place to live in than all their sermons, oration and histrionics.
By Tochukwu Ezukanma
No comments:
Post a Comment