Nigeria is hard! Sounds awkward in the first line of an article on a Monday morning. But that’s the smell of truth. Silver nor gold do I have to give those who are going through this hardship, but I wake up most of the time thinking about experience sharing that can give someone out there more hope and strength to hold on and keep moving. I wish sincerely every time I share my thoughts that, at least, one person finds a line that makes him or her say, it’s not over after all.
As someone who went to church very well, let me reminisce with you. In almost every prayer gathering, if we had, for instance, ten prayer points, the first one or two would be “brethren, let us give thanks and glory to God for A or B.” They are the habitual opening lines. Like the appetizer. Something like, ‘testing the mic.’ The volume and energy in the prayer are still low amongst the congregation.
After that, the rest of the prayer time is dedicated to the DEVIL. We suddenly swoop on binding and losing demons and ancestral spirits and family and business chains and so on. When we have exhausted all that energy when we are rounding up, we now return to “brethren, let us thank the Lord for answered prayers. And we share the grace. You may not have given thought to it, but if you are a Pentecostal in particular, take your church prayer bulletins and reread them and you will notice that most of your prayer time has been focused on praying against the devil, than giving thanks to God.
As a choir leader at that time, I preferred the music sessions. I never hated the prayer sessions. I simply preferred the music sessions and quality, life-changing sermons. More time was given to praising God in the praise and worship. If you stop and sing ten church songs even now that you are reading, you will realize that church songs are more focused on glorifying the Supreme than binding the devil. More energy is put into praising and “making God’s head big.” God loves praises we were told. He inhabits the praises of his people. Combine that with a provocative sermon, and I had a great Sunday service.
If I needed to be engrossed in prayer, I would return to wherever I called home then, and in my own ten prayer points, I apply what I called the ‘reverse principle.’ Instead of spending so much time tearing down strongholds and binding and losing one Satan, I will list out “ten reasons” to give gratitude to God in prayer. I will list out all the minutest and even the ridiculous things that you wouldn’t even expect. I will calculate the hospital cost of oxygen per hour for sick people and multiply it by 24 hours, times the number of my years, and bring that calculation on paper to my prayer altar and spend one hour thanking God for supplying it free to me even when my life didn’t really matter to him.
I will spend another hour giving thanks in prayer to God because I can defecate feces out of my system. Because I imagine how it would have been if I couldn’t. I thanked God for the grueling conditions. I thanked God for my work and then that put a morsel of food on my table. I always had ten reasons to thank God. I was not interested in the devil. Not because I didn’t believe in the devil as we were told but because I was also told that God is the one that fights my battles with the devil. Not me. My own is to serve God. If I have to shout and bark at, and bind and lose the devil all the time, then what exactly will God be doing for me, I questioned. God who created the devil, whom God can still destroy but has refused to, and has granted him life and freedom till judgment day, to perish in eternal hell fire, so to who am I seeking help to bind whom the Lord himself hasn’t bonded still?
When I spoke out to my close pals in Church and insisted they give me examples from Jesus and not Paul, they always took me to, Luke 22:44, where Jesus Christ experienced hematohidrosis while praying in the garden of Gethsemane before his crucifixion. “and being in anguish he (Jesus), prayed more earnestly and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” My only challenge here was that the account didn’t tell us whether, in his anguish, Christ was thanking his Father or binding the devil. Praising God even brings out more sweat than binding the devil.
The Lord’s prayer in Luke 11:2-4 and Christ’s advice in Mathew 6:6, “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” were my best standards of praying and not the methods of Paul. Not because I despised Paul but because Jesus was and is higher than Paul. That was in my own opinion.
To date, in the God I still hold to be sacred, I believe fervently that it is in paying focused attention to the glorification of that divine deity that we unlock the rains of God. The task of fighting the devil is not ours. It is God’s work. If you serve your God well and indeed, the devil can try but he won’t be able to hurt you. You don’t have to shout and wrestle with him anywhere. Just simply focus on your own God and always look for ten reasons to praise him every morning beginning from today.
Pretend that the devil is absent. It will be difficult because of how you have been configured but it is possible. Spend 90 percent of your time looking for ten new reasons every day to praise God before leaving for your work. Do that for as long as you can make a habit of it. You will be shocked at the much God has done for you that you didn’t even notice and secondly, you will experience the piercing power of consistent gratitude in amazing ways.
Citizen Agba Jalingo is the Publisher of CrossRiverWatch and a rights activist, a Cross Riverian, and writes from Lagos.
NB: Opinions expressed in this article are strictly attributable to the author, Agba Jalingo, and do not represent the opinion of CrossRiverWatch or any other organization the author works for/with.