APAD DAY 42 Chapter 8

by Daniel Owino Ogweno
04/03/17
Not For Sale
Author requests article critique

  Message Writer
  Hire Writer

Tweet

—Chapter 8—

FOR YOU TO LOSE:

Things That Will Be Stolen From You

“And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.”—Matthew 5:40.

Never lose your spiritual gains because someone has stolen your material things. Those who hold so tight to the material things stand the risk of being dragged, along with what they hold on to, into the abyss of godlessness.

The Thief is More Lost Than What He Has Stolen

Let not the title of this chapter give the wrong impression. The losing is not on purpose. I call them things for us to lose because God seems to allow them to be stolen or robbed. Fish is never caught by a baitless hook. We must not love material things to the extent that the enemy can use it as a bait to hook us and subsequently pull us out of ‘the waters of life’ into the ‘dryness of death.’ Sometimes, it is wise to let go.

Basically, there are different ways through which we can lose something: we can lose something because somebody has stolen it, or because we accidentally misplaced it, or because we are not careful enough to take good care of it. As we shall see below, there are other subcategories of ways that we can lose things. May I emphasize that the kind of losing things I am talking about is not that which results from carelessness. If anybody loses things because of carelessness, that is a sign that he is a bad steward. He needs to pull up.

If you have never lost anything by the hand of a thief, fraudster or the likes, you must be one of the luckiest few. Maybe it is a question of time. That something will be stolen from you in one way or the other is certain—and this is no negative confession. The question is, what will you do when you are defrauded, short-changed or conned?

The very people that we believe to have been brought our way by the Lord to work with, may defraud us in one way or the other. Apart from through “lending” to people posing as “borrowers”, there are other ways we may lose what we have.

At one time, someone stole my bag. Among the things in the bag was a Bible. I felt so bad losing so many of my valuables, including passport. As I was lamenting the loss of my things, I felt that God was lamenting the loss of a soul. I prayed that God may use my loss to win the soul. I asked Him to let the thief make good use of the Bible. If only he could read it and get convicted unto salvation, I would jump for joy imagining the person giving a testimony that he got saved reading a stolen Bible. I would rather lose money, or any other material thing for that matter, but God wins a soul in the process.

When I started writing this book, I had my outline chapters but they didn’t include For You to Lose. This idea came towards the end of writing this book because of some experiences I went through. I had earlier written a book that I entitled: Faith, Mountain and the Seven Options. I paid a publisher US $ 900 in 2009 to publish the book. Instead of publishing it according to the schedule and agreement, the CEO started giving me empty promises. After waiting for three years, I called off the contract and demanded back my money. It is 2015 and I am yet to get the money back. Initially, I had thought that God was allowing the delay to test my patience because the latter is one of the things I wrote in that book. From experience, I have come to learn and accept that the Lord has not allowed me to write theories but practical things. If I had written about patience as a theory, God was taking me through practical lessons of waiting—so I thought, and so I waited.

I went ahead to look for a new publisher. I got one which looked promising. I paid a total of Kenya Shillings 301,000/-. The agreement was that a thousand copies of the book would be printed in two weeks’ time after the completion of the payments. I completed the payment in March, 2012 but like in the earlier case, the new publisher also started giving me empty promises—that is if I was lucky to get their response, otherwise, they ignored my e-mails and telephone calls most of the times. It is now August, 2015 and they haven’t printed the books. I learnt that the company was grossly mismanaged to the extent that it was at the verge of collapsing.

I was determined to travel back to my home country, Kenya, and institute a legal redress against the company that was not delivering the service I had bought. I was getting bitter, especially because this was the second time I was getting defrauded for the same book. That is when God whispered, reminding me about what He had convicted me about many years ago when I lost the bag with many of my valuables. I felt like I was having a conversation with Christ:

Christ: What are you crying over and why are you allowing bitterness to lodge in your heart?

Me: I am crying over my money. It was a big sacrifice for me to get that amount of money.

Christ: I am also crying! Crying over the souls I died for. It was an infinite sacrifice when I shed My Blood for them.

Me: Mmmh! That is tough, Lord!

That was tough because I had begun to perceive what the Lord Jesus was telling me. In Ephesians 5:10 the Bible exhorts us to prove what is acceptable unto the Lord. NIV renders it as follows: “Find out what pleases the Lord.” On the same note, the reverse is also true: find out what grieves the Lord.