Day 43 (13th June)

Today is Monday. Mondays are always quiet days for me. I thank you Jesus for the Joy of Salvation. After dropping the girls in school, I hit the gym for about one hour. I am determined to give my gyming some structure. The key word is determination. In fact I am adding this character trait to those vital for this period of my life. I am determined to go to the gym x number of times a week. I think I will keep the x number to myself. I learnt from School of Disciple that the devil sends his demons to go out and collate information they will use against you, hence a wise (wo) man learns how to be silent. Not that the devil is so interested in my determination to gym but, hey I’m a child of God, I will not give him the chance in anyway to steal my joy! Anyway, without a specific number written down, I can feel proud when I meet and exceed the target rather than guilty because I didn’t meet it. That is my reverse psychology for it.

I was stuck on Luke chapter 4 and 5. I am still writing up my inspiration on the temptation of Jesus. Not so much the fact that he was tempted but more like what he was tempted on and what we his disciples could learn on what the enemy would use to tempt us. It’s amazing and I am always amazed how God teaches me. In Sunday, our Pastor spoke about temptation. In School of Disciple we learnt that God uses Satan as an examiner for His children, and we know that part of the examination is through temptation. This for me is affirmation that what am writing is in line with what God wants to teach us at this time. I sometimes wonder whether writing is my forte but everytime I take my pen or should I say start punching the keyboard the words flow. Not only that, I wake up most days with pages and pages of words ringing in my head. I have learnt to have note books all around me so that I immediately start jotting the insights down, otherwise I tend not to remember verbatim. My challenge is actually sitting down (or standing up) to put the notes into a coherent outline. The time and focus to do this was one of the major reasons I decided to take a sabbatical. So far, it’s helped but not to the extent I would have loved to have reached at this time.Still, I am grateful to God for the opportunity. I need determination. God help me.

I was in Johannesburg downtown in the evening. I had to submit a letter to get my Nigerian driver’s license authenticated by the Embassy, so a friend and I went to a lady’s house to drop the letter as it was too late to go to the Embassy. This lady lives in the middle of city centre. I have never been there at night before and it was interesting to see how alive it was. It reminded me of Lagos downtown. One must really love the hustle and bustle to set up home there. It reminds me also that a lot of people who live in Lagos actually love the fast paced life and I guess those that live in the major cities of countries. We all have our likes and dislikes. God has created so much diversity and we must appreciate this in life.

I was reading the June JOY magazine today. They had a few articles on Universalism. I have heard about some of these new movements and trend ‘New Age’, ‘Emerging Church’ but not Universalism so I was really interested to know what it was about. I read about one third of the articles before I decided I don’t really want to know a lot about it after all. All these concepts, I believe are meant to turn people away from God by intellectualizing the Bible and creation and every aspect of our faith. These are indeed the end times. This concept believes there are many ways to God, that there is no absolute truth only what is true to you as long as you don’t try to convince me on your own truth, they believe that God (at least they believe that God exists) will draw everyone to Him and this translates that they don’t believe there is hell. And to cap it all, they believe that the Bible is not the ‘authority’ nor is it infallible. I pray that none of us or our children falls into this sect.