How a Book Helped Me Recover My Long-lost Faith
I n August 2019, while the harmattan semester break was ongoing and most of the buildings on the university campus were locked and I daily shuttled between home and school to teach Post-UTME candidates at the basement of a faculty building, I often visited a brother, a university student like me, who lived in my area off-campus, and on one of my visits to his place he showed me a slim-spined, blue-covered book titled Sustainable Beginning, and then said to me: ‘Every Christian life starts here.’
I was seeing the book for the first time, although I knew the man who wrote it. The author, affectionately called ‘Brother Joseph’, though he was already in his fifties, was one of those rare Christian brothers who have forsaken the lucrative, denominational path of ministerial calling and have taken up the painstaking business of discipling believers in the faith. The book was sold at print cost, at the rate of 500 naira per copy—that’s one American dollar and about thirty cents. I bought it immediately, but did not read it with deep concentration until many months later. I never realized that I had, all the while, been missing something big.
That August 2019, so many things were happening to me at the same time. I was recovering from a stagnant and backslidden state of Christian life. I was ebbing away from my closest friend, and from the few female friends I was having more or less ungodly and useless dealings with. I was thinking that, by staying away from the moon and moving closer to the sun—the Sun of Righteousness, I was going to solidify the new clay of my remaking and regeneration. My smartphone was mostly on flight mode. I stopped chatting with many people, put some others at arm’s length. I revived my relationship with serious believers I had lost touch with. For those friends and classmates who were yet around me, who I knew could bring about a second fall, I quietly prayed that God would put them away from me, at least until I was able to stand firm on my feet.
That month, while everyone was away on vac, I had stayed back at school to, among other things, sort out my life in prayer and in studying my Bible. It was a tough time for me. I had no money. Nothing was sent to me from home because my parents did not agree to my staying back at Ife. I remember a particular night, after an arduous day of tutoring at school just to earn some cash, and after spending the whole evening talking at that brother’s place, I got home late, tired and hungry. I picked what’s left of my beans, placed it on fire, then, without meaning to, drifted off to sleep. That night, I narrowly missed being choked to death. I remember waking up at around midnight to a blinding cloud of smoke, as my dinner, the pot of beans, burned on the gas stove, all the beans already burnt to black, hard crusts that crumble to touch. Because of the smoke I coughed and wheezed then waded to put off the gas. I calculated that I had slept for over an hour or more, and since everyone had traveled, there was no one on that floor of the hostel to call me to caution. It was a memorable night for me; for the next two weeks the smell of burnt beans still clung to the room.
Also, that month, August, I was frequently in that brother’s room, the brother who showed me the book. He taught me from the Bible and then we prayed together. On a particular night, after being confronted with God’s word, I remember weeping for my many sins and past errors. I wept so terribly that myself was shocked. What happened? Just a realization of my sinful state? No, not exactly. I think I was actually overwhelmed by God’s love. I was overwhelmed by the fact that I came so close to disastrous sins that could have disfigured my life completely but in all cases God had mercifully delivered and exonerated me.
That blessed evening, I realized that, even if I ran away to the farthest parts of the earth to hide myself from God—whether in the sands of the Sahara or in the snows of Antarctica—I would never be out of His sight, nor venture off the mark of His widespread arms calling me to ‘come back, thou prodigal son.’ I was, again, in my short lifetime, embracing my Christian roots (in a new way, though), after having forsaken it in my heart for nearly three years. Fortunately, I had documented much of what was happening to me then in a long, memoiric and confessional piece I titled ‘Memoir’. The piece, written in third person, was published here on my Medium account in September 2019, although for some reasons it is currently unlisted among my public stories.
So in that state of helplessness and utter disgust for the life I was living I started reading Sustainable Beginning. It was a slim book; the copy I bought had just ninety-four pages. It reminded me of another slim but effective book I had so much heard of and partly-read: The Practice of the Presence of God, written in the 17th century by one Brother Lawrence (Nicholas Herman). But while Brother Lawrence’s book is autobiographical and subjective, Brother Joseph’s book is totally objective: the language is crisply formal, every sentence attempts to fulfil grammatical rules. Like the sermons of Jesus, the book does not quote anybody or any book besides the Bible. In the exclusion of the Dedication, Acknowledgement and Preface, the book does not contain stories from the author’s personal life in correlation to what is being discussed. Each of the eight chapters are straightforward, biblical and clear, like Bible study outlines, or like a Watchman Nee. Reading these chapters feels like swallowing grains of wheat that, unless you ruminate on them and digest them, you’ll never be able to come to the fullest understanding of the message being passed across.
I realized that, even if I ran away to the farthest parts of the earth to hide myself from God—whether in the sands of the Sahara or in the snows of Antarctica—I would never be out of His sight, nor venture off the mark of His widespread arms calling me to ‘come back, thou prodigal son.’
‘Everyone born of a woman is born spiritually deformed’—so goes the first line of the first chapter of the book. This is the chapter that holds the position that everyone is naturally born a sinner, and that it is normal and convenient for humans to sin. It is, in fact, a sin for a sinner not to sin.
Brother Joseph likens the deformed state of the human heart, the heart of sin, to the conditional state of the earth in Genesis 1:2. In that verse the Bible says that the earth was ‘without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.’ The sinful heart of every man, Brother Joseph explains, is just like this deformed earth. It is a heart that is without form, which means: undefinable, shapeless, purposeless, unfixable, perverse and—the adjective that best describes it—unpredictable. This heart is also void—void of God but, since there is no vacuum in nature, full of devils and demons. It is also shroud in darkness, and the Spirit of God keeps hovering around it, seeking for a way to bring it to repentance and conversion.
This sinful heart is further picturized in the Fall of the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden. The moment they ate the forbidden fruit, their eyes were immediately opened. ‘Opened Eyes’, Brother Joseph explains, connotes an eye of criticism that finds faults in others, that points fingers of accusation at others, just as Adam accused the Woman of causing him to fall, and the Woman accused the serpent instead (Genesis 3:12-13). This is the first characteristic of a sinner: it finds faults in others, judges others, and is never ready to bear the brunt of his own faults. It is a life that says: ‘That guy is too proud, I hate him.’ Meanwhile itself is proud and hateful, too.
Another characteristic of the sinful heart is ‘Self-covering’. After Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they hid themselves from God, they covered their selves. The sinner always hides from God, Brother Joseph explains. He hides his sins, hides his addictions, his secret struggles with sin, his ugly sides. He never wants anyone to know that he lies, steals, cheats, kills, fornicates, masturbates. It refuses to answer altar-calls because it is already one pastor or fellowship president. It never opens up.
This covering follows up to his ‘Ego’, the ego of the self-life. This ego, as Brother Joseph explains, is manifested in ‘self-esteem, self-exoneration, self-defence, self-explanation, self-advertisement, selfish ambition and aspirations. It is the root of pride which makes a human to be self-confident and to think he is capable of fixing everything about his life without God.’ To be egoistic is to be confident in oneself and not in God. Or to be fully confident in oneself and less-confident in God. It is to always seek to justify oneself from every fault, as Adam and the Woman tried to. It is to seek after the attainment of a personal ambition or personal goal at the detriment of a God-given ambition. Everyone who practices these, Brother Joseph explains, are yet to be free from sin.
The sinful heart of every man, Brother Joseph explains, is just like the deformed earth in Genesis 1:2: it is a heart that is without form (undefinable, unpredictable), it is void of God, it is shroud in darkness, and the Spirit of God (Holy Spirit) dwells outside of it, hovering around it in an attempt to bring it to repentance and conversion.
‘Seeking Individualism’ is another character trait of the sinner. Adam exemplified this by naming the Woman ‘Eve’ (Genesis 3:20), thus cancelling her previous name ‘Woman’, which means bone of my bones. By giving her a new name he thus individualizes himself from her.
In addition, the sinful life ‘Never Apologizes’. Adam nor Eve apologized to God for eating the forbidden fruit. Up till today they both are yet to say ‘God, we are sorry.’ The sinful life commits sin and never apologizes, whether to God, or men. It finds it difficult to turn to (especially) a man and say ‘I’m sorry. I’m deeply sorry, forgive me.’
It is a ‘Banished Life’, estranged from the presence of God, as God Himself banished Adam and Eve out of the garden. It is a ‘Jealous and Angry’ life that ‘Kills’. This can be seen in the life of Cain, who killed his brother, Abel, because God rejected his sacrifice. ‘The life of deformity sometimes wants to be religious when transformation has not come to his being,’ Brother Joseph writes, ‘and it will always want to appease God with his sacrifice.’ This kind of life tries to please God by works, and not by faith.
Finally, the thoughts of the sinful life is ‘Terribly Evil’ (Genesis 6:5-7), and it nurtures an ‘Insatiable Desire for Women’ (Genesis 4:19). It lusts after any and every woman who are outwardly attractive. This pushes such a life to sexual lusts such as fornication, prostitution and adultery, and sexual perversions such as homosexuality, pedophilia, masturbation, bestiality, sadomasochism, and etcetera.
Preposterously, almost all of these aforementioned character qualities were present in my life then, in one way or another. Most were not very obvious because they were heart conditions that cannot be seen with the naked eye. I had to do away with those sins, although some (such as evil thoughts, seeking individualism, ego and self-covering) did not leave immediately. In fact, the more I read my Bible and listened to God’s word the more God showed me salient sinful heart attitudes and habits that God wanted me to do away with. And about one or two of these sins, refusing to leave even after several months into my Christian life, pushed me to pray in tears. One of them was ‘Terribly Evil Thoughts’. I found it difficult to think good thoughts to those who meant to do me harm, and even when I claimed to have forgiven, I still saw in me bits of hatred, malice and reservation towards such people. I thank God that I’m totally free today. But then, that’s not all. There is another chapter of that book that helped me in ways that years of sitting in church had never helped me. It is about the matter of overcoming sin totally, once and for all. Stay with me, as I explain this awesome part of that book. Stay, please.
Something spectacular happened to me towards the end of year 2019. It must have been around October or November. I had written a WhatsApp status, and in this particular one, I had ignorantly claimed that if a converted believer, that is, someone who had been saved, redeemed and regenerated by God, sins, such is no more a believer but a sinner. I never realized I was wrong by a long chalk until a colleague argued with me about it, claiming that such a person was not a sinner yet. He said ‘not possible’, and kept mentioning something about ‘the Prodigal Son’ and ‘the Cross’.
I understood the whole Prodigal Son analogy, but the Cross was something I never really understood. But then I kept suspecting this classmate of mine because, well, it so happened that the status I wrote, in which I listed some common sexual sins, could have been talking about him in some way. (I later realized it was wrongful of me to have assumed, though.) So I waited for a couple of weeks before I was able to get the answer, first from a discipleship class teaching, and then from the book Sustainable Beginning.
Let me tell you this: one thing I was never taught, despite being born and brought up in a family that dutifully attended Church, was the reality of what happened on the Cross at Calvary. I was never taught about the loving side of God, how He was in fact like that rich father who, seeing his lost prodigal son coming back, quickly called to dress him. I saw God as a judge and nothing but a judge. A father who was always angry at every sin, and who would disown you for every mistake you committed. I realized that this was why my Christian life reached a point of tiredness and then, consequently, stagnancy. I could not overcome sin in my life, and every sin I committed made it seem as though God had forsaken me, and I would have to plead for forgiveness and start all over again. This continued until I was tired of starting all over again. ‘It’d be better to quit entirely,’ I said to myself at last. So on getting to university, I started living life differently. I never knew that ignorance had scammed me, and of course still scamming several people today.
So in the fifth chapter of Sustainable Beginning the mystery of how the Cross has dealt with my sins—past, present and future—is revealed. Titled ‘The Battle Against the New Creation Life’, this chapter opens up about two kinds of battle that faces the newly converted believer: the battle within, and the battle without.
The battle within comes in the form of personally asking oneself whether one has really been saved, after one has surrendered one’s life to Christ. The battle is doubting the genuineness of one’s salvation. This doubt is further aggravated when the newly converted believer falls into sin. Some, in their efforts to overcome whatever sin it is—especially addiction—falls into the error of fasting and praying and subjecting their bodies to ascetical disciplines in order to overcome flesh. Such people think that doing that would make them saved and keep them saved. These set of people—Militant Christians, striving in the efforts of their flesh, can never experience the triumphant life that Christ offers: a life of daily overcoming sin, self and the world. Even if it seems as though their methods work, they are still not triumphant Christians. The best they could ever be is to be moralistic, and ‘Moralistic Christians’ (if there is any term like that) are not ‘Triumphant Christians’ because even many sinners are moralists!
Several people, unable to attain this triumphant life, succumbs to defeat. That was who I was: defeated in my sins. ‘He who is defeated,’ writes Brother Joseph, ‘will only remain religious [… while] the militant one will struggle to overcome in the energy of the flesh only to attain the self-inferior kind of righteousness …’ It is in doing away with this self-inferior kind of righteousness that Brother Joseph offers three jointed solutions to the issue of the battle within, that is, the battle of self-doubt that causes many believers to give up and quit the faith.
Moralistic Christians are not Triumphant Christians.
The first solution is Knowing, as found in Romans 6:6-7: ‘Knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him … that we should no longer be slaves of sin. For he who has died has been freed from sin’ (emphasis mine). The believer has to know that his ‘old man’, his body of sin, that part of him that sins and that is capable of sinning, has been crucified with Christ about two thousand years ago when Christ died on the Cross. It means that all your sins—all the lies and cheating and fornication of the past, of the present and of the morrow—Jesus carried them all to the cross at Golgotha on that blessed day. ‘It is not just a mental knowing,’ Brother Joseph writes, ‘but a revelational knowing of the death of our old man with Christ on the cross continuously’ (emphasis mine).
Galatians 2:20 says, and here is my personal format: ‘I, Boluwatife Oyediran, have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, that is, there is nobody called Boluwatife again, but Christ lives in this my body. And the life which I, now Christ Jesus, no more Boluwatife (Boluwatife is dead!), the life which I, Boluwatife-turned-Jesus, now live in this body of flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.’ That’s my simple creed of victory, trust me. Whenever I’m faced with a temptation, I just tell myself, ‘See, this is Jesus at work in me and through me now. Jesus won’t do this thing. Why then should I try to do it?’ That has always worked for me. Always. And I believe it can work for you, too, in case you’re in my shoes.
‘The termination of the battle within and self-struggle to win is the deep understanding of our death with Christ on the Cross,’ writes Brother Joseph. ‘He who is dead is freed from all allure and power of sin over him.’ This means that sin has no dominion, no power, no authority, no grip, no hold—nothing whatsoever!—over me again. It means that, even if tomorrow I mistakenly—and it has to be mistakenly, not knowingly—fall into sin, that sin still has no hold whatsoever over me. Just as I am born into my biological family, so am I born into the family of God. There is definitely no amount of mistakes I could make that would nullify the fact that my earthly father gave birth to me. And so it is with my heavenly Father. I am His and He is mine. Always and forever. Isn’t that gracious? But first, you have to know that that part of you that sins is dead! It is in knowing that you can sin no more.
‘He who is defeated,’ writes Brother Joseph, ‘will only remain religious [… while] the militant one will struggle to overcome in the energy of the flesh only to attain the self-inferior kind of righteousness …’
Then, following this, you have to Reckon. Romans 6:11-12 says: ‘Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lust’ (emphasis mine). The second step to living a triumphant life in Christ is reckoning. You have to reckon daily that you are dead to sin. If any temptation comes around you only have to reckon: ‘I’m dead to sin, I can’t do this, I am dead to sin,’ because now ‘sin speaks a dead language that means nothing to you’ (Romans 6:11, MSG).
You have to always reckon; don’t ever give up the reckoning of your death. Say to yourself: ‘I am dead to pornography, why then should I watch it? Why?’ and that settles it. In fact, along with reckoning, you also need to ‘deaden the evil desires lurking within you’ (Colossians 3:5, TLB). It is by reckoning that you deaden all those desires, one after the other. Deaden the desire to savour a promiscuously-dressed lady by looking away the moment your eye falls on her. Don’t look at her twice. Look away before you draw in the details. Follow something I learnt from Zac Poonen that the second look is sinful. Pull yourself out of that addiction by starving that addiction. Don’t relate with any lady to the point of fornication. Avoid staying alone in the same room with a lady when you have not fully recovered. If it requires adhering to the ‘Billy Graham Rule’ please do it. Reckon yourself dead to that sin. Reckon and deaden yourself ; these nuggets work hand-in-hand.
But then, what if I fall? Yes, you could fall. You could fall. You’re more or less like a baby that is just beginning to walk this path of faith so falling is permitted, only that it has to be mistakenly. You don’t give birth to a child and expect him to be walking immediately, unless that child is not normal. You can fall, yes, but it is better that you spend more time standing than you spend falling, if you understand what I mean.
But what if I keep on falling and falling and I never stand? Let me tell you that herein lies the problem of most believers, particularly those whose eyes have been opened to this kind of revelation with the wrong understanding. They never get out of their state of frequent sinfulness. I was, for a couple of months, like that. I was trapped in the wilderness between Egypt and the Promised Land. I was more or less like one of those people that would eventually perish in the wilderness, that would never see Canaan, the land flowing with milk and honey. Let me tell you, any life that gets trapped in this position of wakefulness and sleepiness, this position of rising and falling, will not know when destruction will come upon him. In fact, such a person is yet to see it. This shows that such a person is not totally dead to sin, nor is totally alive to Christ. Such is lukewarm, and Jesus detests lukewarm people; He spews them out (Revelation 3:15-16).
Can I be any clearer? Listen to what the Scripture says in Romans 6:1–2 (MSG): ‘So what do we do? Keep on sinning so God can keep on forgiving? I should hope not! If we’ve left the country where sin is sovereign, how can we still live in our old house there? Or didn’t you realize we packed up and left there for good?’
So Christ has not called us into a liberal life of licentious living. No! If you claim to indeed know and reckon, then you can’t knowingly sin again, it’s not possible. You can’t be at sin’s every beck and call. Sin will be for you an instantaneous occurrence. You know how cats are, how you can hardly see dirt on their furs, so it is with the triumphant Christian. Can a cat ever knowingly jump into muddy grounds? No. But if, while treading, it falls into a ditch of mud and slime, what will it do? It will get out immediately, and next time while passing that place, it will definitely take safety precautions. It is exactly like that.
For some months early in my Christian walk I found myself falling back into the same sins over and again. I knew I was in trouble. What could I do? So I read Sustainable Beginning again. And there I found my problem: I was not deadening those desires mentioned in Colossians 3:5 well enough, nor was I yielding the members of my body ‘as instruments of righteousness to God’ (Romans 6:13-14).
Yielding is the third and final stage in this process. It might prove to be difficult to yield, for the believer striving to work out his righteousness in the flesh. I personally found problem with yielding for a while. I was doing it out of the flesh. It was a wasteful exercise because you can never overcome unless you allow the Jesus in you now to do it. That settled it all for me. So, today, with my confidence in God, and walking with faith in Christ Jesus, I can profess that God has worked in me that miracle of total deliverance from sin. I am currently basking in the light of His love and guidance. And there is no fear of falling in me. No fear of failing. Because His perfect love has cast out fear!
But then, I’m concerned: What about you? Have you been totally delivered?
Joseph Okunola is a child of God and bondservant of the Lord Jesus Christ committed to the souls of men with the gifts and grace of God upon his life. His public ministry is centered on discipleship—a platform where he nurtures Christians with the truth of God’s word in becoming like Christ. He lives in Akobo, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. (Source: Amazon)
