•LAGOS Pastor, Pastor ITUAH IGHODALO Reveals A Lot
•Reveals The Spiritual & Practical Lessons Of COVID-19
Pastor Ituah Ighodalo is the founder of The Trinity House Church in Lekki, Lagos. He was our guest recently at one of our City People TV Instagram Live chat during which he revealed what God told him about Covid-19 pandemic. Below he reveals the spiritual & practical lessons of the pandemic and his conclusion is simple: Covid-19 has shown that God is not very pleased with us, as a people. Read on.
Right now there is the easing of the Covid-19 lockdown. How do you see what we have been going through and what is God telling you?
Covid-19 has been a very unusual, very challenging period for everybody, especially as most people were not quite expecting it. It caught a lot of people napping and people did not realise the intensity, and the depth it will over.
You can imagine planes are not flying for about 2 months now. It never happened before. Hotels are all short for about 2 months to 3 months.
Restaurants are not working and of course, social events virtually cancelled, not just in Nigeria but all over the world. And people who travel every 2 weeks; every 2 days, are all stuck here for 3 months and people are now learning to work from home.
So Covid-19 tells us 3 or 4 things, from the Spiritual to the Practical. From the Spiritual, it says that God is in control. God is in control of everything. No 2, God can do anything or he can allow anything to happen. No 3, from my Biblical studies, when things like this happen, it shows that God is not very pleased with us, he is not very pleased with the way we have conducted ourselves and our affairs. Every time there has been a pandemic in the Bible, it has always been a reaction by God to the activities of men.
So it happened first in the time of Noah. People were committing so much sin. God brought a pandemic in the form of flood. It was a pandemic. A pandemic is anything that destroys many people. And only one man was righteous. Subsequent to that was the one in Egypt when they won’t allow the children of Isreal to leave. God brought in a series of pandemics to Egypt, including the killing of the 1st born sons. God was angry with them. Then there was another one in Sodom and Gomorrah.
That was a very serious one. Adultery, Fornication, Lesbianism, Homosexuality and God couldn’t find 10 righteous people there. So another pandemic came. One of the most painful was when David committed a sin. He taunted the people against the Will of God and 70,000 people died in pestilence.
We need to know that God is not too happy with the way we have run our lives, with the way our leaders have led us and with the things that we have tolerated. Those are spiritual lessons to learn from Covid-19. We all need to talk back to God. We need to turn away from our wicked ways. “If my people who are called by my name shall repent and turn from their wicked ways I will hear from heaven and I will heal their land”. This is 2nd Chronicles Chapter 7 vs 14, 15 and 16. So we need to really, really repent and beg God and stop all these self-idolatry and the worship of mammon and money and power and position as done by us can bring down evil governments as we have seen. So, those are the lessons to learn in terms of spirituality.
We need to get closer to God. We need to pray more. We need to listen to God more. We need to serve God better. We need to be nicer people, to one another. And we need to get rid of all evil, like Fornication, Adultery, Homosexuality, Lasciviousness, Wanton behaviour and so on and so forth. That is on that side.
On the practical side, it is very, very clear that Covid-19 aside from the unfortunate incidence of very many people who lost their lives and those God saved, Covid-19 has told us that not all the things we used to think are important are really important. They are not important, like the big parties we used to have. They are not critical. The big burials are not important or critical. The big weddings. They are not critical. Those things are not important. So it brought that out in a lot of us.
No 2. There should be minimalism. There should be better and more efficient ways of doing things and running businesses. That is why a lot of businesses cannot survive, because as they make they spend. No savings. No deep pocket. And a lot of them are a little bit over bleated. So minimalism is key. God will supply all your needs, not necessarily all your wants. We need to be more efficient in the way you run business. No 3, our spirit of acquisition should be curtailed. One celebrity lady was telling me yesterday that she has only been wearing 3 or 4 or 5 sets of comfortable clothes in the last 3 months. She has seen that all the clothes she has put in her wardrobe, she does not need them. And she didn’t need to have had them. I am sure it is the same for a lot of people. If truth be told a lot of the things we have been acquiring all the time (buy this, buy that) they are not really necessary.
The good thing also about Covid-19 is that we are suddenly beginning to love our neighbours especially those who live in nice places. They have suddenly discovered that we have poor people amongst us that we need to be nice to. We are now beginning to give them palliatives. These people have been living with us for years, we didn’t care about them. We would see them on the streets we didn’t even talk to them.
But now that Covid-19 came and we are afraid that if we don’t take care of these people now there will be trouble, we see people raising money to feed the poor, packing rice, packing all sorts, putting food in trucks for those in their neighbourhood.
And my prayer is that post-Covid-19, we would continue to look after these people, we would continue to be there for them. We would continue to do those empowerment programmes for the poor amongst us. How can we take people out of poverty? It is not just a question of giving them some rice and some food to eat for some time it’s better to teach them how to eat. Let’s empower as many as possible. We can help the government to empower these people and turn their lives around. So, these are the lessons of Covid-19.
We all need to be structured and focused and productive & minimal.
My heart goes out to the Tourism industry especially and the Airline industry also. I want to assure them that they will come out of it stronger and more efficient and focused and diligent. I think if we all learn the lessons of this period the world should be a better place.
READ ALSO: WHY I AM NOT READY TO RE-OPEN MY CHURCH NOW – T.B JOSHUA
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