The Advantage Non-christians May Have Over Christians by Apostle Femi Lazarus: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

The Painful Reality

Serving God faithfully does not guarantee success in every area of life. There are Christians who have given everything — their first salaries, their time, their devotion — and still struggled in ways that those who don't acknowledge God did not. The temptation is to form conclusions: either God is not interested in our earthly outcomes, or perhaps those who failed were not Christian enough. Both of these are convenient conclusions formed not out of genuine knowledge but out of the mind's need to resolve tension and find rest.

The more honest and painful conclusion is this: God may want us to succeed, but he has already established systems to help us get there — and many of those systems do not carry religious labels.

Moses and the Jethro Principle

Moses was doing everything. He fought Pharaoh, parted the Red Sea, turned water to blood, led an entire nation out of bondage. He had seen fire, he had seen plague, he had seen God show up in undeniable ways. And yet Jethro — a simple man from Midian who had not witnessed any of that — came, observed what Moses was doing, and said something that should have been obvious but wasn't: you are going to die doing this.

The God Moses was busy serving could watch him burn out. Not because God didn't care — but because there was a Jethro already present with the solution. God does not always send from heaven what is already on earth. Perhaps he doesn't bother saying what someone around you is already saying, trusting that in genuine humility you will receive it.

Religious Filters and Missed Wisdom

Many Christians read the Bible through religious filters that narrow what they are able to receive. They see God only through the lens of the miraculous and the devotional. But God is not revealed only through burning bushes. He is revealed through the ordering of nature, through systems, through structure, through the precision with which he built creation. There is no waste in anything God made. The plant contributes to humans. Humans contribute to the animal. The animal contributes back. Everything interrelates.

Perhaps the reason some believers feel overwhelmed — too many visions, too many assignments, no coherence — is because the things on their table don't interrelate. A certain godliness would see them organized. But because we have been conditioned to see spirituality only in one dimension, we miss the management principles embedded in Genesis 1.

Those who have not been conditioned by religious filters sometimes absorb these principles more readily. They are not reading God through a limiting lens. And that is why a non-Christian may understand and apply a divine principle before the believer does.

God Will Not Give You the Luxury of Thinking You Know Enough

God is not going to give you the luxury of concluding you know him enough to the point that you don't need people — that you don't need systems, that you don't need lessons, that you don't need wisdom. If there are areas of your life where you feel you know God too well to need mentoring, you will fail in those areas. Not as punishment — but because the structure God placed to help you succeed in those areas has been despised.

The rich man in the parable asked that Lazarus be sent to his brothers. Jesus said they have people on earth who should speak to them. Maybe God doesn't send from heaven what is already on earth. Maybe we pray long because we have despised the men God has already placed nearby.

What We Refuse to Receive

There are solutions available — in schools, in academies, through people — that we despise because they don't wear religious colors. We call things conspiracy theory. We reject what we don't understand. We insult the messenger instead of weighing the message. The child of the Shunammite woman died, and Elijah said God did not tell him. We cannot know everything. The burden of assuming God must always speak directly to you — and that if he doesn't it means the information isn't for you — is a burden too heavy to carry and one God never assigned.

If there are aspects of your life where you feel you know God too well to need mentorship, you will fail in those aspects. Not because God is cruel. Not because he does not want you to succeed. But because he has already put in place the principle that will help you not to fail — and you have concluded you are beyond needing it.

• We can serve God and fail.
• We can be in church all our lives and not succeed.
• Everything can go south because of one piece of knowledge we refused to acquire.

Maybe he does not bother saying what someone around you is already saying — and he thinks that in your humility, if you truly want knowledge, you will be the one to go and get it.