If You're Born Into Poverty, Do This To Come Out by Apostle Femi Lazarus: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

What Poverty Really Is

Poverty begins when a person cannot afford the basic necessities of life. The United Nations definition is living below one dollar per day. However, poverty is more than an empty pocket — it is a system that destroys the way a person sees themselves and the world. When you cannot afford the basics, a deeper damage sets in: you begin to conclude that certain things are not for your kind.

There is a concept called fatality — the belief that whatever becomes of your life was God's design. This is one of the most dangerous ideas a person born in deprivation can carry. It becomes spiritual language for giving up.

The Psychological Damage of Growing Up Poor

Apostle Femi Lazarus shared his personal experience of being born the sixth of eight children in a family that made prayer a condition for the next meal. He did not know he was poor — he simply could not relate when social studies class taught a three-meal-a-day schedule. He hawked on the streets, sold things from primary school, and hushed his way through university.

The damage he identified:

• Low self-esteem. Growing up poor creates a constant readiness to be bullied, an inability to match up, and a conclusion that certain levels of life are unavailable to you.
• Shrinking in front of opportunity. There were jobs he could have gotten in university that he never applied for because he did not feel he deserved them. He had the skill — but not the audacity. He even backed out of conversations with influential people because he concluded they would not choose him anyway.
• Wrong marriage choices. Low self-esteem can put you in a place where you marry the low-budget version of your desire. Where you marry someone because they look like who you should have married. Where you marry someone just to leave home. Where you stay in a bad situation because you do not believe anything better is available to you.

Overcompensation: The Other Danger

When someone who grew up in lack suddenly gets resources, overcompensation sets in. Whatever they were most deprived of becomes their most excessive pursuit. This is why a new iPhone becomes an identity statement. This is why people use their rent money at the club. This is the Jacob syndrome — seven years of your life invested for what you should have gotten in days, because you could not negotiate your worth.

Overcompensation in business means undercharging for products and services. It means blurring boundaries with clients, over-delivering, burning out, and getting angry that people do not respect the low price you set for yourself. They sense the lack of audacity and respond accordingly.

Old money does not shout. Nothing makes noise like lack.

Institutionalized Poverty

Poverty is also perpetuated by systems designed to keep people in it. Social welfare structures that reward inactivity over work train people into purposelessness. When you remove purpose from a person's life, you establish them transgenerationally in poverty. The people who benefit from poverty — the politically powerful, the exploitative religious institution — have no interest in seeing it end. Whoever benefits from a situation usually has a stake in maintaining it.

The most effective empowerment is not a handout. It is orientation change — helping a person see who they are and what they are worth.

How to Come Out

• Accept the diagnosis. You cannot begin the journey to freedom until you acknowledge that this is poverty and it is not God's design for your life. Emotional defensiveness about the word poor will prevent you from embracing the knowledge needed to come out.
• Change your orientation. The mentality that kept you in poverty cannot take you out. You need something entirely different. This comes through books, mentorship, change of association, and change of environment. The quality of your conversation is the quality of your transformation.
• Change your associations deliberately. If the people around your esteem cannot boost it, you need different people. Those who carry the presence to affect your orientation may be perceived as proud — that resistance is a sign that they are exactly who you need.
• Guard your name until it can open doors. You cannot throw your brand around people you have not built. The child who does not have a mother should not sustain injury in the back — be careful who you drag online, because you do not know who they know and who you will need tomorrow.
• Seek mentorship ruthlessly. One statement from an experienced mind can rescue you from ten years of mistakes. Ride on the shoulders of those whose today is your desired tomorrow. Coming out of poverty is a day at a time — a little change of orientation here, a little learning there.