Empty And Void 4 by Apostle Femi Lazarus: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

The Blessing Was Never About You Alone

The reason people react with suspicion when told God wants to bless them is not because they hate prosperity. It is because the version of blessing they have been presented with is entirely self-focused — give and receive, sow and harvest, believe for your miracle. The mathematics has not added up, and the disappointment is real.

But every time God talks about the blessing in scripture, it extends beyond the person receiving it. The blessing is always: you being blessed to be a blessing. The covenant with Abraham was not just about Abraham. It was about every nation on the earth finding blessing through him.

The pain around this subject is real. The injustice visible in the world is real. But the anger directed at the idea of blessing has been misdirected — aimed at the concept rather than at the distorted version of it that was taught.

Religion Transfers Responsibility to God

The danger of religion is that it creates the impression that God will come from heaven to do everything. He will put money in pockets. He will decide who lives long. He will sort out the nation. In this framework, people can do whatever they want, since God is sovereign over all outcomes anyway.

That is the foundation of religion: the perpetual transfer of responsibility to a deity.

And that same ignorance can govern a personal life — not taking responsibility for the things one should take responsibility for, waiting for a word, a prophecy, a crossover service to change what requires personal decision and action. 2 Peter 1:3 — "His divine power has given us all things that pertain to life and godliness." Everything needed has already been provided. The task is to do something with it.

The Damage of Being Positioned for the Wrong Thing

A person cannot be effective in areas they have not built for. A man who never trained his body cannot step into athletic competition by faith alone. A person who studied the wrong subject — forced by circumstance into a course they had no wiring for — should not carry their CGPA as a lifelong definition of their intelligence.

Many Nigerians studied subjects that had no connection to their destiny. They ended up in careers that were available, not aligned. Their grades in those courses became a stigma. Their intelligence was measured against a standard that was never designed to measure them.

The problem is not that these people are unintelligent. The problem is that they were never resourced to study what they were actually built for.

The generation before did not always leave inheritance. So the current generation must answer the basic questions first — food, shelter, survival — before anything else. Every choice has to pass through that filter. The luxury of sitting back, thinking, planning, and executing on long-term vision is available only to those who did not inherit poverty along with their birth.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution Is Not Being Discussed

AI is a wrecking ball. It can be ridden, but it is going to keep getting smarter, and it is already dismantling the structures that previous generations were trained to enter.

• Jobs are under threat that people do not yet know are under threat
• The kind of life school prepared people for is going
• The kind of life home training prepared people for is changing
• Entry-level roles across industries are disappearing — the training ground is being removed

Dear Christians: do not embrace the kind of hope that kills. There is morbid hope — the hope that keeps a person passive while the world around them is restructured. Get into rooms where the right conversations are happening now. If not, systems will be built on your back — not behind your back, on your back.

God wants his children to have light and to walk in dominion — not just in spiritual matters, but through whatever revolution the world is currently passing through. There is wisdom in God adequate for every season.

Wisdom Is Not a Cure for Foolishness

The problem of many people is more than ignorance. There are those who fight wisdom. And wisdom, it turns out, is not what the Bible recommends as a cure for foolishness.

Proverbs 24:7 — "Wisdom is too high for a fool." It cannot enter where the heart is closed to it.

The first thing anyone who lacks wisdom needs is not more information. It is humility — specifically, the humility to say: I may know something, but not at the level for it to change my life. The person who tweets insight they cannot live by has not received wisdom. They have received content. Wisdom that cannot change its carrier cannot change anyone else.

Social media has produced a form of intelligence that can argue brilliantly but produces no transformation. It can insult, debate, trend, and accumulate followers — without ever walking in dominion. That intelligence came from somewhere. And often, it came from somewhere that did not walk in dominion either.

Dominion Requires Access to Wisdom

Ephesians 3:10: "So now through the church the multifaceted wisdom of God in all its countless aspects might now be made known, revealing the mystery to the angelic rulers and authorities in heavenly places."

The church is not just a gathering. It is meant to be the display of the wisdom of God to principalities — through what it does in the earth, not just through what it sings in a building.

Nothing makes walking in dominion more difficult than religion that substitutes spiritual performance for actual engagement with the world.

A good name is better than silver and gold. Every relationship broken in a moment of anger, every person walked out on, every door shut by a poorly aimed outburst — these accumulate. People who understand power understand names. They understand what they do with their name, where they go with it, how they position it over time.

Proverbs 22:1 — "A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches."

You were not born to be managed by systems. You were born to understand them and to change them. The wisdom of God available to you is multifaceted — it reaches into science, governance, creativity, medicine, business, and every other domain that shapes human life. It is too high for a fool, yes — but humility unlocks it. Ask. Receive. Walk in it. The generation that rises in dominion will not be the loudest. It will be the most prepared, the most just, and the most surrendered to the God who gives power to get wealth — so that his covenant may be established on the earth.

Father, give us the humility to know we do not know enough. Strip away the religious substitute that has kept your people passive. Let wisdom — not opinion, not argument, not performance — be what flows from us. We want to walk in dominion not as a display of personal power, but as carriers of your justice and your righteousness on the earth. Establish your covenant through us. Let what we build outlast us. Let the generation after us inherit something better than we inherited, in Jesus' name.