Empty And Void 5 by Apostle Femi Lazarus: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Five Reasons God's People Are Where They Are

Why is it that Christians are where they are — salt that cannot sweeten, agents that cannot transform, many in number but unable to do anything significant? There are five reasons.

1. Family System

   The family was God's original design for equipping every child. Congregations only came into being because families failed. The majority of what is now taught in business schools ought to have been taught by parents who did well.

   Think of a number line — negative integers on one side, positive on the other. A person born into dysfunction, pain, despair, depravity, and lack starts deep in the negatives. For that person, getting to zero — becoming nothing remarkable — requires a measure of stamina most people never account for. The mindset required just to reach zero is the mindset of survival, not expansion. The fact that they have produced what their parents never produced does not mean they have done well in real terms — it only means they have done better than their parents.

   God, looking for someone to take ground in the earth, finds this person still fighting just to become nothing. Meanwhile someone else was born at level 100 by virtue of family environment.

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   The family was designed to be the training ground for giants. What a person sees growing up shapes what they believe is possible. Children who wake up every morning fighting for data, exposed to gaslighting and instability, cannot easily conceive of God using them at a level where they are a blessing to the world — because survival consumes every plan, vision, dream, and intention first.

   • A survival-instinct person quits easily — on people, on relationships, on anything stressful
   • They never learned to negotiate because nobody negotiated with them
   • They throw their name around without weight because they were never taught the value of social capital
   • They have only known money that is given, not relationships that produce

   Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. Raise him with a poverty mindset and he will not depart from it. Raise him to react and he will not depart from it. Raise him unable to hold intellectual conversations and he will not depart from it.

   And into this, the church has historically gathered these people with nowhere else to go, kept them busy with services, and called it revival — while the system they could have challenged went untouched. The best the system can manage such a person to become is another pastor.

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Apostle Femi Lazarus
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2. Religion

   The moment Christianity becomes a religion — attended to as a religion rather than as a living covenant — it builds on two foundations: fear and false hope.

   Amos 5:21-24: "I can't stand your religious meetings. I'm fed up with your conferences and conventions. I want nothing to do with your religion projects, your pretentious slogans and goals. I am sick of your fundraising schemes, your public relations and image making. I've had all I can take of your noisy ego music. When was the last time you sang to me? Do you know what I want? I want justice — oceans of it. I want fairness — rivers of it. That's what I want. That's all I want."

   Religion, particularly once the church becomes what it has become, is a hindrance to God's activity on the face of the earth.

   Many people are not doing certain things not because they love God but because they are afraid. That is the architecture of religion — compliance through fear, not through relationship.

3. Schools

   The education system was designed for a world that is rapidly changing. It produces people trained to memorize and comply, not to think and create. The combination of a dysfunctional family system and a compliance-based education system produces people who carry their results from school as an identity for life — not realizing that those results measured only their performance in a system that was never designed to measure the fullness of who they are.

4. Exposure

   The environment of early exposure shapes what a person believes is achievable. Sitting in a room where someone else's child handles money with a different ease is enough to shift what the observer pursues in life. The difference is not intelligence. It is environment.

5. Individual Quality

   This is the most personal and the most confrontational. The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a pattern found across societies: those who score lowest on intelligence tests boast loudest about their scores, while those who actually perform well are the most conservative. The loudest, most confident voice in the room is often the least informed one — and they simply do not know it.

   Social media has accelerated this. It has produced a form of intelligence that can win arguments and accumulate followers without producing transformation. People have reprogrammed themselves from a logic of action to a logic of appearing intelligent. The problem is that nobody needs to know what a person knows. The quality of their life already tells the story.

The Crowd Can Be Engineered

Crowd engineering is a construct by which a small group of people with information can engineer an entire population to think in a certain direction, react when needed, and respond to what serves the agenda. As long as a crowd is being dealt with, it can be manipulated. The ignorant and the wicked alike have always needed someone to lead them — whether that leader is good or bad.

The church has too often been the most engineerable crowd of all — gathered, emotional, organized, and trained toward compliance. Until individual quality rises — until people develop the capacity to hold intellectual conversations, maintain positions under pressure, and build personal weight — the crowd will remain manageable.