Parenting, Poverty And Black Tax by Apostle Femi Lazarus: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

The Cup Principle

For everyone coming from a poor background, at least for a season — maybe five years — a certain kind of what feels like hardness is necessary. You will see people you love suffering and you will not be able to do anything about it, even when you technically could. This sounds harsh. But this is the only way out for most people.

If you have a cup that is half full and you are already pouring to everybody around you, they will not have enough and neither will you. But if you wait until your cup is full, you will overflow — they will end up having enough, and you will not be reduced.

Many people start pouring from an empty cup too early. They sacrifice their own rising to service a family system that the sacrifice cannot save anyway.

There was a man who liquidated his entire business to take care of his sick father. The father still died. The business was gone. Both were lost.

What Black Tax Actually Does

Black tax is the tax that an average black person — particularly in Africa — pays before they have even risen enough to compete in the market. Before you can stand at market-level competition, you are already burdened with liabilities you did not create.

• It is not just about the money sent home — it is about the bandwidth consumed, the decisions distorted, the identity formed around scarcity.
• Giving when you are not yet established trains you not to know what to do with money. You have not built a culture of accumulation and investment; you have built a reflex of distribution.
• Sometimes giving from a place of emotional guilt — not actual generosity — is what drives it. People give to feel okay about themselves, not because they are genuinely in surplus.

A good parent, at a certain season, should be able to say: take care of yourself first. When your child rises, they will come back and take care of you. Pulling them back down before they have risen does not cure the poverty — it simply ensures that everyone remains in the hole.

The Parents Who Could Not Build Wealth Cannot Teach It

One of the painful truths is this: parents who could not build wealth cannot teach you how to build wealth. They will give you what they know — and if what they know is a framework of scarcity, of building one small house as the ceiling of achievement, of keeping quiet around rich people — that is what will be passed on.

When a child deviates from those patterns and tries to learn differently, the family can frame it as rebellion. The child is not rebelling. They are trying to access a system that the family does not yet know.

• There is a difference between honouring parents and being financially entangled with a system that cannot sustain itself.
• Supporting parents can be done — on a budget, with clear limits, at amounts that do not compromise your own capacity to build.
• The moment you have more than what you immediately need, do not send it all home. Channel it into something that multiplies.

What Upbringing Does to Identity

Upbringing does not just shape what resources a child has — it shapes what the child believes they deserve. Children who grow up hearing constantly that money is scarce, that rich people are different, that the family does not belong in certain circles, absorb all of that as identity.

This is why someone can be intelligent, capable, and still not be able to pronounce a contract value of 32 million naira in a boardroom. The language of large numbers was never spoken at home. The body does not know how to hold it.

• Decorum, the ability to carry yourself in high-level spaces, is one of the signs of a healthy upbringing. Those who grew up around people of substance know how to be among people of substance.
• The children who grow up in environments of lack often develop a compensatory relationship with external validation — spending on visible symbols of success because deep down they feel like nobody.
• People who throw insults around publicly, who cannot contain themselves, who always have to be heard — they almost invariably did not come from people of meaning. That anger is tracing a root.

You cannot change what was done to you. But you can know that your brain — shaped by those years — may be damaged in certain ways. The most important thing you can then do is submit it for rewiring, under someone who has gone ahead, and stop trusting the very mind that the environment built.

Religion and the Theology of Smallness

Religion has sometimes been weaponised to keep people in lack. There is a posture that has developed in some Christian environments where visible prosperity is read as spiritual compromise, and visible suffering is read as faithfulness.

That is not theology. It is insincerity. If you cannot afford to give, how spiritual is your lack? Is God honoured by inability?

Money is a tool — like a microphone, like a spanner. It was created to multiply and to solve problems. Someone who is able to give generously, to fund healthcare for those who cannot afford it, to build platforms that change communities — they are doing more with the tool than the person who is spiritually proud of having nothing.

The problem comes when money becomes the point rather than the means. When accumulation replaces purpose. When showing becomes more important than giving. That is where the tool breaks the person. Keep the tool in its proper place — and use it.