My People, Destroyed

I often joke with my kids about who God was speaking to in Hosea 4:6. Of course we know from reading the Scriptures that through the prophet Hosea God was rebuking the House of Israel for their disobedience to and rejection of His precepts. You remember how God delivered them from enslavement through an unlikely vessel, performed miracle after miracle to attest to His sovereignty and dominion, fed them manna from heaven and kept their clothes and countenances in tact so that they didn’t look like the wilderness experience that they had been through, right? And what did they do? They made their own gods as they murmured and complained the whole way to the exodus. Do you ever look at our race of people and how we lag behind other races and cultures? We fall behind on everything from the way that we handle money and investments, business ownership, relationships, parenting and nurturing, marriage…everything. When I look at our people as a whole, I can’t help but to think that the curse that a dark-skinned nation of people brought upon themselves through lack of knowledge is still affecting and breaking families within our community today. Back in 2007, I had an investment idea that would break cycles of debt and poverty within multiple families. I was married at the time so it included my ex, his father and mother, my mom, and my sister and brother-in-law. Through some time praying and fasting, God gave to me instruction to get the above mentioned people together and present to them the idea of real estate investing. We were all working and making decent money. Had we all invested just $10k apiece on a residential property, restored it and then put it back on the market we could have taken the profit and invested in another and continued to flip properties until we were all completely debt free and with enough capital to branch off individually or to continue building together. Sounds familiar, right? That’s because the method that God gave to me wasn’t new; it was knowledge that had been tried and proven effective. That was 14 years ago and to this date, all of us are still in debt and none of us own (without having a mortgage) our homes. Both my mother and my ex father-in-law (his wife died some years ago) are near 70, an age where they should be living comfortably in full retirement with properties and wealth to hand off to their kids and grandkids. I remember that day when I spoke to them about the opportunity that would have changed the course of our lives. Everyone just looked dumbfounded. But beneath their outward expression I could see and hear the condition of their hearts. A couple thought that my ex and I had come up with a way to make money for ourselves even though the idea was presented to use an outside source to govern over the LLC that we would form. And then there were others who even though they professed to be ministers and advocates of the Scripture, couldn’t fathom the idea of using their money to help anyone other than themselves- the very principle that the early Church was built upon. Do you see how lack and rejection of knowledge keep curses in place and families bound? Unfortunately, this kind of division happens too often in our culture. Why is that? I can list a number of reasons: jealousy, selfishness, greed, pride… all things that we can avoid by having and applying biblical knowledge. A lot of things have changed over the past 14 years primarily due to the reasons that I just listed above. Although we didn’t follow God’s instruction as a unit years ago, I am determined to work hard, invest smart and train my children according to the Word so that our lineage is no longer a part of God’s rejected.