CHRONIC SPIRITUAL LEAD POISONING

By Akin Ojumu

You are a genuinely born-again believer in Christ Jesus. But you’ve now found yourself at a point in your Christian life where the flood of disillusionment is eroding your faith and, in the process, washing away your confidence. Downcast and dispirited, a heavy overcast sky presses down on your mind, preventing the sun from shining through. 

Try as you may to get this monkey of despondency off your back, it fastens its grip and stubbornly refuses to let go. To rekindle the fire that once burnt in your soul, you try to bury yourself in more activity, but the spark is long gone. The more conferences and retreats you attend, the further into the funk you sink and the more disenchanted you get.

So dreadful is the discontentment in your soul, going to Church has become a great ordeal. To make matters worse, whenever you succeed in dragging yourself to Church, you are immediately full of regrets even before the service gets halfway. You are confronted with a progressively stale worship, and the well-worn messages are annoyingly clichéd. 

Week after week, it's the same old same old unsatisfying rituals. The whole setup is meant to stimulate emotion, stir up feeling, and whip up sentiment. From start to finishing, everything is choreographed to appeal to the flesh at the expense of the soul. Looking around, everyone is caught up in the hype of faux spirituality.

Unfortunately, the emotional high is characteristically fleeting. By the time the narcigesis inflated fellows enter their vehicles to return home, they are already deflated. In their eyes is the dazed distant stare of a junky coming down hard from a drug-induced high.

All of these have led you to the sad reality that going to Church is no longer worth the consternation or aggravation. In fact, you’ve stopped going all together. In the last several years, you can count on your fingers how many times you’ve been to any Church. Apart from the occasional weddings and funerals, you’ve practically kissed Church attendance goodbye.

To your greatest astonishment, you recently discovered that you aren’t alone in these spiritual doldrums. Suddenly, you realize there are many who, caught up in the same dilemma, have similarly given up playing Church. Strikingly, you find that these people are also asking themselves the same question you’ve been asking yourself for some time now. “Is this all there is to Christianity?”

I’m here to inform you that I too have been where you are now. What you are suffering from is the long-term deleterious effect of chronic poisoning from erroneous teachings. All these years you’ve been operating within the bubble of delusional narcissism. The shepherds to whom you entrusted your spiritual life have fed you with rotten spiritual bread.

You’ve been promised many things in the name of God that God Himself has not promised. Your disillusionment with Christianity stems from your disappointment in having not received all the things you’ve been assured will accrue to you.

The Gospel that is packaged and presented to you as the true Gospel is man-made narcigesis. All this time you’ve sat under the ministry of people who teach the Bible in a way that places excessive emphasis on oneself and prioritizes accumulation of worldly goods. Instead of feeding the sheep, these shepherds entertain the goats. Their goal is to make the Church attractive to unbelievers and not for the unbelievers to fall on their knees and beg God for mercy.

Just as lead poisoning builds up in the body over several years, every time you are fed with the false Gospel, even if it’s in small doses, it gradually builds up to spiritual unwholesomeness. At first, the spiritual lead poisoning can be hard to detect. Even people who seem spiritually healthy can have high spiritual levels of false teachings. The signs and symptoms usually don't appear until dangerous amounts have accumulated.

Eventually, the full-blown symptoms of erroneous teaching poisoning begin to manifest. Often you find developmental delay, learning difficulties, irritability, loss of appetite, weight loss, sluggishness and fatigue, abdominal pain, vomiting, constipation, hearing loss, and seizures. Failing appropriate timely intervention, all these end in spiritual deadness.

“What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means! Let God be true though everyone were a liar, as it is written, “That you may be justified in your words, and prevail when you are judged.”” (Romans 3:3-4).

That you are disillusioned about your faith does not make Christianity of no effect. Your disappointment in the unfaithfulness of men is not evidence of God’s unfaithfulness. What you are is just another victim of men who speak words in the name of God that are not in the Word of God. These are men adept at turning their sins into inordinate profit, and they are proficient at selling their gullible audience a bill of wooden nickels.

I beg of you, pick up your Bible and study the Word of God yourself. Do not let the failure of men stand in the way of having your name written in the Book of life.