Whose Life Are You Living?: Discovering the Wisdom to Walk in Freedom

By Chidi Jacob

In this book, you will learn:
• How to gain freedom from imposed limitations and superficial customs.
• How to locate your place of Relevance and to leave an enduring legacy.
• How to identify and maximize your gifts and talents.
• The fundamental truths about the Christian life

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780989387361

Book preview

978-0-9893873-5-4

eBook ISBN 978-0-9893873-6-1

Library of Congress Control Number 2013946009

Published by

GodKulture Publishing

Chicago, Illinois

Phone: [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

www.GodKulturepublishing.com

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible:

New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica.

Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Other translations used are King James Version (KJV), the Amplified Bible (AMP), the New King James Version (NKJV), and the English Standard Version (ESV). Emphasis is added in some verses by the author.

Printed in the United States of America

I dedicate this book,

first, to the grace of God that has been made available to

everyone to live the God-ordained life;

and also to you, the reader, within whom this life of

greatness is being awakened.

Acknowledgments

My Lovely Wife: Like a gentle force, you inspire and provide the energy from within. Thanks for loving me.

My Mother: The very first love I experienced, you saw strength in me when everyone else saw weakness. Thank you.

Pastor Sam Ore: If all men were like you, everyone will realize their purpose and live to the fullness of their potentials. Thanks for pushing me.

Godkulture Publishing: Thank you so much for your dedication.

Contents

Introduction

Part One / Dependence Phase

What’s wrong with Mama’s Ideals?

Born to Greatness, Tied to Struggles

Living in the State of Incompleteness

First State of Incompleteness: Slave to Self and Fear

Second State of Incompleteness: Slave to Desire

Part Two / Rethinking Phase

The Indispensable Revolution

Necessary Paradigm Shift in Education

Reversing Human Capacity Development

The Road to Recovery

Locating Your Place of Relevance

Part Three / Awakened to Your Creator

In Pursuit of God

The Truth You Must Know

Core Foundation I: Conquering Self

Core Foundation II: Obeying the Great Commandment

Core Foundation III: Reversing the Order

Introduction

Every journey has four primary components; the purpose, the beginning, the process, and the desired end. The most crucial of the four is the purpose. A purposeless journey has no visible end because it lacks focus and a clear sense of direction. Thus, it is characterized by many wandering turns. A purposeful one is not without trouble either but it is worth the challenges if one focuses on the expected end. The journey of life can be cruel and incredibly difficult. This is the reality of existence whether your birth was planned or accidental, whether you were born with a golden spoon or no spoon at all.

The world’s system of suppression, life’s challenges and our environment of nurture can cause a diversion from the path God has set before us. This can be in form of emotional struggles, financial instability, developmental and academic difficulties, dashed hopes or failed dreams. Thus, the totality of human effort has been channeled towards overcoming these challenges. In fact, it appears today that the need to prevail over these issues has redefined the reason for existence of many.

The unfortunate tragedy is that millions have started to live according to the dictates of external pressures, dancing to the tunes programmed by superficial customs and living a life completely foreign to them. Chances are that your originality and uniqueness for relevance has been muffled to conform to these systems of expectations and traditions, killing the very purpose for which life was given to you. 

This book will help you begin a journey of recovery, launching you into freedom and empowering you with the knowledge that will aid you to be in tune with your true identity so that you can live a life of relevance. It guides you to rethink and refocus your educational and career goals, exposing the truth about your quiescent potentials. It also helps you to remember your Creator, presenting you with His truths and the core foundation of your faith.

Remember, one of the greatest gifts God has given to man is the liberty of the mind; and to reclaim that freedom is equally the greatest accomplishment. Devouring the contents of this life-transforming material will invigorate you to regain your freedom so that you can live the life God predetermined for you. The life where genuine success is attainable. Yes! It is attainable. 

Chidi Jacob

Abuja, Nigeria

PART ONE

DEPENDENCE PHASE

Chapter 1

What’s wrong with Mama’s Ideals?

Unfortunately, in an effort to raise children who were not lazy, our parents taught us that hard work equal to better living. Could it be possible that our parents prepared us for a world that passed with them? Could our twenty-first century techno age require us to reposition ourselves for a new way of thinking? Yet subconsciously we often stay with the inherited framework and never make advancement into contemporary progressive thinking that will increase our effectiveness [T.D. Jakes].

While working on this book, I visited a friend whose wife had just put to bed a beautiful baby girl. As this lovely two day old baby was placed into my arms, I looked deeply into her smallish face full of expectations, and I wondered what she knew about her surroundings. When I inquired about her name, her exuberated and joyful mother told me that shortly after or even before she was conceived, they had named her Peculiar.

Hmmm, this got me thinking as I wrote this page the following morning. I began to contemplate how nature often puts us under the control of nurture. When we are born, we are named according to the feelings, experiences, and state of mind of our parents, whether it’s good or bad. In the past, painful experiences gave birth to very unsociable names. For example, I have a distant relative whose name literally translates to, the child of a bitter heart.

Though such names might be changed later on in life, just like my relative did, but in reality our mindset remains unchanged. We simply change our label but not our content. But beyond the brand we carry in our names, our parents, in their duty to raise us, do expose us to whatever they consider good and needful towards a better upbringing.

BATTLE OF IDENTITY

Take for instance, we are sent to the best schools within their physical and economic reach; and they taught us acceptable customs and traditions that must be known and therefore practiced in order to be acceptable both to the family and the larger society. Therefore, like Peculiar, we all are cultured according to the dictates of our parents as the closest representatives of the larger society. Even though, progressively, some approach might have been modified, but the underlying philosophy to this process continues when we have our own children.

Unfortunately, in most cases, this supposedly acceptable custom rarely leads us to the discovery of our true and unique identity and the path of God’s purpose for our existence because they are mostly based on human expectations and calculations. In the place of who we are, they asked what we want to be. Eventually, we spend the rest of our lives struggling to unravel this mismatched equation.

In other words, it only sets up an expectation for us to accomplish or become something the world recognizes while not paying attention to who we are as unique individuals. So, rather than promoting our ingenuity which guarantees our true self esteem, the process is reconfigured, making achievement a substitute for self-esteem and true fulfillment. As a result, though you might be richly endowed with immeasurable talents, the world tells you that you are poor and therefore a ‘nobody’ unless you possess luxury and bears some titles designated by human institutions. Since the world does not recognize the real you, you are forced to abandon the development of your true self in pursuit of what the world defines. Suppressing internal greatness to pursue external acceptance!

Though you might be raised by strangers, adopted parents, or in an orphanage, this method of branding and indoctrination is the same, and the results might not vary considerably. But the fact here is that we are already branded and cultured before we could think for ourselves. In most cases, this brand directly controls who we are, what we do, our general perception, and life expectations unless we go through a process of self-rediscovery at the age of maturity or some other point in life. It is significantly necessary that we exchange ‘who the world told us that we are and how to live’ with the ideals that reconcile our true selves and identity. You must ask yourself, whose life am I living? Is this truly my life or are others living through me? Are you expressing your originality or is the world expressing their values through you? Otherwise, our mentality and approach to life will continually be controlled by external factors like social background, economic status and experiences of our parents.

It is so deep that in most cases, our political ideologies are limited to our environment. For instance, if you were born and raised in the United States during the sixties, you probably saw communism and regarded the USSR as the greatest enemy to your freedom. If you were born in Nigeria, your political thought, and your choice of political candidates is highly hooked on tribal foundations and sentiments. While we may travel further than our parents did, get better education and more exposure, and begin to think that we have escaped this loop, but in reality, the deepest of our motivations are still controlled by this force of nurture. That is why, if your parents were very poor, survival is the most important lesson you learn early in life. Conversely, you would be taught that maintaining status-quo is the very object of life, if your parents are wealthy. Though there might be exceptional cases, but this is the case for the majority.

LIVING AT HOME IN A FOREIGN LAND

While working in the United States, I came out to the parking lot one day to realize that the blacks, especially those of us from Africa, but mainly of Nigerian descent had some of the most expensive cars. Though we were thousands of miles away in the U.S., still our choice of cars did not depend on our actual economic, family or business needs, but it was driven by our want to make a status statement.

Yes, everyone has this need, you might say, but why was it so prevalent among us from Nigeria? The answer is found in our environment of nurture. Among other nations of Africa, Nigeria has become a place where our value system is directly tied to the display of wealth and status. Honor and respect is no longer given to who truly deserves it, but it is accorded based on social status and evidence of money, no matter how ill-gotten it might be. For this reason, though we might be physically and even culturally distanced from the shores of our homeland, our wants and needs were still controlled by the now prominent superficial value system back home. We seek for respect and recognition and measure our relevance relative to the same values with which we are measured in our country. So, to meet up, we slave to live in big homes and drive exotic cars while strangers raise our children.

Husbands and wives work extremely long hours to maintain the mortgage of a house, but lose their home in this process, and the marriage finally heads to the rocks. Our economic status may have improved, but we are now equally losing more families than before. I drove a Mercedes Benz despite the fact that it was worthless when compared to the cost of maintenance and actual value it added to my person and professional development, but it just felt good to show the world that I had arrived. Despite the fact that my boss cared less what car I drove to work because all that mattered was my performance on the job. Anyway, I sold the car when I realized that it took much more than it added to me. But some members of my family, out of their love, respect, and good desires for me, frowned greatly at what they perceived as my dwindling social status.

As a matter of fact, they offered to lend me money if I could no longer afford to maintain this level of prestige. On a further enquiry, I found out that their concern was based majorly on the perception of the society, not really whether I was working to improve my actual self-worth. They were very concerned about what the world would say about me. Friends, make no mistake about it, you will never realize that you are living your life as a prisoner until you taste the other side of freedom. It’s been reported that African Americans spend more annually on depreciable goods such as cars, cloths, liquor, and personal care items than any other groups in America, but fewer than 50 percent own their own homes when compared to more than 70 percent of whites.

Why do you think this is the case? I certainly agree with Bishop T. D Jakes that, often when people have been constantly belittled and ostracized, they so envy their oppressors that they take shortcuts to gratification. This point brings us back to the limitations implanted in the mind by our environment. Given the history and experience of African Americans, it is obvious that majority are still fighting to overcome the