Building a Spiritual Nation: The Foundation: Other Titles, #11

By Theodore Andoseh

A spiritual nation is an organ for God's purposes. 

The Lord Jesus Christ founded a great spiritual nation—the race of the elect, the community of king-priests—and the apostles were the builders. In a sense, every ministry, every community, has a founder and the rest are builders of that spiritual nation.

• What goes into the forging of a spiritual nation?
• What are the characteristics of their founders?
• What are the distinct attributes and responsibilities of its builders?
• How does it start and how does it grow into the nation that God intends?
• How do we remain a spiritual nation and not go astray when success comes?

Building a Spiritual Nation attempts Bible-grounded answers to these questions and more. The author, Theodore Andoseh, harnesses insight from two major approaches to nation building—the pattern of Moses and that of our Lord Jesus Christ. He identifies seven vectors in the forging of a mighty spiritual nation. He singles out disloyalty on the part of the nation builders as the major pitfall on the pathway towards this great nation of kings and priests.

It is the all of us all—produced by absolute surrender and total consecration—that will bring about this global community of the elect.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books4revival
• Release date: Sep 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9798223839019

Theodore Andoseh

The current leader of Christian Missionary Fellowship Internation

Book preview

1

A SPIRITUAL NATION—1

Citizenship Requirement

PASSING ON THE BATON

How long do we go before we are to offer the goal of our ministry to our Lord Jesus? How many years? 43 years to go. Forty-five years ago, I was in my first camp in Mpoundou, in the South West province. We had four major teachers in that camp: Brother Zach taught us on discipleship to Jesus Christ, Brother Lesley Wildon, a tall missionary from England, taught us on consecration, Brother Martin, a missionary from Germany taught us on practical work; carpentry, and Brother Peter Schneider, another missionary from Germany taught us on the four baptisms: the baptism into the Body of Christ, the baptism into water, the baptism into the Holy Spirit and the baptism of fire and sufferings. Then, I was almost 15 years old.

Amongst the people that were singing for us in front, there was a small girl of eleven years—Barbara Atogho, another small girl of about fifteen years—Jessica Atogho, and another small girl, around fourteen years—Margaret Williams. They were the ones singing for us.

Brother Zach taught us on discipleship to Christ. One of the things he told us, he quoted a Christian writer called John Owen from a book entitled The Death of Death in the Death of Christ. John Owen says,

God can never befriend a man whom the world has not totally rejected. No man has ever been totally accepted by God until he was totally rejected by man.

He taught us on discipleship to Christ. And he told us, All who followed Jesus abandoned something in order to follow Him. If you have nothing to abandon, you cannot manifest your discipleship to Christ. And he told us, If you fail your exams, you will not have something to lay on the altar in order to follow Christ as part of your discipleship to Christ.

There used to be small blue exercise-books in those days called Olympia. I wrote my notes in my exercise book and then I read them many times. It was there in that camp that I renewed my consecration to God, and I counted the cost.

If God would accept me totally, I must accept to be rejected totally by the world. If I want to be accepted by my family, by my peers in school, by girls who will admire me, I cannot become a friend of God. So, I had to accept the cost of discipleship. Again, I was fourteen, turning fifteen. And it was a historic camp for me.

Forty-five years from that day, I am serving the Lord as leader of our work. I had no such thoughts on that day. I was just sitting quietly there, confronting the call of God to be a disciple of Jesus, and I accepted. It was in July 1978.

Today, you are also in a Bible camp, and you will have many teachers, just like I had many teachers. And forty-three years from today, some of you will be laying our goal accomplished at the feet of Jesus.

There were many of us that day in the camp. Some have gone deep, others have backslidden, still others like me are passing on the baton to you so that you will be a disciple of Jesus Christ and run the race, fight the fight of faith and serve the Lord, conquer nations, and do the will of God so that God will be glorified and the world for whom Christ died be saved.

DO YOU LOVE GOD?

Many of you sitting here have never believed. You do not love God. You do not feel the love of God in your hearts. You do not feel God in your hearts. You do not know God in your hearts. God has never touched you in your heart. Everything is in your head; everything is because of your parents. You go to the church of your parents, but your heart does not love God. Your heart has never felt the presence of God. There is no desire for God in your heart. The things that you desire in your heart are pleasures, the admiration of your friends, the desire to be like other children whose parents are rich, the desire to have clothes and shoes like other people’s children. But in your heart, there is no love for God. You are religious but you do not love God, you do not know God, you do not feel God, and you do not desire God. God is not real for you. When you want to pray, it is like a recitation. When you are playing, you shout, Eh, I have scored a goal! but when they tell you to pray, you close your eyes and recite lifelessly. That is because you do not know God, because God is not real to you, because you do not feel God in your heart; you are religious. You only know about God, and you only follow your parents, but you do not know God.

Some of you practise sin. Others do not practice sin like others because of their parents. But in your heart, you do not love God and you do not know God. That is how I was.

CONVICTED OF SIN AND SAVED

I knew about God. I went to my parents’ church. I studied the Bible, I even earned three diplomas from Bible studies. In fact, it was very funny; I had a diploma for the study of the book of Ephesians! Today I ask myself, What did I understand? And I had another diploma on a Bible course about the church. Why was I studying about the church? I do not know. I only know that it was a Bible course from the Bible school of the church of Christ. They were making us read all the Bible verses about The church greets you, the church of Christ in Corinth… I think they were trying to teach us that the only true church was their own, the Church of Christ. I got the certificate but there was no desire for God.

I did not feel God. I did not love God. I did not hate sin. I was afraid of sin, but I did not hate sin. I admired boys who could have girlfriends, but I did not have one. In our times, if you had a girlfriend, you had to buy her buns during breaks, and it was 25 francs. So, I could not have a girlfriend because I calculated and I could not spend 25 francs every day, girlfriends were too expensive. That is one of the reasons why I did not have a girlfriend. It was not because I hated sin, but because my pocket did not allow me to have a girlfriend. They had also told us that if you sleep with a girl, she will become pregnant; and I was afraid to go and make a girl pregnant. It was not because I hated sin and it was not because I loved God. So, I was religious, I studied the Bible. I was faithful in church. I loved the church of my parents. I was proud of the church of my parents. In fact, I hated other churches.

When we were in primary seven, there was a girl called Kate that I admired. I wanted to be her friend. But one day, in school, in Buea, they told me that she was Roman Catholic. On the spot, she became ugly. I never greeted her again. Was it because I knew God? No. Was it because I loved God? No. It was just that she was not of our church tribe. People treat churches like tribes. Sometimes, people of this tribe do not marry people of that tribe, and it was the same for us with churches. When they told me that Kate was Roman Catholic, it all ended then and there.

We went to the same secondary school even after primary school, till Form Five. For me she was Catholic. All those Catholics! I knew that I was a sinner but I knew that Catholics would go to hell before us. Who told me that? It is not in the Bible; it was just hatred: hating others who were different from me. But I did not love God.

You may be like that; you may be like me before I met Jesus.

One day, I was going from the refectory to our dormitory, around the place where there was the drum signal, suddenly a question entered my spirit and I asked myself: How can I be sure that I will go to heaven? That day, I remembered the teaching of our catechism, that on the last day, God will bring a moral balance and that it will weigh our good deeds against our bad deeds, and the one that weighs more will determine whether you will go to heaven or not.

I thought, So, our church teaches that when God is judging U, He will bring out all his deeds. If U has 1000 good deeds and 700 evil deeds, God would tell U to go to Heaven. And when God comes to V who is younger than U, V may have 400 evil deeds and 500 good deeds, God would tell him to go to Heaven. And if the good deeds of W are 800, and that having insulted people about 900 times and stolen meat from the pot and all his evil deeds are 1300, God would tell him, W, you are for hell. I thought if God comes to X and finds that all his good deeds were 300 and his evil deeds 400, He would say, Go to hell!" Then, if God came to Y and found that Y had 5000 good deeds and, having disobeyed his parents many times to go and play football, his evil deeds were up to 10000, it would be hell for him.

I thought that if one has more good deeds than others who are sent to heaven, but because he has also done more evil than his own good deeds, he would go to hell. So that day by the drums, I told myself, The doctrine of our church is a lie. If God is like that, then He is practising injustice.

And I told myself, if God is the God that the Bible writes about, when the Bible says, Thou art with purer eyes than to behold violence, or, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. I concluded that anybody who has even just one sin cannot go to heaven, if God is the God that the Bible says He is.

That day, I stood by that drum, and I told myself, Our church has lied. God is holy. People like me cannot go to heaven, no matter how many good deeds they have to their credit.

Around that time, an older student had taught us how to masturbate. That day, I told myself, If the only sin in my life is this masturbation, do I mean that because I visit hospitals and I visit the sick, God will say that this masturbator that I am should enter heaven? I told myself, No! our church has lied.

For the first time in my life, I put my head down; I wanted to scream because I had received the revelation that I will go to hell, because I am a sinner. I received the revelation that the holy God of the Bible cannot allow me into Heaven, even if my only sin was masturbation. This was when I was thirteen.

I was shaken. I had realised that the God of righteousness and holiness cannot allow any sinner—no matter his church—to enter heaven. And for the first time, I stopped looking at other churches and I told myself inside, Theodore, you will go to hell, because you are a sinner.

Many people have prayed the prayer of repentance and asked Jesus to come into their hearts when they have never been convicted of sin, even old leaders.

I do not know how to tell you, that day, by that drum, I knew that I would go to hell. I knew that God cannot be the God I had read about in the Bible and allow a masturbator like me to enter heaven. Nobody was preaching to me. The false doctrines on which I had built my superiority crumbled before me. The falsehoods I had believed crumbled before me. I knew with certainty that if God is the God that the Bible says He is, I would go to hell. I was not thinking about any other person on that day. That is the day I knew that I would go to hell. That is the day that I felt the sin of my sin.

There are many people who know their sins, but they have never felt the sin of their sin and they have recited prayer of escape. They are lost, even if they make one thousand such sinners’ prayers. They are lost. They will not be saved.

It was shortly after that, that Brother Zach came to our school and preached the Gospel. He preached about sin, saying that the heart of man is an industry of sin. I could understand it. From what had happened to me, I understood. He told us that every human being—even those who are pastors’ children like me—have a tendency towards sin just like every plant has a tendency towards light. He said we have sin-tropism just like plants have photo-tropism. And he told us that the reason why Jesus Christ came into this world was to destroy that tendency in the heart, destroy that industry and give us a tendency toward God, a Christ-troprism, a tendency towards Christ. That is what Jesus can do.

And He told us, the only condition is that anybody who wants Jesus to do it for him must be totally honest to God, must tell God the whole truth, must tell