Slavery (part II)

By Odon Bulamba (23rd January 2004)

What is the effort we make to please God? Is it to hate our neighbours, is it to slander, is it to be proud, is it to be sufficient and to think that you are better than others, to think that you are more beautiful than others, to think that you are more intelligent than others, how do you please Your God?

To please God you don’t need to ask yourself one thousand questions, it is just a question to follow His will. Does God allow me to do that? What does God ask me to do? When you please God, your soul will also be pleased. When you do something against God, your soul will also be in distress. Imagine if Steve works for the New Zealand embassy in France and New Zealanders are mistreated in France. Where will the NZ government find out about the situation? Who will be the first person in France to find out about New Zealanders? It will be the ambassadors, it will be Steve. Whether Steve lives in Paris or Marseilles, this is not the problem of the NZ government. He might be in Stratford and something happens in Marseilles, he will be asked, you are in France, tell us what is happening? “I don’t know, you know I live in Marseilles, I don’t know what is happening in Paris”. Its country will say, you must know, you are on the field you must know, give us a report. And his report will be more important than others.

The souls that are in us are God’s ambassadors, these souls will be asked to give a report about all that you have done and if you look seriously on your soul you will have the eternal life but if you don’t care about your soul, you can forget about it. As I say always, your position in society will never give you a visa of heaven, your religion will never give you a visa, your personality will never give you a visa for heaven. We have only one visa, not two or three, only one and this visa is somewhere in people’s lives and this person must accept that this visa is given.

Before telling you what this visa is, I will give you an example. I’ll ask Marcia a question, “when did you leave NZ last time?” 1993. “Where did you go?” Holland. Marcia went to Holland in 1993. Do you remember the date, or the month that you left? April. Although it has been over ten years, Marcia does not forget. She knows that she travelled sometime and Marcia can remember who greeted her at the airport in Holland and she can remember where she spent her first night in Holland, she can even sometimes remember what she ate her first night in Holland, isn’t it true? Yes. It’s easy to remember all this and before leaving this country to go to Holland what did you do? She cried. Why did she cry? Because she left her family? Did she cry because she left her country or did she cry because there was a certain joy somewhere in Holland? Why did you cry Marcia? Because I was leaving my future husband. There was a reason and this reason was Steve. And if Marcia’s mum was beside Marcia, she could think my daughter cries because she is leaving me and she could say, ‘Marcia don’t cry’. And Marcia could think in her heart do you think that I cry over you, no it’s for Steve. This is a personal truth.

When people die on earth we cry, why do we cry? Do we cry because they leave us, do we cry because it is normal to cry or do we cry for our souls because also one day they will leave? Before doing Marcia’s travel I think she found a visa. Maybe New Zealanders don’t need a visa before going to Holland but normally you need a visa and this visa won’t be found on a table at home, you must fill in a form and send your passport and the visa will be placed inside the passport and if you don’t have a passport where will you put the visa?

Many people on earth don’t have an identity. It is like a citizen who doesn’t have a passport and they want to have a visa to go to heaven but where will God put this visa. Are you a citizen of the world, are you a citizen of heaven or are you a citizen of your religion; which passport will God put the visa?

In the past many people reject the passport from Zaire. If you wanted your visa to be rejected, you just had to show your visa from Zaire. You could be well clothed, you could be rich when you go to the embassy and say you need a visa and you show your passport, ‘o Zaire, no thank you’. If you insist they will take the passport and stamp something in it and this thing is in there and it will make you suffer. You know what it is? If you don’t have a visa what do you have?

Interdictions (to prohibit). They put the stamp on your passport to say that this person cannot enter our country. It is finished, it is forbidden and if you go to another embassy and you open your passport and they see interdiction, ‘o he was rejected there’ and they cannot accept because of another interdiction and you will find a passport filled with stamps and this is a negative visa. It means that visa will never allow you to enter into another country.

Us Christians we are called to have a certain identity and the identity we need is the Christian identity and this visa must be sealed by the Holy Spirit. Whoever wants to inherit the kingdom of God must find his identity and accept the Holy Spirit to lead them and if you don’t accept this spirit, woe to you because you will be given another visa and it will be the interdiction. The devil will also put the visa in your life or in your head and your identity will be useless.

I learned while working for the immigration that there are many people in this world today who don’t have a citizenship. They don’t have any nationality, if you ask them what is your citizenship they will say they don’t have any and if you ask them what is their country of origin, there is none. They were born and grew up but don’t have a country so how do they do their travelling? They have to steal passports and travel with them. They buy false passports to travel with them and they go through that way. But in heaven there won’t be any false passports, each one is called to start preparing for their travel and you will start thinking when I’m going to start to leave this earth will I cry for the children who are going to stay? Or will I cry for the joy that I will have to enter heaven.

Remember the story of Lazarus? Lazarus was against Abraham’s breast and behind there was a rich person and this rich person said to Lazarus, ask someone to go to see people from my family to talk about the gospel and they said, ‘no it’s not possible. There are people who are already preaching on the earth, it’s up to them to listen where they are. We cannot leave where we are anymore’.

If Peter would die today, what would we do? We would cry. Why will we cry? Because Peter has left us and we won’t see him anymore, we can feel that in our hearts. Nobody beat us or tortured us, but in our hearts there is something that hurts and it hurts a lot. But after crying, what will we do? We will pray. Yes we will pray but what will we tell God? When we pray are we going to say thank you God because you took Peter? Will it be Ang’s prayer. She might say, why only Peter, why not Steve? Why not Michael why my husband? People do that. People cry and judge God and find that God is unjust, ‘why always my family? Why do you always touch me? Why not elsewhere?

After the death of my father, I asked God, ‘Why didn’t you kill all the old people from my family? And left my father alive?’ One day when I talked to one of these old men, he said to me, ‘shut up, what did you say, don’t say that anymore’. Although he was old, he was not happy about that and I didn’t even kill him but because he was afraid of death, he didn’t want me to say, God take this person. So what will be the prayer that you will do if Peter dies? Forgive his sins. It will be too late to forgive his sins, the only prayer that will be there is to thank God.

One question be sincere, if death would come, if an angel would come and say your father is here and your husband is here, death will say I will take one of these two, choose one, who will be sacrificed? The Dad will go. Can you say that to your father? Never. Your father will say, I gave you life, I sent you to school, if you are what you are today it is thanks to me, remember when I looked after you, when you were a baby, you were sick and had problems but you sacrifice me today, why?

And tomorrow our children might say, ‘take our mum’ How will you feel? You will not be happy. That is the way we give our souls, when sins come I think instead of having my body humiliated, I would have the devil play with my soul, because my soul is not that important. It’s better that people think that I didn’t do the bad thing.

When death comes, a funeral will be there and when someone will be buried it is not a joke, it is serious. People don’t have time to waste, you go down there, they cover it and that is it, whether you cry or not, the body will stay there and the soul will be somewhere else to be judged by itself. So why do we give more value to this body that will stay under the ground and not give great value to our souls?

Many Christians today kill one another, there is such a great war in church today to the point that the church has been divided in one thousand parts and it is the same in the mosque. In each denomination or religious entity there is this history and we all forget the place of our soul but if we gather it is to feed our souls, it is find the visa to go to heaven. Let’s not meet together to fight against one another, where is Martin Luther King today, where is Wesley and others? Where is Mohamed and others? Their bodies are always buried and their souls are somewhere. They fought against one another and this stayed on earth and their souls went back to be judged.

Is your soul prepared to go back to God? When you pray in the morning, when you pray in the middle of the day or any time, do you pray for your souls or do you pray only for your physical life? Are you a coloniser or a colonised? It would be better to have our souls as colonisers and accept to have our bodies as colonised. Amen? Amen!

We are going to stop here and we will pray altogether and ask God to help us to have our souls as colonisers so that we would stop mistreating our souls and to ask God to give us strength to over come evil and find the good visa to go to Heaven. Let’s pray