PS : This presentation is an excerpt from my book: PURPOSE COMPASS; for more about it you may click here. To see the other popular, very surprising and easily avoidable habits that are currently making your life difficult, or otherwise will soon make your life difficult, you may click here; esle see below for a transcript of the video above…

The fourth habit is False-Faith, and before I go into it permit me to issue a disclaimer; that… I am responsible for what I say / mean, and NOT what you THINK I am saying. Wondering why I’m using this disclaimer? Well, I’ve realised over the years that when it comes to matters of faith, often people don’t pay attention enough to understand what one is saying but rather look out for reasons to pick offence, thinking that one is saying what others have said that they did not agree with. So again, I am responsible for what I say / mean, and NOT what you THINK I am saying.
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Right, now let’s talk about false-faith…
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The cover story of the 31st March 1997 edition of the Newsweek magazine was about ‘the mystery of prayer.’ I was doing my industrial attachment when it came out and I was blessed to have access to it. Now it is said that when a dog bites a man that is no news, but when a man bites a dog, man that is news! Likewise to find a topic promoting prayer in a Christian magazine like the Charisma, or Decision, or Awake, is no news; but to find a general news magazine such as Newsweek promoting prayer (more so through a cover story) man, that’s something! The point of the story was that ‘God answers prayer.’ It made a major boost in my prayer life, and I can testify to the goodness of God in that He has answered my prayers in amazing ways.
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So always I say that God is great! And when I say God, I mean the creator of the universe.
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I believe you know what this is; of course it is a stove; an electric stove; the coil type. When you turn it on 
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it heats up and glows. When I was doing my postgraduate course several years ago this is the type of stove I was using, at my balcony. 
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One day I noticed something very strange and dangerous; I noticed that even though it was turned off, when I happened to touch it or touched a metallic saucepan placed on it, it was giving some terrible shock. So logically, I called in an electrician. When the electrician came in; I needed to first narrate the problem or my observation to him so that he could then decide on what to do; while narrating the issue to him, I mistakenly (or absent-mindedly) touched the charged coil, and my God! I was bare-footed too! Hmm, nothing happened; I did not receive any shock at all! Wooooooow! Indeed, the danger crossed my mind only after I had removed my hand.
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All that happened at that balcony on the 7th Floor of the building on the right; the exact place is as shown by the arrow.
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Supposing that today (based on that experience) I charge a similar coil in that same faulty way and invite people to see how that I am able to touch electrically charged metal conductors, what do you think may happen? Your guess is as good as mine. That would tantamount to false-faith!
I believe in miracles because I’ve seen so many rare (or inexplicable) happenings in my life. But there is a reason why they are called miracles; they are called miracles because they are not the normal / natural cause of things / life; they don’t happen regularly or that often so it is dangerous to plan for miracles, or to factor definitive miracles into your plans.
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A terrible storm came into a town and local officials sent out an emergency warning that the riverbanks would soon overflow and flood the nearby homes. They ordered everyone in the town to evacuate immediately.
A faithful (or devout) Christian man heard the warning and decided to stay, saying to himself, “I will trust God and if I am in danger, then God will send a divine miracle to save me.”
The neighbors came by his house and said to him, “We’re leaving and there is room for you in our car, please come with us!” But the man declined. “I have faith that God will save me.”
As the man stood on his porch watching the water rise up the steps, a man in a canoe paddled by and called to him, “Hurry and come into my canoe, the waters are rising quickly!” But the man again said, “No thanks, God will save me.”
The floodwaters rose higher pouring water into his living room and the man had to retreat to the second floor. A police motorboat came by and saw him at the window. “We will come up and rescue you!” they shouted. But the man refused, waving them off saying, “Use your time to save someone else! I have faith that God will save me!”
The flood waters rose higher and higher and the man had to climb up to his rooftop.
A helicopter spotted him and dropped a rope ladder. A rescue officer came down the ladder and pleaded with the man, “Grab my hand and I will pull you up!” But the man STILL refused, folding his arms tightly to his body. “No thank you! God will save me!”
Shortly after, the house broke up and the floodwaters swept the man away and he drowned.
This is a parable, so it is said that the man went to heaven.
Now, when in heaven, the man stood before God and asked, “I put all of my faith in You. Why didn’t You come and save me?”
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And God said, “Son, I sent you a warning. I sent you a car. I sent you a canoe. I sent you a motorboat. I sent you a helicopter. What more were you looking for?”
A number of real world examples come to mind; I will cite two from the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic…
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The first one has to do with a church in South Korea; it contributed heavily to the spread of COVID-19 in South Korea, eventually the leader had to apologise to the nation. As at 2nd March there were 4,000 confirmed cases in the country, and 
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about 60% of them were members of the church; they had ignored the precautions that had strongly been recommended.
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The second one is that, of the 1,183 COVID-19 cases in Malaysia as at 21st March,
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 more than 59% were linked to a mass religious gathering held at a mosque.
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This is a man sitting at the edge of a cliff; let’s call him Emmanuel. When Emmanuel loses balance, what will happen? Obviously he will go down; he will drop, and may injure himself and likely die depending on what’s down there; right? Well, what if he is a strong / committed / faithful believer? Obviously that will not matter; he will still go down; he will drop, and may injure himself and likely die depending on what’s down there because gravity is not a respecter of faith or righteousness. 
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Indeed, scientists know the precise formular that govern a situation like this and can calculate (or plot) his position in mid-air second by second. So I say that, universally accepted knowledge is usually statistical and thus scientific, and is as fully reliable as a word from the creator of the universe himself.
So what is false-faith?
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False-faith refers to having a strong belief that is not based on either sound doctrine, science, or common sense. For instance, ‘to take a promise made to a specific character / person in the Bible (say a promise made to Jeremiah) and simply assume that God has made that promise to you’ may constitute false-faith. >>>
Also, to believe strongly that ‘you can get the good things of this world from God if you just faithfully engage in certain religious acts such as prayer, fasting, tithing, seed-sewing, offering, faith / believing, free acts of service to the church / pastors, etc. without having to work so hard since you will be favoured supernaturally, that may also tantamount to false faith.
A few years ago, I heard a very respectable pastor (with a large following) preaching on radio and teaching that there are three solutions to any and every problem: that, the first 
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is ‘prayer,’ the second 
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is ‘prayer,’ and the third 
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is also ‘prayer!’ I was deeply worried, and still worried because too many people hold to this kind of teaching and demonstrate that in their attitude. If prayer was indeed the solution to every problem, Africa would be paradise by now since we have been praying daily and fervently for so long. 
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Christians pray, muslims pray, traditional religion folks pray, almost everyone in the land prays!
Well, it is said that if the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything as if it were a nail. Believers seem to be using prayer as their sole weapon; as though all we have is prayer. We apply it 
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to football, business, education, sanitation and almost everything else. Which is not necessarily bad, except that perhaps what we have been doing (and calling it prayer) is really not the type that can be answered by God; perhaps we pray amiss. Hm! In any case, faith without works is dead, and sadly, when it comes to putting our hands to the wheel and doing the work we are often not that committed (owing to the pleasure-pain principle). So we fail a lot! Remember all the problems I highlighted from the beginning of this presentation.
To draw our attention to this attitude, some have said very hard-knocking things; 
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like… “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man ‘religion’ and he will die praying for a fish.”
The hard truth is that 
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we do not know what we should pray for as we ought. We often pray amiss.
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In an interview available on YouTube, Bishop TD Jakes gives an analogy that I love so much! His says 
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that… “Your brain is your defence. That’s why God didn’t make chairs; he made trees. He only brings it halfway, and then lets you imagine, create, develop the natural provision into the eventual solution. He continues to say that… The problem with church people is that we are taught that God makes furniture. So we pray and pray and pray and pray and pray and pray and pray and pray and pray and pray… “O I need a table, I need a table! God give me a table; Give me a table Jesus. Just one table Lord. If you give me a table I will praise you. If you give me a table I will serve you…” And God says, “I don’t do that! I make trees!!!”
What the honourable bishop was illustrating bothers
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on Creative Thinking. The good news is that, anyone can tap into his / her brain power by simply following some 8 simple steps, known as the 8-Step Creative Thinking Process. It involves mostly very simple techniques you can follow to generate breakthrough ideas and solutions, and achieve exceptionally great accomplishments. What is sad however is that, a whopping majority of people 
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ignore steps 1 and 2 and go straight 
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to Step 3, which is Prayer. Even though Step 3 is Prayer, and we do pray, most of the times we pray amiss (as earlier explained; we do not know what we should pray for as we ought). In addition to praying we also do aspects 
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of steps 4 and 5. And we 
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ignore steps 6 to 8; mercy!
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So what can we do to avoid this habit?
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We have to know for sure what the Bible (or any other religious book, for that matter) is saying; bringing every verse / passage related to the issue into focus. And equally importantly, we have to know what that religious book is NOT saying. By the way… same with science books, etc. That means we must be like the 
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young believers in Berea (Acts 17) we must be prepared to search the scriptures for ourselves after we have listened to preachers, no matter how supposedly powerful they may be. And by the way, if you have not read the Preface to your bible, and all the introductory elements at the beginning, you are hurting yourself big time! Read the Preface and all the preliminary elements to place the bible (or whatever religious book you use) in it’s proper context. Use a dictionary to understand unfamiliar words. Then also, get a very good concordance (the popular one is the Strong’s concordance; these days they are readily available on the internet). Use the concordance to understand / appreciate what exactly was said in the Hebrew and Greek precedents from which the translations were done. It will surprise you to note that some translations have been a disservice.
In any case, the fact that you believe something so much from your deepest internal conviction does not necessarily mean it is really true or sound. Likewise we must know when a pastor / minister is making an emotional wish / declaration for our lives, as against a true revelation / prophecy; the former is often the case. Please beware of a lot of those nice sounding promise-laden ‘Christian’ themes and confessions; unless they lead you to also take sound practical action such as working hard to provide for yourself; a lot of them are just clichés, and I have seen countless number of faithful Christians who somehow think that God has disappointed them because God did not do something they were trusting him so much to do; in the real sense God did not disappoint them, it is just that they had false-faith.
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To a very large extent I agree to with Rev. Dr. Mensa Otabil that… “We have prayed a lot! We have gone to church a lot! We have sung a lot! We have danced a lot! Now it is time to ‘think’ a lot!” Again, thinking here 
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refers to Creative thinking. And we must make it a point to 
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follow all the 8 steps in the Creative Thinking process, and not just prayer and a few others.
Let me reiterate that I am a firm believer in the power of prayer; prayer works (mostly for spiritual purposes) but certainly not an alternative to the need to take physical or practical action towards dealing with (or finding practical solutions to) our problems! When Nehemiah heard of the great distress and reproach that the Jews who had survived among those who escaped the captivity were going through, and the fact that the wall of Jerusalem was also broken down, and its gates were burnt with fire, he did not pray that God should fix the problem; he mainly prayed and asked God to forgive his people, and also for God to grant him favour before the king! The actual solution to the problem (rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem) was ‘planning and action;’ he put his mind to work, and mobilised his people to work; through great leadership and organisational skills. And the formular has not changed!
You see, most of the problems we face as a people are not spiritual at all; they have no spiritual causes; otherwise most of them could be solved or dealt with by simply fasting and praying against them. Indeed, there are seven (7) main sources / causes of problems / difficulties, and out of the seven, only one could be attributed to evil forces or demonic beings; so statistically, there is almost ninety percent (90%) chance that a problem / difficulty that occurs is man-made. We are often too quick to either put it on God (We suppose that God is taking us through a lesson) or otherwise, we (often erroneously) put it on the devil.
If you seek the appropriate professional advice on the problem, and properly apply all the relevant and adequate professional and scientific remedies, and they prove impotent for your situation; though they happen to work for other same situations, then you are allowed to consider that it is more spiritual than natural. Sometimes it is even just because we have not yet understood the nature of the issue; several years ago malaria was killing people in Africa, and because there was no proper understanding of the problem, it was deemed a spiritual problem. Today you will laugh heartily if someone suggests to you that malaria is a spiritual problem. Insight Knowledge discovery has changed that perception.
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Two fishermen were trapped in a storm in the middle of a lake. One turned to other and asked, “Should we pray, or should we row?” His companion responded, “Let’s do both!” That was wise. Take that advice! Because the universe has consistently demonstrated to us that often God uses science and common sense to provide answers to our prayers.
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Great! So that’s what I wanted to share with you about the fourth habit that makes life difficult; if you have any questions on what I have shared so far you may pause this video and post your question at the comment section below.

PS : This presentation is an excerpt from my book: PURPOSE COMPASS; for more about it you may click here. To see the other popular, very surprising and easily avoidable habits that are currently making your life difficult, or otherwise will soon make your life difficult, you may click here.