Today, Saturday, the 6th of January, 2024, is here with us. This is the first Saturday of the new year. The first Saturday of the new year is a very important date in my socio-spiritual calendar. In 2005, God commanded me to select a suitable day in every new year to thank him profusely for all the favours He has done for me in the year just gone by. I heard him very clearly and proceeded forthwith to organize the very first of what was to become a yearly event that year in my home then in Wuse Zone 4, Abuja.
I decided that for convenience and easy consistency, the event will have to be held on a definite date namely, the first Saturday of every new year. And since the year 2005, what I call my annual Thanksgiving Day has been held to broadcast my blessing and honour the God that has stood by me to accomplish all those things I broadcast to the world. The experience has been liberating. It frees me from the debt I have come to see I owe to my God. It has also been exhilarating. Each year of my life on earth since then has been better than the past year. There is no year since then that I will say a past year has been better than the current one. So each year I look forward to this event. It has become more important to me than other celebratory events in which millions of people on earth engage in.
Each year, God blesses me by giving me lands, buildings, money, good health, safety and security, optimism, peace, joy and many other things I rejoice in. I have been enjoying the benefit of quick obedience to the command of God. Perhaps, the most amazing of the benefits is that he has taken away from me many illnesses and diseases such as Malaria and typhoid fever that had become native to me for some years down the line.
When he commanded me, he told me he was sending me to speak to a generation that was guilty of ingratitude. This generation, he told me, loves to engage in grumbling, murmuring and complaining. God hates this package. He loves us to show gratitude for everything that happens to us whether good or bad.
Ever since 2005, I have been inviting friends and ‘unfriends’ to my modest homes both here in Abuja and sometimes my village, Gakem, in CRS, to deliver this simple and short message to them. I just tell them that God loves us to praise and thank him all the time. Once we do this, we are automatically applying for many more things he has not yet done for us. God, I say to them, is gratified by our praise and thanks because as mighty as he is, praising and thanking himself is what he cannot do. It will look so odd, so ridiculous if he does so! That is why he demands that we his creatures should honour him by doing him that simple service! Is it a thing that is too much for man to do? No.
The amazing thing about the message I deliver is that some leave the venue saying that they have not been aware of this before. I do not know whether it is the examples I cite or the way I say it, people claim they have been made more aware of this message the churches have been teaching us for such a long time now. We have heard the story of the ten lepers who were healed by the Lord Jesus Christ since we were kids and how only one of them, a Samaritan, a non-Jew, returned to give him thanks. We have heard how he rewarded that lone thanksgiving with wholeness while the ungrateful nine were content only with their healing. They had to live with missed fingers and toes while the Samaritan enjoyed his restored limbs.
The story of this Samaritan man shows that a majority of the people, even till now, are never ever grateful for favours done them. we then to take for granted good done us while we complain ceaselessly about the evil we think has been done us.
As many of my followers may have become aware, I retired to my village to engage in farming. After spending a few of my relocation years trying to find my feet, something amazing happened to me this farming year. God prospered the works of my hands as he promised his faithful children I received a bumper harvest in some of my crops and had to be hiding some of these harvests in order not to arouse the envy of some folks and having them attributing the outcomes to some powers other than God as our people tend to do according to their erroneous belief! This is one of the testimonies I want to share with those I have invited for the event of today. Repair to my home in Nyanya if you are an invitee to share with me the many benefits of praise and thanksgiving.
