As a young boy growing up in my country, there was a local fast food that was very popular with children of school-going age. We called it “yooke gari.”It is a combination of boiled beans, palm oil, and gari (a cassava product). On my way to school, I would stop to buy from a particular lady who sold this product.
From primary class two until I moved on to high school, this was part of my routine. Later in life—about seventeen years later—I went by those market stalls again. To my surprise, I saw the same woman selling the same product in the same bowls and containers, wearing the same clothing she had worn so many years ago. It was nice to see her again, but I kept asking myself, “What has this lady been doing in the past twenty years?” She was fruitful all right, but she had failed to excel and expand. In essence, her business got stuck as a start-up.
Many people become so self-satisfied and complacent after becoming fruitful that they get stuck where they are and never advance to the next level, or multiply their initial productivity.
People who may have thought starting a business was out of reach, or an exceptional feat get their business off the ground and feel that is it. They stop innovating, stop thinking of new ways to reach more clients. They become content with the income stream that meets their basic needs, and don’t hunger for more. Even those who are not aspiring entrepreneurs
fall into this trap. People get a job and think that’s it. As long as they receive their monthly or bi-weekly paycheck, they are happy to be getting by, and never aspire for a better position. You may find that same janitor who used to whistle down the halls of your school as he mopped the floor, still there at your twenty-year reunion, whistling the same tune.
This kind of stagnation not only happens in the professional arena.
Unfortunately, quite a lot of good preachers fall into this rut as well. They only preach first-generation messages, never building on them, never expanding, or contextualizing them for a new generation of listeners.
As a preacher, I spend hours, days, and sometimes months incubating and preparing a message that God has dropped into my spirit. I labor in prayer until I know the word is ready to be presented to my audience. On Sunday mornings, I stand before my congregation and give them the fruit of my seed-message, which often has taken more time and effort to produce than to deliver in the pulpit. The congregation in turn, eats the fruit of my labor, and I can say I have been productive.
However, if I only preach that message one time, only to one congregation, the only way the seed of the message will thrive and bear subsequent fruit is based on how much of the message that group remembers, and whether or not they will use it to minister to someone else. However, if we go beyond my one-time fruitfulness on that Sunday morning, record the message on a CD or in a book, then God’s Word is multiplied through me. In those multiplied forms, myfruitfulness will continue to multiply as long as copies of those books and CDs exist and new audiences receive them.
In addition, the multiplied versions of my
fruit will go places that I cannot, and reach people that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to minister to in person.
We are all creators of things whether we are preachers, bankers, investors,real estate developers, or software engineers. But whatever we do, we must start first by producing the fruit and afterwards we multiply the fruit. That is God’s principle: be fruitful, and then multiply. He has wired this principle into every process on this earth. You first produce the fruit and then you multiply it.
– Dr Mensa Otabil (The Dominion Mandate)
– Active Word
