Tuesday, February 5, 2008

On People and Books

Books are very powerful tools in the development of thoughts. For you to be able to develop a right plan of action towards the attainment of your goals you must seek the assistance of other people in the form of advice, experience and knowledge.

The easiest way to get this is by reading books. Books contain practically every event and knowledge that has shaped humanity. They contain the seeds for the events which are to come.Concepts are developed and nourished through reading.

The power behind the printed page is this when you read you have fellowship with the best part of that person, you are not hindered by the personality of the person, you have access to the most valuable and important thoughts of the person. God is able to communicate with us without the personality of the individual colouring the thoughts.

The Corinthian church confirmed this, that the best part of Paul was his writings, when they said his letters were weighty and powerful but his bodily presence (personality) was weak and his speech contemptible.

His writings made a better impression than his person. Frank Gaebelein, a former editor of Christianity Today wrote: ‘Among the eternal resources available to the church the printed page comes first.’Isolation has only been right for the people who have withdrawn temporarily from others for the development of thought through prayer and reading.

You have got to understand the balance between books and people in evolving a right plan of action. All successful people are studious but also sociable. Too many people are studious but don’t socialise so they don’t find the proper balance in their actions by the knowledge they have acquired.Thought development towards a right plan of action must be interactive. Jesus interacted heavily with people yet strictly maintained the process of development by being studious.

He visited with friends, attended feasts and weddings. This is one of the problems the Pharisees had with Jesus He was more of a socialite than a hermit.

Never let the devil push you out of this developmental process, that which helps your thoughts grow (books) and that which is relational. Whatever God intends for your life He would bring it primarily through the hands and the minds of men. He told John the apostle on the island of Patmos, ‘what thou seest write and send…’ God commanded John to document his thoughts in the form of a book.

Today we open the book of Revelation and have access to the knowledge John gained in his personal encounter with God.Without books, the knowledge and experiences of others which could have been beneficial to us would be wasted. The scriptures record that Daniel understood by books the purpose of God for the nation of Israel in his time. He developed his thoughts by reading and then asked God to express, through events the thoughts he had acquired through reading.

No one else saw what he saw, for they did not understand that the plans of God for the future were contained in books available to them then.Bill Gates testifies to the fact that had a man An Wang (a Chinese immigrant) who built Wang laboratories not recognised the importance of compatible software applications there might not have been a Microsoft today. He said he might have been an attorney or mathematician somewhere.

Microsoft, his plan of action for the future was born while reading the January 1975 edition of Popular Electronics magazine. He saw on the cover a photograph of a very small computer not much larger than a toaster oven and from that point on a stream of practical ideas flooded his mind.
Pastor Poju Oyemade

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