"THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS FUNDED BY GOD’S RESOURCES" – PASTOR OYEDEPO EXPLAINS WHY CHRISTIANS SHOULD BE WEALTHY DESPITE THE NATION'S ECONOMY

Founder, Living Faith Church aka Winners Chapel, Bishop David Oyedepo was interviewed by Olabisi Deji-Folutile, Gbenro Adeoye And Tunde Ajaja, in The Punch Newspaper where he talked about what makes the church rich and why believers should not see this as a crime.  Read the interview below:

You preach as if you have committed the entire Bible to your memory. How many times have you read the Bible?

The Bible is an unfinishable book, you keep reading. A student once met me after a meeting and said that I quoted 68 scriptures verbatim. He asked if I memorised the scriptures, I said no, I eat them. No matter how unintelligent you are, you can’t forget the food you ate last night, except you are mentally derailed. If you are given three seconds, you could tell what you ate about five days ago, if you truly ate it. So, the Bible is just not for reading, it’s actually for eating. I’m not among the people that have read the Bible three or five times, I don’t know how many times I have read the Bible and I’m not planning to know how many times. I just know it’s my delight to feed on it daily, and I can’t claim to have finished reading it.

The Living Faith church is 33 years old, how has it been pastoring this one church for the past years?

The ministry is 33 years, the church is now in its 31st year. It started as an itinerant ministry before we were called into the church ministry. It has always been interesting. These things work when you have the right perspective on them. Every pastor is ordained to serve the congregation, not to be served by the congregation. When that understanding dawns on any pastor, and he embraces it, then, pasturing becomes a sweet adventure. I’ve never looked towards what I can get from any member since inception. But I’ve always longed for what I can give to the people. I must say I’m jealous over them, I don’t want anyone to take advantage of them or play games on them. I want them to just be the children of God that they are, serving God without duress or pressure.

Is it true that church members here pray for the dead and they wake up, even in the mortuary, how do they do it?

(Cuts in..) By tapping them and saying wake up (laughs). We must know the source of everything that we experienced or observed. No man has the power to raise the dead. Jesus is the only one that has the keys of resurrection and death in his hands. So, we rely on him to do those things and he quickens whosoever he wills; he determines who to bring back and who not to. We only believe in God to bring back whosoever he wishes, if we have the key, we would be delighted to bring back everybody, and even open a clinic for bringing back the dead.

Why are there so many rich people in Winners?

Because they know better than their contemporaries. If you don’t know what you have, you won’t know if you are deprived of it. The Bible is an open chequebook, it is by revelation we access what belongs to us; by faith we take delivery of it. Someone had access to our empowerment programme and she is a pepper seller, while others sell one basket a day, she sells six, seven. I learnt she had become the envy of all the pepper sellers in her area. Such person has an understanding that whatever she does, she prospers and she knows that when she pays her tithe, she experiences open heavens. But in case people don’t know, they perish for lack of knowledge, and in case they think when you are rich you miss heaven, then they perish for lack of knowledge.

So, it’s right when people claim that this church is only for the rich?

It’s for all the people who believe that Jesus already paid for them to be rich. And those who don’t believe, when they come they start believing when they see it happen in a lot of people’s lives. And we are not ashamed to be called the church of the rich. If they call your family poor, will you be excited? Nobody would be excited. Even when a family is poor, they hate to be called poor. No man in his right mind enjoys being called poor, and nobody truly wants to be poor, people may pretend. Which is more honourable between being a giver and a beggar? Most of us came in very poor, but the light of God’s word came on us and we walked out of poverty in grand style into wealth and riches.

How come there is such wealth in the church despite the poverty in the nation?

The kingdom of God is funded by God’s resources. We are not funded by the economy of the world, but by the economy of the kingdom, which has a budget for all of its agenda on earth. We’ve been here since 1999 and we have never had power outage or water shortage. The main players are Nigerians, the builders are Nigerians. There is no building here that any foreign expert took part in. There is no foreign company’s presence here, including the tabernacle. Some of the revered foreign companies here in Nigeria are technicians in Germany, and they are all political contractors, not that they have something special to offer.

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