Think of a spare-parts trader we’ll call Chinedu, who opens his shop in Onitsha before seven every morning. He is honest and his customers trust him, yet at the end of every year he is standing in the same place. One prophet told him his family was under a poverty covenant and that he needed to sow a large seed to break it. He paid, and nothing changed.
What began to change things was not a payment. He read Galatians 3 and Colossians 2 every morning for a month, renounced what he knew of his family’s past in Christ, and sat down with a deacon to write out, for the first time, where his money actually went. He went to each friend whose loan he had guaranteed and, with advice from a lawyer, began to settle what he owed in small instalments.
“I used to avoid the bank manager,” he said. “Now I greet him.” His circumstances did not change overnight, but he stopped living in fear.
