Ifeoluwa Fatoki

A LETTER TO MY SONS, My dear sons, I want you to consider the possibility that the assignment of GOD upon your life may never make you famous. I also want you to consider that it may demand more from you than people will ever understand. And after considering these things, I pray that you will still find sufficient reason to follow JESUS. I also want you to Know That GOD does not owe you fame because you have agreed to serve HIM. You can be genuinely called, sincerely anointed, faithfully instructed, and yet never become the kind of minister whose name is mentioned in every gathering. And there is nothing wrong with that. Some of you are already troubled that nobody is inviting you to preach. You are worried that your contemporaries are becoming known while you are still labouring in places that appear insignificant. You have begun to question your calling because the people who started after you now have larger platforms. But my sons, who told you that visibility was the evidence that GOD had sent a man? Who told you that the progress of another man’s assignment was the standard by which yours should be measured? The LORD did not call you to compete with your brethren. HE called you to obey HIM. And I fear that if you do not deal with this matter early, you may spend the better part of your ministerial life pursuing things that GOD never included in your assignment. Listen to me carefully. There are men who will spend thirty years faithfully shepherding a congregation of fifty people. They will bury the dead, comfort widows, raise disciples, defend the faith, and preach CHRIST with tears. Their names may never travel beyond the communities where GOD planted them. And when they stand before the LORD, their labour will not be insignificant because the world never celebrated them. Do not despise such men. Do not look upon their small congregations and conclude that they have wasted their lives. Some of the men you consider unsuccessful have preserved the testimony of JESUS in places where many of you would never agree to serve. I want you to understand something about this calling. The assignment is not an opportunity to become somebody. It is a summons to belong wholly to SOMEONE. And that SOMEONE is JESUS CHRIST. If HE gives you a multitude, serve them faithfully. If HE entrusts a handful of souls to your care, do not punish those souls because you are disappointed with the size of your ministry. Do not turn the people of GOD into instruments for satisfying your personal ambitions. They are HIS sheep, not your evidence of success. And please, do not allow social media to become the place where you receive your understanding of ministerial fruitfulness. A man can be trending and be spiritually empty. Another can be unknown to the public and yet be faithfully accomplishing the very work for which GOD sent him. I am not against influence. I am not against growth. I am not against the LORD making a man’s ministry known. But I am against that ambition that makes a young minister feel that his life is being wasted because men have not started calling his name. My sons, You must learn to serve where you are without constantly imagining where you ought to be. You must learn to preach to twenty people with the same sincerity with which you would preach to twenty thousand. Because if the souls before you are not precious enough to command your faithful labour, a larger congregation will not suddenly make you a faithful shepherd. And when the days of hardship come, as they sometimes will, do not immediately conclude that GOD has abandoned you. Paul knew hunger. He knew imprisonment. He knew rejection. He knew what it meant to be misunderstood even by those for whom he had laboured. Yet he could say: “But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus.” Acts 20:24

My sons, you must not become a man who is willing to travel across nations to preach but unwilling to visit a struggling member of his congregation. The responsibilities that attract no applause are often the ones that reveal the sincerity of our shepherding.

My sons, I pray that you will never become ashamed of your congregation because their numbers are small. If CHRIST considered those souls precious enough to die for, you must never consider them too insignificant to what HE asked you to do.

Beloved, do not make your congregation carry the burden of your unfulfilled ambitions. The people of GOD should not suffer because their pastor is disappointed that his ministry has not become as large as he expected.

I pray that you never become so determined to preserve your public image that you begin to hide the condition of your soul. A ministry may continue growing while the man leading it is quietly becoming a stranger to repentance.

There are men who are so desperate to do something great for GOD that they have become unfaithful in the very things GOD asked them to do

There are men who will spend their entire ministerial lives serving people who cannot afford to honour them financially. I pray that the absence of material reward will never persuade you that such labour is beneath your dignity.