Little Flocks in the Wilderness

“It is a great advantage to a minister to commence his public life in a small village, where he can have time a quiet for study and reading: that man is wise who avails himself of that opportunity.”
-C. H. Spurgeon
All-Around Ministry

In the harvest field now ripened
There’s a work for all to do;
Hark! the voice of God is calling
To the harvest calling you.

Little is much when God is in it!
Labor not for wealth or fame.
There’s a crown – and you can win it,
If you go in Jesus’ Name.

Does the place you’re called to labor
Seem too small and little known?
It is great if God is in it,
And He’ll not forget His own.

When the conflict here is ended
And our race on earth is run,
He will say, if we are faithful,
“Welcome home, My child – well done!”

When I was seventeen years old I drove north every week to minister to a little flock in the wilderness for year before I left to study at Moody Bible Institute. When I was twenty-one God entrusted Lois and me with another little flock in the wilderness. This time it was the good people of Beaver Chapel in Mercer County, Ohio. It was there our oldest son, Kyle was born.

One winter morning it snowed so deep that it took me over an hour to shovel a path over to my study. I started a little heater, brewed some coffee and spend sweet hours with the Lord reading E. M. Bounds on prayer and then kneeling by a worn little chair on the hardwood floor of my study and talking to the Lord.

David’s older brother mocked him and taunted him to go back to his “little flock in the wilderness,” but it was there tending “a few sheep in the wilderness” that God was forging in him the character needed to lead a nation. It was there that young David was learning to be a man after God’s own heart.

Not everyone follows the same path into ministry but tending little flock in the wilderness was a good way for us to begin.