Later this month it is my priviledge to minister at Mayfair Bible Church to the men all day May 18 and in the two morning services on the 19th. Mayfair is a thriving church in Flushing, Michigan about ten minutes from where we live.
Someone is Praying for You
I paced the first base coach’s box and watched my little boy warming up on deck. Every cell of his body reflected eager nervousness. When his turn came he stepped into the batter’s box and went through the motions he had seen others perform.
It was his first year of baseball. Every game he put in his three innings in right field which earned him a couple at-bats during each game if things went well for the team. When he was in the batters box my heart was there with him, so much it is impossible to describe. He is my first-born son.
His uniform pants were usually very clean and white. He was smaller than the other boys. The years between ten and twelve can be very significant growth years. Kyle was athletic, but lacking in size, experience, and the confidence that goes with them because he was ten.
When he stepped into the box he would look sternly out toward the pitcher with serious consentration. He never looked relaxed and loose- that was not his style. He would bend his knees and try to “spring” up and down to stay loose. He would take his pracitce cuts with the bat. The ball would come in and I would pray.
If you were watching me that day you would have no way of knowing that pacing up and down that coaches box I was deep in prayer. I prayed, “Lord, I know there are people with serious needs and staggering problems, but please, Lord, please let that little boy get on base. Please let him get on base.” Every time Kyle came up to bat I prayed for him with all my heart.
A few times that year my desperate prayers were answered and my son safely reached first base. One of those times he was immediately called out because he turned toward second base, but he did get on base. The next year he got on base a lot more. By the time he was twelve it was rare for him not to get on base. Nearly every time he came to bat he would eventually score and bat in other runners.
Last week, fourteen years later this same young man stood before a crowd of a couple hundred young people with his Bible in hand. He was sharing about the process our faithful God has been using in his life in bringing him to a place of surrender to a life of vocational ministry. My mind went back to those early prayers and I found myself again pouring out my heart to God, “God bless him, help him, guide him, use him. Make a way for him. Keep him from harm. Deliver him from evil.”
All my life I have had other who poured out their hearts to God for me in prayer every day to make good in life. I thank God for that. I hope you have someone who prays for you with that intesity. I hope there is someone in your life who stirs your heart to pray for them in that way. Everyone ought to have someone pray for them like that.
Ken Pierpont
Riverfront Character Inn
Flint, Michigan
February 27, 2006
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.
Please Help
Would anyone out there be willing to send the poor missionary family money in large amounts so we can afford to buy some new socks for our children? We are just bare-ly clinging to life here.
Just kidding folks. We have never done better. God is so good to us. We all have plenty of nice socks with no holes. Why those girls each have their own bathroom stuffed with makeup and their own closets crammed with clothes.
Lois even has an expensive camera and the leisure to walk around snapping pictures every day. And we’re not even going to start talking about my books.
Bad Tradition
I started a little tradition a few years ago. We were in a department store. Lois and the girls were looking at makeup and stuff. We were trying to avoid the young women in the white coats intent on spraying us with things when an idea came to my mind that I should have resisted. I picked up a lovely sample of women’s cologne in a spay bottle and when Chuk turned away I gave him a generous shot of it in the back of the neck. I thought he smelled real pretty.
He was a little narrow-minded about it. He only thinks things like that are funny when he comes up with them first himself. A few months later the boys began to do it to each other. Since then none of us have really been safe.
Last spring I was preaching a series of meetings for a fellowship of churches in Illinois. Dan and Wes came along and we spent the week boarding with a widow from one of the churches. In the apartment where we were staying the good lady had left a bottle of strong perfume on a dresser. It had probably been there awhile. It was vintage stuff. Wes and Dan were getting ready for church and Dan thought Wes could use a little frgrance, so when he turned his back he gave him both barrells.
Wes let out a loud, gutteral, angry scream. In all my life I know I will never encounter such a fragrance. It was the horseradish of cologne. Three days later you could still smell it on him. At church that night people looked at us kinda’ funny.
The other day the boys crossed the line and took advantage of me when my back was turned. I heard a comotion behind me and turned around. Wes was smiling at me and said, “I got ya’.” He had doused the back of my wool coat with a floral odor that is going to be very hard to explain to my wife.
Sometimes its best just not to get things started. Once things get out of hand there’s no going back. Take it from me. Over the years I have come to wish I’d had never fired the first shot in the perfume war. It’s like sin. It best not to get the thing started in the first place.
Sin is no joke. We should never take it lightly. It has a way of getting out of hand fast. Before you know what has happened things are out of control. And, like the old preacher once said; “Son whatever you don’t control will quickly control you.” At first sin is a trifle to us, a harmless indulgence, before we know it we have been ” – caught in a trap and taken captive by the devil to do his will.” (2 Timothy 2:26).
We should always take sin seriously, especially secret sin. It has a way of spreading like cancer and making any kind of life impossible.
Ken Pierpont
Riverfront Character Inn
Flint, Michigan
February 20, 2006
Snowy Weekend
We just returned from a weekend retreat at Camp Barakel. As always the food and fellowship at Barakel were good. I preached four times at Barakel, a total of about nine times this week. This morning we welcome a nice group of young people to the Stonebridge Newsletter from the retreat this weekend.
It was a beautiful, cold weekend up north. There were over ten inches of snow on the ground. The pines were all dressed in it. We did a little ice skating on Saturday afternoon and a little extra napping and reading in our warm, pine-panelled quarters. At night the winter sky was cold and clear and silent. The lake was a wide expance of white visible thorugh the woods. Late Saturday night I stood on a hill above the lake watching my breath and the steam from a cup of coffe rise up into the cold air. It was refreshing to my spirit to drink in God’s creation.
I was reminded of something Jim Elliot wrote in his Journal fifty years ago:
“I walked out to the hill just now. It is exalting, delicious, to stand embraced by the shadows of a friendly tree with the wind tugging at your coattail and the heavens hailing your heart, to gaze and glory and give oneself again to God-what more could a man ask? Oh, the fullness, pleasure, sheer excitement of knowing God on earth! I care not if I never raise my voice again for Him, if only I may love Him, please Him. Mayhap in mercy He shall give me a host of children that I may lead them through the vast star fields to explore His delicacies whose finger ends set them to burning. But if not, if only I may see Him, touch His garments, and smile into his eyes – ah then, not stars nor children shall matter, only Himself.
“O Jesus, Master and Center and End of all, how long before that Glory is Thine which has so long waited for Thee? Now there is no thought of thee among men; then there shall be thought for nothing else. Now other men are praised; then none shall care for any other’s merits. Hasten, hasten, Glory of Heaven, take Thy crown, subdue Thy Kingdom, enthrall Thy creatures.” (From the Journals of Jim Elliot).
This weekend we will be preaching and singing at Family Fellowship Bible Church near Imlay City.
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