“For David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell on sleep.” Acts 13:36
It is with great emotions, dripping with uncontrollable tears from my eyes, that I struggle to pen down these words of tribute to my fallen hero, pastor, father and friend, Rev. Dr. Musa Asake, the General Secretary of the Christian Association Nigeria (CAN), who passed on to the great beyond in the early hours of Friday, 11th May, 2018. It is unbelievable and looks like a kind of trance to me that we have all actually gathered here today to bid farewell to the ‘Village Boy Pastor’, as he fondly referred to himself.
His fond name, Village Boy Pastor, which he knitted together as his email address actually conveyed the story of his humble beginnings in life and ministry which he often told anyone who cares to listen in thanksgiving to God for liberating him and his family from unbelief and abject poverty in the village and took him to the great height he attained in the Lord’s vine yard before he was called home. Many of his siblings often described him by his name, Musa, meaning Moses in Hausa, as they saw in him the very qualities of the biblical Moses sent by God to emancipate the family and many others from their pitiable conditions to improved statuses God intended for them. His humble background no doubt endeared him more to the down trodden and the persecuted. He was egalitarian, desiring everyone to have equal opportunity in their life’s aspirations.
I had the rare privilege of working with the late Musa Asake as an Elder and Secretary of the Church Board where he pastored and I learnt firsthand from him what love and sacrifice for the congregation means. I bonded with him in the service of the Lord so closely to the extent that he adopted me not only as a member of his immediate family but his extended family for which I am now proudly one, even though from a faraway state and tribe. All his family members and associates enjoyed very special and unique relationship with him that can be better explained by the individual personalities.
As a pastor and former General Secretary of the Evangelical Church Winning All, ECWA, Rev. Asake was well grounded in Church administration and understood the times we live in where there are more “men of God” who called themselves into ministry than the ones God actually inspired and called. He was dogged, fearless and sometimes brutally blunt in speaking the truth to situations. These qualities sometimes made many think of him negatively but at closer quarters he was an Angel, willing to pour out his life for the good of others.
It was the will of God that he should practically touch a broad spectrum of different generations in Nigeria and other lands. As a graduate of Dallas Bible College in the US, he was well groomed in Bible exposition and made sure anyone who came under his tutelage was sufficiently groomed as well.
He was an authority in his chosen field, which he had made peculiarly his own, and made several trips locally and abroad pursuing the interest of the Christendom in Nigeria as CAN General Secretary and boldly appealed to the consciences of those in authority about the oppressive plight of Nigerian Christians. It was God’s will that he should serve, promoting the welfare of Christians in the country. So his influence deepened and widened as the years went by, and it would seem as if God not only gave him length of days despite his years of life-threatening terminal illness in which to serve Him, but also supplied him with strength and vigor almost up to the time of his death. He preached God’s word with passion and detested missing any appointment to deliver the Lord’s message even when he was sick. He told me several times that he would not dignify the devil by shying away from any appointment he had accepted to preach God’s word on account of ill health, stating that it would be a delight to die on the pulpit preaching God’s word.
His ministry was as beautiful at the end as it was in the beginning. Bright and fresh as it was in the rosy glory of its morning, it was indeed all the more glorious as it lay in the sweetness and strength of its beauty even beneath the golden rays of its setting sun. The huge crown at his funeral today testifies of this fact.
It seems to me that his interest in and companionship with young people made him ever ready to welcome new thoughts and ways, and kept him from the tendencies of disparage new and progressive ideas that appeared strange to him. Firm in his devotion and steadfast in the creed and truths in which he had been trained, he was ready to welcome new knowledge, and to reach out to accept new ways. There was something very fine in his character that also made him very willing to entertain new light and bid God-speed to new thoughts, new workers, and new ways of doing things. Despite all these, he also kept along with his generation. And because of his sympathy with the people of that age, he was able to serve it all the more effectively. Herein lay one of the his greatest virtues.
He lived in the present, not in the past; and rejoiced in the progress of all around him, in the growth and gladness and glory of each succeeding year. And so he grew older gracefully, until in the fullness of his over threescore years, still in the service of several generations, which by the will of God he so faithfully fulfilled, drew to its end; and on the 11th of May, 2018, God gave to His beloved disciple and minister, Rev. Musa Asake, the blessing of a calm, long, unbroken sleep in a most unexpected manner and time. May he rest in peace, and may light perpetual shine upon him and may God comfort his family, especially our dear mother, Mrs Tabitha Musa Asake.
In striving to measure the true greatness of a character like that of Rev. Asake, our dear ‘Village Boy Pastor’, we stand perhaps too close to him to get the true perspective of it in its kaleidoscopic and united completeness; our bereaved eyes are too dim to see it in its true proportions. But our loving hearts can comprehend some of its self-evident and salient glories, which will commend them to our love and imitation for a very long time to come.
He was, above all things, a man of God, a faithful and devoted servant of our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ.
He was a man of prayer, of deep spirituality, which pervaded all his life, into which religion was inwrought as a matter of daily conduct and enriched it with its charm and beautified it with a luminous, ever shining, celestial grace.
He was a man of sympathy, with a tear for every woe, and a smile for every joy.
He was a man of charity, and many of the charities which he dispensed only the manifestation of the last day shall declare, and only the hearts of those who enjoyed his benevolence can tell.
He was a man of lovable tenderness, gentle but firm and gracious in his disposition and bearing and benign of character that gave great sweetness to his demeanor and kindness to his deeds. Large hearted and generous in judgment, he thought of men with inexhaustible compassion and forbearance.
He was a man of enduring patience, of remarkable fidelity and of unwavering faith. Though deeply spiritual, he was intensely human, and an abiding sense of humor kept him from sourness, harshness and discouragement. In his wide ranging work, amidst the multitude of men with whom he came in contact, in his chosen field of labor, in the generation he served, the lives he brightened, the souls he cheered, in his untiring devotion to the people put in his peculiar care, he won for himself an affection which we may all envy and which we would all do well to emulate. He has left behind the memorable fragrance of self-sacrifice which will live in the hearts of men as a rich and cherished treasure.
And now he has entered the realm of “the rest that remaineth.” Still the world is full of woe and trouble, still the cry of the needy rings so perilously in our ears, still the oppressed seek our sympathy, the helpless invoke our aid and sin stains and blights God’s fair creation and darkens human life. All of these urgently call for our service, our effort, our sacrifice. It is our own day and time that needs our ministry and requires our service.
Our dear father and friend, Musa Asake, will not have lived in vain, if his life, so full of labors for human kindness, impresses upon us all the duty and the privilege of serving our generation in faithfulness and quietude, without noise or fuss, forgetting self, and making the place where our lot is cast sweeter, happier and better; doing all things according to the Master’s blessed will.
“The night cometh when no man can work.” Our earnest prayer is that, when the shadows also finally descend upon us and we also fall on sleep, may it be said of us, as it is today being said in glowing tribute to the memory of our dear departed Rev. Dr. Musa Asake, and as an encouragement to us to follow the Master as he followed Him: “He served his own generation by the will of God, and fell on sleep.”
Adieu, my dear and beloved ‘Village Boy Pastor ’!
