The silent sacrifices that carved my journey to the nations, By Ayo Akerele

Continue to work hard on your business, career, and ministry. No matter how hard and bad your nation is, God’s word is not altered by human circumstances. If He has said it, you will see it. But build on the principles of consistency and faithfulness. Sit and serve in your church. Give dangerously. Watch and wait for God to blow you. For when God blows you, no man can quench you. For “whatever the Lord does shall be forever” (Ecclesiastes 3:14).

While at the university in 1993, I caught a profound vision of leaving Nigeria for America, obviously for a better life, as we would often describe it. At that time, I was actively serving the Lord under the leadership of a great ministry led by a father in the faith. This was a silent season of hidden labours in my life. I was like a madman for God. I never missed a Sunday service. I never missed a mid-week service. I was so madly in love with God that, on days when I had no money for transportation, I would walk to church and still be the first to arrive for services. We would finish our church conferences at 11:30 p.m., and I would walk back home in the thick darkness of the night, crossing dangerous bridges and neighbourhoods. The Lord kept me.

I had no time for offence. You could not offend me against my pastors or the church. I simply kept serving and serving, and while doing that, I maintained my focus on my university studies as an engineering student. There was nothing called luxury in my life.

There was nothing attractive in my life. There were no achievements. There was no money. It was a season of little beginnings. Things were really hard. These were not the days of social media or the internet. There was no external basis for motivation. But I held firmly to my conviction that God was going to open international doors for me. Right inside my small beginnings, I gave offerings as sacrificially as I could. No call for donation ever eluded me. There were times I gave out the little stipends my parents provided as offerings towards several projects in our church at that time. There was a day I packed my student stove and a few other belongings and sowed them as seeds into the missions department of our church. And I did all of these with excitement. Yet, there was no reward or visible result.

I served God faithfully under a couple of leaders. Things were tough, challenging, and sometimes hopeless. What was that force that drove me to stick with the Lord for a breakthrough for 13 years? I cannot attribute this level of perseverance to anything normal. It must have been solely the product of divine enablement.

I am sharing these stories to connect with what some of you are going through. The enemies of the church, pastors, and church haters have told you that it is worthless and useless to go to church. You have been told that no one needs God to succeed in life. They have pointed you to many people in the world who became billionaires without God. But they have failed to tell you the hidden costs of their success, the occultic societies many of them belong to; the sacrifices performed in secret; the covenants made in dark places to secure their super-rich status. What you see is only the top of the iceberg of their success, not the lower part, which is often the largest portion. Why should Satan, the enemy of the church, be glad that you love God and love the gathering of the saints in a church community?

Everyone pays a price for success. Something for nothing exists only in the paradise of fools. You become a victim of ignorance if you allow any agent of the devil to drain out the need for God in your pursuit of success. No one succeeds in a vacuum. As Dr Olumide Emmanuel once said, “You are either backed up by the secret place or by secret cults.”

So, from 1993, I experienced a plateau, a silence. I gave and gave and gave. There was no smell or sight of any international opportunity. In fact, for the most part, from 1993 to 2001, a period of eight years, I suffered significantly. I served God with no results. I prayed with no results. I gave and became poorer. But understand something today: “Sacrifices work in silence.” Sometimes, when it appears as though God is coming late, it is because He is coming big. Dr Myles Munroe would also say, “Seeds work in silence.” My sacrifices made me look like a fool. However, from 2002 to 2005, I began to see glimmers of hope, because God began to show me favour by helping me secure some good jobs in Nigeria.

But they still fell short of what God told me in 1993: “I am taking you out of this nation.”

Then in 2005, a ray of hope sparked the birth of a torrent of light into my destiny. God miraculously connected me with some missionaries in South Africa for the final lap of my years of sacrifice. I served them faithfully. I worked with them to take many poor South Africans off the streets of Pretoria. We fed them, clothed them, and accommodated many of them. And then rays of light began to build up with a minimal level of intensity toward the end of 2005. The world’s biggest diamond manufacturing company miraculously hired me under circumstances I still cannot explain. My life had taken a new turn, I said to myself, unaware that this was just an appetizer, not the main course. And then, in 2006, the biggest miracle happened.

During my wilderness season of 13 years, I had applied for various visas. I wanted to force what God had said to happen. We’ve all been there. Haven’t you? Joseph tried to use his connection with the Butler to get out of prison, but the Butler forgot him for two years.

The US refused me a visa once; the UK refused me twice. I cannot tell the full story of what happened. But it was right in the middle of pains, regrets, and frustration in South Africa that I received a phone call from Nigeria. Before I tell you what happened, recall that I said I got a fantastic offer from a diamond manufacturing company in South Africa. It was not the deal. It was not my Canaan land. God allowed it to cool me down because I was almost running out of breath. Sometimes in life, God allows flickers of hope, temporary blessings, to cool you off so you don’t break down before the real thing happens. Within four months, that opportunity was gone, and I was back to square one.

Fast forward to after I left that organisation. One day, I sat on my bed, dejected, frustrated, and despondent. I had served God faithfully for years. “God’s word has failed,” I said to myself. Then my phone rang. Someone called from Nigeria, telling me she had received a parcel from the UK embassy, “The visa they refused two years earlier had been re-approved.” I laughed it off, insisting it was a scam. That was in 2006, the 14th year of my waiting on God. The UK visa was issued. A few weeks later, another parcel arrived: a four thousand pound scholarship was approved. I left for the UK. Just less than two weeks in the UK, another parcel arrived — you have been approved for an all expenses paid business mentorship training in France. And many more parcels arrived! Long story short, the rest is now history.

God fulfilled His word, opened international doors for me, and rewarded me massively for years of silent labours. It was as soon as God relocated me to the West that He called me into the teaching ministry. Someone reading this article today may be asking, “Is there hope for me? My case is worse than Pastor Ayo Akerele’s case.” Or perhaps you have been written off as a church slave or a church rat. You may have been labelled a madman for God. I was mad for Jesus in those days, and I am still madly in love with Him. Two things helped me, the ground into which I poured my service and my heart. If your heart is not right, or your ground is not right, you might be sowing in vain.

And to add to my points, I wasn’t just sitting in church doing nothing; I was investing the little I could into my education and career. I worked very hard. I gave God the right platform to bless and reward me, because service without work leads to frustration and woes.

My years of sacrifice were not merely from 1993 to 2006. They truly began in 1984 when I got born again, but it was in 1993 that the Lord gave me a revelation of my journey to the West for a new assignment. I served God passionately and faithfully at a Baptist church as an usher from 1984 to 1992. Not a dime of God’s money ever got stolen by me or went missing under my watch. Many times, I was left alone with the offering in the same room, and I never tampered with God’s money, even when I had desperate financial needs.

I defended my pastor and stood with him even when he was about to be voted out. It was my vote that saved his job in the heat of a gang-up against him by the elders of the church. At his funeral in New York in 2026, his daughter pulled me aside to remind me of this incident. Tears almost filled my eyes. God’s name be praised. It meant a lot to heaven, and it was written in my account.

If you are serving God at any level, do it with the right heart. Don’t gossip about your pastor. Don’t join church haters to criticise the church. The Bible says, “A mocker shall seek for knowledge and won’t find it” (Proverbs 14:6). And if you are serving God in a church founded on truth, stay there. Don’t jump from church to church. Sit and serve. Rewards are triggered by consistency and faithfulness. But if you know your pastor is not a servant of God, you may serve for 50 years and come out with regrets.

“Serve the LORD with gladness: come before His presence with singing” (Psalm 100:2).

So, if I consider all the previous years, I would say it took God 22 years to reposition me. It took Him 22 years to set me up for greatness. You are too much in a hurry with God. The God of the Christian faith does not bless or reward people in a hurry. Many people rush to the top only to be buried in the ground. Satan knows this principle very well, so he often hastens us to give up on God and accept his evil alternatives. Sit, serve, and wait for God. Today, the rest is history. Don’t believe the lies of church haters. I cannot tell you how much blessing God has brought into my life, but the greatest of them all is the oil of ministerial calling He placed on me. That alone is my greatest reward in life.

Continue to work hard on your business, career, and ministry. No matter how hard and bad your nation is, God’s word is not altered by human circumstances. If He has said it, you will see it. But build on the principles of consistency and faithfulness. Sit and serve in your church. Give dangerously. Watch and wait for God to blow you. For when God blows you, no man can quench you. For “whatever the Lord does shall be forever” (Ecclesiastes 3:14).

Ayo Akerele is the senior pastor of Rhema Assembly and the founder of the Voice of the Watchmen Ministries in Ontario, Canada. He can be reached through [email protected]. You can connect with him on: YouTube: @VoiceoftheWatchmen, TikTok: @drayoakerele, Instagram: @drayoakerele, Facebook: @Ayo Akerele