Caleb and Clifford Clark

                                                     by David Parker

What do Caleb, George Mueller, Oswald J. Smith, Raymond Lull, Charles Simeon, and Clifford Clark all have in common?  The answer is that they didn’t (and in Clifford Clark’s case, hasn’t) retired from God’s work during their golden years.  This is a heroes line-up who loved (and loves) the Lord enough to follow Him to the finish.  Oswald J. Smith and George Mueller continued their ministries of traveling and speaking into their nineties, and Charles Simeon in to his mid-seventies.  Oswald J. Smith continued to write books and preach on the mission field in his nineties.  Raymond Lull left his position as a Bible professor and trekked off to North Africa to evangelism Muslims.  As an elderly missionary (eighty years of age), Lull died a martyr’s death at the hands of those whom he had come to proclaim God’s message of deliverance.

We all know Caleb’s story from the Old Testament.  At the age of eighty-five, he asked God (and fought) for a mountain.  Instead of leaving it to the younger guys, Caleb responded in obedience, faith, and God-dependent effort.  Here it is from Caleb himself, “I am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me: as my strength was then, even so is my strength now, for war….Now therefore, give me this mountain” (Joshua 14:11-12).  Caleb was a faith-filled fighter.

What about Clifford Clark?  Well, this long-time pastor of over thirty years (Oklahoma) has just turned eighty-two years young; he’s publishing his autobiography this March (2006); and he continues to preach across the country, traveling weekly with the passion of a missionary statesman.  Recently, I asked him when he and his wife would be heading to Florida for their twilight years of golfing and sea shell collecting.  His response, “I can’t quit: I don’t know how.”

May the example of these men motivate each of us to make faith-filled prayers, to take mountains for God, and to say, “I can’t quit: I don’t know how.”

David Parker