Kizito Jasper is a preacher at the Church of Christ, Obasa, in Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria. He is married and blessed with a daughter. His day job is his service as the director of Advancement, Alumni, and Church Relations at West Nigeria Christian College and School of Biblical Studies, Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria. Kizito teaches Old Testament classes and is passionate about Hebrew poetry.

Link:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kizito-jasper-1ba01a244?utm_source=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=member_ios

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Praise God for you, Tizito.

It's a great pleasure to connect with you.

What part of the world are you in today?

Presently, I'm in Nigeria, Western Africa.

How did you come to meet Jesus?

My family were always Christians.

My parents were Christians, and I was born into a Christian family.

So it was easy to see how God was moving in the life of my parents, and they just transferred their faith to me.

And later on in my early teens, I gave my life to Christ through water baptism.

Is there any fallaway time, or has it been consistent?

Yeah, it's been consistent, but of course, I've had times of, I wouldn't say doubt, but I've had times when situations have pushed me to the wall, and then I begin to question if God is still there, if God is still very much in my situation, if God still has something in it for me, if I'm not alone.

So I've had situations that have pushed me to those extremes, but it's been consistent since then.

What would you say is responsible for the consistency?

Okay, I think one thing that has been responsible for the consistency is the Word of God.

So beyond my parents, shortly after high school, I enrolled in a Bible college and for two years in a diploma program.

Consistently, I was understanding the Word of God in various classes.

I engaged in several spiritual activities, and I was just reading Matthew 7, that's where Jesus was talking about the wise man who built his house on a rock.

When the storms of life comes, his house will just keep standing.

Yes, I think for me, it has been the foundation of the Word of God that has been the hub upon which the consistency has been even up until this time.

Are you a married man or are you a single man?

Yes, I'm married with a daughter.

God bless her.

God bless both of them.

Amen.

Amen.

How did you meet your wife?

I met her at my workplace.

There's the Christian side of you, who's the pastor.

Are you a pastor at this point, after you've gone through the two years?

Yes, I am.

Yes, I am.

So there's the pastor side of you, and then there's the professional side of you.

Correct.

How do you find yourself meshing the both positions?

Okay, it's not been easy, because sometimes the professional part seems to take most of the time, because it's the paid job and all.

But the pastoral side of me, I have tried to make sure that I devote time to that.

So I think the point of devotion, just saying, okay, today is the day for the pastoral side of my job.

I have to push every other professional thing onto another day.

So for me, I devote Thursdays, Saturdays for the pastoral side, and then every other day, unfortunately, takes the professional side, because the professional side runs from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and even after closed hours, I may still be calling for one thing or the other.

So it's more of how I've been able to devote my time to really do the pastoral side of it.

One of the things I picked up when I was researching Who You Are is a paper that was written on the metaphors of Songs of Solomon, and the poetry that goes with the garden.

And it really caught my interest.

Would you explain the garden and what it represents in the Bible for you?

Okay, thank you.

So that was my master's thesis.

I wrote that.

And for that paper, the Song of Songs understands the body as a garden.

So, of course, the Song of Songs is a love poetry, and to really describe the desire that the female beloved had for the male beloved, they used what was quite conceptually available for them, and that was the vegetation, the garden.

So the garden for them becomes not just a physical site, but it also becomes a metaphorical extension of how they see themselves.

So the female beloved can describe herself within garden rhetoric as a lush garden, a secured garden, and then she's inviting the male beloved to come into her and then eat of her fruits.

So the literal physical garden that was their day-to-day physical activity became for these people the conceptual world upon which they could visualize themselves and visualize their love relationship.

Everything I've seen or heard with God has a repeatable mirror-like experience from the beginning to the present.

There's reality and truth in us being created in the garden, having God as our father who visits in the cool of the day and walks and have a conversation with man.

It's a beautiful connection in how God is true to who he is, isn't it?

Sure, it is.

It is.

It is.

I agree with you on that.

When you look at the pastoral side and the professional side, do you see a metaphor within the Bible that helps you keep your sanity?

Okay, I obviously have not thought about that before now because when we look at, say, the prophets, for example, when the prophets were called in the Old Testament, say Amos, for example, Amos was a shepherd.

He was a shepherd of Tekoa anyway.

I think he went to the Northern Kingdom intending to give the prophecy of God to them.

Part of the priestly people were like, who are you, this shepherd boy?

Why not go back to your shepherding?

We are the priests here.

We are going to get things done.

But Amos said, well, yes, I may not be qualified to prophesy, but God is the one who called me from shepherding to come into the walk that he has called me to.

So if I think of a metaphor that really describes both the pastoral and the professional, it would be the metaphor of shepherding.

I love that.

Yeah, so that would be, I think, the perfect metaphor, I guess.

What I love about how you speak is the ability, it feels as though to be any man at any point within your conversations.

Is that something that you've practiced or it's because of where you've been in life?

I think it's a function of where I've been in life.

Because when I think about the book of James, it just says that we should allow suffering to have its impact in us so that we can be able to be built up in endurance and patience.

And I believe it's been a function of all of my experiences from the Bible college as a student to the pulpits in a pastoral setting, back to the classroom setting.

So all of these experiences has contributed significantly in no small way to the person that I am today.

Yes.

It's been an honor speaking with you, Kizito.

Listening back to this, if you would, five years from today, you'll be able to give yourself a gift of a message, a message in a bottle.

So five years from today, you're listening to this conversation.

What's a message you'd leave for future you?

I would say, be true to yourself.

You've got this.

You're not alone.

Whatever happens five years from now, remember that God was with you in the beginning.

So he couldn't have brought you this far to leave you hanging.

So stay the course and you'll be glad you did.

That was what I would tell myself.

Yeah.

I appreciate you tremendously.

This has been a pleasure.

I treasure Kizito.

Thank you for being on what is inspired by 12 and the Converse.