The Significance Of The Small Series

God loves to get His will done in this world by means of little things, little places, and little people.

You and I are conditioned to look for big things like New York, London, or Paris, but God with His

infinite sense of humor often has His eye on hick towns like Bethlehem or Bridges Creek, Virginia,

or Hodgenville, Kentucky, or Epworth, England, or Dole, France. Out of these podunk little places

came the Lord Jesus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John Wesley, and Louis Pasteur.

If we were planning history we would have had Jesus born in Jerusalem, or better yet, in the capital

of the Empire-Rome. But God is not all that impressed by the big. To an infinite God

everything is small, and He seems to favor the small even from the human perspective. The small is

the foundation for both His physical creation and His spiritual kingdom. We want to focus on the

significance of the small because we are so conditioned by our culture that we forget the biblical

perspective. In Scripture we see God specializing in using the small. Those who are in small

churches can easily feel powerless and loose a sense of self-esteem. We need to counter our culture

by the biblical revelation that God is a lover of the little and has a great appreciation for the small.

He took Goliath with little David and reduced the army of Gideon to 300 to show that He does not

need the big to get His will done.

The real question is the one that Mark Twain's daughter Susie asked when she broke one of her

favorite toys. Her mother tried to console her by saying, "There, there Susie, you mustn't cry over

little things." Susie thought for a moment and then asked, "Mama, what is little things?" To a child

the Mid-East crisis is no big deal. What really matters is their toys. The size of anything depends on

your perspective. We need to recognize that the entire universe is built out of atoms that are so

small they cannot be seen. Everything that is big and significant is made out of the exceeding small.

This means that the small is really big and very significant. All visible reality is built out of

invisible tiny atoms. God made every realm of creation in this same way so that all is dependent

upon the small. Look at the three categories by which we sum up all of creation: The animal, the

mineral and the vegetable kingdoms.

I. ANIMAL.

Man fits into this category and no matter how big a man gets he is a product of the small. The

egg is about one twenty millionth of an ounce. This is not exactly jumbo, but compared to the sperm

that fertilizes it, it is massive, for it is 85 thousand times larger than the sperm. Your life and the life

of every person begins with the microscopic and in that small package are all of the genes that

determine how big you and all parts of you will be.

God made everything out of nothing, and He goes on making everything and every person out of

as near to nothing as you can get in size, for it is God's way to use the small.

II. MINERAL.

Back in 1956 when I was in my first year of college scientist discovered that the universe is full

of particles they called neutrinos. There are billions of them going through our skulls right now

coming from the sun and stars, and perhaps even other galaxies. But you can't even blame your

headache on them, for they are so small they could go through your head and not touch a thing. It is

not because your head is so empty, for even if your head is made out of solid steel they would still

make it through just as easily as a bat makes it out of Mammoth Cave without hitting the walls.

These particles are so small that they shoot through the entire earth at the speed of light and

never fell a bump. They can only be stopped by a direct head on collision with another elementary

particle, and the chances of this are one in ten thousand million. Atoms would need microscopes of

enormous power to see these tiny bits of reality. They are closer to thought than they are to matter,

and that is why there are many physicists who feel that matter is just another form of spirit. They

can take a reading of your brain because your brain is throwing off stuff even greater than these

neutrinos. The idea of all creation being commanded into being by the Word of God is no longer an

inconceivable idea as it once was. It is made reasonable by what science has discovered about