The Day of Small Things

There was one difference this morning and he decided it did not count.

Here is what it was. He got up, and instead of doing the thing he usually does first, he stood at the window for about forty seconds. That is all. Forty seconds of standing still where there is normally none, and then he went and did everything else exactly as usual.

He noticed it. That is the important part. Some part of him registered that the shape of the first minute had changed slightly, and something almost lifted, and then a second thought arrived about half a second behind the first one and put it down.

The second thought said: forty seconds is not a change.

And that was that. He got on with the day, and the small thing went into the category of things too small to be evidence, which is a category that has been filling up for about a year.

Now, I want you to notice what he is comparing it against, because that is the whole of the problem. He has a picture of what a real change looks like, and it is large. In the picture something is visibly different from the outside: a person notices, or a situation resolves, or a habit of years simply stops. Against that, forty seconds at a window is not merely small. It is embarrassing. It would be humiliating to offer it to anybody as evidence.

So it gets discarded, and every one of them gets discarded, and a year of small things has been thrown away by a man who has been waiting for a large one.

That is you at the window.

You noticed something this morning. It was small. You put it down before the kettle had boiled, because you are measuring against a picture, and against that picture nothing you have got would ever qualify.

The question in the verse has never been answered

The people in Zechariah's day had begun rebuilding something and it was pitiful compared to what had stood there before, and the older ones among them remembered the first one and wept when they saw the foundation of the second. Into that, God asks a question.

For who hath despised the day of small things?Zechariah 4:10

It is a question rather than a statement and that is deliberate. God does not say small things matter. He asks who has been looking down on them, and the question hangs there, and it is aimed at everybody standing round a foundation that does not look like much.

You are being asked that question this morning about forty seconds at a window, and I am not inflating a verse: Zechariah 4:10 asks it in writing about a building nobody was impressed by, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can get it to a man who has already discarded the evidence.

Now, in my grandmother's house the bread came out of the oven in a particular order and the first loaf was always small, because the first loaf takes the temperature of the oven and tells you about all the others. Nobody ate it as a meal. Nobody would have called it dinner. But no baker in that street would have thrown it away, because the small first thing is what tells you the oven is right.

You have been throwing away the loaf that tells you the temperature, which is written into the question rather than into my fondness for a kitchen, with the Spirit of God able to make a man pick something back up that he put down before the kettle boiled.

And there is a phrase in the same verse that gets left out of most quotations. It goes on to describe eyes that run to and fro through the whole earth, rejoicing to see the work begun. God is not merely tolerating the small foundation. He is watching it with pleasure, and the watching is described as active and delighted.

So while you were putting forty seconds into the discard pile, it was being looked at with joy by Somebody with better eyes than yours.

This counts, at the size it actually is, on a morning that produced nothing else, because Scripture asks who despised the day of small things, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a courtyard as the light reaches the stones.