Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

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 feel 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 matter.

Eddington, the great scientist, said, "The stuff of the world is mind-stuff."

Matter is made up of such small pieces that it cannot be distinguished form thought. Sir James Jeans said, "The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine."

All we see is a thought in the mind of God which He commanded to take form so that we could see it.

It is still like thought when it is broken down into its basic elements.

Science is dealing with the invisible when it gets down to the bottom of things.

These neutrinos are as mysterious to them as our angels to the theologians.

John Updike the novelist wrote this poem to celebrate the neutrino:

Neutrinos, they are very small,

They have no charge and have no mass,

And do not interact at all.

The earth is just a silly ball

To them, through which they simply pass,

Like dust maids down a drafty hall,

Or photons through a sheet of glass.

They snub the most exquisite gas,

Ignore the most substantial wall,

Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass,

Insult the stallion in his stall,

And, scorning barriers of class,

Infiltrate you and me!

Like tall

And painless guillotines, they fall

Down through our heads into the grass.

III.

VEGETABLE.

An ancient story is told of Ammi who said to his son, "Bring me a fruit from that tree and break it open.

What do you see?"

The son replied, "Some small seeds."

The father then said, "Break open a seed and what do you see?" "Nothing," he responded.

"My child," said Ammi, "Where you see nothing, there dwells a mighty tree.

There is no great or small to the God that maketh all."

All God makes in the vegetable kingdom is made out of the small.

Every seed is a mere fraction of the fruit, or the tree, or the vine it can produce.

The big always come from the small in this kingdom from which we get the food we so love.

It would be crazy if we had to plant a coconut to get a peanut.

The big is the finished product, but it gets its existence from the small.

The small seems so insignificant, but it is really the key to the big.

If you have no small you will get no big.

This has many applications.

If man does not get very small quantities of what are called trace elements from the vegetable kingdom he will die.

This was discovered by the Dutch doctor Christiaan Eijkman who cured beriberi by giving sailors rice with the hulls on rather than polished white rice.

The polished rice was not poison, but it lacked a trace substance necessary for health.

This lead to the revolutionary discovery of diseases caused by the lack of something.

Dietary deficiency diseases are caused by the absence of a small bit of matter in the body.

This lead to the discovery of vitamins and how the body has a daily requirement of all sorts of tiny substances.

You live, move, and breathe because of minute bits of stuff that keep your body running.

You and all the animal kingdom keep going because of the small.

God uses the small all through the Bible to give victories to His people.

Someone wrote, "Shamgar had an oxgoad, David had a sling, Samson had a jawbone, Rahab had a string, Mary had some ointment, Aaron had a rod, Dorus had a needle, all were used for God."

We don't want to suggest, however, that the small is somehow sanctified just by being small.

The small is equally effective in the realm of evil.

Termites destroy more homes than earthquakes and matches and cigarettes cause more fires than volcanoes.

More heartache and sorrow is caused by little words and deeds of unkindness than by major acts of hostility.

The small is a great tool of the devil.

It was by means of a mere piece of fruit that he brought about the downfall of man.

He is a clever user of the small, but that is all the more reason to recognize its value.