Woe unto that man who despises “the day of small things” in the Church of Christ, or who despises “the day of small things” in any individual believer, for it is God’s day, it is a day out of which great things will yet come; and therefore he that despises it really despises his Maker’s work, and despises the great and glorious things which are to come out of the small things which are at present apparent!
I know some professing Christians who, I am afraid, despise “the day of small things” in little churches. There is gathered a small community of godly people; perhaps they are poor, and many of them illiterate; and some of you rich folk, who think yourselves wonderfully intelligent—though I am not always sure that you are—if you happen to settle down in that village, you say that you would like to attend the little chapel or mission room, but the minister puts his h’s in the wrong place, and his speech is ungrammatical, and of course that is very painful to your refined taste. Then the people are very poor, and you hardly think that the church is advancing at all, so to help it you leave it alone! “God forbid,” you say, “that we should despise the day of small things!” But you are very sorry that everything is on such a small scale. You say that you pity the poor people; but, instead of helping them, you lie quietly by, or you go off to a more fashionable place where you meet with some of your own class, and feel more at home. There, the h’s are put in properly, though the gospel is left out of the preaching; but the people who attend are such a “respectable” sort of folk that you feel it is quite the correct thing to worship with them. If any of you have any respect for yourselves while acting in such a way as that, I hope you will soon discover that there is really nothing “respectable” in that kind of respectability; I mean that there is nothing that should make a man respected when he gives up his convictions, and leaves his own true brethren for the sake of getting into a better class of society, and seeming to be of a superior order to the godly poor people to whom he might be of real service. To me, it seems that it should be your glory to join the poorest and weakest churches of your denomination, and wherever you go, to say, “This little cause is not as strong as I should like it to be; but, by the grace of God, I will make it more influential. At any rate, I will throw in my weight to strengthen the weak things of Zion, and certainly I will not despise the day of small things”
Where would have been our flourishing churches of today if our forefathers had disdained to sustain them while they were yet in their infancy? I thank God for the men who did not mind going down into back yards and up into haylofts that they might worship God according to the dictates of their conscience. I delight in those who were willing to stand on the village green, with the people sitting down on felled trees or logs to listen to them, and who were not afraid of being called fanatics, and of bearing all manner of reproach and scorn for Christ’s sake. But if you and I grow to be such great and grand people as some we have known, we must mind that the Lord does not take us down a notch or two, and that, perhaps, by a very painful process. He asks, as if in indignation, “Who has despised the day of small things?” and I believe that He is grieved with any of His servants when they fall into such a state of mind as that, and begin to despise His Church because she is despised by the world, and look down on His people as the high peaks of Bashan seemed to regard with contempt the lowly hill of Zion, and therefore the psalmist said to them, “Why leap you, you high hills? This is the hill which God desires to dwell in; yes, the Lord will dwell in it forever.”
Sovereign Grace Apologetics 