Not Enough, And Starting Anyway

There was a church on this continent that woke up one morning with nothing underneath it.

Not a scandal. Not a slow decline. A separation happened between two countries, and overnight the thing that had held that church up simply was not there any more. No crown. No funding. No legal standing. And every single clergyman in it had sworn an oath to a person who was no longer on the other end of the line.

Picture that for a second, because it is stranger than it sounds. Not one of them had done anything wrong that morning. The ground had gone, and they were still standing in the air, holding an oath addressed to nobody.

What they did next was not glorious.

They met in small numbers in borrowed rooms. They argued. They wrote things down and tore them up. They had to invent from scratch a way of deciding anything at all, and in the middle of it they did something almost nobody in their world was doing, which was to give ordinary members of the congregation an actual vote in the rebuilding, because there was no crown left to do the deciding.

It took years. It was unglamorous. And a good deal of it was done by people who were entirely certain, at the time, that there was not enough here to start again with.

Now let me bring it into your kitchen, because that is where this message is going.

Something has gone out from under you.

The marriage, or the company, or the health you built every plan on, or the church you gave nineteen years to, or the person whose presence was the floor of your whole life. And it is not that you are grieving, although you are. It is something more specific and more disorientating than grief.

It is that you have to build something next, and you have counted what you have got, and it does not add up.

You have half the money. You have a body that will not do what it did. You have three people instead of thirty. You have got no idea how to do the thing you now have to do, and no reason to believe you can, and every honest calculation you make says: wait until there is more.

And so you are standing in the middle of it, doing sums, day after day.

He has never despised a small beginning

Now hear me, and hear me carefully, because there are two lies in this room and I want both of them named before we go on.

The first lie is that the ruin was arranged. That somebody engineered the loss to teach you something. I am not going to say that to you, because I do not know it, and nobody who says it to you knows it either. What was taken from you was a real loss and it is allowed to be simply that.

The second lie is quieter and it is the one that has you doing sums.

It says: a beginning this small is not a beginning. It is embarrassing. It is not worth starting until it is worth watching.

And here is what God says about small beginnings, spoken to a man standing in front of a foundation so unimpressive that the older people who remembered the first building wept when they saw it.

Who despises the day of small things?Zechariah 4:10

It is a question, and the shape of the question tells you the answer. Somebody was despising it. Somebody was standing there measuring the new thing against the old thing and finding it pitiful, and God asks, quite bluntly, who is doing that.

Because He is not.

You are standing in front of a beginning God has already refused to despise. Zechariah 4:10 asks who hath despised the day of small things and puts the despising in somebody else’s mouth rather than His own, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that question addressed to men in front of an unimpressive foundation, which means the smallness of what is in your hands is not a disqualification.

He is the one who begins with the small. It is His whole habit. A seed nobody would look at twice. A boy's lunch. A jar of oil at the bottom. Twelve men, and not one of them impressive. There is no verse anywhere that says wait until you have enough, and there is a whole book that keeps happening because somebody started with what was in their hands.

I want to be honest with you about what I am not promising. I am not telling you this rebuild will end the way you want. I am not putting a season on it or a year on it, and anybody who does is guessing with your life. What is coming is not mine to see and it is not yours to guarantee.

You have been doing the wrong sums, and the arithmetic has kept you standing still. Zechariah 4:6 says not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts, and it was spoken over the same half-built foundation, and it is the same Spirit named in the verse itself, which means the total you keep arriving at was never the thing the rebuild depended on.