It's the Little Things

“It’s the little things, huh?”

This is typically an invitation to share how, as we mature, it is often the things most commonly overlooked that we learn to appreciate. In doing so, if we’re grace-oriented, we attribute their very existence to the holy, loving, merciful Lord. This exercise is most welcome when we feel wrought with disappointment or life, itself, is weighing heavily upon our souls. We are bombarded with fresh ideas as to what the “next big thing” ought to be in our lives and, yet, as the proverbial saying goes, it’s really the little things that add up, keeping us contented.

The so-called “little things” really aren’t “little” at all when we step back and realize how they, typically being superior in number to larger things, carry the most weight and influence in our lives. While we tend to focus on the nature of positive little things, the question is whether this weight equation holds true with sin and evil. In other words, though our natural inclination is to focus on the so-called “big” sins in our lives (ones we’ve committed or are currently living in), could it be that it is actually the “little” sins that carry more weight?

I’m going to take a moment here to challenge you. More specifically, I’m going to challenge the religion in you (the part of you that assigns weightiness to what natural, earthy man considers big sins). I want to take pause here and draw your attention to the fact that the Bible teaches us that this phrase, “It’s the little things,” is a two-way street, a double-edged sword, if you will. First, let me take you all the way back to the Fall in the Garden of Eden.

The first three chapters in the Bible (Genesis 1-3) disclose, with incredibly efficient precision, exactly how and why mankind sinned. It also describes the immediate results and perpetuity of sinfulness in this world; hence, our need for a savior. What’s really interesting is the manner in which God put His creatures, namely Adam and Eve, to the test. We all know the story about the forbidden fruit. Those who mock our faith in the Bible might accuse us of believing in something unfair or unjust. They argue that the punishment of spiritual and physical death doesn’t fit the crime. I mean, they only ate some otherwise innocuous fruit, right?

STOP!!! Therein lies the key to understanding something the serpent of old, Satan, himself, doesn’t want you to know. The Bible never says there’s anything special about the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In fact, what we may rightly conclude is that God purposely used something with very little material value to it. We have no biblical reason to conclude that the forbidden fruit looked or tasted differently than the same kind of fruit from other similar trees in the Garden. That, my friends, is the whole point!

In the absence of any distinction, man’s natural desire, his curiosity and, fundamentally, his temptation to investigate it to its ends, doesn’t exist. In other words, because the forbidden fruit carried little weight, it represented no real temptation, in and of itself. What is left is the prohibition assigned to it by God, “from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die”(Genesis 3:3). God chose an otherwise unremarkable, unweighty object as the vehicle to mankind’s self-inflicted demise. He did this, presumably, to prove a point beyond the shadow of a doubt - to show man that the real temptation was to disobey (to seek something outside of God's will), where the command, itself, was the focal point, not the fruit.

Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone.”
God could’ve chosen a different object to test man...say, something much more tempting, like another woman for Adam to gaze upon. When Adam fell (which he would have), he might have argued that the real reason for his disobedience, his wandering eye, was because the second woman was attractive to his natural senses. Adam’s constitution, not being equal to God’s, being fallible as he was, would equip Adam to argue that it was the object’s fault for tempting him. You get the point. God didn’t want to give the first two humans a reason to deflect blame.

This establishes a very important principle. Righteousness is a function of obedience. Any transgression against a known law is sin, “for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20b). Neither the object nor the act is the real issue. Every sin has one common component to it - it represents a departure from God’s will. The point I’m trying to make in this blog pivots on this one principle. I ask that you contemplate it and allow the Holy Spirit to retrain your religious mind, your natural tendency to assign weight to objects and/or actions rather than to the level of disobedience in view, especially in the absence of substantial temptation.

Here’s a quick example. Have you ever noticed how adolescents will, at times, disobey their parents for no other reason than to assert autonomy? As I’ve taught in a recent blog titled, Awakening the Sleeping Giant, sin becomes excited in us whenever it has the opportunity to assert itself against authority (“But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment” - Romans 7:8), namely God, since He ordains all authority on Earth. You see, it’s not the object or the action so much as it is the opportunity to oppose God that comprises the real test. This is precisely what we see in the Garden.

The morality of an action does not depend upon its abstract nature, but upon its relation to the law of God. Men seem often to judge of actions as they judge of material substances—by their bulk. What is great in itself, or in its consequences, they will admit to be a sin; but what appears little they pronounce to be a slight fault, or no fault at all.
Allow me to make my point of encouragement now...

Some of you have to live with the fact that you’ve sinned terribly in the past. As most of you will attest, some sins leave their mark in our lives until the day we die! As a result, we assign a certain “weight” to sin based on the apparent severity of it. Here’s the challenge that I promised you at the outset of this writing:

Which is more offensive to God, sinning in the presence of more or less temptation? What’s more offensive to God, a person who stumbles under great temptation or one who stumbles in naked disobedience? Remember the adolescent who bucked authority merely for the sake of asserting themselves? Is this more offensive than say when the same adolescent stumbles because of peer pressure or sexual tension?

To put this all into perspective, God allowed a benign piece of fruit to be the vehicle for man’s utter desolation. Was this fair? Absolutely! In the absence of any distinguishable temptation, the only temptation is disobedience in its basest form. So, what does this mean for all of us, so many years later?

We sin a lot. We must admit this. Subsequently, we routinely categorize our sins on a continuum between “big” and “little”, and we assign weight, and therefore perceived severity, based on where our sin falls on this continuum. We suppose that if we can just keep the “big” sins to a minimum, God will be more pleased with us. Likewise, we suppose that maybe God doesn’t care as much about the “little” sins. But, my friends, I think we might have this all backwards!

Is it possible, given that God imposed a death sentence upon all of mankind because he ate a piece of unremarkable fruit from an otherwise harmless tree, that punishment for the crime of sinning is based on the degree of blatant disobedience in the absence of real temptation??? I’ve already picked on adolescents twice here, so I’ll turn my attention to adults…

Suppose a married man sees a physically attractive woman and he lusts after her. He shakes it off, continues down the sidewalk, and then refuses to confess it as a sin to God, even though he knows it is. Which is a “bigger” sin in your eyes? The first involves serious temptation, the second merely disobedience. Suppose a woman cheats on her taxes. She sends in her tax portfolio, then reads the Bible and is convicted by, “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” (Matthew 22:21b), but she says to God in her heart, “Well, I’m only saving a few hundred bucks so what does it matter?” Which is a “bigger” sin in your eyes, the one with the temptation to cheat or the one that tries to reason with God about being disobedient? I hope you’re seeing the pattern here.

Why do I find this so encouraging? Well, for starters, over the course of my own life, I’ve had to live with some pretty “big” sins. And yet, all along, the Lord has kept reminding me that He has been pleased with my life (relatively speaking, of course). I mean, I generally live a godly life, making decisions based solely on my desire to obey Him. I, like Paul, never fully succeed (ala Romans 7), but my heart is always aligned with obedience. If I compare the number of times I obey in all the “little” things to the number of times I fail in a “big” way, what I conclude is that in the absence of real temptation, when it’s only just an issue of obedience, I fare very well. I believe this is the same root of righteousness that Jesus spoke of in the Parable of the Minas (Luke 19:12-27).

And he said to him, “Well done, good slave, because you have been faithful in a very little thing, you are to be in authority over ten cities.”
Jesus assigned a tremendous amount of weight to “a very little thing.” Take a moment to let that sink in. He was using the very same standard of measure that was used back in the Garden of Eden! God’s integrity demands that disobedience precipitates cursing (ala Genesis 3) while obedience results in blessing (ala Luke 19:17). Mankind has historically made the mistake of assuming his definitions for “big” and “little” are congruent with God’s, but they aren’t (until we learn better). Our sinful nature wants us to have our definitions backwards because it is able to rule over us with greater ease as a result! As the Lord God told Cain, “If you do well, will not your countenance be lifted up? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it” (Genesis 4:7).

Sin’s base desire is to assert independence from God. Its purest expression is when it does so with all the “little things” in our lives. For it’s all the little things that comprise the vast majority of living. On average, we make over thirty thousand decisions a day! That represents a lot of opportunity to obey or disobey God.

I’ll summarize this way...

Man wrongly assigns relative unrighteousness (the weight of sin) to the “size” of it, rather than recognizing that any breech of authority is equally wrong. In fact, it is when we stray with the little things, in the absence of significant reason for temptation, that reveals the greatest level of disobedience! Every one of us must be retooled in order to thwart sin’s desire to master us - we must accept the Bible’s definitions for “big” and “little” and, in many cases, find our encouragement in the fact that we are, by our new nature’s standard, obedient children, as a result of being saved by grace!

“It’s the little things, huh?”

Indeed it is, my friends!!!

Love in Christ,

Ed Collins