Dear Sister,
Yesterday while returning home from the grocery store, I was thinking about a Scripture in the New Testament. The master says to his slave, who had doubled the two talents he had received to work with, “You were faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things” (Matthew 25:23).
Jesus told this story to illustrate how God decides which of His servants should receive greater responsibilities in His kingdom.
Many of us sincerely ask the Lord to use our lives in significant ways to bring glory to His name and build His work. Perhaps we pray that God will use us to win thousands of souls to Christ, see miracles happening through our ministry, bring our entire village to the Lord, lead a Gospel team, train others for ministry or become a Bible school teacher.
God may indeed be eager to answer all those prayers even far beyond what we asked for. Though His calling and gifts are purely given to us by His grace, when it comes to ministry and leading others, God looks for a specific Christlike character quality in our lives: faithfulness.
It would be irresponsible of God to blindly commit His work to us. That’s why He told us through the apostle Paul: “...it is required of stewards that one be found trustworthy” (1 Corinthians 4:2). Paul explains in the previous verse that we are servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.
This means God has entrusted the whole truth of the Gospel into our care and asked us to represent Him in this world. If we truly understand this responsibility, it should cause us to serve the Lord with fear and trembling. This is not because we are afraid of our heavenly Father, but because we know how easily our own hearts are willing to compromise the truth. Yet we are called to be ambassadors of Him whose very nature is faithfulness.
My dear Sister, before God can justify giving us the greater things we long for, we first must become trustworthy. Otherwise we surely will bring dishonor to the name of the Lord.
That’s the reason He begins our ministry training by letting us practice faithfulness in the small things of daily life and our personal walk with Him. He watches and waits for our faithfulness to grow to a higher level before He adds more responsibilities to our service.
Jesus evaluates our trustworthiness by how faithful we are in the tiny things. When He told His disciples the story about the unrighteous steward, He concluded, “He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much” (Luke 16:10).
Did you realize that Jesus didn’t say, “He who is faithful in a little thing”? Instead, He said, “... in a very little thing”!
That means the Lord is evaluating our readiness for greater responsibility in His kingdom, not by considering our great ministry accomplishments and impressive Bible knowledge, but by examining our very little things.
He knows that most of our compromises in faithfulness are found in the very small things others can’t see and that we consider insignificant. Yet to Him these tiny things are the most accurate measurement of where we truly are with our walk in truth and righteousness.
We must give importance to these very small things. Unless we deliberately deal with these areas of our lives, we ourselves hinder and delay God from using us in a more significant way. We must look carefully for the very small hidden things that until now we haven’t taken seriously.
Yesterday, the Lord pointed one out in my life. My husband has several shirts that are more trouble to iron than the others he has. He likes some of his other shirts to be starched and pressed by the laundry service, but not these. Each time he puts them for washing, I hope he doesn’t tell me to iron them myself. Until now, when he told me to iron them at home, I did it, but if he said nothing, I took them to the cleaners. Technically I didn’t disobey him, but in my heart I knew he would have wanted me to do them at home. However, I had convinced myself that each time I was gaining two hours to work for the Lord.
In the light of these Scriptures about being faithful, I suddenly realized what I was doing, and I loudly said to myself, “God is testing my faithfulness with these shirts. How could I ever think that these two extra hours of ministry would amount to anything eternal?”
I am very sure this is not the only very little thing that needed correction in my life.
What about you, my dear Sister? Perhaps there is a tiny dishonesty in you when it comes to money, such as not giving back a few extra coins of change the lady at the marketplace gave you by mistake.
Maybe your very little thing is a touch of resentment or jealousy toward another sister.
Or it could be a very small disobedience to your husband or team leader, such as doing a task half a day later than you were supposed to.
It could be a slight exaggeration in your ministry report, a little pretense that makes others believe you are praying more than you actually do, a tiny deception by leaving out a few facts when you tell about an incident or a little bit of neglect in a responsibility committed to you.
Our motivation in dealing with our very little things must never be legalism or an attempt to become better than others. No, it must be our sincere desire to align our lives with the truth and become, through and through, trustworthy in the sight of God.
Let’s pray for one another that each of us will surrender to the refining work the Holy Spirit wants to do in our lives in this area of faithfulness.
I love you in Jesus,
Gisela
