God's Instruments Stripped Of Their Own Glory

Zec 4:10  For who hath despised the day of small things? for they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel with those seven; they are the eyes of the LORD, which run to and fro through the whole earth.

Now here is the real value of significance of that little interrogation - "Who hath despised the day of small things?" 

Out of the millions who went into exile, just these forty-two thousand odd would pay the price of letting go their comforts and possessions and all that they had come to settle into in their exile, and go back for the Lord's testimony.

Comparatively, out of the millions, a very small thing and in weakness; coming back with nothing, coming back to a desolate land - nothing there for them, nothing to bring with them, weak, impoverished, stripped, an afflicted people in the land - a day of small things.

But there is something very challenging in that word, "Who hath despised the day of small things?"

We have not really got the value and force of those words.

God Almighty is committed to that which is standing for His glory.

That is no small thing, you cannot despise that, and the fact remains that whenever God has sought to get peculiar glory for Himself, He has taken something which had no glory in itself.

Ah yes, you may despise it, but with God it is elect, precious, it is something of tremendous value.

You would never despise whatever the thing was in itself if it was standing wholly for the glory of God, and you understand that such a thing finds God committed in His anointing to that.

God has ever been under obligation to strip His instruments of their own glory.

A Moses with all his Egyptian glory must go for forty years to the desert to be emptied out and brought to be the man who says, "I cannot!" before the glory of God in Israel can come in.

A Gideon's twenty-two thousand must be brought down to three hundred if God is going to be glorified.

But Moses now is not a man to be despised.

Let them despise Moses and say, "Does the Lord speak only by Moses?

Does He not speak by us also?
 
And they despised him, and it just puts in there, "Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men that were upon the face of the earth."

Now then, see what God will do.

God is committed, and the glory of God appeared at the gate of the tabernacle and took up the challenge.

And the three hundred of Gideon was a small thing, but not to be despised.

The principle holds good.

Sometimes it takes the Lord years and years to get us sufficiently empty, meek and small, to bring in glory to Him...And that explains His dealings with us.

When He has got us small enough and empty enough, then He will begin His real testimony in us.

Not by might, nor by power of any kind whatsoever, but by My Spirit said Jehovah of hosts, the Lord God of Sabaoth.

~T. Austin Sparks~