It May Be That the LORD Will Work for Us

I have been in this conversation so many times that I can usually tell within four minutes.

Somebody is waiting on God about a big thing. A move, a marriage, a career, a calling. They are serious about it and they are not being lazy and the waiting is genuine.

And somewhere in the conversation, almost always in an aside, they mention a small thing. A phone call they know they should make. A conversation they have been avoiding. Money they said they would give and have not. A person they know they should go and see.

They mention it in passing, as a detail, on the way to the real subject.

And I have learned, slowly and by getting it wrong many times, to stop the conversation there.

Because in almost every case, the small thing is not small and it is not unrelated. It is the only part of the whole matter that is actually clear, and it has been sitting undone behind a much larger question that cannot be answered yet.

He said it may be, and then he climbed

Jonathan is a king's son with an armor bearer and no orders. His father is sitting under a tree with six hundred men doing nothing. There is a garrison up a cliff.

And he says this.

And Jonathan said to the young man that bare his armour, Come, and let us go over unto the garrison of these uncircumcised: it may be that the LORD will work for us: for there is no restraint to the LORD to save by many or by few. (1 Samuel 14:6, King James Version)

It may be. Stop there for a second, because that is not the language of a man with a promise in his hand.

He does not say the LORD told me. He does not say I have peace about this. He says it may be, which is honest, and then he says the thing he is actually certain about, which is a fact about God rather than a fact about the plan.

There is no restraint to the LORD to save by many or by few. That is the certainty. Not the outcome. The character of the one he is walking toward.

You have something certain in your hands already, and it is a fact about God rather than a fact about your situation, and 1 Samuel 14 puts it may be and there is no restraint in the same sentence, and it is the Spirit who makes a person able to move on the second one while the first one stays open.

And then he climbs. On hands and feet, the text says, which is not a dignified way to go up a cliff, and he does it because it is the only thing in front of him that can actually be done.

You have a cliff sized certainty available in a sentence about God's character, and Scripture never asks anybody to wait for more than that (1 Samuel 14:6), and the Spirit is the one who makes that enough for a person who has nothing else settled.

The small clear thing goes first

Here is the principle, and Jesus states it in one line without any decoration.

He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much. (Luke 16:10)

That is usually preached as a promotion structure, as though small faithfulness earns a bigger assignment. I do not think that is quite it, and the way it works in real people is more interesting.

A person standing in front of a large unclear thing has no way to move. But almost every one of them has something small and entirely clear that they have not done, and doing it is the only motion available.

And motion is what a person needs. Not because it produces an answer. Because a person who has done nothing for eight months about anything becomes a person who cannot do anything, and the paralysis spreads outward from the one question that cannot be answered.

You have one thing in front of you that needs no discernment at all, and its clarity is not an accident (Luke 16:10). The Spirit is the one who keeps putting a small obvious thing in a person's path while a larger one stays quiet.

This is not a transaction

I want to put a fence here, because this teaching goes bad fast in the wrong hands.

Nobody is saying that doing the small thing unlocks the answer to the big one. That is a technique, and this site does not sell techniques, and it would make God into a machine with a coin slot.

The small thing is worth doing because it is right and because it is clear. Not because of what it might produce. If a person does it in order to get an answer, they have not obeyed, they have paid.

And nothing here says a reader who cannot hear about the big thing has been withholding somewhere. That accusation gets made constantly in Christian rooms and it is not in the text and it is not true.

You are not being punished with silence over something undone, and no verse anywhere makes an unanswered question a receipt for a small disobedience (Zechariah 4:10), and it is His Spirit who is present with a person who is doing everything they know and still hearing nothing.

The mother of Jesus gives the whole instruction in five words at a wedding, and it is one of the last things she says in the record.

Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it. (John 2:5)

Whatsoever he saith. Which is a category that includes the small already-said thing and does not require anything new to arrive first.