God delights in using little things — James Montgomery Boice

“Here [Acts 23:12-22] we have another of those startling biblical cases where God, who is able to use the great as well as the little things of life, uses small things to accomplish his purposes.

A woman I have known for a long time once told me something about her background that I had not heard before. She said, “God used a horse to bring me to the Savior.” She saw the puzzled look on my face and asked, “Haven’t I ever told you that story?”

“No, you haven’t.”

“Well,” she said, “my daughter got interested in horses and joined an equestrian team, where she met a Christian who was one of the other riders and a competitor. He led my daughter to the Lord. Then my daughter helped me to find the Lord too.”

I wonder if you have ever thought about this in terms of the Bible’s stories. God does not hesitate to use small objects for his purposes. When he made the first man, Adam, in Eden, he made him from the dust of the ground, stooping to collect and form it. He could have used some more noble substance, I suppose. But in order that we might be reminded later, “Dust you are and to dust you will return” (Gen. 3:19), he chose dust.

When God revealed himself to Moses to call him to be the deliverer of his people, he appeared in a burning bush on a hillside in a remote, barren area of the world.

When he sent David to kill the Philistine giant, Goliath, it was with a sling and five small stones.

Samson killed a thousand Philistines with a jawbone of a donkey.

Many of the great people of the Bible were, at least in their early days, hardly great people at all. Abraham, the father of the faith, worshiped idols until God revealed himself to him.

Moses was a son of slave parents, killed an Egyptian, and spent the next forty years in the desert as a shepherd.

David was the youngest son in an obscure family in an obscure town in Judah. Yet God called this nobody to be the greatest king of all.

Most striking, when God was ready to send his own Son to earth, he chose a poor virgin of Nazareth to be his Son’s mother.

That is the way God operates. If that is the way God operates, if God delights in using little things, then God can use us, however small or apparently insignificant we may be. Paul states this principle in 1 Corinthians 1:26-29.

If that is true, then there is hope for each of us. In this story, God used Paul’s nephew to save Paul.

Don’t ever say, especially when you go through dark periods, “Things are really bad for me. I am not accomplishing anything. God cannot use somebody like me, especially not in the circumstances in which I find myself now.” It is usually people like us in circumstances like ours that God uses.”

— James Montgomery Boice, Acts: An expositional commentary (384). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.