“Little things are important.” “It’s the little things that mean the most.” These are sayings most of us have heard all our lives. The reason little things are important and matter so much is that big things are made up of little things. Little things require a lot of thought, discipline, commitment, and sacrifice. That means that little things are actually “big things.”
If you look carefully, you can find this concept in Joshua chapter 5. This is a short chapter, but it is a key chapter. The Children of Israel are standing at a threshold. They are leaving behind the last vestige of their slavery and wilderness experience that they’ve known for the last 40+ years, and stepping into a new and unknown phase of life and relationship with God.
At such a time, you would think there would be some major instruction and training going on. But, instead of that, the Children of Israel are brought back to two basic principles or attitudes which will prove sufficient for anything to come…
- An attitude of obedience and commitment to God for His sovereignty.
- An attitude of gratitude to God for all He has done.
It is interesting that after they had renewed those two attitudes (with circumcision and Passover), then they ate the fruit of the land for the very first time!
Obedience and gratitude. Two very big “little things” that we must constantly renew in our lives…wherever we might find ourselves.