God has always started His biggest work with one person who said yes.
The Jews in Babylon had every reason to feel small. Jerusalem was rubble. The temple was gone. They were a remnant living in someone else’s country, and nothing about their numbers suggested a future.
So God sent them to look at a man who had been dead for more than a thousand years.
“Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you; for he was but one when I called him, that I might bless him and multiply him.” (Isaiah 51:2)
He was but one. Out of all Israel’s history, God pointed the exiles to a single man, called by name, and reminded them that everything they were came from that one call.
One man and a promise
When God spoke to Abram, the promise was out of all proportion to the man: “I will make of you a great nation… and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:2–3). He was seventy-five, and his wife was barren. There was no nation yet, only a household packing up to leave.
Hebrews puts it bluntly: “from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven” (Hebrews 11:12).
Then comes the part we tend to skip. Abraham never saw it. The only piece of the promised land he ever owned was a field with a cave in it, bought for four hundred shekels of silver so he would have somewhere to bury Sarah (Genesis 23). “These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar” (Hebrews 11:13).
Being the one God calls does not mean you’ll watch the whole thing unfold.
Moses tried it his own way first
Moses knew he was meant to deliver his people before God ever said so. At forty he killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave. Stephen tells us what Moses was thinking: “He supposed that his brothers would understand that God was giving them salvation by his hand, but they did not understand” (Acts 7:25).
He was right about the assignment and wrong about the method. He fled Egypt and spent forty years keeping someone else’s sheep in Midian.
When the call finally came from the burning bush, it came to an eighty-year-old shepherd: “Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt” (Exodus 3:10). By then Moses had no confidence left. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?”
God’s answer did not describe Moses at all. “But I will be with you” (Exodus 3:12).
God answered “Who am I?” with His own presence. Moses at forty had strength and a plan, and he failed. Moses at eighty had neither, and God sent him.
The pattern does not break
Once you see it, you find it everywhere.
- Noah. An entire generation was corrupt, and one line changes the story: “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD” (Genesis 6:8).
- Joseph. One brother, sold for twenty pieces of silver, who later told the men who sold him that God had used it “to bring it about that many people should be kept alive” (Genesis 50:20).
- Esther. One woman, who knew that anyone who went in to the king without being called would be put to death unless he held out his golden scepter (Esther 4:11), and went in anyway. “If I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16).
None of them started a committee. None of them waited for the crowd to agree. The work of God came through a single person who obeyed, and then it reached the many.
I sought for a man
Ezekiel spoke these words to Jerusalem in the years before it fell.
“And I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it, but I found none.” (Ezekiel 22:30)
God went looking for a man — one — and could not find him.
We have become very comfortable letting the many carry what God meant for one. Someone should pray for that marriage. Someone should say something to the young guy at work who’s falling apart. Someone should open the Bible at the dinner table. We assume the someone is a pastor, a program, a more spiritual person down the row.
Ezekiel 22:30 does not let you hide in the crowd. When God looks at your family, your street and your office, He’s looking for one person who will stand in the gap. The question is whether He finds you.
The One behind every one
Every one of these stories points past itself. Abraham, Moses, Joseph and Esther were each the one for a moment. None of them could be the one for all of it.
Paul names the only man who could: “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19). Adam was one, and death reached everyone. Jesus was one, and life is offered to everyone.
You can say yes without pretending you’re sufficient, because you aren’t anyone’s Savior. Jesus already is. Your part is to be faithful where He has put you, standing on what He has already finished.
Where you come in
God called Abram by name and Moses by name, and He calls you the same way. He does not wait for the church in general to volunteer.
Some honest questions:
- Where have you been waiting for someone else to go first?
- Who in your life is carrying something that God may be asking you, specifically, to stand beside?
- What has God already spoken to you that you have been treating as a suggestion?
Abraham was one man, seventy-five years old, with a barren wife and no land. He never saw the nation. He obeyed anyway, and the whole world has been blessed through it.
God still starts His work the same way. He is still looking for one.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV.