Regardless of what you may think, God is never caught off guard by any happening in your life and never will be. You are special to Him.

<p>Regardless of what you may think, God is never caught off guard by any happening in your life and never will be. You are special to Him.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Triadelphia SDA Church

Jim Ayer

God has never said, “I didn’t see that coming”

This church is so blessed with musical talent.

I know there are some that want to have me sign the guest book, but that happens for a lot of us.

This feels so good to be at our home church.

I want to talk about Janine and I just for a moment.

We had decided we'd made the decision, at least for that time, based on many things that was going to be it for a while.

So my wife was taking birth control pills.

And so 1 day she gets a call from her doctor, Dr.

Reynolds said, I'd like to talk with Jim.

OK, Janine gives me the phone, and I begin talking with the doctor.

He said, Jim, I've got something to share with you.

He said, you know, he said, the birth control pills your wife has been taking, I made a mistake, and it's a fertility pill.

He said, well I'll pay the hospital bills and I'll do all of that.

And I said, yeah, what about the next 18 years?

He didn't really have an answer for that 1.

Now, it was kind of interesting, because God apparently was on a different timetable too, and we didn't have our sweet daughter until quite a bit later.

So fertility drugs or no drugs, it didn't happen.

I came across this fellow here not too long ago who apparently shot 3 young people in a high school while he was wearing a t-shirt that said killer.

Now his pro bono attorney, he and the pro bono attorney are in court, and while he's in court during the time, he takes off his shirt to reveal the T-shirt that he had on.

The attorney said this, he says, I think everyone in the courtroom was shocked today.

Then I think about, for those of you who are old enough here, you think back to the Soviet Union.

It's interesting, 1 of the strategists for the Cold War, George Kennan, wrote, in reviewing our entire history of international affairs in the modern era, he found that it was hard to think of anything more strange or startling and at first glance inexplicable than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance of the great power known as the Soviet Union.

President Ronald Reagan, called the revolution unexpected.

The greatest political minds in the day didn't see it coming.

And then I look back to some time that was very, very recent for all of us, the Romney, the Romney campaign, the Obama campaign, and what was going on with that and the situation.

You know, if you, nobody remembers Dick Morris.

Dick Morris had said on the night before the election, Obama is done for.

The, all the, all the pundits and everybody, they've not got it correctly.

Romney is going to sweep everything, Absolutely everything.

But on that particular night, well, they thought that North Carolina was going to be called rapidly.

They thought that Pennsylvania would be in play all night long.

They said that we were confident that we had a path to victory, but all of a sudden things changed.

I don't think anyone saw this coming." That was their quote, their statement.

Can you imagine God saying, wow, I never saw that coming?

In your own life, can you imagine God saying, oops, oops.

Would that make you have much confidence in God?

They came in in 1949 to a house church in China.

They captured everybody, took everybody, I think 49 people, they took them all, they began beating them and torturing them and threw them into the darkest, most ugly prison.

Finally, every 1 of them recanted except 4 people.

And those 4, especially 1 man, he was tortured continually on and on and on.

But during his time in prison, during his time in prison, he began sharing the gospel with others and wanting others to Jesus Christ.

I wonder if God knew that that was going to happen to his believer.

Are there any instances that you can think of in the Word of God that God was surprised by a particular event, by a particular situation.

You remember that's the chapter of Joseph.

Joseph receives a dream from God where he sees all of his brothers, apparently representative sheaves bound together and each sheave came and bowed before Joseph's sheave.

Joseph being a young, dumb young man maybe, runs out and tells all his brothers immediately the dream.

God gave me a dream and you are all going to bow to me.

Threw him in a pit, sold him to the slave traders who would take him down in Egypt, sell him to Potiphar.

He gets in a mess, entanglement there, and he's thrown into prison.

You think, did God know When He gave that dream to that young man, what was going to happen because of that single dream?

We find here's the children of Israel being led out into the desert.

God brings them all out of Egypt, traveling out there and all of a sudden they reach the Red Sea and here is the Egyptian army behind them.

They're going to destroy them, wipe them out.

But then God speaks to Moses and Moses tells the people, fear not.

You see because if God brings you to it, God will bring you through it.

Whatever is happening, if He brings us to it, He'll bring us through it.

Exodus 15, 24, children of Israel are wandering out there and they're thirsty and they come up to a pool of water apparently or a big body of water, but the water is bitter.

And they start complaining to God, God, we wish we were back in Egypt.

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God has never said, “I didn’t see that coming”

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