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Advent Week 3: The Way of Surprise, Day 1

When has God's plan caught you by surprise? How did you respond?

by David Joynt on December 08, 2016


GOD’S PLAN
LUKE 1:26-33

Mary gets the angelic word, "You'll conceive and bear a son!" Further, this boy will be the Messiah, the inheritor of David's throne, the long-awaited rescuer of Israel. Now this plan, God's plan, was passing strange. World revolutions don't start in Galilee, and they don't begin with teenage girls. Virgins don't shop in the maternity store at the local mall. Our God is a surprising God. His ways are not our ways, His thoughts are not identical with ours. His purposes and plans extend back in time to the moments before creation and forward beyond the consummation of all things. We are temporal, local, and limited, and the scope of our vision is small. He is eternal, within and beyond time, filling all of space, seeing everything and everyone with perfect clarity. 

When has God's plan caught you by surprise? 

How did you respond?  

FAMILY TIME: Share a time when God’s plan for your life surprised you. Ask everyone whether they like or are wary of surprises.

Tags: advent, surprise

About the Author
David Joynt

Dave Joynt began his service as a pastor at Valley Presbyterian Church in Paradise Valley, Arizona in September 2014. This meant a move away from the Northeast, where he has a long history, growing up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and then serving congregations in Delaware and New Jersey for a total of 23 years.

Dave was nurtured in a great church in Bethlehem where his parents, Anne and Carey, served as elders. He graduated in classics from Lehigh University where his Father taught, and then from Oxford, where he met his wife Julia. Ordained in 1988, he completed a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1993.

He and Julia have a son, Tristan, and a daughter, Madeleine.

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