Following Paul

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Paul was the unexpected apostle. He was after the fact. He calls himself one untimely born. He never met Jesus during his public ministry on earth, but he met the resurrected Jesus as one untimely born afterwards when he was trying to kill off the church, kill off the people of God. It was unexpected for him, unexpected for everybody, and probably the most unexpected thing about it is, after he was blinded on the road to Damascus, is probably the thought, I would have expected to be dead because of what I did. Right? I mean, come on. He should have. He was killing other people. He was approving of the stoning of Stephen. Instead, God says, no, you are going to be mine, and you are going to, through you, turn the world upside down. In our Zoom Bible study that we do on Fridays now, Fridays at 1130, we got to that passage where Paul is in Thessalonica, and the accusation is, these people who have turned the world upside down have come here, and it's kind of a backhanded compliment. Isn't that kind of cool? So, that's what we're dealing with in this series. How God works, what no eye has seen, no ear heard, no heart imagined, that's what God has planned. I thought I'd start out with a little Yiddish saying. It's called, Man tracht und Gott lacht. Have you ever heard of that before? I think I've got that slide. Maybe not. Julian, do you see it? Yes, there it is. Man plans and God laughs. Have you ever thought that in yours? You make all these plans. I have made so many plans. Most of them don't get fulfilled. And again, thank God they don't. The best things that have happened in my life are the things that I never planned. That is how God works with us so often. And it is in the Bible, not necessarily in this order, but in Proverbs 16, it says, The plans of the heart belong to a person, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord. All the ways of a person are clean in his own sight, but the Lord examines the motives. Commit your works to the Lord, and your plans will be established. He also says, Don't lean on your own understanding in the book of Proverbs. Don't trust your own judgment, but trust God. And I think that's what we have to do as a people these days. Part of the reason why this series came up, and why I thought it might be a good one for the new year, is because, boy, I would say the last, well, five years at least, maybe ten years since we started Thrive and all, we've lived in unexpected, like, unpredictable times. Things that I never expected. I was told when I got to Florida, we never have hurricanes really hit us. That was in 2002 when we got there. In Gainesville, oh, we never get a hurricane. In 2004, two of them ripped through after they landed on the East Coast, ripped through, and we dealt without power for a week each time in a mess, and it was just like, I never want to go through a hurricane again. And then I get a call down here to start this church and a campus ministry. Yeah, well, and the West Coast of Florida, we haven't had that many hurt. And then all of a sudden, now we're just getting them all the time. And then COVID, and everything else, and everything else in between, in your life and mine, so many unexpected things happen. And we think we're good at predicting these things, and we are not. By the way, do you know what today is? Groundhog's Day. What's Pax Atani Phil's prediction rate? 35%. You better flip a coin. You'd do better at flipping a coin than going with Pax Atani Phil. Do you understand? And probably you or me, I'm less than 35% chance of getting things right. Okay? Here's some from the 1950s. I found this article, I think it's from Fast Company, that put all these predictions that people make. In 1955, Variety magazine said about rock and roll that it will be gone by June. 1955. Yeah, I know. Okay. In 1957, Sir, Harold Spencer Jones wrote two weeks before Sputnik orbited the Earth, space travel is bunk. Okay. Yeah. Now I saw this in a video after the fact. I'm not quite this old, but in 1958, Nikita Khrushchev banged a shoe on the United Nations table and looked at the United States and said, we will bury you. Do you remember that line? Yeah. In 1989, I think the reverse has happened to an extent. The Soviet Union completely fell apart. By the way, organizations, companies aren't really good at predicting the future either. In 1959, International Business Machines or IBM said to the eventual founder of Xerox, the world potential market for copying machines is about 5000 at most. Were they off? Amp that a million times over when it comes to God. What no eye has seen, no ear heard, no heart imagined. No one gets it. And we see that Jesus shows up in odd. And though the prophecies are there, nobody predicted it. Nobody thought this was it. In fact, it was a surprise to everyone. And to his own disciples, they started follow...