Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Are Things Not As You Expected? | Christmas | Isaiah 11:6-9

Episode Date: December 28, 2021

Has your life turned out how you expected? Does everything feel turned upside down? In today's episode, Patrick uses Isaiah 11:6-9 to explain how God can use the unexpected to carry out his plan. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Social Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks Twitter: https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast Passages: Isaiah 11:6-9 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. I'm Tanya Wilman. And I'm Patrick Miller. Right now, we are in our Christmas series. But starting in January, we're going back to the basics and guiding you through the first books of the Bible. I'm really excited about this. We'll be starting in Genesis.

So invite a friend to go on this journey with you starting on January 1st. What happens when reality exceeds? our expectations. What about the opposite? The moments that have changed my life the most are precisely the moments where things happened that I didn't expect. John Green, you might recognize his name. He's the author of The Fault in Our Stars and a number of other New York Times best-selling novels. But before he was an author, he was actually studying to be a pastor at a divinity school. To make ends meet at the time, he was working in a hospital as an orderly. He ended up taking the Knicks chips. He's kind of the new guy. That's the way it goes. But that also meant that he

saw a lot of really tough things. The worst night of his life actually happened inside of that ER. A family rushed in their three-year-old son and he was covered from head to toe in awful, awful, awful burns. I mean, the kid was barely alive. His clothes were melted to his body. And John said that the smell of the burns and the child crying out, it made him sick to his stomach. Doctors and nurses, they're rushing around to care for the child. But just looking at him, John knew that this kid, he probably wasn't going to make it, that the burns were just too bad. He began to struggle to breathe. And so John, he's helping.

He's doing everything he can. And finally his shift ends. And he goes outside and he immediately throws up. He felt grateful that he wouldn't have to be there to see this young boy die in such an awful way. And then he felt this terrible feeling for feeling that way. Why was he thankful for not being there? In his mind, he could see the boy's parents screaming and crying. just desperately wanting their little boy to live.

John Green ended up dropping out of Divinity School. He thought, look, if there's a God and he allows things like this to happen, then he's not a good God. And the honest truth was that in the face of a child burned to death by an accident, there really could be no God. There is no purpose. So John knew he couldn't be a pastor. But here's the strange thing. As 20 years rolled on, John found himself continually praying for that little boy and for his family.

He didn't even believe in God and he knew that the boy was dead, but he couldn't stop praying for the boy and praying for his family. But then again, he actually realized he wasn't totally sure. He wasn't sure if the boy had actually died. He really didn't know what happened to the family. And so sometimes he would get onto Google and he'd type in the boy's name, but he can never bring himself to actually do the search. He didn't want to relive those old memories.

But after 20 years, he finally did it. And to his surprise, Nick, the little boy, Nick was still alive. He'd actually survived those burns. And so John Green called him, and he asked Nick what he was doing, what he was up to. And Nick said that he was in college. In fact, he was going to Bible college to become a pastor. And he explained to John that his parents, they weren't religious at all when the accident happened. But in the aftermath, his parents, they started asking bigger questions about the purpose of life.

And Nick described how they were invited to a church and his family began attending. And that church, it just loved them so well. It helped them meet their needs when they had medical debts. It helped them take care of Nick through countless surgeries. And the church was the one place where Nick felt like he was really accepted for who he was. Nick explained to John that without that accident, his family never would have found Jesus. Without that accident, he probably wouldn't be following Jesus. Without that accident, he wouldn't be studying to be a pastor.

John was completely thrown off. He described how the accident actually wrecked his faith and it pulled him out of ministry. And then, much to John's surprise, Nick began to console him. He began to ask John questions about his life to counsel John. I mean, Nick's only 23 years old. He didn't see John as a famous author with millions of dollars that he could use and manipulate. Instead, he just saw John as a hurting person in need of a friend. You know, sometimes reality is just so unexpected. And it's often in those unexpected reversals that God's kingdom and presence is most evident to us. When Isaiah prophesied about the coming of Jesus' incarnation, he described it using an image, a metaphor from the natural world, but it was the natural world reversing. It was an image of something unexpected, of something impossible happening, just like what happened to John. Isaiah 116 says this, The wolf will lie with the lamb. I mean, that's unexpected. That's a reversal. That's not the way things should go, but he continues, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion

and the yearling together, and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. We have to remember that Isaiah, like all prophets, he used metaphors and images. This is not describing some future era where predators and prayer are going to be buddy-buddy together. It's a way of saying that when Jesus comes on Christmas Day,

there is going to be a great reversal. The death makers will stop making death. the meek and the gentle will sit among the kings and the queens. Life is going to turn upside down when Jesus appears. You see, what happened to Nick when he was three years old? That was a tragedy. But the results shouldn't surprise us. Jesus is always turning things upside down in unexpected ways.

He's always turning tragedies upside down. He's always turning death into life. He's always turning awful accidents into surprising faith. And so this Christmas, as you look at your source, circumstances. Don't buy into the lie that everything is as it seems. Jesus is often reversing the worst things into the best things. He's often bringing good out of evil, life out of death. I want you to give where you are hurting the most right now. I want you to give that place to him. I want you to give him your greatest doubts. Just like John Greenhead, I want you to give those doubts to him.

I want you to give him your questions. I want you to give him your needs. And I want you to ask him to do the impossible today, to make the lion lay with a lamb in your life, to bring good out of that place that's hurt, out of that place that's lost. Just like Nick, who will spend the rest of his life with health consequences because of those burns, this tells us that, look, God isn't just going to fix our problems or make everything okay. It means that he's going to use the hardships. He's going to use the questions to produce deeper faith, deeper character, deeper perseverance, and deeper Christ-likeness in your life. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.