7 CIRCUMSTANCES AND EVENTS Part 1

God speaks through circumstances and events — that is, through God’s sovereignty

God may choose to communicate His voice and movement in your life through nearly imperceptible means. You may see God’s divine orchestration after the fact.

Q. How do you know you are where you’re supposed to be in life — In your career? What led you to that conclusion?

Q. Have you ever thought or asked God: Have I missed my calling? Am I where I’m supposed to be? Did I make the right career choice? Did I marry the right woman/man? Did that choice derail me from God’s plan?
If you have asked those questions to God — how did He respond? Do you know for sure His answer?

Q. Have you ever asked questions like these: Did that misfortune or loss keep me from God’s best? How can God work good (Rom. 8:28) out my great loss? Life hasn’t turned out like I expected, what is God up to?

• God doesn’t always speak to you through a verse of Scripture.
• God doesn’t always clearly speak to you by His Holy Spirit.
• God may rarely, if at all, speak to you through visions, dreams, and angelic visitations, handwritings on walls, talking donkeys, or through His direct, manifest presence and voice.
• God may not give you wisdom to figure it all out every time you have a question.
• God may not give you counselors that know the specific answer you need.

So, what do you do when God doesn’t seem to be speaking?
1. Make sure you are not living in sin — for God may not answer because of unconfessed and unrepentant sin (Isaiah 59:2; 1 Peter 3:12; )

2. Seek Him with all your heart. (Jer. 29:12-14; 1 Chron. 28:9; Deut. 4:29; Prov. 8:17)

3. Trust in His sovereign, unseen, nearly undetectable guidance over your life. This life we live by faith (Heb. 11:1 and 2 Cor. 5:7 and Rom. 1:17b, 20) — we trust in Him whom we cannot see. Understand that God may be “speaking” through His divine orchestration of your life’s circumstances.

Ex. 1 Samuel 8:1— 10:1 The story of Saul becoming Israel’s first king.
Things to watch for:

1. What were the circumstances and events that brought Saul to Samuel?
2. Who was behind bringing Saul to Samuel? And how do we know that?
3. What choices were made that brought Saul to Samuel?

Q. What were the circumstances in the story?
— Israel rejected God’s appointment of judges and wanted a king
— God decided to give them a king — and have Samuel anoint him
— Kish’s donkeys go missing
— Kish decides to send his son Saul and a servant

• Go through the story and list the decisions that were made and who made them.
— Kish decides to send Saul and a servant to look for the lost donkeys (their wealth).
— Saul decides to choose a particular (unnamed) servant to go with him (remember this choice and look for a strategic reason why God may have wanted him with Saul)
— Saul chooses on particular path to go — Ephraim, Shalisha, Shaalim, Benjamites, Zuph) = Southwest. He could have gone north, northeast, East, West and ended up in hundreds of different locations.
— Saul chooses to look and keeping looking for 3 days — he didn’t give up after one day, or two.
— Saul decides after 3 days, it’s time to quit and go home. What keeps him from doing that at just the right time?
— The servant has information Saul doesn’t, and is motivated to share with him about a particular prophet, in a particular close-by place, that may be able to help them.
— Saul chooses to reverse his decision to give up, and decides to go into Zuph.
— The young women were in the right place at the right time, with the right information to guide Saul and his servant to where they needed to be.
— Samuel the prophet comes right toward them and meets up with them on the way.
— 9:16 Key point: God said to Samuel the day before, “Tomorrow, about this time I WILL SEND YOU A MAN from the land of Benjamin, and you shall anoint him commander over MY people Israel.
This verse begins to put all the above story into perspective!
God was behind bringing Saul to Samuel.
Think about every circumstance, choice, even misfortune that happened — and we see that God was sovereignly using it all — orchestrating it all — to bring Saul to Samuel.

Then basically Samuel invites them up to the special sacrifice, to be his special guest — then tells him not worry — that those donkeys have been found which were missing. After that he springs on Saul that he has just become the most important person in all Israel — which takes Saul by obvious surprise (like all of a sudden Billy Graham coming to your house and telling you that you just became president of the United States!)

After that he secretly anoints Saul and you can read the rest in 1 Samuel 10.

Core lessons we can learn from this story:
• “Random” misfortunes and loss…
• “Random” choices we make…
• “Random” people and their influence in our lives…
• “Random” paths we may choose to walk down…
• “Random” events that pop up in life…
… all may be leading to a blessing in disguise. All may be pointing toward God’s divine orchestration. God could very well be speaking through these circumstances and events.

In this story we see Psalm 37:23; Prov. 16:9 come to life! (A man’s steps are ordered by the Lord…)

In closing. read “God’s Got your number” — Ken Gaub testimony (verified by his ministry)