God's Plans v. Our Plans - Monday Evening

Monday evening at Grace Bible Church was scheduled to be "Women’s Night" and Elizabeth was to be the speaker. However, about an hour before starting time we were hit with a torrential rainstorm - lightning, thunder, pouring rain. The Women's Day program was washed out, but is re-scheduled for Wednesday evening.

I became the teacher for the evening service, to a smaller than usual congregation, but we still had a good time. My topic was from Romans 15, where Paul prayed and asked all the churches to pray with him for safety on his trip to Jerusalem. Then he went to Jerusalem and, just as he feared, he was mobbed by the Jews and taken into custody by the Romans and would spend the next 5 years in a Roman prison. We thought about God's plans for us today: that He does not promise to fix all our problems or keep bad things from happening to us. We don't even know what to pray for as we ought (Romans 8:26). But Paul learned that whether things are going well or things are going badly, he could do all things through Christ who constantly strengthens us. I shared with the congregation some ways that this has worked in my life and everyone seemed to be encouraged.