Any parent will tell you, there is something fantastic about surprising your kids. Whether it is birthdays and Christmas, holidays or just a random treat, surprising your kids is wonderful. There is a rich seam of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram content centred on this very thing. Parents love surprising their children.
God is no different.
Our Father loves to surprise his children. So often, we wonder what is going on. We may wonder what the Lord is doing. And he loves to surprise us. Just when everything seems like it isn’t how it ought to be, God loves to surprise his children.
When God paid the price for human sin, he did it in a way that surprised everyone. He didn’t come as a conquering king – at least, not of the order anyone was expecting – he came as a humble carpenter’s son. He didn’t come in splendour, but was a person of ordinary means. Even when he paid for sin itself, he didn’t pay for it in a way anybody expected, but did so by dying a criminal’s death on a Roman cross. And after the had died in that entirely surprising way, and just as his disciples felt what they had left everything for had been proven an abject failure, he surprisingly rose from the dead and then even more surprisingly appeared to his followers a bunch of times too.
The Lord didn’t stop there either. He loves to answer the prayers of his children. Not just the ordinary run of the mill sort of prayer, but the mad he’ll-probably-never-do-this sort of prayers too. God loves to surprise his children. Even in ways that are surprising for people who might be expecting to be surprised.
And there are few ways he loves surprising us more than when our hearts desire is to see his kingdom grow. When we see his people mature in Christ in tangible ways and when we see people come to faith in Christ. The Lord loves to surprise us with growth we weren’t expecting, with people we never thought would be saved, with people groups coming to faith who we almost began to think were beyond his reach. The Lord loves to surprise us.
Just as we get joy out of surprising our own children with good things, God I am sure, gets pleasure out of surprising his children with good things too. He loves to surprise us by working things according to the counsel of his good will which is, from our stand point, usually quite surprising.
What a joy it is to be surprised by what the Lord is doing.