Divine appointments come disguised as interruptions. They come with bad attitudes, at inconvenient times, acting inappropriately. Examples from Jesus’ life include the Gaderene demoniac, the Syrophonecian woman, blind men crying out by the side of the road… and almost every other significant encounter Jesus had!
Jesus didn’t demand that people clean themselves up and approach him with respectful, appropriate attitudes before He reached out to minister to them in love. He met them as they were when they crossed His path and touched them with the love and power of God to meet their needs.
“But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”—Romans 5:8 (NASB)
When we have our minds set on getting to a particular appointment or a particular event that we have scheduled, we may tend to view interruptions as obstacles that are getting in the way of us reaching our goals. We may even think of them as Satanic attacks preventing us from reaching our purpose.
In reality, these may be the most important events in our day. These “interruptions” may be the events God purposed for us before we were born. So we must change the way we view interruptions. In order to view them correctly, as God’s divine appointments, we must retrain ourselves to welcome interruptions as appointments with destiny.
In addition, as we retrain ourselves to recognize the significance of interruptions, we must retrain ourselves to be more “in the moment” and alert to the realization that these God-ordained appointments may occur at any time, without warning and without any hint that signals their eternal significance. We must be ready to welcome interruptions, even when they come at the most inconvenient moments, even when they come with bad attitudes, with inappropriate actions and in unexpected ways that might otherwise offend us.
A Glimpse into the Spiritual Realm
John Paul Jackson, founder of Streams Ministries, had an experience in which God allowed him to view a day in the life of one believer. It was a day filled with interruptions. In John Paul’s experience, he saw this woman going through her day, frustrated at all of the interruptions; but God “pulled back the curtains,” so to speak, to allow John Paul to see what was happening in the spiritual realm. He saw how God arranged these so-called “interruptions” to accomplish His will; to bring the Kingdom of God into this believer’s environment, and to change one person’s life forever.
In John Paul’s experience, the believer was not aware of the flurry of activity in the unseen spiritual realm around her. She was not aware of what God was accomplishing as He masterfully orchestrated circumstances that created apparent “interruptions” for her. She seemed to be simply experiencing a day filled with frustrations and circumstances that were constantly forcing her to adjust and make changes to what she previously planned to do.
I highly recommend that you find the video of John Paul relating this experience and watch it for yourself. You should be able to find it on Vimeo at this address: https://vimeo.com/7456593 . It is called “Storms, Faith and the Miraculous pt.2.” This story begins about eleven minutes and twenty seconds into the video.
Roland Buck’s List of 120 Events
When Roland Buck was taken to the heavenly Throne Room on January 21, 1977, God gave him a list of 120 events that would happen to him in the near future. Upon his return from his heavenly visit, one by one, those events began to happen in order as they were written on the paper. As he described in his sermon entitled, “Sequel to the Throne Room”:
“In this paper, He didn’t tell me that He was putting down everything that would happen. He said, ‘I just want to pick out a few things so you can see by confirmation that God is really on the job.’ So, undoubtedly, there were hundreds of things in between each of these events, but He let me see just a few to have as markers along the road.
“I’ve had people ask me, ‘Well what about the 120? When they’re all done, what’s going to happen then?’ And I just let them know that it’s all planned out ahead of that just as much as we’ll find on the other side, only I don’t know about it.”
You can listen to Roland Buck relate this story, and many others, in his recorded sermons available at www.angelsonassignment.org. I suggest that you start with the titles, “I Visited the Throne Room” and “Sequel to the Throne Room.”
If we can get a glimpse of how God orchestrates the seemingly insignificant circumstances of our lives on a daily basis, we would feel a great sense of security and peace, knowing that God has everything under control. We would also be struck with a compulsion to become more alert to what God is doing in our lives from moment to moment so that we can cooperate with Him rather than complaining and working against what He is doing.
