There are Times when the Best Step can be a Sidestep. I read the biography of a man famous for developing the concept of Lateral Thinking: thinking sideways rather than ahead; not in sequence, as in A + B + C. There are times when before moving forward, we need to be open to intuitive thoughts and ideas that “come out of left field”, as well as those that come to the mind logically and sequentially.
The apostle Peter discovered that God is sometimes unpredictable in the way He does things. When the Apostle Peter began speaking to the Roman centurion Cornelius and his household, he would not have thought that God would interrupt him by giving his listeners the same gift of the Holy Spirit the disciples had received a decade earlier on the Day of Pentecost.
Had he thought that possible, it would have been in the Pentecost order of “Repent, be baptized, receive.” (A + B + C) But the Holy Spirit fell unexpectedly upon everyone while he was still speaking. Cornelius had been praying to God, but his reception of the Holy Spirit is not in the order of Acts 2:38 but instead A + C + B, in that they were baptised in water after first being baptised in the Holy Spirit!
“Who was I to refuse them baptism, when God had filled them the same as He had filled us?” Peter would later ask, after receiving a “Please Explain” request from Jerusalem Head Office. Those in the house of Cornelius had received the same experience — just not in the same order. (Remember that in the Jew’s religion, there was “a place for everything, and everything in its place.”)
God set Time in motion, but twice slowed it down in response to prayer (Joshua 10 & 2 Kings 20). How He did so, we don’t know, and don’t need to. If you own the house, you are entitled to rearrange the furniture at will. John the Baptist drank no wine, but Jesus not only drank it but on one occasion created and supplied it!
This apparent lack of order worries those who find ‘joining the dots’ difficult. When the religious leaders ‘played a tune’, Jesus refused to ‘dance’ to it; and when they put on long faces, he smiled regardless. Paul warned us not to be moulded by the world system. “Do not be conformed to this world but transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Order and formula are necessary in life, but let’s be open to God doing the unexpected!
We think logically and that’s good, but the Holy Spirit will often lead us intuitively. Let’s be open to think A+C+B as well as A+B+C. While moving forward, we also need to think sideways. The Lord has many times led me to do a new thing with a few words, and then left it to me to work out the rest while moving forward, or even after the event.
A Word of Knowledge or a Word of Wisdom are at times marked by their brevity. I must add, however, that I remind myself that no-one I know in the Bible ever got ahead by thinking