DEVOTION BY TRAVIS COOK
For anyone observing from the outside, Jesus’ evening takes an unexpected turn. It starts with him celebrating and enjoying the Passover celebration with his friends, and it ends with him being hauled off, arrested, and questioned by the authorities. He goes from dining with friends to being betrayed by one of them. Despite the apparent chaos, Jesus continually displays his faith in God and God’s plan. Even in the midst of the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus puts God’s will and God’s purposes above his own.
When we are faced with the chaos of unexpected events, our natural survival instincts kick in, and we begin to think about how we can best escape the circumstances or mitigate the damage and pain we believe that we are about to experience. Rarely will we consider what God might be doing during these times, and rarer still will we open our hearts in prayer to God to make himself known in the situation in which we find ourselves. This is often because we do not train ourselves to do so in the expected events of our lives. We do not train ourselves to put God’s plans and purposes first during the mundane events of life, so that when the unexpected chaos shows up, we are forced to revert to our natural instincts.