Has something ever happened in your life and you have said, "Oh no! I'm not ready for this." Have you ever had that experience? Let me ask you this question. Would you like to get into a condition where nothing would ever happen to you that you are not ready for? Would you like to be in that condition?

Well, I want to study with you about that because that is a distinct possibility for every Christian--that the devil, and nobody in this world, no variety of circumstances could bring you into a condition for 'which you are not perfectly prepared. Now, that sounds impossible, doesn't it? If you have lived very long, it sounds impossible; but I want to show you how it can happen. It has happened to people in the past but they did not realize how it was happening, and people today do not realize when it is happening either.

For example, God made a promise to Abraham; He told him He was going to have a son. Was that promise fulfilled? Yes, it was fulfilled, but was it fulfilled the way Abraham was expecting? No, he was not expecting to have to wait for twenty-five plus years. He was not expecting that, but the promise was fulfilled. The Lord revealed to Moses, in fact when Moses was in Egypt in Pharaoh's court, the angels came and gave instructions to Moses. Ellen White distinctly says that Moses was taught by angels and he knew from what the angels of God had told him, that he was the appointed one to deliver the children of Israel from the land of Egypt. He knew that. The angels had taught him that. And so he tried to do what the Lord had told him that he was supposed to do and he failed and he had to flee.

He was out herding sheep. Have you ever tried to think through in your mind what it was like for Moses to herd sheep? Probably most of us cannot imagine it because we have never been in an high enough position in this world to realize what it would feel like. I have noticed that it is never difficult for people to go up, but it is difficult to come down.

Let me tell you a story so you will understand. When my wife and I were in California we became acquainted with a wonderful Seventh-day Adventist Christian family. The father of this family was a physician who had trained as a physician in South America. He had several children when they came to the United States. You know what is going to happen, don't you? He could not get papers to practice medicine in this country. He did not have all the qualifications; besides English was a foreign language. Would you like to take your medical board exams in a foreign language? Well, he couldn't do that, he had to learn English first. In the meantime he had a family to support. As we were visiting in our living room, he told me what happened. He said medicine was the thing that he knew; health was the thing that he knew. So he thought since he could not get a license right now; he would get a job in a hospital because that is what he knew.

Do you know what he was! doing? No, he was not working as a nurse, he was working as a nurse's aide. He told me, "As I would take care of the patients" he said, "from my previous training," (he had been a practicing physician in South America. He had not just gone to medical school; he had been a practicing physician) He says, "As I would take care of the patients," and then he told me how the nurses would all give him orders; everybody acted like he did not know a thing and he could not say a word. He would be there when the physicians came. They knew, of course, that he did not know a thing. And the nurses knew that he did not know a thing, and he could not say a word. If a physician made a mistake, he could not say a word. He was not suppose to know anything. As he was telling me that I was thinking about it in my mind, how we as human beings put people in different categories and how we treat people, very often, according to the category that we put them in.

Moses had been in a very high category. He had been what we would call the crown prince of Egypt. He had been at the head of the country. Ellen White said that he had been a successful general of armies and when he came home from winning victories with these Egyptian armies, the whole nation had sung his praises. He was used to being exalted as a high and wonderful person, highly trained. Ellen White very specifically says that he was one of the greatest men. If you look at it from all intellectual point of view, he was one of the greatest men that ever lived.

In the New Testament, Stephen said that he was trained in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. In those days, he knew all about medicine, languages, military science, and all the learning of the Eg9ptians. He knew all of it. But the people out there in Midia, knew him as just a shepherd--just a shepherd. Have you tried to imagine how that would feel?

You go from the highest position in the nation to an alien and outcast in a foreign nation with a foreign language. You are a nobody. And what was all that for? Because God had a mission for him, and God does not put you in the position He wants to put you in until He has you ready. See, God does not put people in places when they are not ready. He gets them ready first.

The secret is, if you commit your life to God and surrender your heart and life to Him; God knows all about the future. God knows what trials you are going to face tomorrow and the next week Now you don't and I don't know, but God does. If you commit your life to Him, God does not allow anything to come upon you for which He has not prepared you. God knew Moses' background; and that he needed lots of preparation. So, he got a forty-year course, one of the longest educational programs described in the Bible--herding sheep. The educational program that God put Moses through was so successful that it says that he became the meekest man that ever lived. It was very successful, wasn't it? He needed to be the meekest man that ever lived because of what his assignment was going to be. He was going to be dealing with over a million turbulent spirits.

Have you ever dealt with any turbulent spirits? Moses was going to have to deal with over a million, he calls them "stiff-necked and rebellious", turbulent spirits; he was going to have to deal with these people. God knew that he needed a forty-year course to get him ready. So, when the time came, by the way, there was a time schedule. If you read your Bible you will find that there was a time schedule that God was working on that had been pre-planned. It had been announced to Abraham over 400 years before. God told Abraham, after this 430-year period, that the children of Israel would be brought out; that his descendants would come out of Egypt. Did they come out on time? The Bible says that to the very day when that time was up, to the very day, they walked out.

The day came for that prophecy to be fulfilled and they walked out. God was working on a time schedule. God saw forty years before that Moses had to have a forty-year period of training to -get him ready for that; so He sent him out into the wilderness. Moses did not understand what was going on. He thought that this was the biggest disaster of his entire life. Have you ever faced disaster? "Oh no, everything I have planned for the future, it is all mined." Did Moses have plans? Moses had plans.

Have you ever had plans and it seems that your plans all failed and nothing works out? If you have committed your life to God, you have surrendered to Him and you have chosen to follow Him, when those times come and your plans just do not work out, you can know that if you have faith, then the reason your plans are not working out is because God has a bigger and better plan. God is seeing the big plan gets worked out in your life and that you are ready.

That is good news, isn't it? We need to understand these things today because, Friends, we are living in a time when the prophecies are going to be fulfilled. But they are not going to be fulfilled in just the way we thought. I have come to that settled conclusion in my mind. I am not asking you to believe that, if you think you know exactly how the prophecies are going to be fulfilled, that is your privilege; I have no argument with you. But I will tell you this. In the past, the prophecies have never been fulfilled the way the church of God or the people of God thought they would be. They were fulfilled all right, but not the way people thought.

I have pondered a lot of times. Ellen White says that the latter rain can be poured out all around us and we will not even know what is going on. Have you ever thought about that? You see, if it was poured out the way you thought, then you would know what is going on. But if it can be all around you and you don't even know it, that means something could happen that was maybe a little different than somebody thought.

God had big plans for David. David knew it because Samuel came and anointed him. David was the anointed one.

By the way, for those of you that like to study Bible doctrines and theology, here is one you might like to study sometime. Everything in the old covenant was a type of something in the new covenant. You have to go to the new covenant to see the reality. The old covenant is the type. Now, when a king was anointed with oil, what was that a symbol of? Oil is a symbol of the Holy Spirit That is something that is very interesting to study, but, that is not our subject today.

David had been anointed and he had received not only an anointing with oil, but he had received the real thing. He had the Holy Spirit inside and he was living in this period of his life, a righteous and upright life; and he had been anointed to be the king of Israel. Now, did he become the king of Israel? Did it happen the way he thought? No, it did not! Because God decided to put him through a period of training. Do you know what David's training was like? Now it was not herding sheep. God does not put everybody through exactly the same course. In fact, He seems to have an infinite number of ways of dealing with us by putting us through different experiences.

David had to go through a period of training. And his training, you may not think this is training. In fact, I don't think David thought it was training while he was in the training. Very often, when God has people in training for something, they have no idea what is going on. Do you know what David was doing for several years? He was fleeing for his life from one place to another, from here to there, to there to there. That was his training program. That was the way God was training him to be king of Israel. We would never have thought of that, but that was his training program, and it had some other components to it.

A king needs to be able to rule or to govern, to operate, to administrate affairs of a nation. So God gave David a lithe practice. It says that while he was out there in the cave everybody came to him that was in trouble and in debt. Out there he had this group of people and these men that were his soldiers and it was his responsibility. He had another group of turbulent spirits, not as big as Moses had, but he had all these people that were in trouble from all over Israel.

By the way, let me ask you something. Have you ever noticed, (please do not take offense at this; I am not thinking of anybody in particular, just general principle, you think it through) have you ever noticed that sometimes when people get into a lot of trouble, it is at least partially their own fault because of their character defects? Have you ever noticed that?

Well let me tell you, if David had all the people with him that were in trouble from all over Israel, what kind of people do you think he had? Do you think he had people that had reached character perfection yet? Or do you think that he had people that had a lot of character defects? He had all these people that were in trouble from all over the country; and he had all the people that were in debt. They were all out there with him and it was his job to bring organization and order among this group of people. God allowed him to get into that situation.

I have often wondered what it must have been like out there in a cave with all of these people. There were several hundred people out there, in fact, there were over a thousand. We know that because we know at one time David had 600 men in his army and those men, it says, had wives and children. So you just figure that out He had over a thousand people out there in the caves and in the forest; and they had to be prepared to flee at any time. They needed to eat and drink and they needed to have clothes, so do you have any idea of the logistical problems there are with a group that big out there in the caves. That was God's training program for David. Rather severe, wasn't it? But that was to get him ready.

The greatest example of all, of a person who was prepared each day for what was going to happen the next day, is the life of Jesus. If you have your Bibles, I would like you to open to the gospel of John. As I have studied the gospel of John there is something that I noticed because it just kept coming up in the most interesting places. We read the first part of it in our Scripture lesson today, in our Scripture reading.

It says here in John 2:4, "Jesus said to her, 'Woman, what does your concern have to do with Me? My hour has not yet come.'"

Now what does that text mean? I have wondered for a long time what it meant. I don't suppose that I ever would have understood what it meant, because of my dullness of mental aptitude, except that Ellen White explained what it meant. When I read the explanation, I was very interested in what this text means.

Jesus, at this time, answered. Jesus did this by the way very often, it is something that you and I cannot do; Jesus could read people's thoughts. Jesus was not answering what she said to Him; Jesus was answering an unspoken thought that Mary was thinking. She was thinking it and He answered her thought.

If you want to do an interesting Bible study some Sabbath afternoon, you read through the gospel and compare it with the Desire of Ages and find the different times that Jesus answered people when He was not answering their question, but what they were thinking. You will be surprised how many there are. There are many, many times in both the gospel of Matthew and the gospel of John. It is recorded a number of times. In fact in Matthew, it gets so specific it says in Matthew 9, (we never translate this literally in the English, but in the Greek language) it says, He saw their thoughts. A very interesting expression--Jesus saw their thoughts. He could see a person's thoughts just like you can see something on a piece of paper. So he answered their thoughts, and Jesus here was answering Mary's thought.

And what was Mary's thought? Mary's thought was, Oh, she loved Him and she knew that He was the Messiah. Of all people, Mary knew of the miracle birth of Jesus. It had been announced to her months before by the angel Gabriel. By this time, by the way, Joseph had died, so there were only a few people in the world that knew what Mary knew. But Mary knew that He was the Messiah and Mary wanted so much for Jesus to work a miracle and to establish Himself on the throne of Israel. You see Mary did not understand the whole plan yet Very often that is our problem. We see a little bit of what God is doing in our life, but we cannot figure out the whole plan so it doesn't make sense to us yet. She wanted Jesus to establish

Himself on the throne and show people that He was the Messiah.

In the book The Story of Redemption, 6, Ellen White wrote this on the subject of being ready for whatever happens. It says, "The future life of Christ was mapped out before Him." Did Jesus know what was going to happen? He knew what was going to happen. He knew how His future would unfold. He knew that. It says, "His divine power had been hidden and He had waited in obscurity and humiliation for thirty years, and was in no haste to act until the proper time should arrive." Ibid.

Jesus was not in a hurry to act until the proper time and when the time came, He was ready. But until that time came, He would wait.

Let me ask you something. Has God ever allowed you to get into a situation where you were waiting and the wait just went on and on and on and you wondered why you were waiting so long? You intended for this to happen and to be involved in this kind of work, you intended to do this and you are not doing that at all and you seem to be on a detour and the detour just seems to be going on and on and on. Jesus understood that He worked for thirty years at home as a carpenter and He had the biggest job to do of anybody that has ever been born. But it says, "He had waited in obscurity and humiliation for thirty years, and was in no haste to act until the proper time. He answered that His hour had not yet come. His time to be honored and glorified as king was not yet come; it was His lot to be a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." Ibid. So, He waited until the right time.

Now this is the part of what we are studying that you will not like, perhaps. Do you have enough patience to say, "Lord, I'm willing to wait until You see the time, to develop whatever You want to happen in my life?" Do you have that much patience? Sometimes we are in so much of a hurry that we try to force things into high gear and to make it happen when we think it ought to happen. Then when we make something happen we find that we really were not ready for what we thought we were ready for. Have you ever had that experience? God allowed you to speed things up and you got yourself into a situation you were not ready for.

If you commit your life to God, if you surrender your life to Him and choose to follow Him; Jesus sees the end from the beginning. Jesus knows what He has to do in my life and my character to get me where He wants me to be. And not only that, He knows how much time He has. Now I don't know how much time He has, but He knows how much time He has. And if I commit my life to Him, surrender my life, He is going to get me ready for each hour.

I have noticed this in studying the life of Christ. When the hour came, Jesus was ready. Just like He had gotten Moses ready. He knew when the hour would come, and He got Moses ready. He knew when the time would come for David to be anointed king, and He got him ready. There are other Bible characters you could study. The apostle Paul would be another one. God got him ready.

As you look through Jesus' life, you will see that this comes up at various times. For instance look in John 7, Jesus is talking to the people in verses 28 and 29. They had a theory that when Christ came that nobody would know where He came from. That was a Jewish theory. That is not in the Old Testament, but they had this theory. They had read that into the prophecies. (By the way, if you want to study theology that is called isogesis. Isogesis means simply that you read something into the text. Exegesis is what you get out of the text. Isogesis is when you read something into the text. Enough of that, not everybody is interested in theological words.)

They had read this idea into the Scripture that when Jesus came, that is when Christ came, that nobody would know where He came from. Nobody would know who His mother was or anything about Him. They had this idea that He would just ap

pear. And so since they knew who His mother was and where He came from, they thought they knew who His father was, but they didn't. That is always one of our dangers, when we think we know something, but our facts are not straight and we make all kinds of wrong conclusions. Jesus was talking to them in verse 28 and He says, "You both know Me, and you know where I am from; and I have not come of Myself, but He who sent Me is true, whom you do not know. But I know Him, for I am from Him, and He sent Me."

Jesus told them that even though they knew where He was from, it was still the truth that He had come from His Father in heaven. God had sent Him, and they did not know Him. That was a rebuke, wasn't it? The Jews were not able to take rebuke of any kind, so look what it says in verse 30, "Then they sought to take Him; but no one laid a hand on Him, because His hour had not yet come."

You see every hour in the life of Christ had been pre-planned. His life had been pre-planned, and it was not time for Him to die on the cross. Now it was not long away, it was only about six months before the cross, but it still was not time. It was not time. So they were not successful.

Do you know, friend, the life of Christ is written down as an example of what the Christian life can be. If you have committed your life to Christ and this is one of the reasons you need to commit your life to Christ today if you have not already, because God has bigger plans for your life than you have for yourself.

God will not force Himself into your life. There are a lot of people today who are going their own way; they are not following God's plan for their life, they are following their own plans. Sometimes their own plans do not work out good, but they are still following their own plan. The best thing you can do is to let God plan your life and to work out His plans.

Now, let me tell you something that, if you are a young person, you need to think through very carefully. There are some young people here today and I can help young people here today in ways that I cannot help the older people. When you were born, are you listening, children? When you were born, God, even before you were born just like with Jesus, had plans for your life. While you are young, if you give yourself to God, surrender to Him, and choose to follow Him; God will work out His plan in your life.

God has just a specific plan for your life just as much as He did for Moses or David or Paul. God has as specific a plan for your life and if you surrender your life to God when you are a child, when you are young; God will work out His plan for your life.

Now children, let me tell you something, that often happens. There are a lot of people that do not want to follow God's plan for their life, so they grow up and they start following their own plans. Some of these people follow their own plans until they are 20 or 30 or 40 or older and then when they are 20 or 30 or 40 they surrender their life to the Lord. Now when they surrender their life to the Lord, is the Lord going to come into their heart and save them? Well, surely He is! Surely He is! The person who surrenders his life to the Lord, even if he is 80, he can still be saved. If he surrenders his or her life to the Lord and chooses to follow the Lord; the Lord will begin to work in their life and will save them. But here is the catch, can God work out the same plan in your life if you surrender your life to Him when you are 40 as He could if you had surrendered your life when you were a child? No, He cannot. You have already spent half of your life in this world. God cannot work out exactly the same plan in your life as the person who surrenders their life to the Lord as a child.

Well, what is God going to do? He is going to do the very best thing He can do. He is going to take you right where you are and start working in your life, and He is going to start working out the plan of salvation in your life.

You see, when you were born, God had a plan for your life, but some people want to follow their own plans until they get to a certain age. Then they surrender to the Lord, and so God had to start with plan no. 2. Some people kept going and following their own plans for so long that God could not use plan no.2; He had to work on plan no.3.1 have met people that have said to me, "I was stubborn for so long, I wonder if God is working on plan no.20 in my life." I do not know what number it is, but I do know that God will work in anybody's life whenever you surrender to Him.

By the way, Dwight L. Moody understood this. One day Dwight L. Moody was talking to somebody; this is the way I heard the story. He said, "I baptized two and a half people today." The man asked what he was talking about, "You mean you baptized two adults and a child?" H€said, "No, I baptized two children and an adult."

God will accept you, friend, at any time in your life that you choose to surrender your life to Him. If you have not surrendered your life to Him in the past, you have already lost some time. You need to do it today, so God's plan can start to be worked out in your life. By the way, it is comforting, isn't it, that at whatever age you choose to surrender to the Lord, that the Lord will take you right wherever you are and do the very best thing He can do in your life in planning the rest of your future. Isn't that exciting? So there is some comfort in what the Lord does for us at any time we come to Him.

If you look in your Bible in -John 12, Jesus came to a crisis in His life. Now it was pre-planned and He knew He was coming to it, but notice what it says. In the previous chapters it says it could not happen yet, because the hour was not come, but now the hour is come.

John 12:23, "But Jesus answered them, saying, 'The hours has come that the Son of Man should be glorified.' "I have pondered that text for years wondering when was the Son of Man glorified. I still do not know the answer, for sure. If some of you do, lam open or welcome to counsel.

Many people believe that the Son of Man was glorified at the resurrection, which is true. I have no argument with that. However, my tentative conclusion of the meaning of John 12:23 is that it is talking, not about the resurrection, but about the crucifixion. Jesus said that now the hour had come that the Son of Man is going to be glorified.

Incidentally, it says, if you read it in Desire of Ages, that when Jesus died on the cross, just before He died, He said, "It is finished." Ellen White says His face shown with the radiance of what? The sun. That is glory! Jesus knew that the hour was come for Him to be glorified, hut it was never absent from His mind how this was going to happen.

Let me read it from The Upward Look, 110, it says, "Christ heard the eager, hungering cry, 'We would see Jesus.' " That is right here in John 12, "These Greeks represented the nations and tribes and peoples who would awake to theft great need of a power out of and above finite power. For a moment Christ looked into futurity, and heard voices proclaiming in all places of the earth, 'Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world'. This anticipation, the consummation of His hopes, is expressed in His words, 'The hour is come, that the Son of Man should be glorified.' But the way and manner that this glorifying was to take place was never absent from Christ's mind. Only by His death could the world be saved. As the grain of wheat, the Son of man must be cast into the earth, and die, and be buried out of sight; but He was to life again!"

Notice what He says again about this in verse 27, He says, "Now My soul is troubled, and what shall I say? 'Father save Me from this hour?' But for this purpose I came to this hour." Jesus now was coming to the crisis of the ages. Let me ask you something, Was He ready? He was ready! Are we coming to a crisis? Ellen White tells us that it has pleased the Lord to bring us to a crisis that is greater than any since His first advent. Are you ready? "Oh," somebody says, "how will I get ready?"

One of these days, friends, we won't just be reading texts like John 12:27 and saying we are coming to the greatest crisis. We will read texts like this and be able to say that the hour is here, right now. Will you be ready? How will you get ready? Well, if you will commit your life to God and surrender to Him and choose to follow Him; God will get you ready! You may not recognize the way He is using to get you ready.

I heard a preacher say one time, the way you learn to swim is in the water. And the way you get ready for trouble is in what? Trouble. But if you commit your life to God and choose to follow Him, you do not need to4iorry about the future and say, "Oh, all this trouble is coming on the world. What am I going to do?" God is going to get you ready for whatever your future is; God is going to get you ready. And if God sees that in the future you are going to have a great crisis in your life, He is going to allow you to have some problems earlier on so you will be ready for the big one.

Do you understand, Friends, that if God allowed each one of us, if He allowed us to go through life and we had no problems or trials and everything went smooth, by the way, does God have the means that right today God could erase every problem from your life? Does God have the ability to do that? Well then, why doesn't He do it? Here is why.

God knows about the future. If God erased every single problem out of your life and you had no problems and then you just went on and all of a sudden you come to the great crisis of the world at the end, do you know what would happen to you? You would not be ready, and God knows that. So to get you ready for that, He allows you to have a little practice run, some lithe problems along the way so that you will be ready.

Let me read that to you from the book Ministry of Healing, 481, it says, "Worry is blind and cannot discern the future; but Jesus sees the end from the beginning. In every difficulty He has His way prepared to bring relief."

Well, if He has His way prepared to bring relief in every difficulty, why am I ever in difficulty? Now listen to this, "The faithful discharge of today's duties is the best preparation for tomorrow' trials." Ibid. How do you get ready for tomorrow? You look at the problem you have today. Do you have any problems today? You look at the problems you have today and you say, "Lord by Your grace, I am going to do what is right regarding all that I have to deal with today." God will take the responsibility to see that you have the situations in your life day by day that will develop you and prepare you for the future. There will never come a time in your life when you will meet up with a problem that God has not prepared you for if you have chosen to follow Him. Isn't that exciting?

That is why in the time of trouble, not one of God's saints will fail. Did you know that? Now there will be a bunch of pretenders that will, but not one of God's saints will fail. In fact, one of these days, well I say one of these days, I mean a little over a thousand years from now, Ellen White saw this already in vision. She said that the devil is going to see it. The devil is going to see something at the end of the millennium. Do you know what he is going to see? Now he doesn't believe it yet, but he is going to see it someday. He is going to see that he was powerless to destroy -the person that put his trust in Jesus.

You cannot work your way out of the difficulties that you have. Well I don't know, maybe there is somebody here that believes you can; lam not going to contradict you. I know I cannot get myself out of the difficulties that lam involved in. There is no way out. I am facing difficulties every week that from a human point of view there is no way to solve it that will make it go away. There is no way.

Well, what do you have to do? Listen to this sentence again, "The faithful discharge of today's duties is the best preparation for tomorrow's trials. . . Let us be hopeful and courageous. Despondency in God's service is sinful and unreasonable. He, [that is God] knows our every necessity. To the omnipotence of the King of kings our covenant-keeping God unites the gentleness and care of the tender shepherd." Ibid.

Do you like that? He is powerful, but He cares about you. And it says, "His power is absolute, and it is the pledge of the sure fulfillment of His promises to all who trust in Him." Ibid. Do you see, Friend, the tremendous advantage to you to choose to put your trust in the Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus? Do you see the advantage to you?

"He has means for the removal of every difficulty." Ibid. "Well", somebody says, "why doesn't He remove it right now?" Because if you are like Moses herding the sheep, God will not take you away from the sheep herding until you have learned what He intends for you to learn in that situation. That is why it is very appropriate, I pray it often, it is. very appropriate to say to the Lord, "Lord, help me to get the maximum benefit out of these trials I am going through right now." If you get the benefit out of the trials you are going through right now, then God will not have to bring you around, having you go round and round doing them over and over and over. Those can be removed and you can be put into, (you won't like this) you can be put into new sets of trials.

I remember a few years ago, while we were living in Texas, I was working up here in Wichita. Do you know how far it is from Wichita to Cleburne, Texas? It is almost 400 miles. You know that is a fairly long commute. I should have kept track of the number of times I had driven between Wichita and there. I would say to myself, "I wonder how long I am going to do this. How long is this going to keep up? I would like not to have to do this forever and it just seems like it keeps on going year after year after year." I would say, "Well Lord, this situation that I am in is so complicated. I cannot just do like this [he snapped his fingers] and solve the situation; it's just too complicated. You know my situation and if it is Your will that this is not the situation that I need to be in so that I can spend more time working." It is hard to run a computer or do very much work when you are driving a car. Some people can, but I usually don't try to. I used to try to until I found out I was becoming a dangerous driver and then I decided I couldn't do it. And you know what? All of a sudden I was in a different set of circumstances and I was not doing that any more. In fact, I have not driven to Texas now for several months. I used to do it every week or two.

God has the means, at any time, when He has seen that you have learned all that you need to learn in this situation; everything can be changed around. The question I have to ask is, "Am I learning everything that God wants me to learn from this situation so that I can be taken out of this one and be taken up to a higher grade?" To be taken to a different situation nearer to the end, nearer to the perfection of character that God is trying to develop in me.

It says, "He has means for the removal of every difficulty, that those who serve Him and respect the means He employs may be sustained. His love is as far above all other love as the heavens are above the earth. He watches over His children with a love that is measureless and everlasting." Ibid.

Do you like that? God loves you and you are never absent -from His mind. If you surrender to Him, He has big plans for you and He is studying you every moment.

Do you know, friends, that God studies your life, your character, your future as closely and carefully as though you were the only person alive in this world? Now that seems impossible to us because most of us can only do one thing at a time. But God can do an infinite number of things at one time. He loves you and He has big plans for you. Oh, how He longs for you to surrender your life to Him and to choose to follow Him and to trust Him, not so much for His benefit, it is for your benefit.

"In the darkest days, when appearances seem most forbidding, have faith in God. He is working out His will, doing all things well in behalf of His people. The strength of those who love and serve Him will be renewed day by day.

"He is able and willing to bestow upon His servants all the help they need. He will give them the wisdom which their varied necessities demand." Ibid., 482

Oh, friend, do you have that confidence and security in God so that if you have a trouble or a trial in your life, you can be sure that God is going to work things out for you and you are just going to trust Him to do it?

I was so happy, I was so encouraged and really so jubilant the other day in Sabbath School, when Brother Tom Knowles got up and related a trial that he had been going through for several months in his job and how the Lord had worked things out. Wasn't that exciting? The time came, it might have looked like atone time that it was just going to go on and on and on, but God said that the time had come. God worked out a transfer for Tom and now he can work on a different set of problems.

That happens in all of our lives when God sees that we have learned all that we can learn and His plan has been accomplished for us here; then God will shift us to a different place and will -take us another step, another journey up the road toward the New Jerusalem.

I want this experience, do you? There are many texts that I have written down here just in the gospel of John alone, where it talks about Jesus and a certain hour was come and He was ready for that hour, but we will not take time to read those now. The apostle Paul got hold of this. You can read in the first chapter of Romans, after the Lord had gotten him ready he said, "I'm ready."

You see God had prepared him for something. He said, "I am ready to preach the gospel to you, too, in Rome. I'm ready for my mission now." He was ready. The time came at the end of his life when he saw that he was going to be martyred, and he wrote a letter to Timothy and said he was ready. He was ready to be martyred and ready for the hour.

If you surrender your life to God and if you choose to put your trust in Him, "we can never", I am quoting now from Christ's Object Lessons, 173, "be placed in a position for which God has not made provision." Isn't that good news?

See the people in this world, they get into situations that they are not ready for all the time. And it is going to get worse and worse and they are going to get into more and more situations that they are not ready for. Just read Revelation 6. They are all going to go to prayer meeting one of these days and they are going to pray for the rocks and the mountains to fall on them because they are not ready--they are not ready for what is happening.

More and more in this world, we see things happening that people are not ready for, but if you have surrendered your heart, your life to Jesus, you can never be brought into a position for which He has not made provision; because He saw it way back in the past and He looked into the future to see what you were going to meet and He has been getting you ready.

Do you want that experience? Do you want to surrender your-life to Him and say, "Lord, work out your plan in my life." Some of us have tried working out our own plans in our lives and they haven't worked very well. We need to turn our lives over to the Lord and say, "Lord, work Your plan out in my life. Help me to submit to Your plan, so that I will never be brought into a position that I am not ready for. I'll never be unprepared for whatever happens, because you knew about it already and You prepared me." Do you want to have that assurance? Oh, Friend, if you do, I want to invite you to kneel down with me right now and pray with me. Let's ask the Lord to work out His plan in our lives and help us to submit, surrender, and trust so that we will be ready.