Everyone loves a story, especially one that has twists and turns and the
unexpected, one that has detours along the way so your kept wondering, "What's next?
And why did that happen?" Well in our series, we're gonna look at a story with
all kind of detours along the way. It's the life of Joseph. We're gonna discover
how God takes a teenager and meanders him through the realities of life—
the good, the bad, and the ugly—to bring him to his appointed end, and how that story
can become your story as the hand of God moves in your life to take you from
where you are to where He wants you to be. This is Dr. Tony Evans, and the series
is called detours. It's God's unpredictable path to your destiny.
And in this first session, you're going to discover how God uses testings, how God
uses trainings, how God even uses temptations—and the detours that come along
with them—to take you to your destiny. So come along for a ride, because this is
going to be a trip worth taking.
Welcome to our series on detours, as we examine God's unpredictable path to your
destiny. We're all familiar with detours. We have been driving our cars and run
into scenarios that have caused us to veer off from our intended path to reach
whatever destination we were proceeding to go to. A detour is an unplanned, often
unexpected, shift in the route we were taking to get to where we were trying to go.
Now detours are usually, in our cars, determined by one of three primary things.
Detours are determined by disasters. They're accidents. Something has
gone wrong with someone else that has affected us, and so we're steered away
from it and we are forced to take another route because of something going
wrong in someone else's life. Their disaster affects our route. Another
reason why detours take place is because of our own desires. We want to do
something different, go a different way, plan to arrive at a different place, and
so if we take a detour, it's our fault because we decided to go a different way.
But I suspect like me, most of your detours are tied to development—
construction. They're trying to build something. They're trying to make something.
They're trying to redo something. They're trying to fix something.
And so, they reroute you for the purpose of development. I'd like to
submit to you that God rarely takes us from where we are
to where He wants us to be in a straight line. And the reason He doesn't do that
is He's got some construction in mind. There's some development He has in mind
for you and me, and in order for that development to occur, He has to reroute
some things in our lives until we are ready for our destination and our
destination has been made ready for us.