There’s something wrong with our youth; and I don’t mean our teenagers. I mean the children. There’s this thing that they are just addicted too. It gets in their brains. They always want to watch it, and sing it. That’s right, I’m talking about the dangers of Encanto, Disney’s newest adventure for the whole family. We watched Encanto a couple weekends ago and now we’re listening to Surface Pressure and We Don’t Talk About Bruno so many times.

Here’s the plotline of Encanto. There’s an amazing family where each member has been gifted with a superhuman ability—superhuman strength, the ability to grow flowers at will, talking to animals, churning up storms, and hearing really well. But there’s also one family member, Mirabel, who doesn’t have any superpowers, and is looked down upon. Oh, and they also have a magical house. And when that house begins to crumble, and the family members begin to lose their superpowers, the super strong or super gifted heroes aren’t the ones that save the day. The one without all the powers, the ordinary one, she saves the day.

Deliverance comes as a surprise, from someone ordinary and unexpected. That’s what today’s story in Acts is all about, God’s surprising deliverance coming from unexpected places. Paul is being held in the Roman barracks in Jerusalem, called the Antonia Fortress. He doesn’t realize how at-risk he is, how forty assassins are conspiring to ambush him the very next day. This group of forty goes to the chief priests and the elders, members of the ruling council he argued with the previous day, and promise to kill Paul if they’ll help put him in the right place at the right time.

These assassins are so serious, they’ve bound themselves by oath to not eat or drink until Paul is dead. They ask the religious leaders to request the tribune bring Paul out of the Antonia Fortress, across the court of the Gentiles on the temple grounds, to the “Chamber of Hewn Stone,” which is where the Sanhedrin meet. In that approximately quarter-mile trip, they plan to ambush Paul’s Roman guards and kill him. This will ultimately bring disaster not only on Paul, but all of Jerusalem as Rome will retaliate.

This is a pretty dire situation. Paul’s at risk. The Christian movement is at risk. Jerusalem, the temple, and the people are all at risk. Who will rescue them? Will God deliver them? As we go through today’s story, I hope today you’ll reflect on your own life, and recognize some of the ways God has unexpectedly delivered you as well. Or maybe you feel like you need God to throw you the life jacket. The water is just too high. God brings unexpected deliverance four ways:

1) God brings unexpected deliverance through unexpected people.

Who are the people God works through in this story? First, we hear about Paul’s nephew, his sister’s son. Now we’ve never heard of her or her son in this story. Maybe they were estranged, or a part of the church, we don’t know. But he overhears the ambush plans and goes to warn Paul. Paul describes his nephew as a “young man,” which is the same word used for Eutychus who fell out of the window, and Paul himself when he watched the garments as the Sanhedrin stoned Stephen (Acts 7:58; 20:9).

Why does this matter? You’re never too young for God to use you. You could be a teenager, a young man or woman, or even a child, and God can work through you. Maybe that’s in a big amazing way that everyone hears about. But in our story, the commander (tribune) tells the young man not to tell anyone. He must have spilled the beans at some points because we know it happened; but he didn’t do it to go viral. He simply followed God’s direction. God can use anyone, even the most unexpected.

One of the youth-ministry books I have tells the story of a young woman, a teenager, who challenged her church to love the “carnies” (carnival workers) coming through her town. So her church put on “an all-you-can-eat affair for over 200 carnies.” The church didn’t mention it was a church when it served