Luke 1.46-56

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Well, I'd like to invite you to open up your New Testament to the book of Luke, the Gospel of Luke, chapter one.

So for the past several weeks, Pastor Jason has been in a series called The Promise, The Promise of the Messiah.

And we've talked about over the past weeks the grace of the promise, the path of the promise, the birth of the promise.

And today Jason asked me to, in his absence today, to speak on the response to the promise.

The response to the promise fulfilled.

And so our scripture reading is going to be in Luke chapter 1.

Luke 1 · chapter mention

And I'm going to read verses 39 through 56.

In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country to a town in Judah.

And she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.

And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb.

And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.

And she exclaimed with a loud cry, Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.

And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?

For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.

And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.

And Mary said, My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.

For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed.

For he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name, and his mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm.

He has scattered the proud in their thoughts of their heart.

He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts, and he has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of humble estate.

He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his offspring forever.

And Mary remained with Elizabeth about three months and returned to her home.

The word of the Lord.

And it leads one to start thinking about songs and the part that music plays in our lives.

And songs can be very good at moving us inwardly to reflection, to action, even to worship, right?

And in general, in general, apart from the music that accompanies songs, which we all know really makes music, but apart from the music, what really tends to move us in songs are songs that have depth of lyrics to them.

And are songs that tend to have a subject that we can relate to emotionally.

And even more than that are songs that the singer themselves really, we sense, understand this, have entered into the message of the song, and are singing this from their very heart.

In fact, I would say that my own opinion is that good songwriters aren't just there to be on display for us.

They actually are trying to invite us into the experiences of which they sing.

You can see this in some well-known singers.

Take Adele, for example, a British pop star for many years.

Apart from her amazing voice and the great music that accompanies her songs, people connect deeply with Adele.

Because she sings about deep relational pain.

The kinds of stuff that all of us at different points in our life have to go through.

And she's a powerful singer of this because we know even from her own life that what she's intoning in words are experiences that she knows well firsthand.

Well, our songwriter in Luke, in a similar kind of way, is out to invite us into the surprising realities and passionate emotion of this song in order to move us to worship.

In order to move us to worship.

This song is here to invite us to enter into the experiences and the passions out of which this song was written.

Why do we worship?

Why do you worship?

That's a question that I think as a believer, I hope eventually you will come to on your own.

As you raise your children in the church, we we teach them to worship and we point them, and it becomes something that they are they're just doing, and they they kind of come into by way of training and discipline.

And even Christians who come to the Lord early on, we know this is what we're called to do, and the the scriptures are full of it.

But at some point in our lives, life, our lives may begin to kind of push against us in a way that brings disillusionment with what we understood the goal of life to be and how life was actually going to unfold for us.

And it is a very good question to bring to the Lord.

Why do we worship?

He's big enough to take that question.

It's not an illegal question to him.

I think it actually shows that your soul, you're coming into something of your own, and you're really present with where you are.

And some of you may not have um may not have uh entered this because of maybe just kind of the deep solidness of your background.

But for others, this is a great question that has to be faced, and probably more than one time.

Well, as we look at this um worship song this morning, I'd like us to think about it in terms of two movements related to why we worship.

The first movement is going to be um we worship God for who he is.

And then we're going to look at uh we worship God out of our own experience.

So I'd like to begin now with uh the first part of that.

We worship God for who he is.

Uh some of your translations might have the title of this song, the magnificate.

And right, it's the Mary's magnificent.

What the heck is that?

Uh in fact, when I sent Val my title of the sermon in there, I wanted to put that and I spelled it wrong.

Um it's not the English word.

It's not magnificent, it's the magnificent, and it really is the Latin word for magnifies.

Magnifies, and it's the first word, apparently, in the Latin text.

I didn't check that, but uh, it's the very first word when Mary begins this song in English.

My soul magnifies the Lord.

This song is about magnifying the Lord.

If you had to say, what's the subject of this psalm, of this song that she's written, this whole song is about God.

Every single line is about God.

Every line says something about his character and what he's up to in the world.

That's one thing that makes it so rich.

These are rich lyrics in this song.

Many years ago, um I remember as a young married man, my wife asking me this question.

She would look at me in my eyes and usually some um setting where we were embracing, and she would say, What why do you love me?

Well, that's enough to send terror down the down the spine of any young male who hasn't learned very much in the relational sphere.

And uh at times left me scrambling for thinking, uh, wow, how do I answer this?

Um, off the cuff here.

Um, this is a dangerous question.

And um, you know, you're you're worthy of something that's not shallow, but all I can think of right now are shallow answers to that question.

And um, but I want to begin as we kind of look at this section, worshiping God for who he is.

I'd like you to imagine God in you.

And God looking at you face to face, as it were, and asking you, why do you love me?

Why do you love me?

Mary's gonna enter into that question.

And she's a great one for it.

However old she is, we don't really know.

We speculate that she's young.

But she has a very mature outlook, and she's not panicked about the answer.

She's pretty sure about the answer.

She's been a woman of the word all her life, and she's grown up in Jewish society that is known and loved and trusted and relied upon and hoped in the holy scriptures.

Scriptures that were given us to teach us about the Lord, his nature, and his ways.

And what Mary's going to do in this song is that she is going to highlight some of the ways of God that make him uniquely beautiful and glorious and magnificent.

I hope you think about God in those kinds of terms.

And I hope we don't just think of God in terms of great and mighty.

Those are true, they're even in this song.

But I hope we think of God in terms of beautiful.

You know, all beauty that there is in the world is derived from Him, and it's meant to reflect something of His character.

Whether it's beauty of food on a plate, this time of year, when really good chefs can produce food that just is amazing, it's beautiful, or the, you know, beauty and uh and decorations and so forth in the world, a sunset, they're meant to reflect something of the character of God.

We're meant to see that.

Well, what I'd like to do is just pick out a few of the number of uh character traits that she chooses to talk about in this psalm.

And um I'm gonna look at um three different things that we see here about the Lord.

The first thing that is highlighted is that God is no respecter of persons.

He's no respecter of persons.

He sees you at the core, he sees you at the soul level, he sees you as an image bearer.

And he is not like people.

In fact, one of the things that she says about him in this psalm is that holy is his name.

And we think of holiness sometimes as being just morally pure or good behavior, but really I think the idea of holiness goes way beyond that.

That's a part of it.

It has to do with being set apart and being completely other.

And when we think about it in terms of human life and culture, God is completely other than anything we're used to.

He loves in a completely other kind of way.

His kingdom is completely other than the way we do kingdoms in the earthly realm.

And when it comes to seeing people, God is completely other than how we tend to see people in our different stratospheres and cultures and rankings and um pridefulness.

Uh we watched a movie this uh this Christmas season, and I believe the name of this movie was called The Little Princess.

And this movie was about a really young girl, maybe around the age of 10 or 12, whose father was very wealthy, uh, a very prestigious man who loved her deeply and brought her up with a deep sense of security and his love.

And it just happened he was uh had to go off to war uh in England and put her in a kind of boarding school.

And um this boarding school was a wealthy boarding school, so it had a lot of rich kids in it.

And um many of these kids were very prideful and were manipulating and maneuvering to kind of get at the top of the pecking order.

And this girl came in to this school that was kind of already established.

She came as a newcomer, and one of the very first things she noticed was a servant girl whose skin was a different color than the people in this school, and who was dressed in rags, and who had a mop, and who was just mopping this floor with a with a hollow look on her face.

And as the girls walked around her and by her, no one saw her.

But this little girl, I think her name was Sarah, saw her.

She saw her from the get-go.

And she came up to her and she engaged her.

And when it became known to her that she would get in big trouble for even talking to this girl, she secretly gave her a pair of her very best shoes.

These bright yellow shoes that were fur-lined.

And she put them in her room in a secret place.

It was just the centerpiece of this movie kind of flowed out from this other way of seeing people that the movie producer was trying to get at.

And that's really how God is in this song that we're looking at.

Mary is blown away by God's choice of her to bear the Messiah of the world.

Of all the people on the planet that God could have picked to bear the Son of God, the Messiah, the one who was to come.

He picked a girl who was poor, unmarried, living in Gentile territory in Galilee, and someone who was an outsider to the religious establishment of Jerusalem.

She had no pedigree in terms of insider, religious priests in the high priest or anything like that.

She was a very, very different pick than what people would have chosen for the mother of the Lord.

And this selection just speaks volumes about God and his kingdom.

And Mary is out to show this in this psalm.

She is greatly moved by how not only how God has done in her life, that he looks upon the humble state of her, his servant, but that he is a God who exalts the others in humble states, that he fills the hungry in this world, and that in fact he scatters the proud in their hearts, and he brings down the mighty from their thrones, and the rich he sends away empty.

She's talking about this kind of great reversal of the kingdom of God.

And in the day in which she wrote, in the circumstances in which she wrote, some of what she was talking about here would have been the actual physical circumstances, because the rulers were Romans and they were brutal.

And the people who were rich had power and they exploited their power.

But what she has to say goes way beyond the physical resources.

If you think about what she says at the spiritual level, God is a God who sees and exalts the humble, those that have nothing, those that are entitled to nothing, those that have no resources that they can claim to have a position that they have a right to.

God is a God whose mercy extends from generation to generation to those who fear him, to those who have nothing, and yet they're open and responsive, and they acknowledge his position and his authority.

In fact, in God's kingdom, everyone who enters is going to be an adopted orphan.

There are no children by right in his kingdom.

God is no respecter of persons.

No one has an inside track with him.

Just think of who you are in the world.

That the Lord would look down and see you and me.

And that he would invite us to be his very own.

We are nobodies.

Even if we're somebody's in this city, in this town, at the world level, we're really nobodies.

And yet God mercifully, mercifully is not a respecter of persons.

Holy is his name.

And Mary cannot wait to sing about that.

Because that's something we're singing about.

That is something that we're singing about.

If man were in charge of who got into the kingdom, it would be a really sad day.

It would be a really sad day.

Well, a second trait that she celebrates in this song is that God is good for his word.

He's reliable.

God keeps his promise.

That's actually a theme that runs through the whole narrative of Luke, through the birth narratives of the angels announcing the various aspects of the coming of the Messiah, and that the time is here.

There's this constant theme that this is what was said, is what was spoken, and God's good for it.

He keeps his word.

As you think about the idea of keeping your word at the human level, I mean, I hope you know that this is a critical character trait that we should have, we should strive for.

It can make or break a relationship, right?

If you're a person of your word, or if you're not a person of your word.

If you don't keep your word, trust is eroded.

The more you don't keep your word, the more trust is eroded.

Parents learn how hard this is, as infallible humans, to keep our word.

And our children have like radars of what we said.

It goes in a special hard drive that they can access anytime at a moment's notice of what we said.

And um and as they get older and be teenagers and they you know they know we're aging too and that our memory is going a little bit.

And I think they kind of test that how much they can they can add to what we what we actually said.

But be that as it may, um, you know, we're fallible.

And sometimes we do promise things, and sometimes we give our word that things are going to be a certain way, and as much as we try to keep that and want to honor that, there are times when things change that are outside of our control.

But Mary is celebrating God as a keeper of his word.

If you look down in verse 54, if you still have your Bibles open, she says that God has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy as he spoke to our fathers, Abraham, and to his offspring forever.

God is Almighty, and he is able to bring about the things that are needed for him to keep his word.

You know, this is a huge growth area in the Christian life.

If you haven't already discovered this, learning to rightly understand and trust the promises of an unseen God as we walk by faith and not by sight.

Evil is always going to be present to tempt us right at this point when our lives don't match up with how we thought they would be, or how we thought God might have promised them.

And that ancient question in the garden did God really say?

How many times have you heard that in one form or another?

Did God really say He loves you, He'll never leave you, He'll never forsake you, He's for you, all your needs will be met.

Did God really say that?

And so you have these constant temptation that you're hearing if you're in tune with things.

And at times, frankly, God seems so slow at keeping his promises.

The scriptures even speak about this.

In fact, it's ironic because what Mary celebrates here is a promise God made to Abraham and his seed.

And those of you who know Bible stories, you know, you know this history.

God promised Abraham and Sarah they would have a child, they would have a son, right?

And the years ticked off.

Like 25 years ticked off before that promise came to fruition.

And even that, it became clear later, it was not the fullness of the promise.

It was only the beginning of a line that was going to blossom over thousands of years until the coming one came.

And so God's timetables are not our timetables.

So again, let me give you an encouragement.

Do not be afraid to work this out with the Lord.

When it seems like he is slow in engaging his promises, when it seems like you are waiting and waiting and waiting, do not believe that God is not reliable and that he cannot be, that his word isn't trustworthy.

He is fully both.

You know, I think one of the things we learn is that God's purpose is usually more in the journey and not in the outcome.

The waiting journey, the struggling journey, the wrestling journey is where God really is moving and working, and maybe where he's the most present, where we don't see him, obviously.

It's not the destination.

That's the most important thing.

Do you love this about God?

Do you love this about God that you can bank on his word?

Well, a third and last thing that we're going to look at here is something that is celebrated about God.

It actually is not in the song technically itself, but it's in the surrounding events of the song.

And I think the song actually grows out of this particular observation that God provides friends and companions for our emotional and relational needs in this life.

And that is critical.

You are an emotional, relational being.

No one in this room is a robot.

You were never meant to live in isolation, where you just live with yourself and your own thoughts and in your own worlds.

We were made deeply relational.

We were made to live in community with one another and to live in deep relational community.

And isolation is actually the stuff of hell.

It's a part of the description of hell.

If you've read C.S.

Lewis's His Great Divorce, that's one of the striking features about that book, is that those in hell are in these little places around the universe that are small and confined and they're all by themselves.

Even my own conversion experience was centered around this idea of experiencing isolation.

I had a number of dreams when I was a young man, and I would wake up from these dreams just shaking, because in the dreams I was dreaming of being completely isolated after I died.

That I would die and be completely isolated from all human engagement of any kind and be like alone in the solar system, you know, like a spaceman cut loose from a tether, just kind of drifting out into the universe.

It's a terrifying thought.

Have you noticed in this passage how when Mary was chosen to be the mother of the Lord, and how when this was made known to her, that she just happened to have a close relative who seems to function something like a mature aunt and maybe mentor to her, who lives up in the hill country of Judah.

And this lady was without child, was barren, was infertile into her old age and was suffering the shame that went with that, especially in that culture.

And Mary learned that Elizabeth was going to have a child, was already pregnant with a child, even in her old age.

And Mary immediately she arises with haste, with haste into the hill country to be with this woman.

And God provides this woman's own story and experiences.

They're actually intersecting here.

And this woman has experienced the grace of God and the blessing of God in an extraordinary way.

And she is able to visit with Mary and speak to Mary.

And can you just imagine the conversations that these two women had over this time?

Mary was there for three months.

Three months she was there.

Mary, can you imagine what she would have had to work out in her life?

It might sound like a great blessing that you're going to give birth to the Messiah.

There's a lot of suffering and pain that's going to come with that.

That's no easy task.

And not only that, Mary's single at this point, betrothed, but she's still a virgin.

And what is this going to look like?

How is she going to work this out?

I find it fascinating, nothing is mentioned about her mother here and whether her mother was with her.

It doesn't seem to be the case.

It seems that God gave her a refuge away from everyone for three months to sit and speak truth to these two women and to work out, to work out what God was doing and to ground each other and to stay focused and to address their fears as their worlds were unraveling in a lot of ways.

And she gives birth to Samuel, a great figure in ancient Israel, and she writes a song.

And you know that song is woven, the themes of that song, sometimes verbatim, are woven all through Mary's song.

I can just imagine these two women reading scripture together, recalling how God had blessed Hannah and how he does this from generation to generation.

Do you have this kind of friend?

Do you have a spiritual friend?

Have you ever asked for one?

I think if you ask for one, God will give you one.

And it might be in a way that you don't expect because God is a God of unexpected, mysterious ways.

But God never meant for you or for me to live in isolation.

He meant for you to work out your salvation in the company of other believers who can speak the truth to you and encourage you and lift you up.

Do you love this about God?

God provides us a spiritual friend along the journey.

Do you love that about God?

Well, one final movement that we're gonna look at here.

We worship God out of our own experience.

We worship God out of our own experience.

You know, it takes time in life to gain experience, personal experience.

So when we're young, we often ride on the coattails of other people's experiences, right?

Whether you're young at your career or whatever it is that you're doing, there's so much you don't know yet.

You have to trust and just go on what other people say and do.

We've made a little reference to this already.

You know, worship is that kind of way.

When we're young, if we are growing up in a Christian home, we're pointed to God.

And if we didn't, we came to the Lord at some point, and we're we're kind of oftentimes riding on the coattails of others.

Maybe we're with somebody who worships really has a deep faith and a deep expression of faith, and we're we're with them, and we're like, wow, I don't know, I don't know anything about this.

And um, we maybe try to emulate some of that.

But Mary is singing about things that she herself has tasted.

She's tasted.

And I was super struck by how the very beginning of this song, Mary isn't just magnifying God for these far away attributes.

She's magnifying God because of what she experienced in her life with him right then.

God showed up in her life in a profound way, and she's tasted his goodness.

And she's singing about this.

You know, there are times when as Christians we are called to worship, maybe every Sunday here, and it maybe it takes some time to kind of prime the pump, right?

And um, but worship is something that is to be called forth from us.

You can't command a song.

You can't command a song.

A song arises out of us.

And the more we know the Lord, the more those songs, the more we experience him firsthand, the more those songs will begin to come out of us, the more we can taste and see his goodness.

Well, I was imagining that uh as someone's reading uh this song of Mary's that they might stay, depending on the kind of place they were in their life.

Well, that's all good and well for her, but I wasn't picked to be the mother of the Lord.

And Mary had a very blessed providence in this, but you don't know my life.

And you don't know the life that God's given me.

And it doesn't look anything like what Mary's has right there at this particular moment in her life.

That kind of question, that kind of saying betrays a barrier to worship.

There's a lot of barriers to worship in our lives.

That question, I've cast it in this way purposely.

It probably hits on one of the one of the top barriers to worship, and that's resentment.

Just resentment in life.

There's a man named Henry Nowen who is like the master at thinking about movements in the Christian life, from this to this.

And he he has a chapter on from resentment to gratitude.

And here's what he says about resentment.

I'm just gonna read this.

It's worth a few moments to hear this.

Because, in some sense, we will all taste this kind of resentment at different points in our life.

He says, resentment is cold, agonizing anger.

When hot anger grows cold, it hardens your heart and wreaks havoc in your life.

Resentment makes you suspicious, cynical, and depressed.

Over the long term, resentment becomes a way of being.

Many of us live with cold anger, the deep feeling that life has let us down, that we suffer unjustly, and that nothing will be done about our complaints.

Resentment is one of the most vicious qualities of life because it makes human relationships and community life so difficult.

It prevents us from seeking forgiveness and robs us of our joy.

It takes away our inner freedom to act creatively and makes us cling to negative feelings as our only way to find an identity.

He goes on and he puts it a little differently.

Resentment is exactly the complaint that life does not unfold the way we planned, that our many goals and projects are constantly interrupted by the events of the hour, the day, and the year, and that there is no choice other than to become the passive victim of random incidents and happenstance.

The movement to gratitude, away from resentment, involves the discovery that God is the God of history, that things are quietly and slowly unfolding as they should.

My spiritual task is to learn to listen to all that's going on and the trust that God's hand is guiding me.

Then life is no longer a series of interruptions to my schedule and plans, but rather the patient and purposeful way by which God forms and leads me day by day.

Gratitude makes the interruption into an invitation and the occasion of complaint into a moment for contemplation.

Maybe that rings true with you to some degree or another.

Maybe in the coming new year, this would be a good time to think about a movement.

And a movement from a barrier like this can be really slow.

You're not going to change that in a day.

And it might begin with just small things, like each night before you go to bed.

Can you think of one or two significant things of the day, even small things that you're really thankful for, that you notice that God blessed you in?

And can you name them and thank Him for those?

It might be something like noticing that when you pray, you spend a lot of time praying about yourself, which is fine.

But it might be, you know, maybe I'll take a week prayer fast of praying for myself.

And every time I want to pray for myself or say something about myself to the Lord, I'm going to think of praying on behalf of another.

And finally, it might involve a spiritual friend.

It might involve getting more real with a spiritual friend and asking God to provide you with one.

Because a friend is going to tell you the truth you need to know.

A friend is going to tell you that if you're a believer, like Mary, you were picked out for a relationship with God.

A friend might remind you in one way or another that much of the world is perishing.

And you are a friend of God.

A friend is going to remind you of the things the mighty one has done for you in your life.

They'll see them maybe more clearly than you will if you're stuck in bitterness and resentment.

And yes, a friend will remind you that Mary might have had the living God in her womb.

But you have God living in your very soul.

You have the Spirit of Christ living in your very soul, who is in you at work and not passive.

He's a renovator.

He's moving old, outdated in Adam into new in Christ.

And as slow as that work might be going, you know it and you feel it and you taste it.

Your desires are real and alive for the things of God and to see his beauty and to be his servant and to die to all things that are about you.

Yeah, a friend will remind you of those things.

A friend's going to remind you finally that when there's a coming day when we're not going to walk by sight any longer or by faith any longer, but it's going to be by sight.

And we're going to sing a new song that's going to just come out of every fiber of our being.

We won't have to be commanded to praise any longer.

We won't have to prime the pump any longer.

A day is coming when what we were made for is going to be realized in its fullness.

Praise God for his indescribable gift.

Let us pray, and uh Carl's gonna come back up and lead us in a closing song.

Our Father, we uh we thank you for this rich song that you've given us that speaks of you, that highlights you, that reveals you and unveils you.

And uh Lord, we long for that to be unveiled in the deepest places of our hearts.

And so, Lord, wherever we're stuck, wherever we're hindered, wherever barriers there might be, um, we pray that your good spirit would make some impact in the coming year in these in these areas.

And we ask it in Christ's name, amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.