Journeying with Mary, the Mother of Jesus: Humble Servant | Associate Pastor: Matt Armstrong

Well, this morning we come to the end of our summer series.

We've called it Journeying with Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Four weeks ago, Brad walked through the angel Gabriel's announcement to Mary.

Keel looked at Jesus' birth, and Sam walked us through, invited us to the wedding at Cana, where Jesus' first miracle was performed.

Last week we were with Mary at the foot of the cross as she watched her son die a horrible death before her eyes.

Today we close out our series with the last time Mary is mentioned in the Bible, and it's in Acts chapter 1.

Acts 1 · chapter mention

Following his resurrection, Luke tells us that Jesus presented himself alive to his disciples after his sufferings by many proofs, appearing to them during 40 days and speaking about the kingdom of God.

And it's noted in this little section that still at this point the disciples were not fully clear on what was going to happen next.

What was the nature of Jesus and God's kingdom?

Then Luke tells us they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day's journey away.

When they had entered, they went up to the upper room where they were staying.

Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James the son of Alpheus, and Simon the zealot, and Judas, the son of James.

All these, with one accord, were devoting themselves to prayer together with the women, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.

Again, this is the final mention of Mary in the Scriptures.

And it feels a bit anticlimactic, doesn't it?

This is the woman God chose to carry, to give birth to, and to raise the Son of God.

And throughout the Gospels, she has shown herself faithful.

Now she just disappears from history.

Well, we're going to wrestle with these and some other questions in our sermon today, including these.

What does Mary's presence here at this key moment of the burgeoning church tell us?

And what does the portrait we are given of her life have to teach us as fellow disciples of Jesus?

We're going to answer this question through three aspects that we see through Mary that shed light on our discipleship, which is waiting, offering, and kneeling.

So first, waiting.

When we see Mary here in Acts chapter 1, she's with the eleven other disciples, uh apostles.

Acts 1 · chapter mention

Judas has committed suicide.

He is dead.

There are about 120 other disciples all gathered together in this upper room in the city of Jerusalem.

Now, most many of the disciples were from Galilee, the northern portion of Israel.

It was a three-day journey, and so they had likely rented this room or been given access to this room while they waited.

Jesus had told them to return to Jerusalem at his ascension to wait for the promise of the Father, which is the giving of the Holy Spirit, which came on Pentecost.

Pentecost was a Jewish festival related to the harvest, and it was fifty days after the Passover.

So putting all of this information together, it looks like Mary, the apostles, and the other disciples waited in this upper room between seven and ten days praying.

Now my son Noah, seated right here on the front row, he suffers from an ailment that I think he inherited from me, which is the crippling inability to wait.

Sometimes when we purchase things online, right, which is where we purchase most things, something uh untoward happens to him.

He just can't stop asking me to check the delivery status.

He just can't wait for that new whatever to arrive.

Now, I say he inherited it from me because I hate waiting too.

I actually remember, I'm old enough to remember when Amazon Prime was invented.

Do you remember?

For this low, low fee, guaranteed two-day delivery.

I mean, it blows your mind.

But today, two-day delivery is an eternity.

But if you get online at the right time and you order the right thing, it could be delivered in a couple hours.

I mean, talk about power.

Talk about technology getting us closer and closer to what our hearts truly long for, which is instant gratification.

This inability to wait exposes something in my heart and in your heart, and that is common to human nature, and that is that we so badly desire to be God.

It's one of the things that draws us so much to our technology, the ability to do far more than what we as humans and our limitations can do.

We want to be God, or at least a God.

We would love to have the power to control our world, our outcomes, our circumstances, and so it is people, the outcomes around us.

And so it is one of the most difficult aspects of being a follower of Christ, a finite creature, that we must wait.

And I would say this is probably one of the things that kind of move us outside of being a disciple of Jesus.

We hate waiting.

And yet we must.

A servant waits on their master, on their Lord.

Why does Mary wait in this circumstance?

Well, she and the other disciples are waiting, first of all, because Jesus told them to wait.

He was very clear.

Go to Jerusalem and wait for the promise of the Father to be delivered.

But also they wait because apart from the Spirit, they don't have the power, they don't have the ability to do what God is calling them to do, what Jesus is sending them to do, as the inaugural members of this new faith community, the church.

In just a little while, just a day or so, Peter is filled with the Holy Spirit.

He's going to preach an incredible sermon.

We're told that his hearers are cut to the heart, and around 3,000 Jews will come forward to be baptized and put their faith in Jesus as Messiah, the man who just 50 days prior had been executed on a Roman cross, the most the worst and most despicable way, most dishonorable way to die in that day.

Peter could not have done this on his own.

Now, we love to make fun of Peter.

We like to laugh at Peter, and at the end of the day, we like to relate to Peter that he knew firsthand what happens when he works according to his own wisdom.

He embodies the saying, often wrong, but seldom in doubt.

And doesn't that describe me and you all too often?

The truth is that many of us in this room, we have much to offer.

We're well educated, relatively wealthy.

We have a lot of things to offer, skills and abilities and experiences.

But to do the work that God is inviting us to take part in in the coming of his kingdom, we do not have the power or wisdom.

That alone comes from him, or it comes from him alone.

And so we must wait, as humble servants must.

But, beloved, waiting doesn't mean simply twiddling our thumbs or doing nothing.

Mary and the other disciples are praying, they're seeking the Lord, asking for guidance, protection, wisdom, and courage in this moment.

You see, often what we don't see when we forget that God is the one at work, that He He is uh He is always at work.

But because we don't see it, we forget that He is doing things in and around us.

While we are waiting.

Often He's doing a deep work in our own souls, rooting out sin and replacing misplaced affections.

Sometimes He's doing work in others or in circumstances that must come together before this thing that we are praying and waiting for can even happen.

And sometimes what we are waiting for and what we're asking for in prayer is not the Lord's will.

It looks good and right, even necessary to us.

But the Lord has an infinite and an eternal wisdom that we must submit ourselves to at the end of the day.

And this is the theme present throughout the scriptures, and it's good for us to be reminded.

Through Isaiah, God said, My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts your thoughts.

Paul, caught up in rapturous worship in the book of Romans, says it this way: Oh, the depth of the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God, how unsearchable are his judgments, and how inscrutable are his ways.

For who has known the mind of the Lord, and who has been his counselor?

Where are you struggling this morning to give control over your world to your King and your Lord?

Mary gives us a beautiful picture of the humble servant who waits upon the Lord.

Second, offering.

There's a great book published by one of my seminary professors called Instruments in the Redeemer's Hand.

Just the title gives us a great picture of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.

We don't just wait, but we offer ourselves as instruments in the hand of our wise God.

And that's what we see Mary doing here.

The reason Mary is named, she's the only one other than the apostles named in this final passage where she is mentioned, because she has had incredible influence in this young church community.

Think about it.

Where did the gospel writers get much of the information that they report to us?

For example, Gabriel's announcement to Mary.

Mary's the only one present.

The fact that Mary remained a virgin until Jesus was born.

To the shepherds, what the shepherds saw and said the night Jesus was born, the details of the visit and the gifts of the Magi, or the prophecies of Anna and Simeon in the temple.

Mary was one of the few present at the miracle at the wedding of Cana.

And again, one of the few who heard Jesus speak from the cross.

How could Luke have written after the shepherds had visited Mary and Joseph at the birth of Jesus, that Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart, unless she told him.

In fact, so much of the gospel accounts are personal to Mary's experience that some have called them Mary's memoirs.

Mary profoundly shaped the scriptures that God has given us.

And not only that, but humanly speaking, Mary and Joseph raised Jesus to be the man he became.

Now it's true that Jesus of Nazareth was fully God and fully man.

But the fact that he was fully man means that he did not come out of the womb fully formed.

And in fact, the scriptures tell us that he grew in wisdom and stature in favor with God and men as a child.

And when we look at the Magnificat, this is Mary's kind of prayer and praise of God, her most profound theological statement that we have recorded, we see an incredible resonance with Jesus' own ministry.

Care for the poor, care for widows, equity, justice, mercy, and forgiveness.

Do you think that it's a coincidence that these are the themes that Mary cares about, exalts in, expounds, shape Jesus, the man whom she helped to raise?

Mary was no mere background character in the life and ministry of Jesus.

God worked powerfully through her as and who she was as a person.

She was a poor first-century Jew.

And that was the lens through which Jesus viewed the world as a man, as a rabbi, and as a teacher.

Now, why do I camp out, why do we camp out here kind of rehearsing all these things?

Well, first of all, it shines a brighter light on the influence of Mary in this early church.

In many ways, her influence was hidden to us.

It's only when we step back and we reflect on the information that we have and the person that she was that we get a greater view into her profound influence and work in the early church and in the scriptures.

But the same is true of us, beloved.

That our names may be forgotten from history.

We may never be known by the vast majority of people in our community or even in our church, and yet God calls us to offer up the gifts, the talents, the experiences that we have and give them to Him.

And He says, I can use these powerfully in the coming of my kingdom and the shaping of what I am doing.

You see, beloved, this is what humble servants and a disciple of Christ does.

We wait, we offer, and we watch.

Whether or not anyone else sees what the Lord does in and through us, we know that he sees.

And there's a deep satisfaction in knowing that the God of the universe both loves us but also chooses to work through us.

But I'll also say as an encouragement, this also means that we never come to church as consumers.

In our more cynical moments, the church can look like a purveyor of goods and services that we give in response to tithes and offerings.

Let me say from the pulpit, God forbid.

We are the family of God.

We are the community of faith.

We come together as forgiven sinners, beloved sons and daughters of God, each offering what we've been given, being blessed by one another and blessing others.

This is the community that Jesus has created.

What would it look like for you to offer yourself as a humble servant to the Lord this morning?

Third and final point, kneeling.

I want to meditate on this last question.

Why does Mary simply disappear from the pages of the New Testament and really the pages of history after this passage?

We have 27 more chapters in the book of Acts.

We have 22 more books in the New Testament.

And yet Mary is never mentioned again.

Now, pretty early in the church, what we would call now the Roman Catholic Church, but really back then it was just the church in the first few centuries.

Even early on, Mary began to be elevated and venerated.

But within the scriptures, God was pleased to allow her to step quietly into the background.

Why is that?

Well, it seems in line with her familiar initial confession.

She said, Behold, I am the servant of the Lord.

Let it be to me according to your will.

Mary was content to play her part and nothing more.

She was pleased to offer her life for the kingdom of God and to serve her Lord and King.

She echoes the same sentiment as John the Baptist when he said, He, Jesus, must increase, but I must decrease.

One of my favorite shows is The West Wing.

I don't know if you guys have seen that.

It's an Aaron Sorkin show.

It's got great writing, great, if you like dialogue, it's just a fantastic show.

It tries to portray working in the White House in an inspiring way.

And, you know, again, in our cynical time, this could be a good show to return to.

There are a few scenes throughout the show where the White House staffers that kind of come, you know, and over time you come to love these characters.

I came to love these characters.

And at these key moments, a couple times throughout the show, they come before the president and they say out loud, I serve at the pleasure of the president.

And what they mean is that they are there, they work in the White House, they see their jobs as pursuing his agenda, his desired ends, and not their own.

Now it helps in the show that most of the things President Bartlett chooses to do seem good and wise.

And so, yes, we get on board with these fellow staffers.

But often when I think about my relationship to King Jesus as a humble servant, this line comes to mind.

I serve at the pleasure of my King Jesus.

And I believe Mary embodies this sentiment beautifully.

And this is something we can often lose sight of.

That our lives are glorified when we glorify our Lord and King.

That we gain a greater joy and satisfaction in our lives when we give our lives away to the God who created us, loved us, and gave himself for us.

And this is something we can easily lose sight of.

We often and rightly emphasize the fact that we are adopted sons and daughters of God.

We are the beloved.

God loves us even in our brokenness and our sin, and that will never end.

And we will preach that and proclaim that to the end of days.

And yet, we are also servants of the Lord.

And we are called to give our lives for his honor and glory.

And so we kneel, we kneel our lives, our gifts, our prerogatives to him.

Beloved, in the first sermon in this series, Brad encouraged us to imitate Mary's beautiful confession when she said, Behold, I am the servant of the Lord.

Let it be according to your word.

And I can't think of a better word, a better way to end this series.

I encourage you and I commend you to commit this verse to memory and to pray it regularly.

If you have any questions about this sermon or if you have any prayer requests, I'll be down front after the service and I would love to meet with you.

Let's pray.

Our Father and our God.

Lord, we, along with David, we confess that there's nothing better than to be called into the Lord's service, to be present in your house forevermore.

Lord, thank you that you not only call us servants, but you call us friends.

You call us sons and daughters, and you pour your love into our hearts.

But Lord, show us this morning and throughout this week what does it look like for us to be your humble servants as Mary was.

We ask in Jesus' name.

Amen.