The Joy for You | Advent | Pastor Joe Coffey

This is a reading from Luke 1:46-56

Luke 1:46–56

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 and the thoughts of their hearts.

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 her about three months and returned to her home.

Hey everybody, good morning and welcome to Christ Community Chapel.

My name is Joe.

I'm one of the pastors here, and I am really glad that you have come.

All right.

This is the first week of advent where we turn our eyes toward Christmas.

And I always think that Thanksgiving is like, a starting line

when that you swallow that last piece of turkey,

then like, a gun goes off and it's an all out sprint to Christmas,

Christmas specials start showing up on TV, have office

Christmas parties, and everywhere you go you hear Christmas music.

For the most part, I, I enjoy Christmas music.

Although songs like Sleigh

Bells ringing or chestnuts roasting, they're fine.

They just kind of miss the point, because the point of Christmas is Jesus,

that healing has been injected into the brokenness of our world,

that healing has come for the brokenness

deep down in you and deep down in me.

The passage we just had read to us is actually the first Christmas carol,

and it's sung by Mary, the mother of Jesus.

It's commonly called the Magnificat, which sounds like the word magnificent.

It seems like it's referring to how great the song is,

but Magnificat is Latin for magnifies.

It's the first line that Mary sings my soul magnifies

the Lord, and my spirit rejoices

in God my Savior.

Our theme for advent

this year here at TCC is joy.

That's it. Just joy.

And the title of this message is Joy for you.

And we take this passage because Mary is overflowing with joy.

It's like it's cascading out of her.

She has come to understand something and what has happened.

The result of that is irrepressible and glorious joy.

That's what I want this Christmas.

That's what I want for you this Christmas.

When I say she came to understand something, what I mean is,

a couple of weeks before she sings this song, the angel Gabriel pierced her

and tells her that she's going to have a baby.

And she says, how can these things be?

And Gabriel says, The Holy Spirit's going to come upon you.

The baby's going to be conceived by the Holy Spirit.

She has no idea what that means right now. How could she

at that moment, she is not experiencing joy.

What she does is she submits

like she knows that if what the angel said is true, then

all the plans that she had for her life are gone.

She knows if what the angel says is true, she's going to be an unwed

mother with the story that no one will believe.

And she says,

okay,

I'm in.

You know, sometimes obedience is like,

you know, when you go to a vending machine,

you put the coins in and you press the button

for the coke or whatever, and nothing happens.

And then there's kind of a rumbling in the machine.

And then the coke finally pops out.

That's what happens sometimes when God asks you to obey him.

You don't really know what God is doing.

You don't know what the result is going to be.

There's that rumbling.

And then for Mary, the coke finally pops out.

She finally understands something, and the result of that

is great, great joy.

All right, let me

read verses 46 through 50 and I'm going to give you my three points,

which are what Mary understood

and what I want us to understand as we head into advent.

This is where it starts.

And Mary said, my soul magnifies the Lord.

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.

Then this 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.

Mary understood three things.

These are my three points.

She understood three things about God, and they're all mentioned in those verses.

First, God is mighty, God is mighty.

The second is God is holy,

God is holy, and the third is God his mercy.

God is mighty.

God is holy.

God is mercy.

All right, first, God is mighty.

Everyone.

So I meet somebody who really struggles with the virgin birth

like it's just blows their mind. They can't.

They don't believe it. They can't understand it.

And I always think that's an odd thing to get stuck on.

I mean, in one way it's understandable.

In another way, it's not the way it's understandable.

Mary struggled with the virgin birth and she had an angel telling her

and when Gabriel says, you're going to have a baby, she said,

how can that be right?

How is that possible?

And Gabriel in verse 37 says, nothing is impossible with God.

And that's that's where it's not.

I have I have trouble understanding when people struggle with the virgin birth,

because if there is a God and

he created all that is,

how difficult is the virgin birth?

Yeah, I love this.

I get into this that the first hundred and 60 years of modern science,

scientists believed in what was called the static universe.

What that meant was they believed that matter

and energy and time were eternal, that they had always existed.

And the real question that science needs to figure out

was how matter and energy over time,

kind of organized together to create such a complex world.

That was their big question,

until a man named Albert Einstein came up with a theory

called the Theory of relativity, and that began, just

an avalanche of data

proving beyond a shadow of a doubt

that matter, energy and time

were not eternal, that all three of those came

into existence in a moment that scientists

call the singularity.

Right.

And what this is, this is really interesting to me.

So I get it.

I get geeky about this, but,

when he was like, figuring out

his famous equation equals n squared,

he kept making a mathematical mistake.

And there was a Russian mathematician named Alexander Friedmann who wrote him

several times and said, I see the mistake you're making in your equation.

If you're correct that I think

your equation will work and your theory will be proved right.

And finally, Albert Einstein wrote him back and he said, I have known

about that mistake for a while, but I could not get myself to correct it.

Then he said, this

because if my theory is correct,

the question about the universe is no longer

when or how,

but who.

What Einstein understood

was that his theory implied a creator.

And if there is a creator who created all that is really,

how hard is it for him to fertilize an egg

without any help, right?

This whole idea

that Jesus came means that

not only did Jesus come, but the gospel came.

The good news that God is the God of the impossible,

that God can save someone like you

and someone like me without violating his justice.

And he does it with Jesus

going to the cross.

Christmas is a time when we celebrate

like it's like that kid's song that we taught our kids a long time ago.

My God is so big, so strong and so mighty.

There is nothing my God cannot do.

That's the first thing

that goes that Mary understands,

that begins to build this joy, that she realizes

there's a God in heaven and there is nothing that he cannot do.

That's the first thing.

The second thing comes from the same verse, is that God is holy.

It says, for he who is mighty has done great things for me,

and holy is his name.

Holy holiness is scary.

At least it should be.

It's the aspect of God that is so pure

that it is overwhelming, that it is actually dangerous to come close to

pure goodness.

Like pure evil

is too much for a human being

to actually experience.

And holiness is the the.

The best analogy that I can get for holiness is electricity.

I mean, electricity is wonderful, but electricity is very dangerous.

You don't

you don't approach electricity on your terms.

You approach electricity on its terms.

You don't go willy nilly into electricity grabbing live wires.

Right. It will always have the same impact.

I worked as an electrician's

apprentice one summer when I was in college,

and, the owner of the company was a friend of the family.

That's how I got the job.

Because I've told you over and over again that I am not handy right at all.

So the first day of work,

I was riding with this electrician

and I said, listen, I thought I'd come clean.

Listen, I just want you to know that,

I don't know much about tools or anything.

Right?

And I still remember he was driving and he said,

yeah, you can't be as bad as the kid I had last, last summer.

And I said, I think that might have been my brother.

And he goes, oh, my, oh, God, like that.

But the thing I remember about

this guy is that he worked very fast, and sometimes he wouldn't

turn the breaker off.

And one day he was moving too fast and he touched a live wire.

It knocked him off the ladder and he almost bit his tongue in half.

You don't mess with electricity.

That's holiness.

That's holiness.

You know, in the Old Testament,

the Jews would worship at a place called the Tabernacle, which was a tent.

And then later on the temple right in.

And both structures were built

to, to show the Israelites that the closer

you got to God, the more dangerous it became because of his holiness.

In fact, there was a the closest anyone could get to God

was called the Holy of Holies was a little room

that only one person could go in once a year.

That was the high priest,

and before he went

in, he had to bathe himself a certain way.

Then he had to put on certain clothes, and then he had to make a sacrifice

and bring the blood in for his own sin, to atone for his sin

before he went into the Holy of Holies.

He would have bells put around his robe

and a rope tied to his ankle, just in case

he was not approaching God on God's terms.

And he dropped dead.

They would know because the bells would quit ringing,

and they could pull him out with the rope

that was tied around his ankle.

Holiness is scary.

Mary includes it in her song of joy.

She is not scared of the holiness of God.

Right. You know, there's a famous,

like, passage in a book by C.S.

Lewis called The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe.

It's a kid's book. It's a great book.

But the Christ figure is,

a giant lion named Aslan.

And one of the little girls,

when she hears about Aslan,

she says, well, is he a safe lion?

And the answer comes back.

Of course he's not safe.

Nobody said anything about him being safe.

He's good.

He's the king.

I tell you, that's what Mary understood

about God,

that he was holy.

But he had become

safe for her because of his goodness.

You know, there's, a weird story in the Old Testament where Moses

goes up on the mountain, to get the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.

And, he and God tells

Moses, tell the people, don't even touch the mountain,

because my holiness has gone down through the soil.

So if they touch the mountain, they're going to die,

and they're going to want to come.

They're going to try to break through to get to me,

because the pure goodness of God

is what we long for, what we were made for.

And we are, like Maus, drawn to a flame.

But Mary says,

God has done something for me with the coming of Jesus.

That makes it so that I don't have to run away from the holiness of God.

But I can run toward him.

I can run into his arms.

She says, God is mighty, God is holy.

And then my third point is God has mercy.

This is what he says.

She says, my soul.

I'm going to read the whole four verses.

My soul magnifies the Lord.

My spirit rejoices in God my Savior.

For he's looked on the humble state of his servant.

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

for he 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.

There is a movement of love

that is the greatest movement of love our world has ever known.

It is weaved into the fabric of who we are.

It's a three part movement.

Is the three part movement is to give up, go to and be with.

That's it.

Give up, go to be with every mother knows that movement.

Instinctively a mother hears her child cry out in another room.

She drops what she's doing and runs to her child.

That's giving up. Go to be with.

If you have a great friend, you count on that movement.

If you call your friend in the middle of the night and say, I need you now,

a friend who loves you will crawl out of bed,

put on his coat, meet you at the hospital.

He will give up. Go to be with

700 years before the angel Gabriel appears

to Mary to tell her that she's going to have a baby.

The prophet Isaiah writes this.

This is in Isaiah seven

says, therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign.

Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,

and shall call his name Emmanuel.

That same prophecy is reiterated by an angel

to Joseph in the Gospel of Matthew,

and he adds, you shall call his name Emmanuel,

which means God with us.

What Mary realized is that

God had joined in that movement,

that the coming of Jesus was God giving up, going to being with.

And that's about all she understood at that time.

But she also understood that the the baby

she would hold was white hot

with the holiness of God, yet she could hold him

because God had come

with mercy, and that mercy was in Jesus.

Then going to the cross

and dying on the cross for us.

You know, I remember I mentioned the tabernacle in the temple,

that before the priest could have, the high priest could ever get close to God.

The high priest had to make a sacrifice for his own sin and bring that blood

sacrifice into the holy of Holies to atone for his sin.

This is what the writer of Hebrews says about Jesus says he entered once

for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves,

but by means of his own blood, thus securing

an eternal redemption.

It says that Jesus blood was different, right?

That Jesus blood was not for his own sin,

but for your sin, for my sin.

And then the Gospels tell

us the moment that Jesus dies on the cross, the curtain in the temple

that separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple

tore into.

And what that meant was that God had done something

that would allow people like you and people like me

to run to him

and not away from him.

So what Mary understood,

and that resulted in great joy,

was that there was a God

who is mighty, who could do the impossible,

who could come as a human being and pay the price

so that somebody like you and somebody like me could actually

be saved without violating his justice,

that God was holy, that he wasn't safe.

But he was good.

He was good. And then finally, the God

was mercy

that God would provide a way to heal the brokenness deep down

inside of us that would inject broke healing into the brokenness of our world.

So it would never be the same.

So this is my thing

as you go in this sprint toward Christmas,

as you see Christmas specials

pop up on TV as you

go to office, Christmas parties, as you hear

Christmas music, whatever that music is,

be reminded

of the Magnificat

of what Mary sang about God.

Be reminded that you serve a God who is mighty,

who can do the impossible, who is holy,

but above all is mercy.

And then sing with Mary.

My soul magnifies

the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.

And let joy be the theme in your heart.

Let it be irrepressible and glorious joy for you.

All right. Would you pray with me?

Father in heaven, we come to you.

And, Christmas is usually not a time, at least for me, that I think

of your mighty, mighty ness, your holiness, your mercy.

I think of Jesus.

But that is why you sent Jesus.

That is why Jesus came.

And the whole movement

to give out go to be with is overwhelming.

I pray for, all of us, as we approach Christmas.

That will be a time where Joy would begin to well up inside of us

as we understand what Mary understood.

And we worship you where we say our souls

magnify the Lord, and our spirits rejoice

in God our Savior. Thanks.

Thanks for joy.

Thanks for Jesus. We pray this in his name.

Amen.