Christmas 2021: Mary with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

It's so good to see you guys here.

If it's your first time, my name is Clayton, and I'm the lead pastor here at Meta.

We also are streaming for the first time in a few weeks, and I want to thank Spectrum Internet.

We mentioned them a few weeks ago, and they got on the ball.

They got out here, got our internet in.

We have Wi-Fi.

We're streaming.

Hello to everyone online.

We are in the Christmas season, and we're gonna jump right into scripture today.

In Luke's Gospel, chapter one, verse 26, it says this.

But she was deeply troubled by this statement, wondering what kind of greeting this could be.

And the angel told her, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.

Now listen, you will conceive, give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus.

And Mary asked the angel, How can this be, since I've not had sexual relations with a man?

And the angel replied, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.

Therefore, the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God.

And consider your relative Elizabeth, even she has conceived a son in her old age, and is now in the sixth month for her who is called childless, for nothing will be impossible with God.

See, I am the Lord's servant, said Mary.

May it happen to me as you have said.

And then the angel left her.

This is one of the three tellings of the Christmas story in the scriptures.

There are four Gospels, three of them tell the nativity story: Matthew, Luke, and John.

And last week we learned about this thing that happens to us as humans called narrative fatigue.

What narrative fatigue is, is this process of hearing a story so many times that you begin to lose the details and the significance of that story.

The first time you hear a great story, like the moment that changed all of human history at Christmas, you take it in like an IMAX movie, you see all the details, you put yourself in the scene, you understand the weight and the significance of it, but the tenth time you've heard it, your brain can only store so much data.

And so you start hitting the bullet points.

The hundredth time you've heard it, you have a very two-dimensional, non-dynamic view of the nativity, a version of the story that is as thin as the cardboard cutout nativity scene in our front yards.

This is just a part of how we take in information.

It doesn't have to be a great story of historical significance like Christmas.

It can be any story that you hear again and again and again.

And over time, you end up with a very low-resolution bullet point version of that story.

And so Christmas is a story that is told at least once a year.

Every year of your life, you have been exposed to the Christmas story in some form or fashion.

Here in the West, and especially in Texas, the Bible belt, you cannot escape it.

And because you've heard the story over and over and over again, it is in danger of narrative fatigue.

So we know the story.

Mary and Joseph, Immaculate Conception, a virgin gives birth, the cattle are lowing, the baby awakes, but little boy Jesus, no crying he makes.

Let's correct the record.

Jesus cried as a baby, okay?

He was a baby.

Crying is not a sin.

That's just what babies do.

We have a very low-resolution view of this.

And the way that you combat narrative fatigue is you slow down and you relive the story almost like you're hearing it for the very first time.

You rediscover the weight and the significance of it.

What we've decided to do this Christmas season is over three weeks, starting last Sunday, we are looking at all three accounts of the story, the birth of Jesus.

We are looking in Matthew's gospel last week, and we saw it through the lens of Joseph.

This week we're in Luke and we're seeing the story through the lens of Mary, and on Christmas Eve, we will do it one more time through the lens of Jesus.

You see, these are the three main characters of the Christmas story.

And what we believe is if we can slow down, then out of these three characters, we can find the characteristics that God is looking for in all of our lives to position us to fully live out our purpose in the story that God is telling, just like Mary and Joseph were able to do.

Last week we learned from Joseph that God is looking for people who are living righteous lives.

And we admit it that the word righteous is probably an overused phrase.

It's a very churchy phrase, it feels very biblical and spiritual and maybe like something you could never attain to, but we learned what it means to be righteous.

To be righteous means to do what's right, even when you have the right not to.

It is living a right life, not living based on your own rights.

It's using your rights and your power and authority, not for your own gain, but for the gain of those around you.

God is looking for people who are righteous.

Today we are going to look at Mary, one of the most incredible stories in all of Scripture.

But to really understand it, we must slow down.

The title of my message today is actually a question.

And so I'm gonna get you to help me out.

I'm gonna let you know right off the bat, 945 was absolutely terrible at this.

And I believe in you, 11:30.

So I want you to look at someone near you and ask them, Are you ready?

Y'all think we are in the second Methodist, Baptist, Depression era Church of Christ.

Look at someone next to you and say, Are you ready?

Now you sound ready.

Let's pray.

God, we're trying to get ready.

We're Texans and it's 40 degrees, so we're freezing.

Help us shake it off, melt our cold hearts right now.

God, we are here seeking you, and MetaCurch matters because it's a place where anyone can come, where they can believe or belong even before they believe all the things that we believe.

They can wrestle with hard questions.

And you've said, if we seek you, we will find you.

And so help us to do just that, to have open minds and open hearts as we look at the story of Mary.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

And if you're ready, say amen.

So let's talk about Mary.

We live in the Bible Belt.

More specifically, we're here in San Antonio.

So not only are we a Christian city, we are a primarily Catholic city.

And if you grew up Catholic, you know that in Catholicism, Mary is elevated to a place even higher than we would elevate her as a Protestant.

But even you Protestants aren't gonna really get off the hook today because we see Mary and we think of her almost on the level of Jesus.

Like she just stepped into the world.

She was just born with the sense of destiny, right?

She's gonna get it right.

Like she came out of the womb doing miracles, you know.

She hit puberty and sprouted a halo, you know.

That's how we think about Mary, that she was just waiting.

Like when the angel finally showed up, she was like, What took you so long?

I'm ready, I am ready to change the world.

We see Mary from a retrospective, and we know her as Mary, the mother of Jesus, the mother of the savior of the world.

And by doing that, with this narrative fatigue, and we gotta tell the story quickly, and so Mary was just probably always awesome, you know?

She always knew she had this great potential, she always had a big future ahead of her.

Because we think that way, we miss the real power of Mary's story.

Last week we talked about how Joseph, as a man 2,000 years ago in the Middle East, had all of the power and all of the authority and all of the rights in the situation he found himself in with Mary.

Mary showed up pregnant, he didn't know who the baby belonged to, and he wasn't really buying this whole line about it coming from God, right?

He had the rights, he had the power, he had the authority.

At that place and that time, men and women were not equal under the law.

Women were somewhere right above property and cattle.

It was tough to be a woman.

This is Mary's reality.

Not only is she a woman, but we have good evidence from scripture that she was a poor woman from a poor family, that she was impoverished.

We see that she is marrying into a working class man, Joseph, who was a carpenter, which meant he took the apprentice route.

He wasn't uh bright enough to be brought into Hebrew school like some of the other boys who would have some upward mobility in their life.

We know Mary and Joseph were poor because later in scripture, when they take Jesus to the temple to dedicate them, they have to give the lesser offering, the offering that was put into the Jewish law almost as an asterisk for those who couldn't afford the real deal.

This was at a place in time where there was a class system and there was no mobility between classes, which meant if your parents were lower class, you were going to be born lower class, you were going to live lower class, you were going to marry lower class, you were going to work lower class, and someday you are going to die lower class.

This is Mary's existence.

Not a life where she woke up like we do in the West, just assuming because we're breathing and because we showed up here on the scene that we should automatically be beautiful millionaires, you know?

It's like if we don't have everything handed to us and 10 million followers on Instagram, we assume something is wrong with the world around us.

Mary would have assumed the exact opposite.

If she was just told to sit down, to shut up, to live her life, to not make any noise, to be poor and be okay with it, to have no hope or no future besides marrying a lower class man and having him some babies, that was her future.

And if that came to pass, everything was right on schedule.

And so we think about Mary like she was always Mary, the mother of Jesus, like she always knew it was coming, but the exact opposite was true.

The story of Mary is the story of someone who did not believe they were qualified for the job that God was getting ready to put in front of them.

And what we do at Metachurch is we always start with the assumption, and I'll joke with the staff here because I it's like, dude, I preach the same sermon every week.

We always start at the same place.

We believe that God created you on purpose, it's no accident that you're here on earth, and God created you with purpose, which means there is something inside of you, there is a destiny ahead of you that God's wanting to use all that you are and all that you have for a potential that you cannot imagine.

And so you come week after week and you hear that reflected in every sermon.

It's our starting point that this is a movement of people who are actually meant to change the world.

You are a part of that movement, which means you are meant to be a world changer.

And so many people sit and they like that message.

Maybe they amen that message.

You nod along to the message, but as you're processing it later that Sunday, as you get into Monday, as it creeps into Wednesday, in those moments where you're alone, in those moments where you're silent, in those moments where you put the phone down, because honestly, it ran out of battery and it's only 11 o'clock, and you finally have to charge it.

In those moments where you're actually quiet and you're alone with yourself, you know you better than anyone else knows you.

And what you actually believe behind the facade, at the very core of the narrative you have about yourself, you believe you are unqualified as well.

Mary was a nobody, she had nothing going on in her life and nothing planned for her future.

And we do things to cover this up, you know?

Like for some people, they just protect themselves with arrogance.

They are boastful and braggadocious, and all that arrogance is is a handout to keep people at bay because if they got close enough, they would see that at your deepest, darkest part, you actually don't think that you are qualified for the life that you feel like God is calling you to live.

And for some of you, that's how you spend your money and you buy a bunch of crap, put yourself in debt, things you don't need for people who don't actually care about you.

And it's your way to separate yourself from the broken narratives in your mind, convincing you that you don't have what it takes to actually live a life that is anything other than barely status quo.

Everyone wrestles with this.

And in a culture where we are taught that we are supposed to be the star of the show, that we should be famous, we should all be rich, we should all be influencers when we're not, and when we inevitably fall short of that, we all deal with imposter syndrome, thinking that if we can just fake it, no one will know how critical we actually are of ourselves inside.

If that's you, the story of Mary, not Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary with it all together, Mary who almost seems perfect in every way, but Mary, a young, impoverished girl who had no hope for her future, who had convinced herself that all she was good for is what the culture around her told her her life should be.

And what you see in scripture is that what God is calling you to and the purpose he's placed inside of you has almost nothing to do with whether or not you are qualified or accomplished enough for it.

Last week we learned from Joseph that God is looking for people who are righteous, who will not let their rights get in the way of what is right.

And Mary teaches us something even more fundamental, something that all of us have access to and can actually apply to our lives.

Let's break down these passages that we looked at.

In verse 26, it says, In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth.

Let me see hands of anyone who grew up in a small podunk town.

Any small town people like like, okay, very good.

Maybe, maybe 15% of the room.

The rest of you, you can check out for a minute because you will not relate to this in any way imaginable.

You big city slickers with your movie theaters and grocery stores.

I grew up in Lampasas, and Lampasas felt like nowhere.

All my small town people, there's nowhere to even take anyone on a date.

You gotta go 45 minutes one way to get to a movie theater, you gotta go an hour and a half the other way to play some putt-putt.

There's nothing to do.

I grew up in Lampasas at a time where we lost every game in every single sport.

Like it was tough coming up in Lampasas.

If you don't know where Lampasas is, that's my point.

It's a small town.

And if you grew up in a small town, you know one of the hardest things about a small town is getting out of it.

It almost feels like it has a gravitational pull.

And I didn't appreciate growing up in a small town.

It took me a really, really long time to actually appreciate the things that I learned there, but it can be tough.

Mary is from Nazareth.

Now her resume is already stacked against her.

She is a female at a time when it's not easy to be female, she is impoverished, she is marginalized, and she's from Nazareth.

When Jesus comes on the scene in one of the gospels, they say, This is Jesus from Nazareth, this amazing teacher.

He does all these miracles.

Jesus from Nazareth.

And you know what the people respond?

Can anything good come from Nazareth?

And that wasn't just something that was said one time.

When you study historically the area around Jerusalem and Judea, that was an actual saying that people had about Mary's hometown.

Can anything good come from Nazareth?

We felt like that a lot of times in Lampasas.

Like, can anything good come from Lampasas?

And the answer is yes, it's Storm's hamburgers.

And if you haven't had a Storms hamburger, you are missing out.

Besides that, though, really, can anything good come from Nazareth?

So not only is Mary a nobody, and not only is she doing nothing with her life, she is a nobody from nowhere.

The place that is so despised in the Galilee region that no one believes anything positive could possibly come from Nazareth.

And maybe you're not from a small town.

But we all have spaces and seasons in our life that feel like Nazareth.

You have some habits that you are stuck in that feel like Nazareth, and you're questioning: can anything good come out of this?

You have some depression that feels a lot like Nazareth.

How could God possibly use this part of my life?

You have some loneliness that feels a lot like Nazareth.

Like, how could God make anything good out of this crippling loneliness that keeps me stuck to my couch?

Everyone has a sense of Nazareth in their life, and everyone has the same question: can anything good come from this?

In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth.

And sometimes the things that we despise in our lives, the very thing that we count out in our lives, are the very places that God is counting on to do something significant with your life.

The angel came in verse 27 to a virgin engaged to a man named Joseph of the house of David, and the virgin's name was Mary.

And this is gonna be tough for some of you, because in your mind, Mary cannot be touched.

In your mind, Mary is perfect in every way.

In your mind, Mary always had her mind made up.

She always had a sense of her future, she always knew what she was gonna accomplish.

And I'm just telling you what scripture is telling us today that before she was Mary, the mother of Jesus, she was Mary from Nazareth, and nobody from nowhere doing nothing with her life.

And to really understand the story of Christmas, you have to become familiar with who Mary was.

In verse 28, the angel came to her and said, Greetings, favored woman.

The Lord is with you, favored woman.

And Mary responds the way that maybe you would respond.

Favored woman.

Greetings, you who are favored.

The Lord is with you.

And look at her response in 29.

But Mary was deeply troubled by this statement.

Deeply troubled by this greeting.

Favored woman, the Lord is with you.

Mary's like, favored in what way?

Not monetarily, not socially, not based on my influence, not based on my perspectives for my future, not based on where I live.

What exactly am I favored with?

It's really interesting because what we try to do at MetaCurch is we try to just let scripture speak to our current context and we try to draw out of there the starting place that God actually is interested in you and he actually loves you, and he proved that love by giving his life for you, and he proved that love on Christmas by stepping out of a perfect heaven into our broken, jacked up world.

And he did that for you because you actually have a purpose and a path and a potential that is unimaginable to you, but yet, week after week, God is wrestling with you.

And every time you hear all about how you have this potential and this purpose and this power, and you are beautifully and wonderfully made, and that God sees you and He has a destiny for you, God is wrestling with you, and you're deeply troubled by it, and you think, look, bro, that's great for all the rest of the people.

For the, you know, the people that were raising their hands in the song, probably for those people, right?

But for me, and what God is wrestling with isn't the situations around you, it isn't the culture that's against you, it isn't all the tension in your life.

The first line of defense that you have is you.

You have a version of yourself, and you have these narratives about yourself that you're not good enough, and you're not smart enough, and you're from the wrong family and the wrong side of town, and you've done too much bad, and God could never use you, and and you're too far behind, and it's too late, and you're too old now, or you're too young and too inexperienced, or you don't know enough about the Bible, and God is having to wrestle first and foremost with the very things that you have decided to believe about you, and the way God talks to us now is scripture says the spirit of God resides in the life of every believer in Jesus.

And so it's this still small voice that's inside of all of us and guiding us and prompting us.

Back in the day, God would speak to people audibly, sometimes through these angels, like showed up to Mary.

And I wonder if God showed up that way.

If tonight an angel of the Lord came to you and spoke what God believes about you, how much of what God believes about you would actually be in contradiction to what you believe about you?

This whole idea that Mary had it all planned out and she knew this was coming and she was born for this, and she she was just like waiting on the angel to show up, that is disproven by verse 29.

She was troubled by this statement.

She's like trying to figure out how this angel even showed up here.

Mary's like, look, I don't want to like I don't wanna like disrespect you, you know.

But if you used Apple Maps instead of Google Maps, you're probably at the wrong place, right?

You might have got turned around between heaven and here because I am a nobody.

I'm from nowhere, and I have nothing going on in my life.

And one of the first pieces to getting ready for what God has for you is not getting your life in order.

It's not getting your money in order.

It's not getting all your emotions in order.

It's not getting your relationships in order.

Those things will come.

The first thing you often have to get in order is the things you believe about yourself.

And so often what God is saying when he says, you are favored, you are blessed, you have a destiny.

I'm offering you peace.

You have a path.

What he is saying to you is truer about you than your current circumstances are capable of reflecting to you.

What God says is imminently more true than anything you could experience about yourself.

God, who sees the beginning from the end and the end from the beginning, he already knew that Mary from Nazareth was getting ready to be Mary, the mother of Jesus.

All she had to do was be ready.

Highly favored.

It says, the Lord is with you.

And it's interesting when you look through scripture.

Every time you see an angel tell someone the Lord is with you, there are about to be some instructions on the backside of that.

And those instructions are usually really scary instructions.

Like when God says to Moses, The Lord is with you.

I need you to go into Egypt, the most powerful empire that's ever existed.

Walk right up to the king and demand that he freeze a million plus slaves.

That's a bad plan.

And God's like, Don't worry, the Lord is with you.

And he comes to Joshua and says, The Lord is with you.

You're gonna go up against a fortified city.

You're just gonna walk a whole bunch of marathons and then blow some horns.

Don't worry, the Lord is with you.

Jonah, I need to send you out, and you're gonna get eaten by a big fish, but don't worry, the Lord is with you.

It's like always these giant challenges on the other side of that.

Greetings, Mary, you who are favored, the Lord is with you.

And it's like, what does God have for me?

How can I even be considered for something significant?

Mary is deeply troubled.

In verse 30, the angel told her, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.

Now listen, you will conceive and you'll give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus.

And we have to slow down because we get narrative fatigue.

And we have this idea that Mary was just born perfect and lived perfect and had it all planned out and had a sense of her future.

And so it's like, of course, God chose her.

She earned the right to go from Mary of Nazareth to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

But the truth is, if we slow down, it says, Mary, you have found favor with God.

And that's so critical because it doesn't say you have earned favor with God.

It doesn't say you have merited favor with God.

You have played your role well enough.

You have stayed away from enough sin, that you have lived a spiritually superior life to all the other women and all the other parts of Galilee and Jerusalem.

It says you have found favor with God.

And what this is actually telling us for all of us, myself included, who can be so quick to disqualify ourselves when God is looking at us desperate to use us in this world.

What it's saying is that God putting a calling on your life and placing a purpose inside of you is not based on your ability to earn that.

If you can earn your way to God, God would not have necessitated to come down to us.

God chooses us because he is gracious and he freely gives to those that he is calling to make a difference in this world.

And that is you and me.

It isn't something that we could earn even if we tried.

Because for some of you, you're like, look, I don't really have the worst false narratives.

I'm a pretty confident person.

I've done all right for myself.

I just have stacks and stacks of sin in my life.

You don't know where I've been, you don't know what I'm capable of, you don't know how many times I've cheated, you don't know how many relationships I've destroyed, you don't know how how much tax fraud I've committed, you don't know the thoughts I have, you don't know the rage that I am capable of.

And so you have opted yourself out of this conversation because of some sin in your life.

And what Christmas shows us is that although sin is great and should be taken very seriously, and we do take it very seriously here at MetaCurch, although sin is great, Jesus is greater.

Jesus came to this earth to overcome the power of our sins.

And if you're not clapping for that, you don't understand the weight of your sin.

What God did for us coming down to this world is to show us that yes, you are flawed, you are jacked up, you are in desperate need of some help, but God has a plan and a path for you anyway.

That is the starting point of Christmas.

Mary was not perfect.

And I know that a lot of people do believe that.

But Mary was not perfect.

And if that's been an important part of your theology, which just means what you believe about God, I want to encourage you that the power of the Christmas narrative is not found in Mary or Joseph's perfection.

The power of the Christmas story is God using real, broken people, just like me and you to change this world forever.

Mary found favor with God.

And maybe you have counted yourself out, but God is desperate to show you favor today.

Now, Mary is coming to terms with this plan.

However, she does have one really legitimate question.

In verse 34, Mary asked the angel, How can this be?

Since I have not had sexual relations with a man.

It's like, look, there's a lot of ways to do a lot of things.

There's one way to get pregnant, okay?

And that one thing Mary has not taken part in.

So it's like, good plan, I'm all ears, I found favor with God.

This seems like a giant obstacle to me being a partner.

She asks, how can this be?

You see, anytime you get really close to taking these steps of faith and live out your purpose, every time you get close when you're like really trying to stay in tune with God and you feel God prompting you towards that coworker that nobody likes, and there's a reason nobody likes them, because they are honestly kind of the worst, but because they're the worst, nobody likes them, and because no one likes them, they choose to be even worse than the worst, and it's a vicious cycle, and God is telling you, like, just take them to coffee, just hear their story, just show them some love.

You don't know what people are going through, and you feel that little prompting, and you're like, I'm gonna take this step of faith, I'm gonna do it.

And then you think, how can this be?

How can this be my responsibility?

Like, there are better Christians in this office.

Like, Martha's got a Bible verse on her cubicle, you know?

Can't Martha take this food of coffee?

And and so there's always an excuse.

And if you don't have an excuse, Satan will provide you one anytime you get close to your purpose.

Anytime you get close to taking dynamic steps of following Jesus, there will be a how can this be?

How can this be my path in life?

I'm not even educated enough.

I don't even know scripture, I don't have any experience.

How can this be?

I've never been passionate about this before.

There will always be an excuse.

And listen, Mary has one of the most legitimate.

We're talking basic biology here, we're talking an actual miracle.

But you see, in the story right before this story, the one that opens up the gospel of Luke, we see Mary's relative, Elizabeth.

And Elizabeth is not kind of old.

Elizabeth is like old, old, old, real old.

And she's never been able to have kids, which at that place in time was a real disgrace on a woman.

And she prayed and prayed, and she was a very godly woman, and she never had a child.

And the angel Gabriel, the same angel that came to Mary, came to her and told her that even in her old, old age, she would get pregnant.

Now, not as impossible as a virgin getting pregnant, but this lady is like the kitchen is closed old, okay?

Like, should not have a kid.

And Mary doesn't know the full situation, she just knows that there has been grief over her life.

Because her whole life she's been unable to have a child.

And listen to how the angel answers her, how can this be?

In verse 35, the angel replied, The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.

That is the Spirit and the Father all coming together for the conception of God, the Son.

And because of this, therefore, the Holy One will be called the Son of God.

And consider your relative Elizabeth.

Even she conceived the Son in her old age.

And this is the sixth month of pregnancy for her who has been called childless.

And this is the power of spiritual community.

This is the power of being a part of this movement that we call the church, is because you have a how can this be, and you're sitting on an aisle with someone who had their how can this be, decided to make themselves ready for what God has for them, took that step of faith and moved from the how can this be to the let it be so.

And you can look at real people who are just like you, flawed and broken and jacked up, imperfect people who have taken steps towards their purpose.

And when you see it is possible for them, you realize it is possible for you as well.

And the angel nails it down for nothing, nothing will be impossible with God.

The story of Christmas is not a story of one impossible thing happening, one virgin getting pregnant, one virgin giving birth, one deity coming down and living among us.

The story of Christmas is a calling for people to live a life where we take the impossible out of our equation.

It's not about recognizing Mary, the mother of Jesus, this super, super special, unbelievable, unattainable person that we could never be like.

It is a calling to all of us to consider what God might be calling us to, and how to add the characteristics to our life to position ourselves, to maximize our God-given purpose.

How does Mary from Nazareth a nobody from nowhere doing nothing respond to these marching orders?

Our last verse, verse 38, she says, See, I am the Lord's servant.

May it happen to me as you have said.

I am the Lord's servant, may it happen to me as you have said.

When you look at the ancient world, this was a very common phrase, a very common phrase.

And it wasn't a spiritual phrase, it wasn't something that you would hear said at the synagogue or the local temple in the Jewish world.

This was a phrase that was said every day by almost every man in the lower working class.

This was the phrase that when you would show up to the middle and upper class business owners, you would show up to your supervisor and they would lay out the plan for the day.

We're going to execute on this, I need to see this done, I'm gonna be back at this time, I'm gonna check your work.

Here is my expectations.

And these men in the lower class, the worker bees of that society, would look at their supervisor and they would say, I am your servant.

May it happen to me as you have said.

This is a phrase that Mary affirmed her commitment to moving from Mary of Nazareth with no plan for her future to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

And she did it using the phrase that she grew up curing the men in her life, even her father saying, day after day after day, even the statement itself is a lower class statement.

And it should be an acknowledgement to us that God is not looking for those who have the right qualifications or the right accomplishments.

God is looking for people who are ready.

Ready is not something that you are, that you just get to, that you earn, that you work through.

Like I'll be I'll be ready.

I'll be ready when I learn a little more Bible, I'll be ready when I join a live team.

I'll be ready when I get my marriage worked out, I'll be ready.

Ready is a decision that you make, a decision that when God speaks, you will move, that you will be the kind of follower of Jesus who doesn't just sing the songs and raise the hands and say amen, but that when God moves in your heart, you will move with your feet and with your lips and with your life and with your resources and with your love.

God is not looking for the spiritual elite, he's looking for regular people like us who are ready to follow him when he calls.

God is looking for people who are righteous like Joseph.

That's not some spiritual, unattainable level that you get to.

Righteous is doing what is right even when you don't have to.

And he's looking for people who are ready, who are ready to move out of the how can this be into the let it be so.

I am your servant.

May it be exactly, exactly as you have seen.

And I have to imagine that Mary had no idea the plans that God had for her life.

That she would take place in the moment in human history that changed the world forever.

And in the same way, I don't know exactly what God has for you, but I have to believe that He has a purpose for your life that if you could get a glimpse of it would be unimaginable to you.

And it starts with taking one step of faith.

And to take that step of faith, we must be ready.

God, we love you and we thank you for loving us, for giving us a purpose.

God, I pray that as we move into a new year, this will be the year that we get ready, that we start listening for you, that we start following those promptings, that we get uncomfortable, that we become more audacious in our faith, that we combat the false narratives that convince us of things that do not line up to the truths you have said of us.

God, we want to be righteous people.

We want to use whatever power and authority and rights we have for the good of everyone around us, and we want to be ready.

I pray you would help us in that pursuit.

We love you.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

And everyone said, Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

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Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.