Good morning everyone. My name is Neil Schori and I’m one of the pastors here at The Edge Church. We are so glad that you’re joining us today, whether you’re online or you’re in one of our house church groups or somewhere else, we welcome you. We are in week two of our Advent series that we are calling Thy Kingdom Come.
Advent is a most special time of year because it’s all about anticipation. We understand anticipation from the time we’re little kids through adulthood. We wait for things, that’s just the nature of life. But when it comes to Christmas, there is just an excitement that builds. For me, it’s right after Halloween. I get the sense that, while I love Thanksgiving, I really want to get to the good holiday. I want to get to Christmas. It’s all about Christmas movies and Christmas fires and car rides and hot chocolate and looking at Christmas lights. It just reminds us about the light of the world, who is Jesus, who entered into his own creation to show us the way and a whole new way to live.
What’s even more important for us to recognize though, is what all of this ultimately points us to and that is the day when God’s kingdom is fully realized. It’s the day that the apostle John wrote about in Revelation 21:4, he said:
4 He [speaking of God] will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away (NIV).
That sounds amazing, doesn’t it? One day all of the things that were lost, all of the things that have been corrupted, will be restored. We will see things the way they were always meant to be, even our own bodies. Just imagine what a glorious day that will be.
That is what Advent ultimately looks forward to. And we’re in week number two of the four weeks of Advent, so we’re going to light the second Advent candle right here. The second candle, it represents faith and is known as the Bethlehem Candle because it reminds us of the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem.
Today, we’re going to take a look at Mary, the Virgin mother of Jesus and see what we can learn from how Mary responded to this angel that came straight from heaven with this incredible news for her, that she was going to be the mother of the savior. There are so many issues that we could dive into when it comes to Mary. I mean, this was a scandalous story. It looked so bad from the angle that most people had.
This young girl suddenly became pregnant in a culture that was ready to stone her for fornication or adultery. Or she might continue in this relationship with Joseph, if he was willing, but then feel the shame of the whole community. Let’s not even start with how Joseph must’ve felt and all of the feelings that he had to overcome and, truthfully, all the faith that it took for him to move forward with Mary. It literally took a message from heaven itself for all this to happen.
So let’s take a moment, before we begin and just ask God to speak to us today, right now.
God of heaven and earth, we invite you into this place. As we look at Mary and what you did with her and through her. We don’t understand it. It goes beyond anything that we would ever choose to do, but it was a plan that you made and because of that, Lord, we pray that today you would help us to reframe this story in a way that helps us get all of the wisdom from it that you have for us. Give us eyes to see and give us willing hearts. Help us to excitedly take part in your life. Help us to make your kingdom a reality in this world. And it’s in Jesus’ name that we pray. Amen.
Let’s take just a minute to set the scene. So we have Mary’s relative Elizabeth; she was pregnant with John the Baptist, and Mary had just been told by the angel Gabriel that she was going to become the mother of Jesus, who was the savior of the world. Then the story tells us that Mary got up and went quickly to the hill country where Elizabeth lived. And it says, as soon as she walked in the door, Elizabeth knew the story before Mary could share it.
Clearly, this was a revelation given to Elizabeth by God himself. And then we’re told how Mary responded to Elisabeth’s excited declaration that she got through the Holy Spirit. Mary responded with what a lot of people know as the Magnificat, which means ‘my soul magnifies the Lord.’ In Latin, that’s what the word magnificat means. Mary started, this is what she said:
Luke 1:46-55
My soul magnifies the Lord,
47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
48 for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
49 for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
50 And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
51 He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
52 he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
53 he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
54 He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
55 as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring forever (ESV).
I want to start by asking you a question. What is the first thing that you notice about Mary’s response? I know that for me, one thing stands out in a way that nothing else does; it’s a conspicuous absence, and it’s this: Mary’s lack of focus on herself. She hardly says anything about herself. Let’s be real for a second — I don’t think any of us would blame Mary for making this a little more about herself, right? That’s what happens. When crazy things happen in life, we tend to want to talk about ourselves. But she didn’t do that, and even though this was a huge deal for her personally, she made God bigger and she made herself less in the story. That should really give us pause today.
When we encounter God, do we talk more about him? Do we talk more about the goodness that we’ve experienced from God or do we make it more about us? I think all of us have heard people share stories — I’m sure I’m included in this — we’ve all shared stories or we’ve heard people share stories about when they encountered God and you say, “wait, I feel like I’m hearing more about what you did wrong and a little bit about your encounter with God and then more about you than actually about God himself.” But Mary is this great example of what it looks like to magnify God and his actions in our lives and to keep a humble perspective of self.
I often need the reminder that James, the brother of Jesus, gives all of humanity in James 4:13-15. He writes:
13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” — 14 yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that” (ESV).
I think that’s something that COVID has kind of given us all a reminder of. We should hold things loosely because we ultimately don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know what will happen if we get sick. We might not have any symptoms. We might have mild symptoms. We could have devastating symptoms. We don’t know. So James is telling us, and this was how Mary acted as well, that it’s all about the Lord and his will and how he teaches us how to live in a way that recognizes his greatness — God’s greatness — and how we just play a role in God’s story.
It’s really humbling, isn’t it, when we recognize that we don’t have the power to choose our next breath? Now, I get it, you could stop right here and say, “well, look at me, I’m choosing to breathe.” Yeah, you can. But when you go to sleep tonight — whenever that is — it’s God who keeps you breathing throughout the night. It’s ultimately God who appoints a time for all of us to die and none of us gets to avoid that. I heard it said when I lived in Minnesota, “there are two things that are certain: death and taxes.” I would say there’s a third in Minnesota (and sometimes around here, too) and it’s road construction all winter long for the potholes. But I’m not complaining.
Ultimately, all of this is in God’s hands. For the rest of today, I want to share how Mary responded to the goodness of God and how that can teach us how we might want to respond when we encounter the Lord.
Here’s the first thing that Mary did: She made God the central character in the story by magnifying him rather than her own story. She didn’t take credit for being good enough that God wanted to come to her. She chose to make God great because he is great, and she recognized that she was just a character in his story. I’ve got a friend, a really good friend of mine for a whole lot of years, who is extremely good at this. As a matter of fact, if you compliment him about anything — you could compliment him on his cooking or you can compliment him on the way he serves people — and almost immediately, he’ll just say, “Oh, no it’s not me. It’s him.” And he’ll point up to heaven. There were times in the past when he would say that and I’d get a little bit annoyed inside. Now I tried not to show it, but I kind of wanted to say, “listen, man, you still had to say yes to doing that.” But I recognize, as the years have passed and I’ve internalized what he was really doing and I think what he recognized is this: There is not one thing that he has that wasn’t given to him by God, even his ability to do things was given to him by God. So he always turned the spotlight off of himself and reflected right back up to the Lord. I can appreciate his zeal in making God big and making himself smaller.
So here’s the second way that Mary magnified God. It was by celebrating the fact that God was her savior. She didn’t think that she was perfect. She knew that she was a human being that was sinful, just like everybody else, and she talked about how he was her savior. She made him big and she made herself small.
When life gets hard — and I think all of us have had a really challenging year, 2020 has been hard, it’s been weird, it’s been different — when life gets hard it’s really easy to just kind of keep your head down and just sort of focus on your own path and the difficulties of life. We have sickness in life and we have pain and betrayal and we have feelings of not being good enough. But Mary gives us this incredible picture and this gift of perspective, that no matter what happens in our lives, we still have a God who loves us, who created us and ultimately provided a way for us to be saved. So no matter what happens in your life, there is something to be thankful for. It’s that you have a God who loves you and who has offered salvation to you through his son, Jesus.
King David once needed this perspective shift that I think we all do, to take our eyes off of our own circumstances, our own bad situations, when he prayed in Psalm 51: 12, saying:
12 Restore to me [and he’s praying to the Lord] the joy of your salvation,
and uphold me with a willing spirit (ESV).
Now David knew firsthand that the world and sin would try to steal our joy. He knew that he needed to always keep in front of him on his path this great reality, this important fact, that God saved him, and that that was always worthy of celebration.
Here’s the third way that Mary made God great, it’s in verse 48: She magnified her own humble state. Now hey, I get it. We all know people that talk about their own humility or you’ve heard someone say, “well, you know, I’m kinda known for this or that.” And they might say, “well, I’m known for being humble.” But the reality for Mary was that she was just a young girl with very few resources who most likely received a whole lot of bad local press, and yet God chose her. He loves to do that. He loves to pick the humble to shock the world.
The picture that the apostle Paul gives in 1 Corinthians 1:26-29, writing:
26 For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God (ESV)
Mary’s humble position caused the Lord to take notice of her. I think it’s really neat that this idea is not foreign to our church community here at The Edge. The ministry that was the forerunner to The Edge Church, for some of you who might be newer to this community, was called Fools for Christ and it comes right out of the book of 1 Corinthians.
The fourth way that Mary magnified the Lord was to point out that he used his strength to do good for her. Mary never said, “Hey, look what I did. God chose me. Look what I did.” But she said, “Look at what God has done for me.” All of the focus, her whole life’s focus, was about what God had done for her. She pointed out a quality that we’re all called to exhibit as followers of Christ. In Matthew 20:25-26, Jesus told his disciples how they were supposed to use the authority that God had given them. It says:
25 But Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. 26 It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant” (ESV).
Mary magnified this God who used his uncontainable and unfathomable glory for the good of the ones he created.
The fifth way that Mary magnified God was by shifting to how God loved the whole world with his mercy. I think it’s fascinating that this incredible thing — I’d say one of the most incredible things that’s ever happened in the history of the world — God making a virgin pregnant and, within a very short time, she moves the focus off of what he had even done for her and says, “I want the whole world to see the goodness of God.”
She talked about his mercy. She wanted people to know that God’s mercy was available to all people, not just to her. The truth is when we have been saved by God, when we recognize what God has saved us from, it is a natural byproduct for us to want to reflect that mercy to other people because we live in a dark world.
For those of you who know me pretty well, you know that I’m very intentional about going to businesses that are local to where I live. It’s not just because I like to go someplace close, but I made a choice a few years ago to go to a gas station that’s very close to my house and I go to it almost every single day and I’ve made it a point to get to know the staff that works there. I wanted them to see who I am consistently, without me just announcing that I’m a pastor. That’s really not my style. I really love to just go and be with people so they can see what kind of person I am, that I’m going to be consistent and that I’m going to show up. Hopefully, in doing this, they might just see God in me. Just this week, one of my friends who works there, told me that the day that he started working there, he was having a really rough day. He said, “you didn’t know that, but I was having a really rough day. And when you came in,” he said, “it was like, there was a light that surrounded you.” He said, “and I knew that you were someone that I could talk about my life with.”
That was incredible to me. And I want to be really clear about this. I know me, I know me — that wasn’t about me. It was about what the Lord wants to do through me just because I invited him to do that. One of the things I love to say is, “God just use me, when I go to this place. When I go to that place, just show people love through me. Show them goodness. May they feel comfortable asking me about what’s different in me.” I just, I love it when that happens. Because I love to show his glory to a world that’s in desperate need. The same God that reached down to Mary, the same God that reached down to me, showed me mercy and he’s willing to show you that exact same mercy, too.
Here’s the sixth way that Mary magnified the Lord: She weaved together the truth of God and also the human condition. She said that with his great strength, God scattered the proud and then uplifted the humble by sending Jesus to earth.
I want you to picture this all powerful God who is self-contained and self-sustained; he needs nothing from us. He came to earth in the form of a baby. He didn’t come to earth in the form of a conqueror to tell us how bad we were. He could have announced his coming with military presence and demanded immediate submission and say, “you guys have screwed all of this up.” He could have punished us immediately for being rebellious people, but he didn’t do it.
He came in a way that caused people to mock him who were proud, and that pride would ultimately be the reason for their individual downfalls. People who are the least of these in this world, people who don’t have any stature on the corporate ladder, or they don’t have many finances, they found an ally in him, one who didn’t use the same operating system that the power hungry crave in this world because the world that Jesus came to be a part of, the world that God wanted to create, is one of mercy and sacrifice. It’s one of gentleness and it’s one of love. It’s the kind of world that ultimately, the humble will lead because only the humble, only servants, are great in the kingdom of God.
There is a theme throughout the Bible that can be seen in verses like 1 Peter 5:5, it says that God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. We tend to look at the proud and we pump them up. All you have to do is look on social media and see that. Mary knew that God didn’t come to her because of how good she was, but because she truly recognized who she was in light of this all powerful, all knowing, all gracious God, and we need that same thing.
Here’s our final point today: Mary magnified the Lord’s provision and ultimately therefore his faithfulness to her. In Jesus’ three-year ministry, I think it’s really important to point out that he went around and met the physical needs of people all around him. He fed the hungry and he healed the sick and he was with the lonely. He did these things, he did the physical things, for two reasons. One is that he knows that we need things. We aren’t self-contained, we aren’t self-sustaining. As much as we like to be able to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, we really can’t do that in all of the areas of life. There will always be an area that we know we don’t have enough. So we have this need for supernatural provision. We have this need for an encounter with the unseen, and he does these physical things to point us to the unseen that is an everlasting kingdom, where all things that were lost will be recovered and all things sick will never be unwell again.
Mary knew what we all need to know today too, that it’s this God who she had learned about from Old Testament scriptures and from the oral traditions of her family throughout generations; she needed to know that he was here with her and that he was here for her and we need to know that, too. He is a great and worthy God. Can you see that?
Just as God spoke through the prophet, Isaiah in chapter 43:18-19, it says:
18 Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.
19 See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland (NIV).
That is the great God that we have. That is the great God that we get to choose to serve.
Maybe you’re reading this today and you know that you have not given your life to God — you have not made your life about magnifying God. I just want you to know that you can choose to do that today. This is the way to do it (you can’t just do it on your own): you have to submit your life to the way that God says to submit your life to him because ultimately, it’s his world and his rules, but those rules, in this world, are surrounded by his love. You can trust his love for you. Acts 2:38 tells us how to do that. It says:
Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit (NIV).
This is a great promise. This will cost you your life, but what you’ll get in return will be everlasting.
I encourage you to stick with us just a little bit longer. We’ll have a final worship song in a few minutes, but first we love to give you questions to consider related to the sermons that we do because hearing is one thing and applying it a completely different thing. Sermons are only good if they’re applied to our lives. So wherever you are today — whether you’re in a house church or with your family or by yourself — I’ve got two questions for you today and then a simple challenge for your personal reflection. First question is this: What in this message did God have just for you today? What was there, in this message, that you just know that God had for you?
The second one is this: 2020 has been weird and hard for so many reasons. As you think through the year, where have you seen God work in your life the most? I want you to dig deep — don’t focus on all the things that you’ve been through, but I want you to look for where you can magnify the Lord.
The third is just a simple challenge. Most of you guys post on social media just about every day. Some of you do a lot more than once a day. I want to encourage you to magnify God on Facebook for something that you see in your life. Be totally unashamed. You don’t have to be weird about it, but just look at your life, look back at what he’s done in the last eight or nine months of this whole COVID experience, and then post something with the sole purpose of magnifying the Lord and ask God to allow your light to shine so that others who need his light, others who need him, would receive him.
Finally, all throughout Advent, we’re doing what we call an Advent Action. We’re challenging our community to think of someone who might be going through a hard time — it could be related to COVID, it could be related to something else in life, but hard times are not something that we get to avoid. So I want you to think about someone that you know is going through a hard time and do something that’s natural. Reach out to that person, maybe pick up the phone and call them, send them an email, send them a text, maybe give them a gift card or do something for them that will be meaningful to that person.
Let’s choose to offer love and encouragement to others, just like Jesus has for us and when we do that, we can know that we are actively seeking to magnify God and the goodness that he exhibits through our lives. God bless you and we’ll see you next week.