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Speaking of singing and responses, I don't know about you, but I love to sing. I probably am a better singer in my mind than in real life, but I love to sing. And one of the things that happened to me when I became a Christian is that I didn't mind singing in front of other people.
I knew I couldn't sing well, but I thought, I just want to sing the praises of God. I went to Calvary Chapel when I first was a Christian, and they didn't have any screens, and it was Maranatha songs, and there were no hymnals, and so I secretly, I don't know why it was secret, well, I guess I do, it's my pride, but I secretly brought in a little microcassette to record all the songs so that the next week I could learn them to be able to sing with the congregation the wonderful Maranatha songs about the Lord Jesus.
I just love to sing, and I recall hearing Sinclair Ferguson tell me, Mike, you need to learn how to sing hymns, and here's a good way to do it, because men especially sometimes are afraid to sing. Pretend you're holding the hymnal with Jesus.
That will help you sing. Remember who gave you the voice? Your voice. That will help you to sing. So I thought this morning, since I love singing, and singing is a good response to Scripture, I'd like to teach you to sing this morning.
Now, I know you think the crane should be up here instead of me, but I am going to teach you how to sing this morning. Now, if I look at the internet, how to sing a song, it's pretty simple. Number one, you warm up your body and vocal cords before you sing.
There's all kinds of humming and exhaling and things like that. That's step one. Number two, develop good posture. It's hard to sing well if you're not standing up straight. Find your range, so figure out your low point and your high point.
Sing from your chest. Improve your lung capacity with breathing exercise. Practice singing. Sing with others, and one that I didn't know about until today, how do you sing? How do you learn to sing? Stay hydrated.
I didn't know that. But if you take your Bibles today and turn to Luke chapter 1, I want you to teach you to sing, not necessarily with inflection and your vocal cords, but I want you to learn how to sing a song of joy.
That's what I'm after today. Not the mechanics of singing, but singing with a certain spirit, a certain soul, a certain attitude, and that is how to sing a song with joy. Specifically, songs about who God is.
As you turn your Bible to Luke, some people call this the gospel of songs, because there are so many songs in chapter 1 and chapter 2, more so than in Matthew or Mark or John. We're going to learn today a praise song, a song of thanksgiving to magnify the Lord for who He is and what He's done.
And my goal is really simple. I want you to, of course, learn the passage, and I want you to be able to sing with Mary songs of joy from the heart with your soul. Before we get into the passage today, verses 46 to 56 in Luke 1, let's just catch us up to speed with a little review.
It doesn't take you long to see in verse 5 of chapter 1, the title above verse 5, the birth of John the Baptist foretold. Remember, we have a man, Zechariah. He's a priest. He's chosen by Lot. It's a wonderful privilege.
He's in the temple. He knows the scriptures. He's been praying for a son. He's been praying for a deliverer for Israel and the future for Israel. The people are outside praying, and when God shows up, well, He doesn't technically show up, but His word shows up through Gabriel, the messenger.
Zechariah doesn't believe. And so, remember, he's chastened with, I can't talk. I can't speak. I'm now mute. Then you have a parallel with the birth of not John the Baptist foretold, but in verse 26, the birth of Jesus foretold.
And I can pick it up in verse 30 of chapter 1. And the angel said to her, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, which you will call His name Jesus, or Savior.
He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord will give to Him the throne of His father David, and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and His kingdom shall have no end.
Mary said to the angel, How will this be, since I'm a virgin? And the angel answered her, Very delicate, wonderful language. The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
Therefore, the child to be born will be called Holy, the Son of God. And so we see in Luke chapter 1, not only this older man, Zechariah, who's going to have a child, supernaturally and miraculously, but a young lady, 12 years old, 13, 15, they could be very young back in those days.
She, a virgin, betrothed to Joseph, has not been with him intimately, and she is going to have a baby. And we know this is going to happen because when the forerunner shows up, when John the Baptist shows up, we know who's going to follow him, and it's the Lord Jesus.
And while Mary was in a nowhere place, Nazareth, she certainly knew the Scriptures. We'll find that out later today and next week. We have these great parallel tracks. John the Baptist's birth, Jesus' birth.
And we come now to Luke chapter 1, verse 46, and what we call the Magnificat. And so I'm going to read the first two verses, and this is where we get the title of the song. Songs have titles. This is the title of the song, Magnificat.
And where do we get that from? Verse 46, And Mary said, My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. Now, Magnificat is a Latin word, and it just means magnification. And so I don't know much Latin, but if you want the full, my soul magnifies the Lord, Magnificat anima mea dominum.
And it's from the first word of what she says. English says my soul, but really the first word in the original is magnify. And the Greek is to make great. And I automatically begin to think about magnifiers.
I now know why Grandma and Grandpa had so many magnifiers around the house. Because I have magnifiers around the house everywhere. I mean, when I was a kid, magnifiers only had one purpose, and that was to try to get the sun's focal point perfectly on some bug that we wanted to roast in Nebraska.
Although, that's probably better than iPhones these days. Would you rather have your kids on iPhones or roasting grasshoppers? Hey, John the Baptist-like. I mean, the other day, I had to try to change a watch battery, and I couldn't see it.
I mean, now I have an app on my phone. The Apple phone has an app, a magnifier, and I can just open that up a little bit, and I go, oh, I need a battery. I need a 364, not a 377. I'll never forget the day when Luke and I watched the Celtics and the Lakers play on TV, on a big TV.
Luke was used to watching a little tiny screen. I had a TV about this big. We didn't have cable, because, of course, we're Christians. Actually, when the kids were growing up, we didn't have cable, and that was a wise decision for our family.
Luke and I were watching, and I'll never forget, he said, Ted, every player has tattoos, because you can't see the tattoos on this big of a screen. Basketball players, yes, in fact, have a lot of tattoos.
And so, what Mary starts off with, she says, my soul wants to magnify God, to enlarge Him. I mean, can you make God bigger? Of course, she's not talking about that. Even if you think about glory, when we say we want to give God glory, are we making Him more glorious?
No, we're recognizing His glory, right? He has intrinsic glory. He has weight. He's heavy. He's awesome. And when we give God glory, we ascribe God glory, we're not making Him heavier, or more fantastic, or more wonderful.
We're just recognizing that in our heart. In fact, He is that. And so, the magnification really isn't in God's essence or nature. I mean, how could He be greater? He's already great. But in her soul, in her heart, she, see it again, verse 46, my soul magnifies the Lord.
She wanted to magnify God. She wanted to make Him bigger in her mind, and in the minds of everybody else who would listen. We don't make God bigger. We don't make Him larger. But in our minds, in other people's hearts, we want to express the fact that God is great.
And of course, the context is, she's a virgin, and she's going to have a child, and it's not any child. It's the Savior, the Redeemer, the Lord Jesus. Now, if you look at your Bibles, most Bibles will show some extra margins in verses 46 -55.
If you look at verses 39 -45, for instance, you'll see just kind of block quotes, and that's because it's a narrative. It's a story. And when you see a lot of indentations, if you were to go to the Psalms, you'd see the same thing.
It tells us it's a different kind of genre. It's a poem. It's a song. It's a hymn. And so one of the things we do with hymns is we realize, if you look at verse 46, my soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.
It's just a parallel thought. She's not trying to say we're made up of body, soul, and spirit, tripartite. No. We're made of material and immaterial. And so she's just exchanging soul and spirit, and she's just saying, everything that's in me, I want to magnify God and make Him great.
This is the same song that David sings in Psalm 34. Listen. I will bless the Lord at all times. His praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul makes its boast in the Lord. Let the humble hear and be glad.
O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His name together. David is saying, join me. Come with me. God is so great. Let's stand together and respond to the revelation of God in His Word and nature and sing and worship and tell people how great the Lord is.
So today, we're going to look at how to sing with joy. I know what you're thinking. Life is hard. I have difficult struggles. That's why we're going to learn how to sing with joy. Not based on circumstances or happenstances, but if you can get this passage down in your mind by the Spirit's illumination, you will see that the key to joy is not circumstances, but who the Lord is.
I need this for my own soul because I tend to do things wrongly like you do when my focus is in the wrong place. I want to, with David, sing songs like this. Psalm 103. Bless the Lord, O my what? Soul, and all that is within me.
Bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul. It's from the heart. Who forgives all your iniquities. Who heals all your diseases. Who redeems your life from the pit. Who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy.
Who satisfies you with good so that your youth is renewed like the eagles. Listen, if we don't do what Mary is doing, here's the problem. We magnify our problems. We take the magnifying glass and we put them on our problems.
They're real problems. The world has fallen. Cancer is real. Death is real. Getting laid off from work is real. Bad relationships are real. I don't want to ever say trials and things are not real. But if you're like me, have you ever made a mountain out of a molehill?
And you get the magnifying glass and instead of magnifying the Lord for who He is, it's just like a spotlight. It's the magnifying glass. And you just begin to look and look and look at these problems and they keep getting bigger the longer you look at them.
I think maybe Pastor Steve said it last week. We were in Los Angeles. Gracie is graduating from university. Friday we have a huge party. It's wonderful. I get to see all four of my children. I'm assuming there are going to be more.
I get to see my children and my grandson. By the way, the wildest thing that we did while we were gone is we went to swimming lessons. Kim and I paid for swimming lessons for little Amos. He's seven months old.
And I thought it was going to be sprinkle some water, like a Presbyterian thing. They didn't even immerse him like Baptizo. She, the teacher, was really good and she just took him, put his head under about a foot, waited for a second, and then pushed him like a submarine over to Haley, three or four feet away.
I thought, wow. And everything was wonderful and graduation and seeing old friends. And I wake up to the text from Gracie, Dad, my catalytic converter has been cut out. Luke wakes up. He checks his car that was parked next door to Gracie's in a very expensive part of town.
And Luke's catalytic converter was cut out too. For Gracie's car, because it's a Honda Accord, it was $4 ,600. It's starting to magnify. The magnifying glass is out. Luke, you know, typical Luke, I'll get a California non-compliant for $500 and figure out how to insult myself or whatever.
Then they're like, well, you've got to get the shield underneath it and the shield's going to cost $500 because they're going to keep stealing it over and over and over. And the problems kept magnifying and magnifying.
I thought, I went from the joys of graduation to... Welcome to California. Do you ever do that? Do you ever have trials that are so big it just consumes you? You wake up in the middle of the night, you're thinking about them.
There's a solution, a God-ordained solution to this very issue. Mary could have said, I'm going to magnify my problems. I'm going to start showing and people are going to go, oh yeah, you got pregnant by the Holy Spirit.
Right. She could foresee all these things, but instead, of course, inspired by the Spirit of God, she begins not to magnify problems, but magnify the Lord. To my shame, when I got prostate cancer in 2015, for two years at least, every day that I woke up, every day, the first thing I thought of was not, God is good.
Good morning, Lord. I didn't even think, good Lord, it's morning. I thought, I have cancer. Every single day, I have cancer. I have cancer. And again, health issues are real. Problems are real. This is a fallen world.
I don't want to say that these things aren't real. But magnifying problems is not good for you. It's not good for me and it's not healthy. I know there are problems. I know there are problem people. I know we live in a post-Christian society and it gets worse and worse and worse.
One political party essentially runs on the platform of sin, abortion, trans, homosexuality. This is a bad place. Acts 22 makes me realize how the world hates Christ and therefore we've been skating under the radar for years but it is coming.
Persecution is around the corner and they said of Paul in Acts 22, 22, he should not be allowed to live. That's what we think about Christianity and your Messiah. You need to die for your hateful thinking.
So what do we do? There's a book by Ed Welch called When People are Big and God is Small. Subtitle is Overcoming Peer Pressure, Codependency and the Fear of Man. And guess what's on the cover? A magnifying glass.
Today I want to help you sing for joy in a difficult world with hard times and personal trials by magnifying your view of the Triune God. I know what you could be thinking. Hey, this is Mary's song. It doesn't say here we should sing it.
It's true. It doesn't say sing this with Mary. Let me ask you a question if you're asking that question. In Ephesians 1, verses 3 -14 it talks about the blessings of God the Father who's bestowed upon us all kinds of blessings and He chose us in Him.
Jesus died for us and redeemed us. The Spirit of God sealed us. That praise song in Ephesians 1, 3 -14 is that a good way to praise God? It doesn't say praise God this way. By the way, if you go back to chapter 1, verse 4 what's this whole book about?
Every verse and every chapter in this book stems from this purpose that you, Luke 1, 4 may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught. Mary is certain that she is going to bear the Son of God.
And Luke wants you to be certain. That's why he writes. Mary responds to this certainty with joy. God wants you to respond with joy. This is not just we analyze what Mary says and we leave it there. No.
Luther was right. Our goal is to sing with Mary. Luther said this. This song is about, quote, the great works and deeds of God for the strengthening of our faith for the comforting of all those who are of low degree and for the terrifying of all the mighty ones on earth.
We are to let the hymn serve this threefold purpose for she sang it not for herself alone but for us all to sing it after her. Let me give you an outline today and it's how to sing for joy with Mary in spite of your trials.
We're going to look at four ways to learn how to sing. But probably not all four today. Probably a few today. Several today. How's that? If we get all four, that's fine. Essentially, she is going to say, remember her estate, who she is.
Remember who God is. Remember what God has done. That's essentially this great praise song. So how to sing for joy? Number one, remember your lost condition. Dear Christian, when things are difficult and you want to put the magnifying glass on your problems, real problems, number one, remember your lost condition.
How can we sing for joy? Well, you're going to see hints of all this in this poem, in this hymn of Mary. Verse 47. She says, And my spirit rejoices in God, my Savior. We talked about it last time. Mary needed to be saved.
Because Mary was a sinner. She doesn't say, My spirit rejoices in God, the Savior. She doesn't say, rejoice in God, a Savior. She says, I rejoice in God, my Savior. She, Mary, like all of us, have been born in Adam.
The only one who hasn't been born in Adam is the Lord Jesus, who we just read earlier, is overshadowed by the Holy Spirit to keep that egg, to keep that baby pure, and to keep that baby sinless, and to keep that baby one who would be our representative and substitute as a sinless Lamb of God.
Mary needed a Savior. She needed a deliverer. And that word Savior can mean preserver, protector, Savior. When Luke uses this word Savior, it's not about Jesus somehow rescues Israel out of Egypt and it's just a temporal salvation.
It can be used that way, but not in Luke. Listen to what Luke says in Luke 2. But the angel said to them, do not be afraid, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy, which will be for all the people.
For today in the city of David, there has been born for you a Savior who is Christ the Lord. And in Acts, Luke also writes, Acts 5, He is the one whom God exalted to His right hand as a Prince and a Savior.
What kind of Savior? To grant repentance to Israel. Forgiveness of sins. You can't take this Savior language and just say, she understands that God is just a deliverer and a rescuer of people out of Egypt.
Acts 13, from the descendants of this man, according to the promise, God has brought to Israel a Savior, Jesus. And so, Mary's got a heart full and a heart magnifying who God is because she knows she's a sinner.
She remembers who she was. Romans 5,. Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned. Does that mean Mary sinned? Yes.
I'd like you to take your Bibles and turn to Ephesians 2, an all-time classic. But I just want to remind all of us, including me, our lowest state before we were saved. Because when you remember your lowest state, and you remember your Savior, then you say, oh, magnify the Lord with me.
One of the keys to seeing with joy is to remember where you came from in terms of pre-salvation. Could there be darker words in Ephesians 2, 1 -3? And you were dead in trespasses and sins. Trespasses when you go someplace you're not supposed to.
Sins when you fall short. I mean, you put that together, that covers everything. You missed the mark or you stepped the line. In which you once walked following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work and the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.
You want to know what our resume was like before we got saved? This is the resume. We were children of wrath like the rest of mankind. And if it wasn't for God who intercepted and God intervened as Pastor Steve prayed, a God who caused us to be born again, where would we be today?
And where would we be eternally? And so what Paul does in Ephesians 2, to show the comparison of how great God's saving is, verse 4 and following, he shows how bleak the situation is. How much we owe the Lord.
John Calvin said, to bring home more affectionately to the Ephesians, the general doctrine of divine grace, he reminds them first of their former condition. We aren't to wallow in our old lives. We aren't to want to be going back to our old lives.
We don't want to be crushed by them and be nostalgic. But it's good for us to be reminded. He even says that in Ephesians 2 .11. Remember, you used to be a Gentile. Remember, you were far away from God.
I mean, for me to think, okay, if the Lord wouldn't have saved me, how long is eternity? How awful is hell? Our statement of faith says, from this original corruption, that's Adam's corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, wholly inclined, W .H., to do all evil, to proceed all actual transgressions.
In other words, we're darkened in our understanding, we're excluded from the life of God, we have hard hearts, callous hearts, giving ourselves over to sensuality, impurity, greediness. We're dead, dead, dead.
I wonder if there could be any help for us in the midst of that. I mean, who could rescue us? John Gerstner said, is God going to come to the rescue of people who are in Ephesians 2 .1 -3 world? Gerstner said, that's preposterous.
It was against Him we've done all this. It was His law we violated. It was His commands we disobeyed. It was His image we had ruined. It was under His wrath that we now are. It was His awful judgment.
He's a just God. We must fear. How could there be any hope for us? And then what are the next two words in Ephesians 2 .4? Probably summarizes the Gospel. You ought to listen to that sermon by Martin Lloyd-Jones on Ephesians 2 .4, But God.
This is the summary of the Gospel. But God. Here comes the good news. You can see, remembering your former condition, mulling on that a little bit, ruminating on that a little bit, spurs you into saying, yes, the Lord.
But God. Here comes the good news. And he doesn't say, therefore God judged. And God said, therefore, here's my justice. No, he says, but God. It doesn't matter how much guilt there is, how much corruption, how much sin.
The answer to our need is there. First John 4. Herein is love. Not that we love God, but that He loved us. We love Him because He first loved us. And so what Paul does is he says, I can elicit praise from you by making you recall your former condition.
So when you hear words like this, you're excited. This is the promise that He has promised us, even eternal life. Christ was delivered for our offenses and was raised again for our justification. Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior which is Christ the Lord.
When you realize how sinful you are, and then you realize how great God is, then you think, my sins washed, pardoned, forgiven. I can't even get those all out of my mind. My sins. But they're clean. They're gone.
No wonder William Tyndale said the word gospel signifies good, merry, glad, and joyful tidings that will make a man's heart glad and make him sing, dance, and leap for joy. I promise I won't dance up here, but in my heart I'm dancing.
I mean, what does he go on to say? But God who's rich in mercy, I mean, we're rich in sin. We're dead in sin. What does God do? He didn't have to do anything. The angels sinned. He didn't give them anything but judgment.
We sin, but God being rich in mercy, we've got great sins, but because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, what does God do? Make us alive together with Christ and by grace you've been saved.
You've been raised up with Him, seated with Him in the heavenly places, so that in the coming ages He might show the immeasurable riches of His grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you've been saved through faith, and it's not your own doing.
It's the gift of God, not a result of works that no one may boast. Back to Luke 1, please. I hope that's worth singing about for joy in your heart, knowing our former condition. She calls God Savior, but there's more that makes me think she recognizes her condition.
She's in a humble estate. Look at verse 48. Now, this is certainly temporal for her. He has looked on the humble estate of a servant. She's not a big shot. Her parents aren't a big shot. She doesn't live in a good city, a big city.
She's in a humble state. Pregnant teen from Nazareth. Engaged to most likely the poor carpenter. And it says, for behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed. Pastor Mike, what's your point?
My point is for Mary to magnify the Lord. She's remembering who she is. She needed a Savior. She's in a humble estate. And of course, her humble estate is temporal and physical. It doesn't take that much for us to say, well, we had a humble estate as well, even spiritually.
Ray Pritchard said, isn't that just like God to choose the most unlikely girl for the greatest privilege any woman would ever know? The answer is yes. Humble position. Humble state. She would even know if you look at verse 49 about God's holiness and how she's not holy and she is before this great holy God.
What does verse 49 say? And holy is his name. When you realize how holy God is and you realize how sinful you are, you realize, I'm thankful for the holy one who knew no corruption and became my representative.
Because the world is unholy. I'm unholy. And God is holy. How do you sing for joy with Mary in spite of your trials? Number one, remember what you were like before you were a Christian. Number two, Pastor Steve said he uses alliteration last week, so I'm going to do the same thing.
Number two, rehearse the truths about who God is. Remember your lost condition. Rehearse the truths about who God is, who our triune God is, Father, Son, and Spirit. So the first one was kind of more implicit.
Kind of see what's going on as her heart is revealed. This one is super explicit. You see this passage and you recognize two things. She knows who God is and she knows what God does. So let's focus on what God is.
What he calls himself. His names. His attributes. If you read through this on your own, and I said to you in a Sunday school class, how many names of God can you find here? I hope you would find things like Lord in verse 1.
And of course when you read Lord in the New Testament, you ought to be thinking Yahweh. Kurios is the Greek word for the New Testament, English word Lord. And that's from the Old Testament, personal covenant name of God.
If you're looking for words that talk about who God is and his name and his attributes, I think you see Lord in verse 46. Don't you see God in verse 47? This great creative God, the God who is sovereign over everything.
Don't you see Savior in verse 47? It's harder with the ESV in verse 49, but the literal, it says, for he who is mighty. It's talking about mighty as a title there. The mighty one. Literally, the mighty.
Everywhere you go, holy is his name. She begins to say, I'm rehearsing who God is. I'm magnifying who God is. Yes, I remember where I came from. And now I am remembering who God is. He's the Lord. He's God.
He's Savior. He's mighty. He's holy. Let's look at the mighty one for a minute because I think that's interesting. We talked a little bit about Lord and some about Savior. But that mighty one. He's mighty.
By the way, he's so mighty that he can cause a virgin to be pregnant. That's how mighty he is. When I was a child, I remember a song about the might of God. Can you remember any songs about the might of God?
Why does it even matter if he's mighty? Well, it matters because he's all-powerful and when you pray, he can accomplish it. He's mighty enough that if you have an unbelieving spouse or children, he's mighty enough to do the work in their hearts.
It's not like their will versus God's will. God's will always wins. He's mighty enough to help you get through the trial. He's mighty enough to sustain you until the day that he's designated for you to die.
He's mighty enough to cause relationships to get back together and the list can go on and on and on and on. My problems are magnified. I'm supposed to be thinking about this mighty God who can do things.
And when I was a kid, I used to sing that song even in my Lutheran church. What a mighty God we serve. What a mighty God we serve. Angels bow before Him. Heaven and earth adore Him. What a mighty God we serve.
Don't read the second stanza because it has some bad theology, but that first one's fine. I want to know if there are extra stanzas. There were, but no wonder we didn't sing them. Mighty is His name. This is just Old Testament over and over and over.
You need to know how mighty God is. We forget. Who is the King of Glory? The Lord strong and mighty. The Lord mighty in battle, Psalm 24. And you just think about your problems through these verses as I read them.
Psalm 45, Gird your sword on your thigh, O mighty one, in your splendor and majesty. Psalm 89, O God of hosts, who is like you, O mighty Lord? Your faithfulness surrounds you. Zephaniah 3. Could there be a verse like this in the Bible?
The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty to save warrior. He will exalt over you with joy. He will be quiet in His love, and He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy. Jeremiah, there's none like you, O Lord, who are great, and you're great, and great is your name in might.
Mighty to sustain you. Mighty to help you. And you think, if God is like that, I should probably sing with joy. That's the point. He's the Lord. He's God. He's Savior. He's mighty. At the end of verse 49, and holy is His name.
Can you see how she just fills this song with who God is by His name and His attributes? Holy is His name. By the way, how holy is God? He's holy enough to keep the Son perfectly pristine and pure in the womb of Mary.
He's that holy. But He's different. He's above. He's pure. Mary is not magnifying her problems. She has her mind on the Lord Jesus. This reminds me of my mother when she got lung cancer. I think she's been dead maybe 15 years now.
Who knows? She just started going through the attributes of God when she was in a problem, in a trial. She's thinking about the lung cancer. She's thinking about, you know, I feel like I'm drowning in my own fluids.
And I remember she'd always say, I just start doing the ABCs, the alphabet of who God is in His names, in His attributes. And she'd begin to think, okay, A, He's almighty. Think about, okay, He's powerful.
And you think about B. I don't know what she came up with, B, but He's bold. He's beautiful. He's brave. C, He's compassionate. D, He's a deliverer. E, He's eternal. F, He's a fortress. G, and off you go.
And by the time you get to X, you don't care. I'll give you a hint, Z is zealous. Rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing. Because otherwise, I'll tell you what I do, I get the magnifying glass out on WebMD.
That's what I do. You know, the stupidest thing in the world now is like, I can get the charts of my test results before the doctor can. I just go to my chart, there it is, ding. Test results. And I don't have a doctor to say, yes, I know it says you're almost dead, but you're in pretty good shape.
I need a filter. And every word's highlighted and mulled over and like severe, extreme, life-threatening, paralyzing. By the way, if you have not read the Gerald Bray book that we have right out there on Attributes of God, you ought to read it.
You ought to read the Attributes of God by Pink. You ought to read the Attributes of God found in Scripture. They're so wonderful. They tell about who God is and then they settle us in too. Flavel said, they that know God will be humble and they that know themselves cannot be proud.
That's Mary. She knows who she is. Yes, she's blessed among women, but she understands who she is. I read of a guy back in 2002 and his name was Charles Haffey and he wanted to have his name changed and he wanted to have his name changed to I am who I am.
Because the judge wouldn't let him be called God. And I thought, how wicked is that pride? And I can see it in others. That means I know I can see it in myself and that's what I should see. But you start to study the Attributes of God and you think, okay, no wonder it's the refrain.
Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom. Let not the mighty man boast of his might. Let not a rich man boast of his riches. Let not Mary boast that she's the one who's going to have the eternal Son dwelling in her.
I added that. But let him who boasts of this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who exercises loving kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for I, God says, delight in these things.
I mean, when I look to myself, bad. I look to you, could be bad. No wonder the Bible says we're to look somewhere else. Listen to 2 Chronicles 20. Oh God, will you not judge them? For we're powerless before this great multitude who are coming against us.
We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on You. That's Mary. I don't know what to do. We're in situations, I don't know what to do, but our eyes by faith are on You. The more you study God, the more you want to study God.
It's the psalmist who says, as the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for Thee, O God. My soul thirsts for God, the living God. Did you know you were born to praise God? Did you know you were born to sing songs like this, like Mary did?
Did you know you'll sing these kind of songs forever and ever in eternity in heaven? Worthy are you to take the book and break its seals, for you were slain and purchased for God with men, purchased for God with your blood, men from every tribe, tongue, people and nation.
Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of His glory, blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority before all time now and forever.
If you want convicting words, Spurgeon said, if I did not praise and bless Christ my Lord, I should deserve to have my tongue torn out by its roots. If I did not bless and magnify His name, I should deserve that every stone I tread on in the street should rise up to curse my ingratitude, for I may drown debtor to the mercy of God.
Over head and ears, to the infinite love and boundless compassion, I am a debtor. Are you not the same? In Bethlehem Bible Church with Spurgeon, then I charge you by the love of Christ. Awake. Awake your hearts now to magnify His glorious name.
How do you sing for joy in a world like this? Well, for Mary it was simple. She realized what she was without the Lord before she was saved. And then she began to rehearse who God is. And she went on to rehearse what God has done.
But we're going to see that next week. If you have a magnifying glass, my suggestion to you is, I have no authority to tell you to do this by command, just set it out. Just get your magnifying glass out, you older people, just set all 50 of them out.
My mom, every room there's reading glasses, every room there's a magnifier. Set it out and just let that be a reminder to you. That you can either put it on your problems, and we know how that works. Or we can say, you know what, I'm going to be reminded again who God is.
And He is my Lord, He is my God, He is my Savior, He is my Holy Deliverer, and I am a debtor to grace, and I want to respond with joy. I think that will solve a lot of problems in life. Don't you? Let's pray.
Father in heaven, thank you for your word. We are weak and frail people, and therefore we rejoice with Mary, that we can put our focus on you. My soul magnifies the Lord. My spirit rejoices in God, my Savior.
May that be true for Bethlehem Bible Church. God, you are great, and you have done great things. Who is like you? As the psalmist said. And we pray this in Jesus name. Amen.