Mary's Song

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Word of God, that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and that you would catch a greater vision of who

Christ is. May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word, and may the Lord be with you.

Alright. We ended our time last week with the following points of application.

We said that knowing God produces love for God. And love for God wells up inside of us, and it produces singing and songs for God.

And when we sing to God, it produces joy inside of our hearts. And that really is the heart of Christmas, is that knowledge leads to love, that love leads to song, and singing the songs of God fills us with unspeakable joy.

We see that in the book of Psalms. We see that in the men and women who encounter

Christ in His incarnation. We see that all over the pages of Luke 1, Matthew 1, Luke 2, that the knowledge of God leads to song, and the songs lead to joy unspeakable.

Today, we're going to be looking at Mary, the mother of Christ. And we're going to be looking at how all of the promises of old are going to be fulfilled in the coming of Jesus, and how that's going to fill her heart with love, and that's going to fill her lips with joyful songs.

And I pray that it would do the same for us today. So with that, let us turn to our passage. Let us read, let us pray, and let us begin.

We're going to be in Luke chapter 1. And Mary said,

My soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my

Savior. For he has been mindful of the humble estate of his servant.

From now on, all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me.

Holy is His name. His mercy extends to those who fear

Him from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with His arm. He has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.

He has brought down rulers from their thrones, but has lifted up the humble.

He has filled the hungry with good things, but has sent the rich away empty. He has helped the servant

Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and to his descendants forever, just as He promised our ancestors.

Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for our sister

Mary and the testimony that she has of your faithfulness. Out of all the people that you could have picked,

Lord, you picked this poor Galilean Nazareth girl. You pick her to bear our

Savior. Lord, we pray that we would see the joy that this lady has.

I pray that we would let that joy enter into our hearts this morning. And like her, Lord, I pray that we would sing.

It's in Christ's name we pray. Amen. Now, to get started, I want to give a little bit of a background on who

Mary is. Not an exhaustive one, but I do want to give a little bit of a background. She is a woman who was born in Roman occupation.

That's the first thing. She didn't live in a country that had sovereignty like you and I. It would be like us growing up in a country that had an overlord, like Russia or China or someone else, who's ruling over us so that you couldn't go to the market without seeing their soldiers.

You couldn't go to your friend's house without someone giving you a stare, like, what are you doing? It was an occupied region that she grew up in.

And she would have been always looking over her shoulder to make sure that she was safe.

The second thing that we need to realize about Mary is that she's living in a region that's not her own. She's living in Galilee.

She's living in Nazareth. But yet, she is from the tribe of Judah. And at that time, that would have been a very, very strange thing.

That would have been like a southerner living in New England. Now, the reason that this is the case is a couple of reasons, for instance.

Number one, the northern tribes who should have lived in the north had been destroyed.

In 786 BC, the Assyrians came in and decimated the northern ten tribes of Israel.

They deported them out of their land, and they moved them all over the Assyrian empire and forced them to intermarry with other people so that they ethnically suicided them.

There is no northern ten tribes by the time that we get to the New Testament. There is Judah, Benjamin, and Levi, and that is it.

So that's the first reason, is there were lands available. Judah was growing. They were becoming fruitful at that time, and they needed more space because Judah and Judea and Jerusalem were filled to the brim.

Samaritans and Gentiles also moved in at this time. Now, it is important to understand that a reputable

Judean would not have lived in Galilee. They would have lived in the land of Judah because that's their ancestral lands.

If you look back in the book of Deuteronomy, where it divvies out all of the different lands, Judah was supposed to live in Judea, not in the lands of Galilee.

So the question that we need to ask ourselves is why, other than just the land was open, why did they end up there?

Why were Mary and Joseph not living in Judah? Especially considering that Mary and Joseph were descended from the line of David, the king.

Why weren't they in the king's city? Why weren't they living in Bethlehem when they were called? Why does

Jesus get raised in Nazareth, in Galilee? There are two reasons,

I think, for this. The number one is poverty. They were poor, Mary and Joseph were, which is surprising because they come from the line of the kings.

It's what Harry's gonna look like in 15 years after he's been cut off from the royal purse and Netflix no longer gives him any more deals.

Maybe, maybe he can eke it out, I don't know. But it's like today. If you wanna live somewhere expensive, you live in downtown

Boston. Beacon Hill, the seaport, some of those areas, South Boston.

If you wanna shave off a little bit of that, you maybe move to Cambridge or Lexington. Still very expensive.

But not quite as expensive as Beacon Hill. If you wanna get a little bit outside of that, into Stoneham or Burlington, still pretty expensive, but you're moving away from the city.

If you wanna live in a really cheap place and be considered entirely irrelevant, move down the street from me and Lowell.

The further outside of Boston that you get, the more irrelevant you become to the city, but also the cheaper it is for you to live.

The same was true in Jerusalem. The further outside of Jerusalem that you got into the foothills of Judea or even up into Galilee, the more inexpensive it became, but the more irrelevant you became to the movers and shakers as well.

That's the first way we know that they were poor, is that they were living in Galilee. The second reason we know that they're poor is because there was nowhere for them to stay when they went to Bethlehem.

Now, we know that the inn was overcrowded, but if you had money at that time, money opens up doors and opportunities that the innkeeper couldn't have stopped.

They didn't have the resources to open up any doors. The only door that they opened was the door to Bethlehem's stall, where Jesus was born amidst the animals.

So they didn't have the resources to be able to provide any other accommodations. The other reason we know that they were poor is because of their offering.

Eight days after Jesus is born, they circumcised him in the temple, and according to the Old Testament law, when you circumcise someone, you also would present an offering, and normally it would be a lamb or a goat, but if you were poor, the law actually tells us, if you're poor, then you could sacrifice two pigeons.

That's what Mary and Joseph sacrificed, because they didn't have the means to sacrifice anything else.

They were poor people, long removed from the legacy of King David, living in the halls of palaces.

They were eking out their existence day to day, paycheck to paycheck in Joseph's carpentry shop.

They were poor. But I think there's a better reason for why they ended up in Nazareth, because poverty is true, but I also think the second reason is because of God's providence.

It was poverty and providence that they were in Nazareth, and the reason it was providential that they would be in Nazareth, in the land of Zebulun, is because the prophecies had already been given in the book of Isaiah.

Look at what Isaiah says in chapter nine, verses one and two. This is why Mary and Joseph ultimately were in Zebulun.

There will be no more gloom for her who was in anguish. In earlier times,

He, God, treated the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali with contempt. But later on,

He shall make it glorious by the way of the sea. And on the other side of the Jordan, Galilee of the

Gentiles, the people who walk in darkness will see a great light.

And those who live in a dark land, the light will shine on them. That light is Christ. The city of Nazareth is in Zebulun's territory.

God is so sovereign and providential that every facet of Mary and Joseph's life was orchestrated so that they would be from Nazareth.

Their parents, their grandparents, all of it leading up to the culmination of God's promises, they could have lived in any town, in Dan, in Issachar, in Reuben, in Ephraim, in Judah, in Benjamin, but God had them living in Nazareth to fulfill

His promises of old. So that's why I say that it's both poverty and providence that they were from this land of Nazareth.

This is why Jesus, in fact, grows up in Nazareth, begins His ministry in Nazareth because the people who walked in darkness have now seen a great light in Christ.

So for just a summary really quickly, Mary's a young woman who grew up in Roman occupation.

Looking over her shoulder, she was a woman who grew up outside of her tribal lands living in the projects of Nazareth.

She was out of place financially, not connected to her lineage and the line of kings. She was a nobody from nowhere who expected when she was born and when she died that she would live in the same town and that she would be forgotten by history.

You and I in this room can identify with that. While our life is important to us and important to the people around us, we will be forgotten.

A hundred years from now, no one will know our names. If you think that that's a strange thing to say, try to remember the most important people who've ever lived in history, and there's only a handful of them that we remember their names.

Unless you're a history scholar. But even then, it's a really small list.

The average person is forgotten. Not by God, which is why Mary has a name that will never be forgotten.

She thought, she grew up thinking, I will be forgotten by history. I'll never travel more than 100 miles outside of my hometown.

I'll never accomplish the things that other people will accomplish. But yet, God, in his incredible grace, gives

Mary a name that will never be forgotten. Isn't it interesting that a poor Galilean from the tribe of Judah, young woman, is remembered now more than even the

Caesar that was on the throne when she lived? If you ask most people, do they know who Mary the

Virgin is? They will say yes. If you ask them if they know who was on the throne when Mary the Virgin gave birth to Christ, you will get puzzled looks.

By the way, it was Caesar Augustus. But more people today know of Mary than of Caesar himself.

Because God can take even the lowest and the most broken of us, and he can do great things.

Even more than that, you and I who are here today will have a name that will never be forgotten. Not in the halls of history on this earth, but when we stand before King Jesus and he opens up his books and our name, which can never be blotted out with ink, is in the

Lamb's Book of Life for all of eternity. And he says, enter into my rest. You will have a name that is more powerful than any president, any potentate, any ruler, any king.

Because God can take humble and lowly people like you and I and give us a great name like Mary.

Another fascinating thing that happens in the life of Mary. She grew up in a time period where God was no longer speaking.

We take this for granted, unless you're charismatic. We take this for granted because we have the word.

If you want to know if God is speaking to us today, then open the word. As Justin Peters has famously said, and I love it, if you want to hear

God speak, read the Bible. If you want to hear God speak audibly, read it out loud. God is speaking to us daily if we're in our word.

We take it for granted that there's 400 years of silence from God.

400 years. How old is America? Not even 300 yet.

400 years God was silent. Mary grew up in a time period where no one expected to hear anything from God.

No one expected a new prophet, a new book, nothing. From the moment she was born to the moment she died, she would have assumed that she was still living in the silence of God.

Now this is a very interesting feature, the silence of God, because what you'll notice in the

Bible is when God turns the chapter to a new chapter, whenever that happens, old themes begin repeating themselves over and over and over again.

So for instance, 400 years of silence has already happened before in the Exodus. The people were in Egypt, 400 years of silence.

God speaking and going silent has already happened before and it shows a particular purpose that God has.

For instance, if you think about God speaking, when did he begin speaking? He began speaking in the garden. And he began speaking to the, after the fall, he was speaking to Cain and to Abel.

He was speaking to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and Moses all the way until the Exodus.

He was speaking to his people and then all of a sudden he stops. Why? Because God was preparing his people for deliverance.

You see, God can accomplish more in silence than you and I can accomplish with all the words under heaven, with all the noises, with all the panoply of tones and tunes, or panoply, however you pronounce that word.

God can accomplish more in silence. And then all of a sudden after that, he starts speaking again.

He speaks to Moses. He speaks to the people of Israel. He speaks through the judges and through the prophets. And we get to Samuel, who's the last judge, first prophet, transitional man.

He's got one foot in the prophetic era. He's got one foot in the king or in the judges era.

He's the last judge, the first prophet. And you get this period of time where God is gonna be speaking uniquely to his prophets, which started about 1000

BC with the first prophet Samuel. And it continues on until the book of Malachi, the final prophet, which was around 400

BC, which means that there were 600 years of God speaking to God's people and then silence.

Now, we have to remember that God has done this before because when God's done something before, then there's precedence, right?

God got the people to Egypt and then he went silent for 400 years. He's preparing them for deliverance.

What do you think God is preparing the people of God for in the New Testament? 400 years of silence.

He's preparing them to be delivered, but not from a pagan king, although the

Israelites wanted that. They wanted to be free from Rome. He's delivering them from an even greater tyrant, from one who afflicted them worse than the

Pharaoh, from the one that beat them and chained them and enslaved them far worse than Egypt had ever done.

That 400 years of silence was to prepare the people of God for Christ, the true and better Moses, the one who would deliver us from Satan, sin, and death.

That 400 years of silence was intentional. Now, another theme that repeats itself when the chapter turns is

Mary sings. God breaks his silence by announcing to the last prophet, John the Baptist, or Zechariah, that John the

Baptist is gonna be born and then God speaks to Mary and Mary sings. Isn't it interesting that the last prophet, Samuel, when his birth was announced, his mother sang and now when

Jesus is born, the true and greater Samuel, his mother sings as well.

You see, when new chapters turn in the Bible, old themes repeat themselves over and over. What I want you to hear in this section is that God can do more in the quiet than you can do in your striving.

You may feel like that God is distant from you. You may feel like you're all alone at times where darkness is covering the voice of God.

You can't hear, you can't see, you can't move, you can't think. Don't lie, you've been there.

So have I. God can accomplish more in those seasons than anything that you can accomplish on your own.

Lean in to God. Maybe he's preparing you for something. Maybe he's preparing you to set you free from a sin you've been struggling with.

Maybe he's preparing you to raise you up to do something that you never thought that you were gonna do. My point is

God can accomplish more in the silence and in the distance than you could ever imagine.

Lean in to that. When things look ordinary in your life,

God is still working. God actually works in the ordinary, in the plain, in the mundane, in the ebb and flow of everyday monotony.

This is why I take such issue with, let's call it the charismatic or charismania

Pentecostal churches because they're looking for God in all of the spectacular, the firework shows.

They're looking for God in all of the miracles when God actually is working and moving and doing his greatest work in your life in the mundane, day -to -day work.

That's what's crafting you. That's what's shaping you is when God is working in the ordinary.

After 400 years of silence, God speaks. God breaks the silence heralding and announcing the coming of his new

Moses, the deliverer of God's people, but he also breaks the silence announcing the coming of the final

Elijah. Now, it's very interesting. In fact, the last prophet in the book in the Old Testament is

Malachi. Malachi tells us some fascinating things that are gonna happen when Jesus comes. I love the book of Malachi.

It is a fascinating story about Israel's spiritual apathy and what God is going to do to save them anyway.

Look at what it says in Malachi 4, verse 6. This is what's gonna happen before Jesus comes. Behold, I'm going to send you

Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. He will, pay attention to this part, restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse.

When God speaks in the New Testament, he takes this passage from Malachi 400 years before and he pulls this in and says, now this is happening.

Look at what it says in Luke 1. In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named

Zacharias and for the division of Abijah. And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron and her name was

Elizabeth. They were both righteous in the sight of God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and requirements of the

Lord, but they had no child. Themes repeating itself again, the old barren couple like Sarah and Abram.

Because Elizabeth was barren and they were both advanced in their years. Now it happened that while he was performing his priestly service before God in the appointed order of his division, according to the custom of the priestly office, he was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the

Lord and to burn incense. And the whole multitude of people were in prayer outside at the hour of the incense offering.

Now let's just stop right there for a second. For 400 years, the people, the priest would gather outside of the temple and one of them would be chosen to go in and none of them expected to have a dramatic encounter with God.

And yet I love the fact that they're all outside praying. Maybe they're praying because he was old. Maybe they're like, you know, we don't want him to wander in there and get lost.

Zacharias had been wanting this opportunity for years and years and years and now finally came in his old age.

That's not coincidental. It says, the whole multitude of the people were in prayer outside at the hour of the incense offering.

Now he wouldn't have been going into the holiest of holy places, but into the holy place he would go. And an angel of the

Lord appeared to him standing at the right hand of the altar of incense. Zacharias was troubled when he saw the angel and fear gripped him.

Only 400 years has passed since anything like this had happened. Of course he was troubled.

Do not be afraid, Zacharias, for your petition has been heard and your wife,

Elizabeth, will bear you a son and you will give him the name John and you will have joy and gladness and many will rejoice at his birth for he will be great in the sight of the

Lord and he will drink no wine or liquor and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit while yet in his mother's womb and he will turn away or he will turn many of the sons of Israel back to the

Lord their God. You remember that from Malachi? Direct quote. It is he who will go as a forerunner before him in the spirit and the power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children and the disobedient to their attitude of the righteous so as to make ready a people prepared for the

Lord. You see the connection from Malachi? 400 years before John the

Baptist was gonna be born, the prophecy was given that when Christ comes, he will be preceded by the

Elijah and God burst into the temple announcing the time had come.

Here you have people who have not been used to hearing the voice of God startled by this reality.

When John or when Zacharias comes out of the temple, he's mute. He can't even speak. You can imagine what the people were saying.

Surely nothing like this has happened in hundreds of years. Now what

I find most fascinating is how Luke compares Zacharias to Mary because Mary now is the next person that God reveals himself to in the text and there's this comparison that Luke is doing because if you think about it,

Zacharias is old, Mary is young. There's a contrast. She's overlooked by most people in that society.

He's respected and noticed. He's a member of the priestly class. He was an outcast. He's married.

She's single. He's a man. She's a woman. He was serving in Judah in the temple of all places.

She's tucked away in secrecy in Galilee. He was doing the Lord's work publicly.

Hers was private. He was in God's house. She was in her house. All of these comparisons between Zacharias and Mary, all of these contrasts, what are the contrasts pointing to?

That only one of them is the one who had true belief and it's ironic who it is because you would expect the old man, the one who's read the

Bible more than Mary, the one who served in the temple, the one who's done all of these great things, you would expect the priest would have been the one that had true belief and yet it wasn't.

It was Mary, the one who had true belief in Christ. The irony of it is Mary, meek, mild, tender maiden, is the one who believed and who sang and who rejoiced and it was

Zachariah who went away mute. The point cannot be overlooked that you and I are the ones that measure ourselves up against other people and say surely they get it.

And yet look at what God does. He takes the most unlikely person that he could have ever chosen.

He uses her. He fills her with love for God and her song comes bursting out of her lips.

There is no one, if he can use Mary, if he can use the apostle Paul, the murderer, if he can use

David, the drama queen king, if he can use Jeremiah, the one who's habitually depressed, if he can use the men and women that we find in scripture, he can use anyone in this room.

He can put his song in any heart. There's no one too far gone for Christ.

Luke is calling you and I to be like Mary and then from that we will transition to her song.

That's a little bit of the background. She's poor, she's broken, she's out of place, she's out of time, she's in Roman occupation and yet God chooses her to be the one to sing this beautiful song.

And I just want to say her song was not the sort of overly emotional lyrics that we hear in a lot of churches today, the

Jesus is my boyfriend ballad. It is not the 7 -11 hymn where it's seven words spoken 11 times over and over and over in some sort of mantric hip swaying motions.

When the women in the Bible sing, you'll notice this. I'm gonna quote every song, a verse from every song that a woman sings in the

Bible. When women sing, it's songs of victory. It's songs of trusting God and his war -like vengeance against their enemies.

For instance, Miriam, the sister of Moses, this is her song.

She says, sing to the Lord for he is highly exalted, the horse and the rider he hurled into the sea. When Deborah sings,

Deborah, the judge of all Israel, she says, thus let all your enemies perish, O Lord. But let those who love him be like the rising of the sun and its might,

Judges 5, 31. Hannah, her song, those who contend with the Lord will be shattered.

I love the songs of these women. Against them he will thunder in the heavens.

The Lord will judge the ends of the earth and he will give strength to his king and will exalt the horn of his anointed. And then

Mary's song, he has scattered those who are proud in their thoughts of heart. He has brought down the rulers from their thrones and exalted those who are humble.

What we have when women sing in the Bible is some of the deepest and robust theology given to song that's ever been written.

This is not superficial Taylor Swift lyrics of the ancient variety. This is serious biblical theology sung to the glory of God, celebrating the victory of God.

This is how Mary's song begins. My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God, my savior.

Do you see the theme at work again? The knowledge that God has given her of his promises are now bursting forth out of her chest.

When it uses the word glorifies here, that's an English translation of the word that actually means multiplied.

Magnified praise is what she's saying. The word means that she is piling up and heaping up praises upon praises upon praises.

This is the word that you would use when you're raking leaves and you're piling them up and piling them up until there's so many that you don't know what to do with.

You don't have enough yard bags to contain them all. This is the word that is being used here, the piling up and the overflowing of praise.

It's like when you pour a glass of wine, one drop hits the glass at first, but then it continues flowing and flowing and flowing until it overflows and spills out all over the place.

You think about a teapot when it's starting to boil and the pressure is building, then eventually it's screaming.

This is what is happening to Mary. The pressure and intensity of God's goodness and his beauty and his love is magnifying inside of her heart to the point to where she's now shouting to the glory of God because of what she has seen in the knowledge and the beauty of God.

I call this combustible praise because it doesn't take a lot, but when your heart sees what

God has done for you in Christ, it's like an atom being split in half through nuclear fission.

Your heart explodes. You ever had those moments where your heart just explodes and you, like Mary, magnify the praises of God?

That's what I'm praying for, for me, for my family. That's what I'm praying for, for us.

It is so easy for us who've tasted what

God has done to get bored, complacent, to become sort of like,

I know the story, when actually I believe that as we taste and see that the

Lord is good, it should get better. We should see it even more fully. Like Paul, when he says at the end of his life,

I'm the chief of sinners, but there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ. Paul has evidence of the fact that he's softening over time.

He's growing more in love with Christ over time. That's what I want for me and that's what I want for you. Not that we would become complacent, but that the volume of our praise, the passion in our praise would grow more and more and more over time.

The more we know Christ, the more love we have for Christ. The more joy we have in singing to Christ.

Has God been good to you? Is his promise is still true?

Is he faithful to you? Even when you're faithless, is he faithful to you? Does the love of God been poured out upon you?

Has God shown a long suffering commitment to you? Will God safely deliver you to heaven where you will stand before the face of Christ and he will look at you and say, well done, my good and faithful servant?

Is that happening for you? But then if so, you have every reason to praise.

You have every reason to sing out to the glory of Christ like Mary in combustible affection, ignited heart kind of praise.

That's the first thing we see in Mary's song is that she is bursting forth with the knowledge of God in joyful song.

The second thing we see is she does what's so hard for you and I to do. She praises God even in her humiliation.

There's not an area of Mary's life where the praise of God doesn't touch. It touches in the curse, touches in humiliation, it touches in the brokenness.

How often do we, we're fair weather Christians at times, right? We praise

God when the good things come. We praise God when the thing we asked for comes. But when the trial comes, the pain comes, how often do we are still left singing?

I love that Mary is singing in her humiliation. She says, for he has been mindful of the humble estate of his servant.

She knows who she is. None of us have to tell her who she is. She's the poor girl on the wrong side of town who has a failing legacy from King David who no one cared about at that point.

No one would have picked her. No one would have chosen her. She would have been last to get picked for the dodgeball team. Whatever you wanna, whatever metaphor you wanna give her, she knew who she was, but she also knew that God chose her anyway, which made it all the more meaningful to her as she compared those two thoughts together.

Have you ever went outside during the brightness of the noon day and stared up at the sky and tried to find the

North Star or try to find any star for that matter? You can't see them because the light is way too bright of the sun.

You can't see the stars even though they're there. We don't believe that the stars are only on one half of the sky.

It's against the darkness that the light of the star shines so brightly. It's against your weakness.

It's against your failure. It's against your brokenness. It's against your downtroddenness.

It's against your pain that the light of Christ shines most brightly. Don't avoid to praise

God in your pain because it's in the pain that you see most clearly the beautiful, brilliant, lustering love of Christ.

We have to know ourselves rightly. One of the things that I think is unfortunate today in the church is that there's so much talk of love of God, which is true.

We love the love of God, but there's so much talk of his love and there's so little talk of sin that we actually robbed ourself of seeing how beautiful he is.

There's too much light, like when you walk outside and you can't see the stars. If you don't and if you're not being reminded of your sin, you miss being able to see how beautiful Christ is.

It's against the backdrop of your ugliness that he looks most precious. Our task today is not the same as Mary's, but our task is similar and that we recognize who we are and all of our brokenness so that we can see the light and the beauty of Christ.

None of us will be called to carry Jesus in the womb like Mary, but let us remember our task.

It's even greater than hers. There's far too many people who worship Mary today. There's far too many people who venerate

Mary as if she had some special privilege. You and I carry the spirit of Christ our entire lives.

Mary got to carry Christ for nine months and when she saw her savior, the one that she gave birth to, rise from the dead and she believed on the one that she birthed, the greater privilege was given to her that the

Holy Spirit came into her heart. Let us not venerate Mary. Mary's wonderful.

It's just that she was blessed, but let us look at the privilege that she had as a type for the greater privilege that you and I have to bear the spirit of God in our soul.

We carry Christ with us every day, do we not? Even in our humiliation, our task is even better.

How much more for ardent praise? You and I are the orphan who've now become a child of the king.

You and I are the peasant who've now been chosen to be married to the prince. You and I are a real life story of Cinderella, spiritual rags to riches, all because of Christ.

The joy of Jesus doesn't come from trying to boost your own ego. Like the world will tell you, just believe in yourself.

What a hopeless and miserable occupation that would be. You do you is the way that you will trip and stumble right into the gates of hell.

We must come to see our wretchedness like Mary so that we can come to see his loveliness like Mary.

The third thing that we see in this passage is that she's praising him because of her blessings.

From now on, all generations will call me blessed, she says in verse 48, for the mighty one has done great things for me.

Holy is his name. Her praise is a multifaceted diamond.

If you hold a diamond up to the light and you look at it, it refracts off a different angle so that when you spin it and when you turn it, it intersects with the diamond in various different ways.

She's praising God for who he is. She's praising God for how limited she is in her humiliation.

Now she's praising God for the blessings that he has given her. Do you see that her praise has now permeated every facet of her being.

Mary's receiving what she did not deserve. That's the blessings. You think about it like this.

I look this up. I don't know how accurate this is. Maybe some of you will say it's not accurate. Just give me grace.

I'm a novice. There's about $100 trillion of money in the world, in the whole world.

This is $40 trillion of coin, fiat currency. There's about $50 trillion in fungible assets, things that are worth things that you can sell for money.

And there's about $1 to $3 trillion in digital assets. Maybe a little less now that FTX collapsed, but you get the point.

About $100 trillion if you round it up in money of some sort in the world.

Now I want you to imagine that your debt was racked up to the 999 trillions, 10 times all the money that's on earth.

You couldn't pay it. Now imagine that there was someone who had such a sum of money, and I have no idea how they could come about such a sum of money, but they did.

Why would they even look at you? Why would they even talk to you? And yet imagine that person not only looked at you and talked to you, but paid your debt.

And then imagine that that person not only paid your $999 trillion, which by an order of magnitude higher than even the

GDP of the United States, they did that, but they also left you with a surplus in your account. So that you were not only set back to zero, but you were given riches and treasures, influence and authority and privilege, living food that was better than anything that any

Michelin star chef could ever cook. When you begin to see that example, where more was given to you than could ever possibly be imagined through your own squandering, when you begin to see that, you begin to have the joy of Mary, who saw the treasures of Christ overflowing into her heart in a way that she could have never imagined.

A woman who no one would have ever remembered is now the woman who no one can ever forget. She said, from now on, all generations will call me blessed for the mighty one has done great things for me.

Holy is his name. She understood that the mightiest men in history would fail and fall, but the mighty one of Israel has done great things.

She's the blessed daughter of Eve, who was promised would come and her seed would crush the serpent's head.

Can you imagine? Can you imagine after the angel left and she's talking to her father, she goes to synagogue the next week before she visits

Elizabeth and they read the passage from Genesis 3, 15. Can you imagine the tears that would have welled up in that woman's eyes that this is me, this is my womb that God is going to bless for the sake of his people?

These blessings caused her to sing and these blessings ought to cause us to sing because the mighty one of Israel has done great things in your life too.

You were dead, now you're alive. You were in the kingdom of darkness, now you're in the kingdom of light. You were an orphan, now you have been a maid, a part of the family.

God has done great things for you, his people. Let that truth well up inside of you like it did for Mary and let it cause you to praise.

She gave praises to him for who he is, for who she is, for the blessings. She also gave praises to him for his mercy.

Now, mercy is a funny word because we tend to interchange mercy with grace. We tend to think about it as the same thing.

It's not the same thing. Mercy and grace are not at all the same thing. Grace is when you get something that you didn't deserve.

Mercy is when you do not get what you did deserve. Do you see the difference?

Grace is when you gain something that was never yours. Mercy is when you do not get what should have been yours.

Grace is when you get something you couldn't earn. Mercy is when you don't get what you deserve. Grace is

God's undeserved gifts in your life. Mercy is the ungiven punishments. Grace is what you receive.

Mercy is what you don't receive. Grace is heaven. Mercy is that you don't go to hell.

Grace is that we are adopted. Mercy is that you're no longer orphans. Grace is that we've been made rich in Christ.

Mercy is that you're no longer poor. Grace is that we've been clothed with the royal robes of Jesus. Mercy is that you're no longer naked and ashamed.

Grace is the blessings. Mercy is that you don't get the curse. And we get both

God's grace and God's mercy. We don't get what we deserve, but yet we do get what we could have never earned in Christ.

That's not so for the world. The world doesn't get God's grace and the world doesn't get

God's mercy. The only thing left for them is justice, holiness, and wrath, which is why

Mary also praises God for his justice. When Mary looks and she sees the wicked being punished by God, it causes her to praise

God for his holiness and his justice. She says, God has performed mighty deeds with his arm.

He scattered those who are proud in their innermost thoughts. He's brought down the rulers from their thrones and he has lifted up the humble.

He has filled the hungry with good things and he has sent the rich away empty.

The imagery that she's giving here is the arm of the Lord. It's anthropomorphism. You can use that word in a trivia next time and you can thank me for it.

When you win a free burrito or whatever you win. Anthropomorphism means that it's a word that's trying to help us humans with finite understanding understand something about God.

God is not up in heaven with a right arm only. God is spirit.

He doesn't have a body. The right arm of the Lord is meant to describe his power and his wrath.

The way that he rips kingdoms apart and pulls pagan kings down off their throne like he did with Nebuchadnezzar if you remember.

Nebuchadnezzar in his hubris thought that all of this around him was all about him and God made him eat grass like a wild beast for seven years.

You think about Herod Agrippa in the New Testament. He boasts and he receives praise from the crowd and God brings him down and eats his body full of worms and in that God is worthy to be praised.

He's the one who scatters the proud. He brings down the rulers of men. He makes impoverished the wealthy.

He lifts up the humble and he fills the hungry with food. We love the same

God today, do we not? We live in Babylon in many ways.

Do you think that our democratic government, our fake senators, the people who say that they're for righteousness, who support the abortion of babies, the murder of innocent children, do you think that our

God doesn't see? Do you think that our God has somehow in his older age, although he's eternal, that his eyes has grown dim?

They live and move and have their being in him and when God's grace is up, his wrath will be what consumes them.

This is why we pray for our presidents. What an awful job that would be because you're gonna inherit the wrath of God if you don't serve in a way that God requires.

It's easy to make fun of these people. It's easy to look at them and to scoff at them and to be angry at them.

I feel terrified for them because if they don't repent, they will be hit with the tidal wave of God's holiness and it will consume them.

Let us pray for these people that they would humble themselves like Nebuchadnezzar and they would cry out to the living

God before it's too late. And if they don't, and if this nation falls, and if those leaders in our country and in every country on earth who are not in Christ break wide the gates of hell when they splash in the lake of fire, you and I will be at the throne of Christ praising

God for his justice and praising God for his holiness and praising him that he has done great things.

The judgments of God are a comfort to the church. The final thing that we see in this passage is that she doesn't just pray for ethnic

Israel. She prays not just for biological Jews. She prays for the entirety of Abraham's line.

She prays for the church that Paul calls the Israel of God. This is how she ends her song.

He, God has helped his servant Israel remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever just as he promised our ancestors.

Don't miss what this means. Paul says if you're in Christ, you're a descendant of Abraham. So these blessings are for you.

These blessings are for the church, the Israel of God. Mary, though she could not have possibly understood all that was going on, sang a song that now applies to you and I in these seats.

When you pray, you think you know what you're praying for, and yet God takes your prayers and multiplies your prayers and takes your songs and multiplies your songs and does things that you could have never imagined.

Do you think Mary could have ever conceived of a bunch of New Englanders and a couple of Southerners praising

God in Chelmsford, Massachusetts because of the prayer she prayed? Unbelievable.

When she considers God's promises, it causes her to magnify praises. When she considers her lowly estate, it causes her to sing out affections for God.

When she considers her blessings, she bellows out gratefulness. When she considers God's mercy, she shouts with thanksgiving.

When she considers God's judgment, she exalts him in the deepest awe. And when she considers God's people, she can do nothing at all but praise

God. When you and I consider the coming of Jesus Christ, the incarnation, the

Emmanuel, God with us, my prayer is that our hearts would be filled with the same love and affection that filled our sister

Mary. Because God has made great promises to you in Christ, let that magnify praises in you.

Because God has saved us in our lowly estate, let that magnify great praises in you.

Because God has given you great blessings in the gospel, let that overwhelm you and magnify praises in you.

Because God has given you mercy and not given you what you deserved, let that magnify

His praise in you. Because God's judgment is going to come to all of those who oppose

God, let that magnify God's praise in you. And because, dear church, you are under the blessings of God, both now and for eternity, let it fill our hearts and thrill our bones and to the deepest recesses of our soul, let us sing now as we will sing forever at the throne of God.

Let us pray. Lord, let our hearts be tender and malleable like Mary.

Let us see how beautiful you are and let that magnify our praise. Lord, let us see how broken we are and let that still magnify our praise.

Let us bless you in our blessings and let us praise you in our pain. Let us extol you when you show your righteous, furious holiness and let us,

God, remember that we are the most gifted, privileged, blessed people on the planet by being a part of the church.

Lord, let us not let that make us prideful, but let us take those blessings and herald them to the nations.

And Lord, let every person in this room, I pray, Holy Spirit, please, I'm begging you, let no one walk through this

Christmas with sorrow in their hearts, with sadness, with abandonment, with brokenness, when you have done such great things.

Lord, open up our hearts to see it, to taste it, to feel it, and let us be like Mary and explode with the praises of God.