Dec. 18, 2016 Songs Of Praise by Pastor Josh Sheldon

The Mighty Work of God in Luke 1

God has done a great work, a great work has been recorded here for us in the Scriptures and in Luke 1 and these verses that were just read to you. He's done a mighty work. The might of His arm here is on full display and the depth of His mercy in what was just read to you, the depth of His mercy begins to be plumbed.

The vindication of the poor and humble is now broadcast, the rich and proud will be put to shame, the promises made to His people Israel are set to be made final and will now overflow the borders of that singular people, God's peculiar treasure, and they will rush like a flood to people of every tribe, every nation, every kindred, and every tongue.

This is the beginning, this is what is beginning here, this is the summation of so much biblical history as it rises to its final fulfillment, and of course it rises to fulfillment in Jesus Christ, the very person of God's salvation, the repository of His word and the one for whom and by whom and because of whom are all things.

He is about to come into the world. In His conception, in Jesus Christ's conception, God has set in motion the final act in the salvation of sinners. The final act going all the way back to Genesis 3 and the fall of man and Genesis 3 15 and the first promise, the first hint of the gospel to come.

And here after all those many centuries, after all the promises of God growing in detail, growing in clarity, seen in typological fulfillments throughout history, as it comes, as it crescendos, as it accelerates, as it were explodes upon this point that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has been conceived in the virgin's womb.

God has done great things, and nowhere has His arm been shown as mighty in such clarity as in this, and the whole history that we have of Jesus Christ and His life, His perfect life before God, and ultimately His sacrifice of Himself on behalf of us.

This is what is finally set in motion. After centuries of anticipation and waiting and God's people trying to put the pieces together and to understand what was going to come, the faithful remnant looking, keeping track of this line from David through to Jesus Christ, though they didn't know His name then but they knew He'd be the Messiah.

Here it is, in young Mary, carrying this one who is that final chapter in this long history for the salvation of sinners. The extraordinary nature of the works of the Lord in the advent of our Lord Jesus Christ are matched here with the common and everyday people through whom He sets all this in motion.

Mary and Elizabeth, who are they? Who would have ever known of them had not God chosen to use them in this way and inspired Luke to record it for us so we have a true history of them? But how much more common, how much more everyday can you be than these two?

Elizabeth and her husband Zacharias, we know from the previous passages, were exceptionally pious people. They walked in righteousness, they obeyed all the commands of the Lord. We spoke last week, that doesn't mean that they were perfect, they were completely sanctified that they had, as we might say today, arrived.

Just that they were exceptionally pious, righteous, faithful to the commands of God. They followed them. But there must have been others like them. Some were in that same range of piety as they were. Not many perhaps, but there had to have been some.

So in that sense they were exceptional within their realm, but ordinary people. Just a couple in this whole population of Israel. Mary was a young Jewish girl betrothed to a carpenter. Now carpentry is a good and an honorable profession and trade, but it had no significance beyond his satisfied customers then and there, other than this part that she took here in this bringing of salvation to history to a close, we would never have heard of her.

She was headed to a life of hard work and struggle. She was in every way nondescript, but for this, by God's sovereign choice, she was, and for no reason that the scripture bothers to give us, chosen by God for this singular honor and then setting in motion the finality of salvation.

And through these two unremarkable women, Mary and Elizabeth, God made a display of the might of his right arm. In the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, we begin to see just how deep and how full and how complete and how wonderful is his mercy to sinners.

The Holy Spirit, the Songs of Praise, and the Coming Christ

Our attention this morning will God willing be on what the scriptures emphasize in these couple of songs in this meeting of Mary and Elizabeth here in chapter one of Luke. And what does the scripture emphasize for us but this?

It is God who is at work here. It is God who must receive all the attention and all the glory and all the praise for what he has done, because that's what these women do. They take none of it upon themselves, reflect it all back to God who has done these mighty deeds in them and through them.

Lest there be any credit given to man, I mean of course mankind, I mean man, woman, I mean child, anybody, the two songs for us today, the song of Elizabeth to Mary and Mary to Elizabeth, they sing praises to God and to God alone.

And in each case, Luke is very specific about the catalyst of these prayers, these songs of praise. The one to the other and the other back to her but meant for us and recorded in the scripture for the church in all ages.

Luke is very clear about how they were quickened to understand what was happening, how they gained utterance to speak these words to each other and as I said to us by their record in the scripture. How did all this come about?

By the Holy Spirit of God. By the working of God through these two. And so he gets all the credit for all that happened here. You remember the Holy Spirit came upon Mary when Gabriel spoke that word to her, the Holy Spirit will come upon you.

And as I said last week, I think it happened then. I think that's when she was full of the Holy Spirit. Elizabeth, on seeing her relative, the scripture says, Joseph just read this to you, she was full of the Holy Spirit and being full of the Holy Spirit, she cries out this song of blessing upon Mary, all the while praises to God.

And Mary answers with what we call the Magnificat, the Magnificat. And these songs were inspired by God, they combine towards a single point for us. The Christ is coming and in him, in the Christ, in Jesus, all God's promises are yes, all his promises are amen in him.

John will be his herald and he will be God's Messiah. Immediately after hearing Gabriel's message, verse 139 tells us, Mary left with haste to see her relative, and many commentators think they were cousins.

Makes sense. And as soon as she entered the house, she's greeted, or she greets Elizabeth. And verse 41 says that when Elizabeth heard Mary's voice, what happened? It says that the baby within her leaped, it leaped, and we're going to come back to that in a little bit.

We're going to talk about what that really meant. But consider for a moment, Elizabeth heard, she hears her cousin's voice, and the baby leaps. And immediately, Elizabeth gives this greeting, this song of blessing to Mary.

That's verses 39 to 35, filled with the Holy Spirit, she pronounces these blessings on Mary. And the first one is, blessed are you among women. Blessed are you among women. Blessed is in a form of the verb that describes a definitive act, something that happens at a point in time, but the effects of which continue beyond the act itself, or the initiation of the act, we could say.

She's not blessed over anyone, much less women, but she's blessed among women. She was, for no cause that the Bible bothers to tell us, chosen for this blessed honor, we could say by grace, and not of works, by grace, not for merit of any kind.

For not even Mary can boast before God, even though she carried God's only Son. I will say that Catholic errors about Mary have for too long caused the Protestant camp to retreat too far from what the Scriptures teach us about her.

Mary is not to be worshipped, she's not to be venerated, or any such thing, we know that. When she answers Elizabeth, she's going to call God her Savior. She needs a Savior, just like all of us need a Savior.

Can we say that Mary, like all the rest, was a sinner, in need of the redemption that the one she's going to bring forth into the world will provide? Certainly we can, certainly we can say that. Mary's role in redemptive history is unique, it's even exalted, we can say that without fear.

We needn't apologize for this any more than we should apologize for the woman in Mark chapter 14. The one who anointed the Lord Jesus Christ, and you remember, one of the disciples was outraged and he said we could use this money for some holy purpose, some pious purpose, we could have fed some poor, instead she wastes it by pouring it on Jesus, and Jesus says to leave her alone.

Truly I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her. That's an exalted position, is it not? That we don't even know her name. And can any of us imagine that it would be anything but a blessing to take so important a role in salvation itself?

We can affirm all this, we can say yes to all this, without attributing to her any Catholic superstition, without exalting her and having her be co-redemptress in heaven and all those other things that happen with Mary.

We can say that yes, blessed is she among women, exalted even, but a sinner with feet of clay. We would have to at the same time acknowledge that. I see no conflict there. Well Elizabeth blesses Mary and the child she was carrying.

She wasn't there when Gabriel came to her relative, that was just Gabriel and Mary. But here she says with confidence, and remember she's filled with the Holy Spirit, so she says with confidence that the fruit of her womb was something extraordinary.

If Elizabeth had any doubts about the circumstances around Mary's condition, she would have said something very different than blessed. And then she makes this great affirmation, she calls Mary the mother of my Lord.

She's carrying Elizabeth's Lord. Elizabeth is speaking to the one who has within her at that moment, the one who Elizabeth as well as Mary needs to be her Lord, needs to be her Savior, needs to be her sacrifice on the cross for her own sins.

How much of that Elizabeth recognized at that point, I don't know. But she did say that why am I so blessed, why am I so honored as to have the mother of my Lord, capital L, come to me. She knew a lot.

Take a moment and consider though how she knew this. We know that the Holy Spirit is directing everything that happens here. Luke makes that so plain to us. But notice the sign that she's given. At the sound of Mary's voice, the baby in Elizabeth leaps, leaps.

I have no idea, of course, what it's like to feel a baby kick. I can't even imagine. I'm sure every mother does. I'm sure even if you're carrying your first child, you know what a kick is. But Elizabeth doesn't say that.

She doesn't say the baby kicked. He leaped. It wasn't indigestion that made him into an acrobat. It was joy. And it wasn't Elizabeth's joy. The baby, the child within her, where is she here, six months along?

That child leaped for joy. For joy. His case was extraordinary. And I won't try to find what this means for the rest of us whose conceptions were more routine. And is every fetus then cognizant, can do something like this?

More inclined to take this as an extremely exceptional case. Because of the exceptional thing that is being initiated here. He leapt for joy. He didn't kick. It wasn't indigestion. It wasn't a burp. He leaped and he did that for joy.

Somehow, the fetus that was John the Baptist knew that he was in such close proximity to his Lord. The one he would proclaim and be a herald for. Verse 115 really explains this to us, again from last week.

He, John the Baptist, he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb. Does this explain it well enough for us? I believe it does. He leaped for joy. And Elizabeth goes on and blesses Mary.

Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord. In other words, blessed are you for believing the word of God. Zechariah, as we'll recall, had a few months of being mute.

He couldn't speak because he did not believe the word of the Lord. Blessed is Mary who did believe the word of God spoken to her by Gabriel. Blessed is she who believed. What did she say? Mary said, let it be to me according to your word.

To Gabriel? No, not Gabriel. Gabriel has no authority but was given to him to speak. Gabriel has no power to do anything except what is granted to him to perform all by and from God. She said, let it be to me according to your word, understanding that this was indeed the angel Gabriel who did indeed stand before God and was speaking and acting for him.

It's an answer of faith. It was an answer of faith. God's word from God's chosen messenger. Let it be to me. So the wheel God sets in motion is confirmed. Mary is carrying Elizabeth's Lord, Mary's Lord, John the Baptist's Lord, God willing, your Lord, your Savior, just as Mary calls him, God, my Savior.

The Magnificat and Hannah’s Song

Mary's answer to Elizabeth, a bit longer than Elizabeth's answer to Mary, but Mary's answer to her is the justly famous magnificat, as we call it, this magnification. And this magnification not of self, as we keep saying, but of God and the works of God and what God is doing through these ordinary women.

Now this song depends quite a lot on Hannah's song of praise and thanks for the Lord having opened her womb. And that's why I had Joseph read to you from 1 Samuel. But the purpose of these two songs is really pretty different.

We could almost say it's entirely different. The connections between the two seem to me to be more a matter of style than of substance. And the main difference is that Hannah had, with her husband Elkanah, been praying for her son.

Hannah's song was a song of praise to God for fulfilling that prayer. Mary, we're not told anything she was praying for. We can well speculate, I think an informed speculation, that she was a woman of prayer.

Sure seems to fit everything we know about her. We don't know anything she was praying for. We could say she couldn't have been praying for a son. Not yet. She wasn't married yet. These two songs are similar in that they both give the glory to God and they both thank Him for taking notice of them.

The poor and the humble. Poor and humble as compared to the rich and the powerful and the famous. The ones that we heard of in both Hannah and Mary's songs. If you think back to the end of Hannah's song, if you want to turn there in 2 Samuel, this might help you there.

2 Samuel, was it chapter 2? The end of Hannah's song has this chord of thanksgiving and it could be taken as a prophecy about her son Samuel. Remember that Samuel was born at the time this song was sung.

Jesus just conceived at the time of Mary's song. Remember that difference between the two. But Hannah sings this. What did Hannah's pregnancy mean? Way back then, centuries before Elizabeth and Mary met.

Her pregnancy meant that Israel would soon have their greatest judge. See, I misspoke there a second ago. It was the birth that she gave forth. Not the pregnancy. The birth she gave forth. And it meant that they would soon have this great judge Samuel.

The one who would anoint their greatest king, David. Samuel, who would labor towards Israel's salvation as their prophet and their priest. David, the great warrior king, the one he would anoint, who would save his people with his huge, enormous, and consistent battlefield successes.

How does any of this relate to Mary's child? To this Jesus, this savior of Mary that is coming into the world. Mary's child, Jesus, is going to fulfill all these roles. If Samuel acted as a judge in the role of a prophet and a priest, though not king, and he anointed David, the greatest king of Israel, well, Mary's child is going to fulfill all these roles.

He and only he can be called prophet, priest, and king. We had some, we've talked about this before, who could do a couple of the roles. Never, until Jesus, all three, prophet, priest, and king, roll up in one, God's Christ, the Messiah, our Savior.

In Jesus, these would combine in this single man who would perfectly fulfill each role and bring about a more lasting priesthood, a more complete prophetic word, and a victory over his enemies that would make David's triumphs on the battlefield pale by comparison.

That's what's coming here through these ordinary women. Now, let me take a short excursus here for you. It's generally taught in all the good books on homiletics, and I think it was told this in seminary as well.

It's a mistake for a preacher to tell you what he's not going to do or to tell you what he's not going to tell you, because it just gets you wondering, why isn't he telling me this? But this morning, I'm going to break this law of preaching and tell you something I'm not going to do as we go through this.

I am not going to take Mary's song, this Magnificat, I'm not going to take it apart for you piece by piece. There are many technical points we can make as Mary borrows liberally from Hannah and from several Psalms and even from many prophets.

We could talk about first century Jewish education and what she could have known about the scriptures at the time, but I'm not going to do any of that. And there's a reason I don't want to do that. As I looked over my exegetical notes in preparing for this message, and really fine notes they are, they have parsing, they have cross-references, verbs are paired with the objects of their actions, every sentence analyzed and taken apart, the structure investigated.

And as I was going through all this, it occurred to me that somehow all this effort aimed at deriving the main point only drives us away from what's really happening here. It becomes more of a lecture.

Someday, perhaps during lunch even today, everybody came to me and said, Pastor Josh, we have to have this lecture. I want to know the sentence diagramming you went through. Give me the Hebrew verbs and how they all work together, or the Greek verbs, excuse me.

We could do that. But what's happening here in these songs, and especially in Mary's songs, what's really happening here is sheer, unrestrained joy. Sheer, unrestrained joy at what God is doing through what is in these two women, these two men, these babies.

John the Baptist is six months within Mary, or within Elizabeth. And Jesus, just then conceived, only so old as it would take Mary to have gone from the meeting with Gabriel and to get to wherever she was with Elizabeth.

It's sheer, unrestrained joy, overarching it, all the Holy Spirit of God. It's the joy of the Lord that has overwhelmed both these women. They realize together just what God has begun through them. And both of them, filled with the Holy Spirit, see him as the one who brings this great, unrestrained joy.

And what's the focus of this celebration? It is that they are in the presence of the Lord. Elizabeth knew that Mary was pregnant when they met. Why is it granted to me that the mother of my Lord, we should underline those in the Bible, the mother of my Lord, capital L, Why should she come to me?

It's a good question. Gabriel told Mary that Elizabeth was with child, but he didn't tell her to go there. Not that it was wrong for her to go there, it's just that she wasn't specifically told to go there.

But she goes and she meets her cousin. Elizabeth doesn't say that Mary will be the mother of her Lord, but that she is then, at that moment, the mother of God, Jesus Christ. We know what comes next in the next few months.

God will enflesh himself in the person of his son, Jesus. For now, his presence is mediated, it is hidden, it's clouded by the vessel in which it is contained. And that vessel in which it is contained is, of course, Mary.

And Mary, in this sense, and just in this sense, it's a metaphor, but just in this limited sense, Mary is like the ark of God. The ark had in it the proofs of God's presence among his people. In the ark we found the golden urn holding the manna, Aaron's staff that budded, the tablets of the covenant, that inventory coming from Hebrews chapter 9.

What is that? The manna, God's provision in the wilderness. Not just the bread, but shoes and clothes that refused to wear out, water from rocks, victory over enemies, all brought to memory by the manna that was in the ark.

Aaron's budded staff showing God's sovereign choice of him as Israel's first high priest. The tablets of the covenant, what did they have on it? God's will for his people. That word which once accepted and sworn to by the people constituted them as his people.

All these reminders of the direct and immediate presence of God with his people. Small wonder that the ancient people rejoiced in the presence of the ark. It wasn't the ark itself that elicited the praise, but what it represented, the presence of God, his determination to intrude upon the affairs of man and that by his immediate residence with them.

Small wonder that David danced and rejoiced as the ark was brought into Jerusalem. He stripped off his royal robes, he humbled himself as the presence of God was too near for him to appear in fine robes and jewels.

Before the king of the universe, the king of Israel, as should be all of us, as I think were Mary and Elizabeth both, humbled, humbled to be so close to his presence. When the glory of the Lord fell on the temple that Solomon built, 1 Kings 8 -11, the people worshiped.

Why did they worship? Because God's presence was near to them. His pleasure with the temple they had built was confirmed. Whenever we read of God's people being in the presence of God, we read of them worshiping, of them falling down on their faces, we read of rejoicing in the presence of God.

So back to our two ladies, Mary and Elizabeth. Songs of praise and rejoicing will forgive Elizabeth, an elderly woman now six months along, for not dancing, but her words are more delightful than a dance.

She knew she was in the presence of the Lord when her child leaped for joy, a spontaneous act of worship confirming his and the Lord's calling. He leaped for joy and his mother followed with bounds of joyful leaping, dancing blessings.

Mary's answer to her was no less a spirit-led, scripture-infused, joyful, dancing, celebrating, rejoicing, reveling dance. She saw in her child, then only old enough to account for the time it took her to travel to Elizabeth, God's ultimate procession from heaven to earth.

Christ within her, the Messiah would come, and so she praised God. So what is this all about? This short three-sermon series where we took a digression from our study of Romans, set that aside for these three, is to remind us that the advent of Jesus Christ is cause for joy.

It's cause for joy. We look back and by faith we believe that these things happened just as Luke tells us that they did. I don't know that we could ever rise to the heights of wonder Elizabeth and Mary did.

We sort of take it as an article of faith that the Virgin brought forth our Lord and that in Jesus Christ God dwelt in the flesh amongst us. But I think just reading these songs and just letting the sheer emotion of them come upon us and overwhelm us, to let our eyes increase in wonder, like little children's eyes when they see something amazing.

Let's try to do that. Let's try to be like the babe that Jesus sat on his lap. So as you become like this one, you can by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. Let's let our eyes and our spirits increase in the wonder of what is happening here.

Let's put ourselves with these two, chosen by God to bear the two men who will open the final chapter of salvation. Let us rejoice with them, even knowing the rest of the story, that God used humanity to bring all this about.

These ordinary two, and that in them, because of the advent, we have everlasting cause for rejoicing. One day, if you know Jesus Christ, that rejoicing that is a hint here and now will go on forever and ever.

More with the Lord, and see him as he is. Amen? Thank you, Father, for again the day you've given us, for the scripture you've given us that records these things, that shows us the way of you bringing about this final chapter in salvation history for us.

We thank you, Father, that we have this, that we can rely upon this word. And so, Lord, with Mary, with Elizabeth, we rejoice in what you have done for us. We thank you, Father, for the conception of our Lord Jesus Christ, that we know that he was your true Son, and yet he was truly human and untainted by sin.

And so he truly is our Savior. And we thank you for all this in Jesus' name. Amen.