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In Christ, Mark
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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy
word.
“I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered.
“May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.”
Luke 1:38
This ends
today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.
Note: I will
get to the final devotion in my Mary series tomorrow, MARY: THE PRAISE, but
today I wanted to share with you a sermon I delivered several years ago on Mary
and her remarkable display of faith and trust in accepting God’s proposition to
bear and give birth to His son, despite the challenges it would bring. I hope
you will be inspired and blessed by these words.
I pray you will be instructed and blessed
by the word of God as we look at the matter of being a servant and God’s call
of servitude as we look at this message God has given to me, a message titled,
“The Perfect Servant”.
Please turn with me in your bibles to the
first chapter in the Gospel of Luke. I’ll be reading verses 26 through 38 as we
look at the encounter between Gabriel, an angel of God, and Mary, a young
betrothed virgin who is about to have her life drastically changed through
divine intervention. Hear now the word of the Lord.
In the sixth
month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in
Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named
Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to
her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
Mary was
greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.
But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with
God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He
will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will
give Him the throne of his father David, and He will reign over Jacob’s
descendants forever; His kingdom will never end.”
“How will
this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
The angel
answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High
will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even
Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who
was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God
will ever fail.”
“I am the
Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.”
Then the
angel left her.
Here ends the reading of God’s holy word.
Let us pray.
Come Lord
Jesus, come into our presence we pray. As we study the scriptures, we ask that
You enter into our hearts and do something fresh and new this morning. Open our
minds so that Your Holy Spirit can enter in and fill our thoughts. Bless us
with Your guidance and instruction and lead us to trust and grow in You,
obediently answering your call to serve to the glory of God our Father. I
particularly pray that the words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be
pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen.
As I prepared today’s message, I wondered
how I would best introduce myself. I mean, I’m not an ordained minister but I
am a bible teacher with more than 20 years experience and currently teach the
Tweeners class here at Bayside Baptist. I could say that I am a writer with
nearly 1,000 writings online, writings straight from the word of God and posted
every day on my ministry, The Christian Walk. But I decided that it would be
best in regard to today’s sermon to just introduce myself as Mark Cummings, a
servant of the Lord Most High, a man who submits himself to the Lord as an
instrument of His will, and an ordinary person that God uses for extraordinary
purposes even though I am a sinner.
I pray that you are seeking to define
yourself the same way today because at the very heart of being Christian is
Christ and when we look at Jesus (and it doesn’t take much looking), we find
the heart of a perfect servant, a man who was perfectly God and perfectly like
you and me at the same time. Jesus was always about His Father’s business. He
said as much and testified that He came to serve and not be served. This
humility was expressed fully in His actions, actions that put His love and
compassion on full display, a perfect, unconditional agape love that was
willing to go all the way, even to death. It was the purest kind of love, a
love that would lead Him to be falsely accused and hauled into court where the
scales were tipped against Him. He was derided by the very people He came to
love and save, and then beaten and flogged before being nailed to a cross and
placed on public display to die.
Yes, Jesus more than any other person in
the Scriptures showed us by example that serving others involves sacrifice, a
willingness to go above and beyond the norm, even to death if need be. And the
important thing we need to remember is that He called us to do likewise.
Indeed, there’s no doubt we were created
for service and the scriptures affirm this. Consider these words from 1st
Peter:
Each of you
should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful
stewards of God’s grace in its various forms. If anyone serves, they should do
so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised
through Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 4:10-11
Friends, God has imparted gifts on us all
to be used for His service and I can say with confidence today that all of you
have gifts inside that you have not even tapped into yet. Some of them have not
been explored while others are dormant and waiting for the Lord to activate
them for His service at His appointed time.
We’re expected to be good stewards of these
gifts and that means putting them to use to the glory of the One who provided
them, the One who will grant us the strength to carry out whatever tasks He
gives us so that in all things God may be praised through our Savior, and
service role model, Jesus.
You see, Jesus said what He meant and meant
what He said. There was no double standard in Him. The way He lived reflected
the divine attitude of His heart, a heart that was never too busy for someone
in need, a heart that was never too preoccupied to love, care, teach, and heal.
Jesus didn’t put people on hold. Rather, He promptly answered the call to make
a difference in their lives and, in doing so, gave us a blueprint for service
to follow.
As Christians, Jesus is trying to lead us
to live like Him through the Holy Spirit, to make us servants who ever seek to
glorify the Father, using the gifts He has given to care for the needs of
others and standing for causes greater than ourselves.
So we know we are to serve self
sacrificially because Jesus served. But how will the Lord use us? In what ways
does He want us to serve?
As we ponder the answers to these
questions, praying over them and asking God to reveal His calling, we should
remember one key point that is illuminated by the scriptures:
Never
underestimate what God can do in and through you in accordance with His plan.
Let me say that again and listen carefully
to this point because it’s critical to us being the servants that God wants us
to be.
Never
underestimate what God can do in and through you in accordance with His
plan.
You see, it’s not about my plan or your
plan but it’s all about His plan.
I say this because it’s where we usually
get in trouble when it comes to service. We too often want to shape the Lord’s
will to look like ours. We want to remain in our nice little comfort zones, to
do the things we feel most comfortable with. We reject anything we’re asked to
do that might be outside of what we think our abilities are. And we wrongly
assume that God will only call us to do things that we want to
do.
Unfortunately, this way of thinking is not
anywhere near the truth we find in the Bible regarding service and God’s call
to it. For the reality of being in the Lord’s service requires us to understand
two key things:
First, God’s plan is usually completely
counter to ours.
and
Second, He will call us out
of our comfort zone into something we have never done before.
Consider these examples:
In Genesis, Chapter 12, we find Abraham who
at the time was named Abram and was seventy five years old. He was living
comfortably with his family in Haran on land he had inherited. Life was good.
And then God entered in one day and said:
“Leave
your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will
show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will
make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless
you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be
blessed through you.” (verses 1-3)
Wow. Imagine if you were Abram. You were up
in years and in your comfort zone. Life was good.
But God had other plans and tells you to pull
up your roots and leave everything behind to go to an unknown place.
So much for the retired life. Right?
So how did Abram respond to this? How would
you respond to it if God called for you to pull up your roots and travel
somewhere, not being sure where “somewhere” was, but assured by God that He
would eventually reveal your destination?
Well, we see in the scriptures that Abram
didn’t reject God and come up with a multitude of reasons why he and his family
couldn’t go. Instead, he just went as the Lord had told him, taking his wife
Sarai (later to be Sarah), his nephew Lot, and all the possessions they had
accumulated in Haran, and they set out for wherever God would guide him (a land
we know would be Canaan).
Abraham didn’t know where God was leading
him. And he had no idea what God wanted him to do. All he knew was that God had
made a promise to him and called him to go and that’s exactly what he did in
obedience.
In Exodus, Chapter 3, we find Moses, another
figure who was called out of his comfort zone. I mean, he was minding his own
business tending to the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, when at Horeb he
encountered an odd scene: a bush that was burning, but not being consumed by
the flames. He curiously went to look at the bush and found out it had one
other strange feature, it talked and the voice was none other than the Lord
Almighty Himself who was calling Moses from shepherding sheep to shepherding
the Israelites away from the oppression of Pharoah and the Egyptians.
Now that was going to be a change don’t you
think? Minding sheep was one thing. Opposing the powerful Pharoah was quite
another. Again, imagine yourself as Moses. It would have been a pretty
harrowing prospect, don’t you think?
So how did Moses handle the Lord’s request?
Did he see himself as being able to do this?
Well, God’s word tells us that Moses was
not quite as compliant as Abraham. In fact, Moses doubted he was the right guy
for the job saying:
“Who
am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”
Maybe you and I would feel the same way.
But God assured Moses that he was up to the task because He would be with him
and deliver him to victory. And that’s exactly what happened.
Move a little later in the Old Testament
and you will be introduced to a man named Jonah, a man called to serve who
reacted differently than either Abraham or Moses. You may remember how God
called him out of his comfort zone…He told Jonah to “Go to the
great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because of its wickedness”, a
harrowing task given the incredible power and might of the Assyrian empire.
Well, after receiving this tasking, Jonah
didn’t question God, wondering whether He had selected the right man.
This is because he was too busy running
away from God’s plan all together.
The Bible tells us that he got underway on
a ship destined for Tarshish thinking he would flee the Lord. But instead,
Jonah ended up overboard and swallowed up by a great fish where he would spend
three days and nights weighing his poor decision to defy God and choosing
whether he would change his mind and trust and obey God or be digested by the
fish. Facing that set of choices has a way of bring a person to their senses
and the Scriptures tell us that Jonah, in the midst of his dilemma, turned to
the Lord in prayer and said:
“I,
with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you.”
And as God saw his change of heart, He had
the fish spit Jonah onto dry land before ordering Jonah again to go to Nineveh
and deliver the news of their impending doom.
And as you might have guessed, this time he
went.
Wouldn’t it have been so much easier if
Jonah would have just obeyed God from the start?
There’s definitely a lesson for all of us
as we are called to serve in ways that we might not want.
Well, the examples of biblical figures who
were faced with responding to the word of God were not limited to the Old
Testament.
Consider the first disciples called by
Jesus: Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, and brothers James and John. They
were doing well fishing the Sea of Galilee when Jesus walked into their lives
and promised to make them fishers of men (Mark 1:14-20). And in response to the
call, the four fisherman immediately left their nets to follow Him. They had no
idea what fishing for men really meant but they had faith enough in Jesus to
follow Him and find out.
Sometimes we just need to go as Christ
commands and trust that he will show us the way He wants us to serve as we walk
with Him.
Then there was Paul. You see, Paul had no
idea what the Lord had in store for him to include a name change from Saul, the
name he bore as he persecuted and murdered Christians. You’ll remember one
instance where he presided over the stoning of Stephen, one of the seven chosen
to support the disciples after Christ’s ascension (Acts 8:1). Saul had no
interest in Christ except killing those who he found following Him. He was on
the road to Damascus to continue doing just that when he met Jesus, and not in
a pleasant way I might add, but it was an encounter that changed Paul’s life
forever as well as the lives of countless others who would come to find
salvation through his passionate evangelistic work.
You remember the encounter on the road to
Damascus, don’t you?
As Saul walked with his entourage, he was
struck down blind before having dialogue with what was to him at that moment…an
unseen, unknown force.
“Saul,
Saul, why do you persecute me?” the voice asked.
“Who
are you, Lord?” replied Saul.
“I
am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” He replied. “Now get up and go into the
city, and you will be told what you must do.”
And with the help of others to get him to
Damascus, Paul did what Jesus commanded.
Now given his own devices, Saul probably
would have never changed and become Paul, the greatest apostle ever. He needed
Christ to intervene in a powerful way on that Damascus road and maybe you’re a
lot like Saul. Maybe you have rejected Christ’s call to serve and advance the
Gospel, a call all Christians have received, and are doing nothing productive
for His cause and the cause of others. You aren’t running from the call as much
as you are just ignoring it and don’t doubt that Jesus can and will initiate a
Damascus moment in your life, a time when He’ll powerfully strike you at the
core of your soul to draw you to Him and His work.
The truth is that Jesus Christ is more than
ready to do what it takes to win you over for His purpose.
You see, Jesus could have destroyed Saul
for how he murdered Christians but He didn’t. Instead, He made Saul blind to
the sinful way he was living only to allow him to open his eyes to new
possibilities of service that would bring people to life, and not just any life,
but life eternal. Indeed, Paul’s identity changed after his Damascus moment and
as he wrote letters to the Christian churches he helped Jesus sow seeds of
salvation, now identifying himself as Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus. Indeed,
he had come a long way from the murderous Saul he once was.
So what should we learn from this?
If you wish to change today, know Jesus is
ready to receive you and put you to work. If you haven’t accepted Jesus as your
personal Savior, then today is the day He can and will change your life
forever. Or maybe you are a Christian but have decided to turn away from your
obligation to serve Him and others. Again, today you can change all that and
make a renewed commitment to partner with Christ in powerful ways in the new
year and beyond. Whatever the case, I pray that you’ll come forward during our
invitation after this message to affirm your willingness to sacrifice yourself
in service as Christ sacrificed Himself for you.
So we’ve talked about Abraham, Moses, Jonah,
the first disciples, and Paul. Now let’s talk about Mary, the mother of Jesus and
the focus of today’s scripture passage. She too faced a daunting task from the
Lord, one that would definitely take her out of her comfort zone, placing her
under public shame and scorn.
As our pastor highlighted a few Sundays
ago, Mary was a virgin who was pledged to be married to Joseph but it was far
different than our modern day engagements. A Jewish betrothal period was
definitely a more stringent, binding agreement. There was to be no sexual
relations during this period; in fact, the two future mates couldn’t even live
together and the engagement could only be broken by divorce. It was as if the
couple was quasi-married before they actually were.
So imagine all this now as you consider the
scene in our scripture passage.
The angel Gabriel, sent by God, suddenly
enters into Mary’s life one day. Now I’m sure she had a routine she followed
like any of us do. She had an idea of what she would be doing that day, what
she would be doing in the coming days, and through her betrothal, she knew what
the future was holding for her.
But her plans and her life were about to be
changed in a big way.
Gabriel detailed it all for her. Mary had
found God’s favor and would soon conceive, giving birth to a son who would be
great and called the Son of the Most High, a son who would reign over Israel
and the rest of God’s kingdom forever, a son who was to bear the name Jesus.
Imagine being Mary for a moment. How would
you feel at that point? Wouldn’t you feel like she did, afraid and confused?
It was all so hard to believe and Mary’s
words underscore that as she asks Gabriel how what he said could ever happen as
she was a virgin, unmarried, and forbidden to have sexual relations. How would
she ever be able to conceive?
Gabriel explains starting in verse 36. For
Mary would not be impregnated naturally but supernaturally through the power of
the Most High and the Holy Spirit. And just in case Mary doubted that miracles
like this could happen, Gabriel reminds her that Elizabeth, Mary’s relative,
was going to have a child even though she was in her latter years with
conception believed to be an impossibility. The angel of the Lord used this to
assure Mary that God’s word was true and would never fail.
We need to remember this in our own lives
when God calls us to do something out of our comfort zone.
So God’s plan for Mary had been revealed.
She was going to become pregnant even though it would not result from intimacy with
any man. I think any ordinary person in Mary’s time would resist this notion. I
mean, think of the enormous social ramifications it would bring.
Everyone knew Mary was betrothed to Joseph
and was not yet married. And now, imagine their reaction as Mary began to show as
Jesus is growing inside her. There would be no doubt she was with child and
there would be no doubt the questions and criticism would come. Maybe they
sounded a little like these:
Who is the father of your child?
Did you and Joseph get together before the
marriage or is it someone else’s baby?
Either way, you knew what you were supposed
to do. You have sinned before God and should be cursed. You’ve disgraced your
family and are a disgrace to our community. You deserve to die.
The pregnancy could and did take its toll
on Joseph too. From the Gospel of Matthew, we know Joseph would have His own
personal struggle with the matter and planned to quietly divorce Mary to try
and minimize the disdain she would already be experiencing. In order to resolve
the matter with Joseph, it took another intervention by Gabriel to explain to
him about the divine conception that was in progress. And Joseph chose to
comply with what the Lord wanted him to do, staying the course to take Mary as
his wife.
Yes, there were a multitude of things that
could have led Mary to resist and even reject this special calling, a unique
form of service unto her God. But she didn’t and this is what makes Mary one of
the more amazing people in the Bible.
For despite everything that could and would
happen to her through the conception to come, Mary simply said:
“I
am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.”
Her words inspire us because they display
an incredible faith and trust in God that defies our human reasoning. It would
have been easy for Mary to say, “no”, but she didn’t because above all things,
she was the Lord’s servant.
Yes, God’s plan definitely brings us to
unexpected places with purposes different from our own. And He can and will
take us from our comfort zones, places where we can easily reason His call
away.
But God doesn’t just call us into His plan
but He instructs us and empowers us to carry that plan out.
Think about it. Would the Lord call you
into His service for you NOT to succeed?
No, the Lord executes plans that will end
up just the way He wants them to. And He will instruct and
empower us as He uses us to ensure His will is done on earth just as He did
with everyone we have talked about this morning.
God told Abraham to go and become the
Father of Israel. And then He went with Abraham to see it through.
Moses was directed to lead and deliver
Israel from oppression, pointing them toward the Promised Land. And God divided
the seas so they could escape on dry land and then helped them through their
wilderness journey to Canaan.
Jonah was told to go to Nineveh and
proclaim God’s message, the word that Nineveh would be destroyed in 40 days.
And although Jonah ran at first, he realized that following God’s plan and
going to Nineveh was better than being fish food. As a result, God showed Jonah
that He will see His plans through to fruition as Nineveh’s people repented and
changed their hearts, turned from their evil ways, and experienced God’s grace
and mercy as He relented from His intended judgment.
As for Saul, well Ananias would be sent by
the Lord to go to him and relay the message that he would be the Lord’s chosen
instrument to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles and their
kings and to the people of Israel. And after Ananias touched Saul’s eyes
enabling him to see again, Saul would become Paul and would do just that, fully
realizing along the way that there is sometimes suffering and hardship attached
to fully committing yourself to the cause of Christ.
Friends, maybe today the Lord is removing
the blindness from your eyes and is revealing His purposes to you. Maybe He’s
ready to change your life forever, bringing you to adopt an attitude like Mary,
a humble attitude that responds to the Lord’s call to service by simply saying:
“I
am the Lord’s servant. May your word be fulfilled in my heart and my life now
and forever.”
Yes, God’s word calls us from our comfort
zone and He does so with no notion of failure. Rather, He is fully ready to
instruct and empower us by way of the Holy Spirit, ensuring His plans will ALWAYS
succeed. Remember that He can do all things and so can we when we submit to Him
and His will and His strength. Then and only then, will we discover, like the
changed Paul did, that we can do all things through the power of the living
Christ living and abiding within us (Philippians 4:13).
So what’s left?
We know we’re called and will be called to
do things we never imagined we might do and we know God will give us everything
we need to answer and fulfill that call.
Well, the only thing needed now to put
things in motion is our obedience.
You see, God can call us to a plan, ready
to instruct and empower us toward success, but things only move forward when we
respond to His calling in action through faith. There’s no doubt that God
expects this from us, to not doubt what He’s calling us to do but rather to go
when called, compliant to whatever He wants us to do.
Abraham, Moses, Jonah (and we could even
add Noah here), the first disciples, Paul, and Mary, the mother of our beloved
Savior Jesus, were all examples of ordinary people like you and me who were
called by God for extraordinary purposes and they responded in obedience, even
if it had to be coaxed or even forced in some circumstances.
Going back to Mary, she never questioned
what was about to happen to her or choose to debate God through Gabriel about
what He was asking her to do. Rather, she submitted fully despite knowing the
road ahead would not be an easy one. She didn’t opt to remain a virgin but
instead freely received the divine conception of the Holy Spirit, and in doing
so, she changed the course of mankind forever.
Now I’m not saying the Lord is ready to
call you to do something to change mankind but then again, maybe He is because
you can never underestimate what God is doing in and through you. Stranger
things have happened in the history of creation, that’s for sure, but one thing
is certain, being a Christian equals being like Christ. This babe, soon to be
born of Mary in Bethlehem’s manger, is no ordinary child. For He would grow up
to be a Servant King and not just any servant but a perfect Servant,
One who never hesitated to put others ahead of Himself, One who willingly was
crucified for us, dying so we might live.
After all, it was His destiny (remember
that He was always about His Father’s business) and it was His Father’s plan
for Him to live and die and then rise on the third day, ascending to sit at His
right hand and, in doing so, pave the way for all those who believe and trust
in Him to follow someday. I pray you are counted in that number.
And so I close with a few questions:
How will you respond to this message from
the Lord today?
If you’re not currently serving, will you
continue to not do so, serving your own desires instead of the Lord’s and
shunning the magnitude of help needed here at our church?
Or will you freely give of your time and
talent self sacrificially toward the good of others just as Mary did and then
as her Son would do, the perfect Servant from whom we draw our identity as
Christians.
Brothers and sisters, as we get set to
receive Jesus, the perfect Servant, into our world and our hearts once again,
let’s all move forward to the new year with a reinvigorated sense of service,
following the lead of Mary and so many others in the Bible who were just like
you and me, ordinary people who God chose to use in extraordinary ways, all
because they were willing to serve.
Amen.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus,
as we prepare to celebrate Your birth, we thank You for the sacrifices You made
on our behalf and the way You humbly served others before Yourself. We pray
that we can serve like You did and commit ourselves to Your will and
calling…for You are truly the Way and the Truth and the Life…and THE only way
to the Father. Reveal Your purpose to us now and in the new year…and guide us
to make a difference in the lives of others as we seek to glorify the Father by
helping all to know and trust in You. Amen.
In Christ,
Mark
PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it.
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