In anticipation of Christmas, amazingly only two weeks away, now we turn our attention this morning to Luke 1, 26 to 38, a familiar passage and one of several passages that proceed and anticipate the account of Christ's birth as recorded in Luke 2. And as you've heard me say on a number of occasions now, familiar passages are hard to hear because when we get to them, we tend to shift into autopilot because we already know what to expect. Now if it's true that familiar passages are hard to hear and therefore hard to preach and it is, then I think it is equally true that familiar seasons can be difficult to manage for the same reasons. And that is precisely where we find ourselves this morning. In a familiar season, looking at a familiar passage, nevertheless, while all of that is true, there's something else to consider here and it's this. You are not the same person today that you were last year. You see things differently than you did before. Some things you probably see better and more clearly. Some things you may see a lot less clearly than you did previously. And because of that, things have occurred to you that hadn't occurred to you before. And your life situation, well that has changed too undoubtedly. Some of the changes have been quite significant, others perhaps not so much. Things that weren't even on your radar this time last year or right there now, sit or stage, and that means you're paying attention to different things. Your focus is different. You noticed stuff that previously might have gone right past you. Again, you're just not the same person you were last year. And here's something else to consider. The passages that you've read so many times before are always deeper than you realize. They're not changing, mind you, God's truth doesn't do that. But there's always more to them than you think. It's like waiting out into the ocean. You might venture in for a ways and even hit a little level ground for a while. But if you keep moving forward, the ocean floor begins sloping downward and the water gets deeper and deeper. Or to use a mining illustration, just when you think you've recovered every bit of gold that could be found from a particular mine, just when you think you've exhausted a particular section, you stumble across a new vein, a new seam that after a little more excavation reveals even further treasures. And so combining the realities of an inexhaustible treasure trove of truth and a continually changing growing person, but put those two together and you have the necessary conditions for ensuring that once encounter with the Word of God continues to bear fruit and will go on and on bringing new and fresh insights, even when you do return to familiar passages in the midst of familiar seasons. At any rate, that is certainly my hope and prayer for all of us as we turn to the passages before us this morning, before we do let's pray together. Father in heaven, as we turn to you again with this familiar passage of scripture, please help us to hear it anew, to hear the good things that you have for us in your Word, make us more like your Son Jesus as a result of this time, and we pray in His name, amen. Luke 1, 26 to 33, in the 6th month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph of the house of David, and the virgin's name was Mary, and he came to her and said, greetings of favorite one, the Lord is with you. But she was greatly troubled at the saying and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be, and the angel said to her, do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God, and behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his Father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end. The first thing I want us to focus on this morning is Mary's blessing, which is to say, God's blessing upon Mary, God's showing of great favor to Mary. Quite out of the blue, without giving any sort of heads up at all, God just shows up in Mary and Joseph's life, and this showing up, this invasion, if you will, into Mary's life is an occasion of great blessing for her. Now while Mary certainly did not, and could not have seen this coming, she could not have personally guessed or dreamed such a thing would ever happen to her, at the same time what was happening was not without any sort of precedent or foreshadowing, there had been plenty of that. Ever since the beginning, in the earliest history of God's people, all the way back to the Garden of Eden, it was made clear even then that as a consequence of Adam's sin and Eve with him, the God was going to sin to deliver, one who would come and crush the serpents slash Satan, and undue and reverse the lasting effects of the fall, including eventually the abolition and defeat of death itself. And then in the lives of first Abraham, then Isaac and Jacob, and Joseph we see a series of covenants and promises that God made and kept with his people as he was growing them from a family to a tribe and finally to an entire nation, which would then become the setting or the canvas in which and upon which he would further reveal himself, expanding on his original covenant and in particular demonstrating by means of the temple system of sacrifice and atonement just what he was heading toward with his great plan of redemption. And then there was the time of the judges and the kings of Judah and Israel that showed among other things that God's people needed a king but that the king they needed was not to be found among mere men. Even the greatest of human kings, men like David and Solomon, they all revealed their sin and brokenness in various ways, and yet God remained faithful to his people and his purposes, promising that he would one day raise up a king, a descendant of David, who would do and be what none of the kings before him could ever have done or been. And then there was a dark period that followed as first Israel and then Judah spiraled slowly into a greater and greater unfaithfulness even though God very patiently and repeatedly had sent his prophets to warn them to plead with them, call them back to renewed faithfulness. Eventually, as a means of disciplining his own people, God sent them into exile which decimated them as a nation, reducing them to a remnant and a shadow of what they had once been. Even so, in spite of it all, God had not abandoned his people. He had not given up on them. He had not changed his mind or his plan or purposes, one Iota. Everything was still going according to plan. But it had been many years since the exile and since a remnant had returned. Many years, hundreds of years, no further word from the Lord had come, no further prophets had been sent. They were just silence. A silence that was so profound, it was palpable, so profound it was conspicuous. And it was in the midst of this silence that Mary was born and grew up. While we cannot say for sure how detailed her understanding was, she would note out of being quite familiar with the story of her people and of God's interactions with them over the centuries. And she would have grown up hearing these things, remembering them through story and ritual. And the teachings and speculations about the promised deliverer, the Messiah, who he was and what he would be like and what he would do when he came, those things would not have escaped her notice. But it had been so long now. I mean, as far back as anyone in her family could remember, they had talked about this and waited for this and looked for this, prayed for this. But years had come and gone, people were born and died and were buried and still no Messiah came. Perhaps the hope remained for Mary, but it would not be surprising to discover that right alongside the faint hope would have been a healthy amount of doubt or at least a suspicion that if the pattern held, she too would finish her life as those before her did, without having seen her hopes fulfilled. See, I think that's right where Mary was. When out of the blue, she received a shock of her life, and Gabriel said, greetings of favored one, the Lord is with you. And so part of the blessing that comes Mary's way is simply the fact that after all this time, after so much waiting, after so much silence, of all the people that might have been addressed, Mary is the one that God sends, the angel Gabriel to speak to. Now, we'll think about Mary's reaction to and experience of all this in a moment, but before we do, I want to point out another way that Mary was blessed in this encounter, not only in the fact that she was addressed in the way she was, but also, and more importantly, by the content of the substance of what was said. After he gets past the initial greeting, notice that the angel says to Mary, notice the things he says to her, three things in particular stand out here. Firstly, he says, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. Now naming a child is typically the prerogative of the parents, however, throughout the history of God's people. There were certain times and places where God stepped in and took that privilege to himself. And when God did that, the name that he gave on those occasions was suited to the particular and unique purposes that God had ordained for that person. But didn't happen very often. So whenever you see God stepping in and taking over the naming process anywhere in the scriptures, that's a big deal. Well, the same is true here, Mary is told not only that she's going to have a child, she's told what his name will be. And then that too, of course, was an indicator of great things to come, since the name Jesus means savior or deliver, or God is salvation. Secondly, she was told he will be great and be called the son of the most high God. Now to be sure, the whole concept of the Son of God was something that after Jesus did come, would take on a whole new world of meaning. But even in this early stage, it would have been an awesome description to give to someone. Because to say that a person was a son of someone was to say that they were of the essence of that person. And so to describe a person as a son of the most high God, well, that was a pretty astounding claim to make. And even though Mary's understanding of this, as I've said, would have been fairly superficial at this stage, it would still have been enough to evoke a sense of mystery and wonder within her, which in fact the text makes clear is precisely what happened. The third thing she hears is, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father, David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever and one of his kingdom and of his kingdom, and it will be no end. With this third description, we hear the echo of Nathan, the prophet's words, to King David and Second Samuel. The Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house, and when your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom, and he shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. Again, Mary certainly would not have grasped the full significance of this phrase, but she surely would have understood that anyone who was supposed to inherit David's throne and enjoy a never-ending kingdom, well, that would have to be a person such as had never been seen before. And so God's decision to set apart Mary in this way, to involve her in such a pivotal way in his great plans and purposes, was truly a blessing for her, both in the sheer fact of her involvement, and beyond that in the very substance of what was about to happen, as God was going to, through her, bring into the world a person that was so wonderful that God sent an angel to tell her about it, a person about whom things were said that had never been said of any person before or since. Now, the second thing I want you to see this morning is not only the fact of Mary's having been blessed, but also what realistically that meant for her. I want us to see and think about what the experience of blessedness would have looked like and felt like from Mary's perspective. Let me read a passage, as part of the passage, again, to you, backtracking a little bit. And he came to her and said, greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you, but she was greatly troubled at the saying and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God, and behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name, Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his Father, David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever and of his kingdom. There will be no end. And Mary said to the angel, how will this be since I am a virgin? The angel answered, the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you, and therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth, in her old age, has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her, who was called Baron, for nothing will be impossible with God. Now, blessing is a word to get thrown around a lot these days, especially amongst Christians and brightly so. I mean, blessing is a good word. It's a Bible word. It's a word that describes the actions of God toward his people in all sorts of ways. And I hear people praying and asking for God's blessing a lot, perhaps you do too. And that's all fine and good. But my suspicion is that for many people, when they are asking for God's blessing, they are thinking about that fairly one-dimensional. Let me say that again, most Christians, when they think about blessing, they think about that fairly one-dimensionally. The blessedness they are seeking, whatever it might be, is something typically that is positive, affirming, pleasing, comfortable, even exciting. Which is why it's instructive to think about Mary's experience of being blessed as recorded here in Luke. It is challenging and not a little eye-opening to take a moment to consider just how Mary's being favored and blessed would have and did in fact play out for her. One of the first and most obvious things we see is that this whole experience was pretty scary, at least initially. The passage talks about Mary being troubled. Indeed, Gabriel comes right out and tells her not to be afraid, which implies that she in fact was afraid. And if you are familiar with Scripture, then you will know that this is a pretty common reaction on those occasions, where God decides to visit one of His people either personally or through some other manifestation or being like an angel. Now, this time of year, there are typically numerous screenings of the classic Christian, sorry, Christmas movie, it's a wonderful life. And if you know the movie, then you'll know that one of the primary characters is this sort of bumbling but lovable angel named Clarence who is trying to earn his wings. And really, he is quite a pathetic figure, and certainly not one that would evoke the slightest bit of fear and even the most timid of personalities. Let me tell you, that's not how Gabriel came across. He was no Clarence, and so the initial experience for Mary was truly quite unnerving. Not only is the experience scary, it is also one that is mysterious to put it mildly and downright confounding to put it more bluntly. You see this in a couple of places. You see it when the text says Mary was troubled and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. You see it later when after being told what was about to take place, she asks, how will this be since I am a virgin? Good question. I mean, what answer does she get? When the angel answered her, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the most high will overshadow you. I don't know what was going on in her head, but it could well have been something like, could you run that by me again? I mean, Mary is confused. She asks a question. She gets an answer, but the answer she gets doesn't really clear things up very much. I mean, she's not really much further along in understanding that she was before she asked the question. What's the problem? The problem is, Mary asked a great question, but it was a question, the answer for which was beyond her capacity, really, to understand. Lisa and I experience this sort of thing countless times as our kids were growing up. I mean, kids are marvelously, wonderfully curious creatures, especially when they're really little, like two, three, and four. They ask millions of questions about all kinds of things. It's amazing how their minds work. A lot of our kids' questions were pre-routine, but then sometimes they would ask these really great questions, you know, where's the sun going? Why is the sky blue? Why does everything break daddy? And as soon as they ask some of their better questions, you knew sometimes that you were not going to be able to explain it to them in a way that they would really grasp. So what do you do? Well, you do the best you can. You give them an answer that's suited to their level of understanding, and sometimes you just have to say to them, I'll explain that to you one day, but not today. And then there's those times when you have to look at them and say, you know, I don't know. I don't know the answer to your question. And I can remember well those times, and I couldn't really give them the answer they were looking for, and I could see their frustration. But the point is this, kids can ask adult-sized questions, the answers to which are beyond the capacity of their kid-sized understanding in a similar way. When Mary asked, how can this be? She was asking a great question, a huge question, but ultimately a question, and she didn't have the capacity to understand the answer to. And just for the record, I'm quite certain no one in this room has the capacity to understand it either. But you know, God knows our frame, He knows our limits, and He knew Mary's too. And so He gave her an answer, that was both true and yet at the same time incomplete. And I've no doubt that while Mary accepted the answer she got and submitted to it, she would still have had unanswered questions. Still would have been unclear on how it was all going to take place. Still would have felt this whole thing was a bit mysterious. Well, in addition to being frightening and a little confusing, this whole situation would have also been quite awkward, embarrassing, and even scandalous for Mary. And this comes from the fact that Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but she wasn't yet married to Joseph. You see, back in the day a man and a woman would typically be betrothed at one point, but would not be wedded and formally married until some time later, usually at least a year later. Now, it's similar to our system of being engaged and then married, but with the important exception that back then, unlike engagement today, being betrothed to someone was as binding as being married, and in fact the two parties could legally and technically refer to each other as wife and husband, even while they were betrothed. But somewhere between betrothed and married is where Joseph and Mary were when all of this went down, and therein lies the problem. People back then could count to nine as well as the rest of which meant that when this baby arrived, some might do a bit of mental math and, you know, hmm, that's kind of interesting. Sure, she could tell people about the angel, what was told to her, and how the whole thing happened, and perhaps some would believe her, but not everybody would, some people would talk. Now, Joseph, of course, saw all this coming, see Matthew 118 following, and initially seeking to minimize her troubles was going to quietly divorce Mary, that is, Mary would be accused of getting pregnant outside a wedlock, but would escape the additional charge of adultery at least. But after being confronted himself by an angel, Joseph goes ahead with the marriage, and in the process deliberately enters into the shame, and at least the suspicion in which Mary would undoubtedly endure in the eyes of some, their assumption being that it was Joseph who got Mary pregnant, not some angel, all of which is to say, for Mary the experience of being, quote unquote, blessed, the result of her being so favored, at least in part, was that she was frightened, bewildered, and placed in a very awkward and even scandalous position, not to mention the sorts of pains and difficulties that ordinarily go along with caring and then delivering a baby anyway. Now of course, that was not all there was to it, right? There was a great deal that was positive as we've already seen, the privilege of having a child, and not just any child, the very son of God, the privilege of playing such an integral role in the outworking of God's redemptive purpose, the privilege of being remembered, of having your name forever attached to one of the most significant moments in the history of the universe, the privilege of getting to raise this child, God incarnate, and of being daily odd and humbled and amazed as you enjoy this front row seat, I mean, watching the daily growth and development of this beautiful, holy, perfect, sinless child. So there were certainly a lot of good and positive things, but there were the other things as well, these things I've been talking about, the difficult things, the challenging things, hard things. For Mary, being blessed by God was a real mixed bag, frankly, being greatly favored by God, being on the receiving end of God's mercy and kindness was not a one-dimensional reality, it was not all cotton candy and roses, it was glorious and it was terrifying, it was uplifting and it was humbling, it was amazing and it was mystifying, it made Mary both an object of admiration and the subject of unkind gossip and rumors, such as the nature of God's blessing in the midst of a broken world that has yet to be restored. And finally, very quickly, the last thing I want you to see this morning is not only the fact of Mary's blessing and the experience of Mary's being blessed, but also the response that Mary makes to all of this, that is, how she reacts to this astounding, troubling invasion of God into her life. Let me read once more from Luke 1, starting at verse 34. And Mary said to the angel, how will this be since I'm a virgin and the angel answered her, Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the most high will overshadow you, therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God, and he holds your relative Elizabeth, an old age, has also conceived a son and this is the sixth month with her who is called Baron, for nothing will be impossible with God and Mary said, behold, I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word and the angel departed from her. Three things I would highlight here. One of Mary's responses to this amazing revelation of God is curiosity, right? How will this be, she asks? She wants to understand, she wants to know what all this means, and not just what it means objectively, but what it's going to mean for her. That's certainly a natural and legitimate response to this glorious, invasive revelation of God into her life. Another response you see here is one of humble acceptance. She accepts God's answer to her question, even though it doesn't tell her everything she might have wanted to know. She accepts the fact that God is working with her on a kind of need-to-know basis. She understands that identifying with and following this God means humbly accepting and trusting, his sovereignty, his wisdom, his power, and his goodness. It means sometimes not fully understanding what is going on or how things are going to happen, but still trusting the one who is responsible for it. Hold, I am the servant of the Lord, she says. And along with that, you see here a willing subordination of whatever her life agenda might have been up till then. I mean, whatever Mary might have thought about, or planned for, or expected, or hoped for, whatever trajectory she might have thought her life was on, she now knows differently. She understands that she really is a small, although important part of a much bigger plan. So she says, let it be to me according to your word. Well, there is, of course, a certain uniqueness to what God did, and through, in and through his servant Mary, and the events associated with her certainly will never be repeated, given the nature of the case. God nevertheless is still in the business of sovereignly, mercifully invading the lives of men and women, and calling people into the midst of his ongoing purposes of redemption. People today are still coming face to face with God's self-revelation, and particularly with that revelation centered upon the person of his son, which we know as the gospel, the good news of the Lord Jesus Christ. And just as with Mary, the revelation of what God has done and sending his son into the world to take on human flesh, that is an invitation to wonder, to be amazed, astounded, and even bewildered by what God has done. It is an invitation to ask real questions, to want to know and understand, to ask the Lord what all of this means, not just objectively, but what it means for you. Further just as with Mary, the revelation of God's purposes and sending his son calls for our humble acceptance. And be sure we can't ask questions. We can seek understanding, and we can make great strides in these things. There is a great deal that we can know and make sense of. But there's also the reality that, sooner or later, we get to the place where our questions are bigger than our capacity to understand the answers. We get to the place where we confront the difference between a sufficient revelation and an exhaustive one. Well we have to reckon with the fact that God has told us everything we need to know, but not everything that could be known. We get to the place where like Mary, we trust him because of who he is, and not because we know everything about him or because we completely understand what he's doing all the time. We trust him in the way we expect our own children to trust us, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Still further, and also like Mary, God's revelation of his purposes and in through his son calls for our glad and willing submission. It's an invitation to sink our smaller agendas with God's greater one, and it's an invitation to learn by that submission, that when you subordinate your plans and coordinate your purposes with God's, it doesn't mean you give up on your dreams. It means you find out how short-sighted those dreams actually were. It means you trade them in for better dreams and better purposes, things that you could not and would not have planned, but which when you're on the other side of them, and indeed even when you are in the midst of them, you know you are right where you need to be as crazy as that can sometimes seem. When you get to one of those vantage points in your life where you turn around and look back on the path you've been taking and taken the full view, you know that the only way you could have arrived where you have arrived was by going through what God took you through. To seek to understand, humbly accept and willingly submit. Let's part together.