Mary's Song and God's Glory

Friday, December 23, 2022

Mary responded, “Oh, how my soul praises the Lord.  How my spirit rejoices in God my Savior!  For he took notice of his lowly servant girl, and from now on all generations will call me blessed.  For the Mighty One is holy, and he has done great things for me.  He shows mercy from generation to generation to all who fear him.  His mighty arm has done tremendous things!  He has scattered the proud and haughty ones.  He has brought down princes from their thrones and exalted the humble.  He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away with empty hands.  He has helped his servant Israel and remembered to be merciful.  For he made this promise to our ancestors, to Abraham and his children forever.”  Luke 1:46-55

There is something of an idyllic impression which persists about Mary, the teen virgin;  she is untouched, and therefore “perfect”.  That is not supported in Scripture.  In fact, Scripture goes to great lengths to debunk that notion.  Old Testament prophet, Isaiah pointed to the universality of human sin:

We are all infected and impure with sin.  When we display our righteous deeds, they are nothing but filthy rags.  Like autumn leaves, we wither and fall, and our sins sweep us away like the wind.  Isaiah 64:6

New Testament apostle Paul reaffirmed total human depravity:

As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:  For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; Romans 3:10, 23

If all that falls short of convincing, even Jesus said it plainly:

“Only God is truly good.  Mark 10:18

What is untainted in Mary’s case is not sinlessness of the vessel, but the immaculateness of conception…the fact that Jesus had no earthly father.  Mary was simply the host chosen by God to participate in God’s plan.  It was a miracle that she became pregnant, sidestepping the order of things in the natural, or biological sense.  But there was no circumventing the spiritual order of things; Mary was a human, born of a lengthy line of sinners, stretching back to Adam.  It’s often made note of Mary’s (and therefore Jesus’) family heritage, which included harlots (Rahab), and conspirators in murder (King David).  For God to choose Mary, it was the love of God for all humanity, laying aside the prerogatives of deity, choosing mercy and forgiveness to offer holiness to undeserving humankind.  It was nothing less, or more, than grace

It is no wonder Mary sang a song of blessing; even as a human, especially another sinful human like you or me, she could see she wasn’t worthy, except for the gracious love of God wrapping holy arms around her life.  She was overwhelmed by kindness and joy.

For You Today  

We have an immediate identity with Mary.  She wasn’t naïve enough to imagine she was beginning a road-trip paved with rose petals and sunshine; her position was dangerous and swimming upstream all the way.  Her “blessedness” (which we only see from this side of the story) is that she would be overshadowed by the glory it would bring to God. 

Mary’s story, God’s glory, our choice to follow.  True disciples of Jesus Christ can never be bored with hum-drum lives; it’s a path like no other.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these: 

   Highly Favored   and   Mary's Song; Our Song

Images:  Title Annunciazione by DaVinci via Wikimedia Commons   Images without citation are either personal property of the author, or in public domain.

Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©   

Doing Good

 

Monday, November 16, 2020

There will be trouble and calamity for everyone who keeps on doing what is evil—for the Jew first and also for the Gentile.  But there will be glory and honor and peace from God for all who do good—for the Jew first and also for the Gentile.  For God does not show favoritism.  Romans 2:9-11

There is a God-ordained balance to everything under the sun.  From the first rays of creation God chose to have the results of His work involved in spreading “good” and dispelling evil.  This is characteristic of God’s nature; He is good!

Adam and Eve quickly disproved that we are capable of sustaining personal goodness.  Jesus chided the man who came to him and called him Good rabbi, informing the man that only God is good.  Paul the apostle said the same in no uncertain terms, that we are all sinners, and that included himself:

And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.  I want to do what is right, but I can’t.  Romans 7:18

Fast-forward a couple of millennia and you have our day, truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne…we are still proving Jesus’ point that humanity is incapable of sustaining “goodness”. 

Yet, in today’s reading, Paul asserts there will be glory, honor, and peace for all who do good.  So, what gives, Paul?  Is there a possibility to enter that category of those who are blessed for “doing good”?  Or are we consigned to failure in our epic attempts to overcome our no-good selves with doing good?  The answer is a simple answer (to those with ears to hear) … yes and no.  Well, thanks, that clears it up.

Seriously…the answer is “yes” if all the so-called good we do is what we can do; we are doomed to fail in our own strength.  On the other hand, that reward of glory, honor, and peace is available to those whose lives are surrendered to Christ, being led (empowered) by the Spirit of God, not just personal advancement thru works. 

In Acts 8 Simon, a man who gained fame and wealth by using witchcraft saw the apostles laying hands on people so they would receive the Holy Ghost.  Simon saw the advantage of that power and offered the apostles money to have that gift of laying on hands.  Peter saw through this veiled offer to do good and told Simon he and his money would be destroyed for such evil.  In this we see the contrast of Peter, doing good works for the sake of God’s will, and Simon, barging-in with a plan to do powerful stuff to boost his popularity ratings.  An apostle was led and empowered by the Spirit of God; the other carrying on the tradition of evil with a false face of good to float a lie.

And the beat goes on…in politics, business, daily life, and even the church.  It is no wonder Scripture cautions us to pray without ceasing; our hearts are so prone to wander from God and into evil.  As the hymn has it:

Oh, to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee:
prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love;
here's my heart, O take and seal it; seal it for thy courts above. 

This is the kind of transparent, honest prayer which surrenders our hearts and lives to the keeping of God and invites the Spirit of God to do the good works of God’s Kingdom through us. 

It is the Spirit who empowers any genuine goodness.

For You Today

Whatever good you do today will never get off the ground unless your knees hit that ground first.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

GO TO VIDEO

Title image, Pixabay.com   W   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©

For other posts on Psalm 90 see:  The God of Equal Opportunity and  The Road that Leads Home  

 

He Was Crushed...for us

[i][ii]

Thursday, April 11, 2019

But it was the Lord’s good plan to crush him and cause him grief.  Yet when his life is made an offering for sin, he will have many descendants.  He will enjoy a long life, and the Lord’s good plan will prosper in his hands.  When he sees all that is accomplished by his anguish, he will be satisfied.  And because of his experience, my righteous servant will make it possible for many to be counted righteous, for he will bear all their sins.  I will give him the honors of a victorious soldier, because he exposed himself to death.  He was counted among the rebels.  He bore the sins of many and interceded for rebels.    Isaiah 53:10-12

The process of doing theology is, simply put, attempting to get your mind wrapped around what God has said and done.  It’s as one of my professors at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, Fischer Humphries said:  Theology is thinking about God.  At the risk of presumption, I also believe it includes trying to make sense of the why of what God does.  And if there’s one concept that makes my head hurt it’s that God had Isaiah write that crushing Jesus was the Lord’s good plan.  What?  In my limited human capacity for understanding, it is hard to wrap my hurting head around how crushing your only much-loved son with a savage beating, mockery, wrongful conviction, and an infamous, brutal death, nailed like a naked buzzard to a cross on the town garbage dump could possibly be a good plan.

Now, I know asking a question of God’s motive almost treads on the holy ground of questioning God’s character.  However, this question is not one of How could, you, God; it is more like, please help me understand, God, so I can better worship and serve you.

And I think in order to understand this concept of a Father crushing his beloved son, we need the Holy Spirit’s help to get higher than our earth-bound understanding.  With that prayer offered from my heart, let me take a stab at it.  I believe there are these few necessary pieces to help understand this complex syllogism:

1.     Faith – you must, in order to believe, believe first! 

2.     Faith – you must trust that God is truly good; since, according to Scripture[iii], God is entirely good by nature, every God-deed is incapable of evil.

3.     Faith – this was God’s plan, and its goodness is odd (considering our use of the word “good” usually means “more” or “easier” or “palatable”).  But in God’s loving actions “good” is more equated with true, benevolent, and righteous.  Some not so easy, plentiful, or palatable course-corrections on behalf of a disobedient human family are what God has taken to Himself.

So it begins with faith, and it’s all about faith.  We can easily see in Scripture the holiness of Jehovah.  Virtually every page of the Bible points in some way to the other-ness of God, His holy nature and righteous ways.  No evil may even exist in His presence.  For us to ever have a hope of meeting God without being turned away because of our unholiness, there had to be a cleansing.  And because of the life issue…blood was the cost.  And because unholy blood wouldn’t suffice, it was the crushing of the holy that became God’s good plan.

In a simple illustration with which I live every day, I offer my bride.  Elizabeth got that cleanliness is next to Godliness thing as a dominant gene!  Russell…not so much!  Sometimes it is difficult to wrap my head around why every stick of furniture must be moved at least 412 times during the year to dust under there, but Elizabeth knows what it takes to have a home that actually IS clean and smells fresh without the use of cover-up sprays. 

In the same way, God won’t compromise on holiness requirements.  If you’re going to be “clean” from the inside out, it will never do to count on anything other than (or less than) the sacrifice that crushed Jesus for our rebellion!

For You Today

He was crushed for our rebellion – believe it or not, the only acceptable approach to the throne of God is to receive that forgiveness…and it is only a humble, heartfelt prayer away.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day.

Go to VIDEO

---

[i] Title Image:   Pixabay.com

[ii] Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from The New Living Translation©

[iii] Mark 10:18 (and many more)