Take your Bibles turn to the Gospel of Luke chapter 1.
Luke chapter 1. It's page 908.
If you're using one of the Bibles in the seat around you as
you're opening up to Luke 1, I have the privilege of welcoming
another new member to our church family.
So would you join me in welcoming Elsa Dublik in the
membership here at Forward? And if you call forward your
church home, but you're not yet a member, I want to encourage
you to take that step, joining us in in this covenant that we
have together to love each other and to live on this mission that
God's called us to together. You can just text the word
member to our text line and that'll get the process started
for you. Many of you have grown up in
church your whole life or since you were a young child.
And so, you know some songs that you learned as a kid in church.
And so you're going to have to help me.
Otherwise we're singing a solo right now.
So we're going to sing a song. I'm going to start it.
I want to make sure. I want to see if you remember
this song for those of you who didn't grow up in church.
Just bear with the rest of us for a second.
OK? All right.
So I've got the where where. Where?
Wow, very good. All right.
Then there was another one that was, I'm not going to sing it,
but there was like, I've got peace like a river, love like an
ocean, joy like a fountain in my soul, in my soul.
Forgot about that part, right. For those of you who are new to
church, I'm sorry we're not normally this weird.
I know that thinking about those songs brings all kinds of things
to our minds. There's literally hundreds of
things that can bring you joy in life, things that make you
happy. But I also know that for a lot
of us, as we go through life, life has a way of sucking the
joy out of us. If you're like most Canadians,
you're actually losing your sense of happiness. 10 years
ago, Canada was considered the 5th happiest country in the
world. Today we are ranked as the 18th
happiest country in the world. If you want to be happy, move to
Norway. That is the apparently the
happiest place in the world is Norway.
I don't know why, but that's the way it is.
I deep down inside every single human being, I, I know we all
just want to be happy. We want joy.
Every day. We're making decisions with our
lives that is based on the idea of how can I find happiness?
What's going to make me happy today?
What's going to bring that joy into my life?
It's something we long for in life, and that's what Advent is
all about. Advent is about this sense of
longing for something. So this week as we continue
through our Advent series, we're going to look at the longing for
joy that we all have as humans by exploring the story of a
young woman who had just had her entire world turned upside down,
and yet somehow she is incredibly happy and filled with
joy. So look at verse 46 of Luke
chapter 1. And Mary said, my soul magnifies
the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.
I want you to put yourself in Mary's shoes just for the next
couple of minutes. You're a young teenage girl.
You're betrothed to be married to a guy by the name of Joseph.
And betrothal is like engagement, but more serious
than engagement. It actually comes with some
legal binding agreement that you make to get married to this man.
And then one day out of nowhere, an Angel shows up and says to
you, fear not, which immediately would make you what?
Be afraid because an Angel just showed up and said, don't be
afraid. And then the Angel says that not
only should you not be afraid, but you're going to have a baby.
And you're thinking to yourself, but I haven't been intimate with
anyone yet. How am I going to have a baby?
And the Angel says it's going to be the Holy Spirit's baby.
And on top of all that, not only are you going to carry a baby,
but the the baby is going to be the Messiah that everybody's
been waiting for. Now, if you have ever been a
mom, a first time mom, you remember all the pressures that
you felt bringing a child into the world and raising a child.
Those pressures don't compare at all to being told, hey, you're
going to be a first time mom who's also raising the son of
God. Life just got really complicated
for Mary. She's, she's dealing with a
pregnancy outside of marriage, which is going to carry this
incredible social risk. She could be rejected by
everyone. How in the world is she going to
explain this to her family? How is she going to explain this
to Joseph of all people? She could have faced public
punishment because she was having a child outside of
marriage. Her present and her future are
incredibly uncertain. And here she comes in verse 46
and 47, these verses we just read, and she comes across as
the happiest person that you've ever met.
She's rejoicing. She says her heart is
overflowing with joy in this moment.
Now, all of us have met those people that we think you are
annoyingly happy. And sometimes it seems like no
matter what's going on in their life, they're just happy all the
time. And I think that some of us
would have felt this way about Mary.
She she would have come across as being a little bit annoyingly
happy. That's how overflowingly happy
she is. But if we're honest, there's
also a part of us that's a little envious of people who are
happy all the time because deep down side, all of us want that
same kind of joy. Every single person I've ever
known wants to be happy. And the question we all ask and
wrestle with day in and day out, whether we're thinking about it
consciously or subconsciously, is where do I find that kind of
joy? Where do I find that kind of
happiness? The story of Mary teaches us
that joy is the fruit of what you trust to bring you life.
I think about the things that make you happy besides the Blue
Jays. For me, one of the things that
makes me so happy is experiencing little kids running
around our house again. One and two year old kids.
There's just something about sitting on the floor watching a
toddler come running at me to give me a big hug and kind of
tackle me to the ground. It's the most amazing thing.
And listen to them giggle as they do it.
Now I might throw my back out sometimes and not be able to get
back up, but it's amazingly fun when they do that.
What are the things that make you happy?
The truth is, the strength of your joy will be directly
connected to the strength of what you're placing your trust
in. We've all experienced this.
When people rely on things that are temporary to make them
happy, their joy's like a roller coaster.
You're only as happy as life is good.
When life gets rough, we lose our joy.
Like if you're a sports fan, when are you the happiest?
When your team's doing well. Your joy disappears.
When your team can't score any more runs in the bottom of the
ninth inning. This game seven of the World
Series, I'm not bitter. I'm just getting it out.
When you are at work or you are at home, we're all the happiest.
When things are going well, when your relationships with family
are in a good spot, you're happy.
When you've had a good productive day at work and
things are going well at work, you're happy about it.
But as soon as someone starts to let us down, as soon as somebody
does something that makes life more difficult other at work or
otherwise, you're going, man, my joy is just gone.
I'm I'm not happy anymore. And so we pursue more money,
thinking money can make us happy and money can buy you some
things that you'll feel happy in a moment, but it's only going to
take you so far. If you go back to verse 44 and
45, in Luke 1, Mary's visiting her cousin Elizabeth.
Elizabeth is also pregnant, and she hears Mary greeting her off
of the distance. And as Elizabeth hears Mary
greeting her in the distance, her own baby leaps for joy
inside of her, which is just amazing when you think about it.
In a world that wants to say a baby isn't a baby until they're
born. I got to tell you something.
A baby leaping for joy inside their mother's womb, that's a
human life right there. It's amazing that joy can start
even in the womb for a baby. And Elizabeth says, Mary, you're
blessed. Happy is the one who's believed
the Lord. And Mary's response is, I
rejoice in God my Savior. Her joy is not manufactured.
She's not the greeter at your local store who's just putting
on a happy face because she has to.
She's genuinely filled with joy. Why?
Because she's put her hope in God and she's at complete peace
that God's in control. If you're struggling today to
find joy in your life, I want you to think about something,
whatever it is that you wish would happen so that you could
be happier. That is simply an indicator of
what you are placing your hope in to bring you joy.
But Mary's response teaches us that joy grows best when God is
magnified the most. See, every single one of us
magnifies someone or something all the time.
What what you talk about and what you think about and what
you trust in, that's what you are magnifying.
You're, you're lifting up something in your mind and in
your words and your conversations.
You're magnifying that person or that thing.
And when you're feeling good about life, what are the things
that you think and talk about? That's what you're magnifying in
your life. And when you're not feeling good
about life, what are the things that you're focused on that
you're lifting up and magnifying and talking about?
Like when life is not going good?
If if you're like me, you're saying things like, well, if I
just had and you just fill in the blank, I'd be happy.
Or if that other person would just do this, I'd be happy.
And when all else fails, I'll just work harder to try to
figure out how to make myself happy.
And so you focus all of your attention, your energy on
strategizing and planning on how you're going to make yourself
happy. And I'm not saying that you
shouldn't talk about your desires or the good or the hard
things in life. But what I am saying is that
what you magnify the most, what you talk about and focus on the
most, what you trust in the most, that's going to influence
and shape your level of happiness and joy.
In all the chaos that Mary's experiencing here and all the
uncertainties for her own life, she makes a choice to magnify
God. She she doesn't focus on
anything temporary that could have made her life a little bit
easier. She magnifies the eternal God
that she believes is in control of all things and has her good
at heart. Now I know you hear somebody say
things like magnify God. We sing songs about magnifying
God, but we don't even know what that practically looks like in
our lives. You can grow up in church your
entire life and have heard the phrase go and magnify God.
What does that really mean and look like day-to-day?
And so for the rest of this message, I want to unpack how
Mary magnify God over her circumstances and see how that
can help strengthen joy in our own lives.
The first thing that I want you to see is that God is magnified
when you celebrate his favor in your life.
Look at verse 48 and 49. Because He has looked with favor
on the humble condition of His servants.
Surely from now on all generations will call me
blessed, because the mighty One has done great things for me,
and His name is holy. Mary enters into what is often
called the Magnificat here. The Magnificat is a beautiful
and powerful song or poem that she is singing and declaring
that's coming from her heart to magnify God.
You know, when we think about our own lives as humans and we
ask ourselves what is it that makes us happy?
If you are like most people, the thing that makes you happiest
are the relationships in your life.
Harvard did a study recently and said that it's not money, it's
not knowledge, it's not living out your dreams, it's not your
social status or your health or your sex life that makes people
the happiest. It's when our relationships are
in a good spot. Relationships at home, with our
friends, with the people we work with.
When those relationships are in a good place, we just feel
satisfied and filled with joy. I want you to think about
something. We love and we find joy in
relationships. And the reason why we find joy
in relationships is because you and I have been created by a God
who made us for a relationship. And the joy that you find in
relationship with other people is meant to be a taste to give
you a sense that there is actually a greater relationship
that you get to have. It's meant to give you a little
taste that you get to have a relationship with God Himself.
When you are adopted by God to be His child, you get to be in a
relationship with the Almighty God.
There is no greater relationship you can possibly have.
That's the favor of God on your life.
If you're here today and you don't know what I'm talking
about, I want to invite you to consider knowing the same Savior
that Mary knew. God knows your search for
happiness, but He also knows that there's only one place you
can go to have that search, that longing for joy, satisfied He.
He wants you to know His favor and His grace in your life, that
there is nothing you can ever do to make God love you more.
There's nothing you can do to earn favor with Him because He's
done it all. He wants you to receive His gift
of salvation from the sin of your life and all that this
world has to offer, and trying to satisfy that desire for joy,
He wants you to know Him so that you can know the only joy that
lasts. The Bible says that Mary
believed what the Lord had spoken to her and salvation is
available for you by believing God with all of your heart and
receiving the salvation that He came to give you.
I think one of the reasons why we sometimes struggle to find
joy even for those of us who are Christians is because we have
too low a view of God. Mary starts off this song by
declaring like you are the Almighty God.
There is. You are holy.
There is nobody like you. You are unique.
Your thoughts are higher than my thoughts.
And who am I as Mary? I'm I'm a nobody.
I'm a young girl living in a village in the middle of
nowhere. And for some reason you have
chosen me for this moment. You've shown your favor to me.
You've chosen me to be part of unfolding your story in this
world. Sure, Mary's life was
complicated, but she says for all of human history, people are
going to call me blessed. I can't get over how kind God
has been to me. I want you to know this.
God shows His favor to save people, but when He saves you,
He also shows His favor by making you part of the story
that He is unfolding in human history, just like He did for
Mary. See, it's not only Mary who gets
to be part of the big story, you and I, we get to be part of it
as well. Ephesians chapter 2 says that we
are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that
you are saved by God and he brings you into this grand story
that he is writing for all of human history to accomplish his
redemptive purposes in this world.
You little you sitting here in Cambridge, ON, of all the
billions of people who've ever walked the face of the earth,
God chose you and you and you and you and you.
He chose you to save you and to make you part of his redemptive
purposes, to show his favor to you.
Like for some of us, the story of God's grace has become so
normalized that we just like it bypasses our thinking all
together. For somehow, somehow we act like
we deserve God's grace in our life.
But when you see God properly for who He is and who you are,
you can't help but be filled with joy, because the Sovereign
Almighty God has shown His favor to you.
Mary's response to this reality that she's experiencing, she
says her spirit rejoices in God, her Savior.
It's a tangible thing. It's overflowing out of her.
Now, I get that part of us wants to be in awe of the majesty of
God and be reflective in our worship around that.
But Mary teaches us that God's grace and favor in our life was
never meant to be something that leads Christians to become more
somber. Church should never feel like a
funeral service. It leads Mary to rejoice because
she's experienced this grace of God.
It's deep down inside and overflowing out of her.
It's good for people who've experienced the favor of God to
celebrate and get excited that they've experienced the grace in
favor of God. Some of you need to try truly
celebrating God's gift of grace in your life.
It might make you a happier person.
The second thing Mary teaches us is that God is magnified when
you reflect on the mercies that He's shown for generations.
Look at verse 50. She says His mercy is from
generation to generation on those who fear Him.
Mary would have known the Old Testament stories and prophecies
of what would need to happen for the Messiah to be born.
Somehow, for dozens of generations, over two dozen
generations, God orchestrates a whole series of events to bring
things to the point where would be Mary, who would carry the Son
of God into the world. That is remarkable mercy.
Think about all the ways that God would have had to show up in
generation after generation after generation, and little
ways and big ways to have it all culminate in this moment where
Mary is now going to have this child.
All the prophecies that had to be fulfilled to come to this
moment in time. When life gets hard, the natural
response that most of us have is to focus on the moment of today.
How am I going to fix this? Is this ever going to change and
get any better? But what we lose sight of is how
God has constantly shown His mercies through generation after
generation after generation in the past.
And if God has shown His mercies from generation after generation
after generation, why is he suddenly going to stop now?
He's not. He's the same God yesterday,
today, and forever, like you here in this room today.
For some of you, if you just think back to the story of your
own family or your own life, for some of you, it's crazy to even
imagine that you'd be sitting here today.
You've got stories of brokenness in your family.
You've got stories in your own life of brokenness.
Maybe at one point in your life you were just mad at God and
wanted nothing to do with them. And yet here you are.
It's the mercy of God in your life.
Some of you've gone through terrible things through
generations of your family, and you're still standing.
It's the mercy of God in your life.
For some of you, you can look back at generations of your own
family and you just see faithful Christians over the course of
your history as a family. You see people who've just built
beautiful families. But I want you to know that's
the mercy of God as well, that one generation after another
generation after another generation, God has shown his
mercy. God is constantly showing his
mercy from one generation to the next.
He sees the brokenness of our lives.
He sees the pain, the things that we're longing for, and he
acts with a desire to bring relief to our lives.
And when we remember the mercies of God from one generation to
the next, suddenly the things that feels so powerful, that
feel like life is never going to get better, the things that
don't make us happy, they lose their power because we're
reminded that there is a God who is clearly greater than all the
challenges of life. But it's not just the past where
God has shown his mercies today. Today there are new mercies for
you. Lamentations chapter 3 tells us
that every day His mercies are new every morning.
And if you're struggling today to find where are God's mercies,
where are they showing up? I challenge you.
I encourage you today, pray and say, God, help me to see your
mercies that are new today. You guys, I, I promise you, part
of the problem is God's. It's not that God's not showing
His mercies, it's just that we're miss seeing them.
We we need to have our eyes open to pay attention to the mercies
that are showing up every day. God is alive and active every
single day showing His mercies to you.
When life is sucking the joy out of you, ask God to help you see
His mercies today. You'd be amazed how many times
they're there now. I know that reflecting on God's
mercies don't always change the present circumstances of life,
which is why Mary's song also reminds us that God is magnified
when you speak about His faithfulness to keep His
promises. Look at verse 51, Mary
continues, and she says He's done a mighty deed with his arm.
He scattered the proud because of the thoughts of their hearts.
He's toppled the mighty from their Thrones and exalted the
lowly. He has satisfied the hungry with
good things and sent the rich away, rich away, empty.
He's helped his servant Israel, remembering his mercy to Abraham
and his descendants forever, just as he spoke to our
ancestors. Mary looks both at God's
promises in the past and God's promises going into the future.
She points back at a promise that God made to Abraham, a
promise to bless all people through his descendants.
And now, as she's carrying this baby, she knows this promise is
about to be fulfilled, that this baby was going to be the king of
a Kingdom that was never going to end.
He would breakthrough into a world where people were living
for themselves and people were oppressing other people, and he
would be the one who would come to bless all people.
Not just Jewish people, but all people that no matter what
culture you come from or what country you call home, no matter
what language you speak or how much money you have or don't
have, He would be the one who is coming to bless all people.
The baby that Mary is going to deliver is the evidence that God
always keeps his promises. It's not just looking back at
the promises of God. She's also looking to the
promises of God in the future as well.
See, she knows that this baby hasn't actually accomplished all
the things that was yet to accomplish.
So she's looking to the future and reminding herself that God
is a God of justice for people who have suffered at the hands
of other people. And this baby was going to
initiate bringing that justice into the future.
She says, like here, here's what God's going to do.
Here's the promises that God's going to do.
There are proud people in the world who think they can act
like God, who think that they are all powerful.
God picks up the proud, picks them up like a bunch of sand
from a sandbox and just goes and they just float into the wind.
That's what God's going to do. That's a promise.
There's the mighty who think they're all powerful and God's
just going to come one day and he's just going to kind of flick
them like they're a little mosquito on your arm, knock them
down like a set of dominoes. There's the rich who live to
make more for their for themselves, no matter what it
costs other people. And God just goes delete to the
bank account. What Mary is saying here in her
prayer, in this, in this song that she is singing, is that not
only is there a God who is keeping his promises from the
past, but there is a God who has promises he's still going to
fulfill in the future. And the promise of justice is
part of that promise that He's going to fulfill, that there is
no contest between God and those who have committed any
injustice. I want you to know, whatever it
is that is happening in your life today, it does not get the
final word. God does.
When you look at the world and you read the news and you look
at things that are happening, whether it's wars or famines or
political leaders who are doing things want you to know there is
not one politician or multi billionaire in the world who
gets the final say. God gets the final say.
Don't ever get caught up in the fear of all that's going on
around us because God is not done yet.
He has kept his promises in the past.
Jesus is the is the reminder to us that God has kept his
promises, but he's also still got promises yet to fulfill and
complete and he's going to do it.
Mary hasn't experienced the fullness of this justice yet
that she's singing about, but she knows it's coming, which is
why she's singing about it from the bottom of her heart.
Want you to think about how often do you really talk about
God's promises? Like be honest.
How often do you really talk about God's promises?
How often do you talk about how God has kept his promises in the
past or how he's keeping his promises today?
What what about the promises that are still to come in the
future? One of the greatest gifts that
you can ever receive or pass along is to tell stories of God
keeping His promises. I would love, I would love for
Forward to be a storytelling church.
I'm so grateful for Amanda sharing that story today of just
how God met her in answer to a prayer.
It's a reminder to us that you can cast all your cares on God
because He cares for you. That's a promise.
Guess what? God kept His promise.
When you talk positively about anything science says, you
activate mood lifting chemicals in your brain.
But when you talk positively about a God who keeps His
promises yesterday, today, and forever, you are rewiring your
brain and your soul to see the entire world through a different
lens. But it's not just you that
you're helping. When you tell stories of God's
faithfulness, you're helping to encourage other people as well.
See, it's, it's a domino effect. Elizabeth finds joy because her
baby found joy in Jesus. So tell stories to your family,
tell stories to your friends, Tell stories of God's
faithfulness when you meet with your discipleship group because
you might be the instrument that God's going to use to bring joy
to another person. Now, I know for some of you, it
might feel like a big stretch to magnify God because life just
sucks right now. You know why Mary's able to
magnify God in this way? It's because she's bringing two
things together in her life. She she knows God's Word, and
she's looking at her life through the lens of what she
knows to be true from God's Word.
Almost everything that Mary sings about in this song are
quotes from other parts of Scripture.
She knew God's Word, and now she's singing it out loud
because she knows it's true. So God is magnified when you
filter the good and the heart of life through His Word.
One of the reasons why we encourage you to read your Bible
on a regular basis is because it's so critical that you are
grounded in who God is, how God operates, what God has promised
to do. If you don't read your Bible
regularly, I want to challenge you to sign up for our Bible
reading plan that comes out every day.
You just text the word Bible to the text line.
Hundreds of people in our church are already reading this and
accessing this every day. Want to encourage you to do
that? Read your Bible.
Get into places where you can study your Bible, get into a
discipleship group or be part of an equipped class.
Meditate on the Bible. Let God's Word soak into your
heart and your mind, because when you know God's Word, it
gives you a filter to process everything else in life through.
Now you're looking at everything through God's perspective, and
I'll tell you, all of life looks very different when you look at
it through God's eyes. Now let's be honest, there are
some of us who know our Bible. We've read it for years, but we
have no joy. Why?
Why are Christians sometimes some of the crankiest people on
the planet? Here's why.
You can know your Bible, but unless you use your Bible to
teach, to remind yourself who God is, it won't matter.
You have to know your Bible and then filter, use your Bible to
filter everything else in life through the truth of what God
says in His Word. When we take the good and the
bad of life and we filter it through the lens of Scripture,
things will change. I'll be honest with you, I find
one of the weird things about preaching is whatever you're
preaching on, you seem to struggle with it through the
week. So if you were to ask my wife,
hey, how was Kirk's joy this week, she would have a very
different story to tell you than the one that I'm preaching to
you right now. I struggled with joy throughout
this week. I'm I'm, I'm preparing this
message and I'm like, man, I am cranky as anything while I'm
getting ready to teach people about joy.
But I will tell you, there is just something about being able
to open up the scriptures, read a great Advent devotional that
shifted my thinking and shifted my heart.
There's something about putting on some worship music that sings
songs about the truth of who God is that just goes, yeah, you
know what? That's where the real joy is.
When you know God's Word and you filter it through what you know
to be true, it's always going to bring you to one place.
It's going to bring you to Jesus.
We can have joy because Jesus is the reminder that God has not
forgotten us in the waiting and in the darkness of life.
That Jesus is the reality that God is with us in every moment
of life. We can have joy because Jesus is
the gift that God gives so we can know His grace and favor in
our lives and we can have an eternal relationship with the
God of the universe. We can have joy because Jesus is
the promise that all things will be made right.
The desire you have for joy is real because God placed it
there. God wants you to have joy.
He wants you to be happy, Charles Spurgeon once said.
Humans are in their right element when they're happy.
It's just that God knows the limitations and even the harm of
everything that we think is going to make us happy.
So he gives us Jesus so that we can put our attention somewhere
else and magnify Jesus over all the other things that we try to
magnify. Try it this Christmas season.
Try it. Try every day when you find
yourself focusing on whatever it is that's sucking the joy out of
you. Try every day to change your
focus and say, I'm going to magnify.
I'm going to put my attention, I'm going to talk about God and
watch what God does. Joy isn't something you
manufacture. It's the fruit of what you're
putting your hope in. Focus on Jesus, magnify him.
Watch what God does in your life.
Father, thank you for your word. Thank you that you've made us
with a desire to be happy. What a wonderful, beautiful
gift. God, I pray that as we enter
into this Christmas season, I pray for every person in this
room who's struggling with joy right now.
Just life feels hard and the weight of it is strong.
Can I pray for the help of your Spirit to lift our eyes off of
magnifying what is taking us down and help us to fix our eyes
on the One who came to bring us life.
God, I pray that as we do that you would be the one who
produces joy in us, that we would experience the joy that
you came to give us. And I asked this in the mighty
powerful name of the King who was born as a baby, King Jesus.
Amen. Amen.
Stand together and magnify our Lord.