Welcome to the River City Church podcast and a message by our
lead pastor Jason Powers. Our prayer is that this message
would inspire and encourage you, build your faith and point you
to the life changing love of Jesus.
May you enjoy the goodness of God as you follow Him today.
In our house. Our my oldest son, Jackson is
home from college and I see several other college home
people and it's such a different deal.
Automatically when the kids come home, it's like my house just
feels different. There is like a a piece that
settles just knowing that all the chickens are in their roost,
right? And we saw a little bit of that.
Last week we talked about joy. We've been talking about
preparing room in this holiday season for the coming of the
King, right? Like for Jesus to come.
And we talked about preparing room for hope.
And one of the things about hope is like, I don't when Christmas
comes. The point of hope isn't that we,
you know, the lights turn on. Oh, hey, hope.
The point of hope is we feel afraid.
But what? Christmas does what Jesus does
is points us to a time when all things will be made new, when
all things will be set right. So that we don't.
Have to be afraid. The same thing with peace.
What we saw last week with Joy was Mary having received this
crazy the virgin will be with child, and the child is going to
be the king, the Messiah, the one who had been promised
literally in the Garden of Eden. And Mary's just freaked out.
And so she runs to her cousin's house.
Cousin Elizabeth. And what we find is in that
connection and in that community, in that relationship,
Mary and Elizabeth both experience the coming of joy,
the beginning of joy in that place.
And so as our kids come home and our kids are all around, we see
that we prepare room in our place for joy and.
What we're going to see today is the next part of that passage.
Last see last week we saw Mary and Elizabeth come together and
we saw Elizabeth recognize this thing that God was doing in Mary
and she said, Mary, this is the mother of my Lord that has come.
And this was the first prophecy, this prophetic inside as she
sees this is my Lord and the John the Baptist in her womb
left with joy and Mary and Elizabeth was filled with the
Holy Spirit. And what we have today is a
poem. If you look in your Bible and if
you read it in, you know, and you read it in the context, it's
indent, right? It's set off lines.
Anytime that you look at that, anytime that you see a passage
that's like that, you can know it was either a song or a poem
of some kind. And So what that means is that
what we're going to look at today is a prophecy from Mary.
We saw a little bit of a prophecy from Elizabeth.
We saw a prophecy from John the Baptist in utero.
Remember, he leapt. In A room.
And so today we're going to see a prophecy come from Mary.
So before we jump into the Scripture, before we jump into
the passage, we've got to talk a little bit about.
What is a prophecy and what do we?
Do. With prophecy when it comes.
Because a prophecy isn't just telling the future right?
It's not just. Right.
Like the Cowboys are going to win the Super Bowl or something
like that. That's not.
That's wishful thinking. That is hope that is going to
disappoint someday, right? That's not prophecy.
What prophecies? And we saw this last year in the
meeting when we talked about the Revelation.
What prophecy is it is a declaration.
It gives it an insight. And prophecy is a declaration of
what God is doing. So when you go back and you read
about Jeremiah and Isaiah, the message of the prophets was God
is at work in this place. And the reason he tells us that
God is at work in this place is because he wants us to get
involved in it. The point of pointing out what
God is at work is to say, hey, he's doing good things, you
should get in line too. And that puts.
The responsibility on us to say yes or.
To know so as we read Mary's prophetic utterance, say it's
called the Magnificat and we're going to read it's because
there's very early she talks about her soul magnifying the
Lord. We're going to talk about that
and we're going to look at that. But before we get on this, it's
important that we come to this the right way to this passage,
because it's very easy to get this.
Really wrong, right? So what do we do when we come to
a prophecy? These set off poems that are
supposed to show us God's word. The first thing that we do is
slow down. There are multiple readings.
You can read it right on the surface level of what it says,
but there's more underneath that's going on.
So we we slow. Down.
We need to humble ourselves. We need to realize that God got
this message out into the world because He wanted people to hear
it. He wanted people to be impacted
by it. He wanted people to touch it.
And sometimes when we look at it, when we stand far back, we
just go, Oh yeah, I know what that means.
And we just moved on. Especially something as familiar
as this. If you've been around the church
for a long time and you've seen this, we're familiar with it.
We may even be able to quote it from memory.
And sometimes it's so it loses its teeth.
But if we humble ourselves and move in to listen, the prophecy,
this prophetic word that comes to us might just have an impact
on our hearts and it might just change things.
And again, we should expect that God wants to change things.
We should expect that God wants to change our attitudes, our
hearts, our responses to other people, our responses to
ourselves, our responses to him. We should expect that.
And so some, but but we don't, we don't like that.
I mean, I want him to change you.
And make no mistake, you would not believe how much I go home
and pray Lord, change him just like, and then he's like, well,
how about you, Jason? I'm like Lord.
I pray for them. That's enough, Lord, right now
you're busy, right? We'll come back to me at a later
time, right? So I want to warn you in advance
about a couple of things to be careful for a couple of impulses
that might come up as we read this passage.
The first one is defensiveness. You might read this and get a
little insulted that Jesus would talk about you.
I sort of know like Mary and and and Elizabeth, they, they didn't
know you. They did not know your
situation. This is not to you.
But what I would say is the point of a prophecy is to point
out a space where there's distance between what we're
doing and what God is doing. And so if you begin to feel a
little bit of conviction, if you begin to little bit like, hey,
now you're reading my mail a little bit, my encouragement
again is humble yourself, slow down, back up and go.
What's that about? What's going on in my oh, what
am I supposed to do? Because the point of conviction,
the point of that thing is alignment.
The reason, it's like, you know when your call wheel starts
doing this, the point of doing this is to get you to go to the
Firestone so we can fix it so you can ride without.
The bump, bump, bump, right? It's the same thing here.
If we read something in your heart, it feels like a dagger in
your heart. Instead of just going, Jason,
why you're offending me? I'm like, I don't like to start
going God. Is that the cause of a bump in
my life? Is that a speed bump that I keep
running into? And what can I do?
So the first thing to be careful of is defensiveness.
Jesus isn't mad at you, but boy. Does he want to save you and me
and us? The second impulse that we need
to be careful of is rushing to application.
Where we sit back and just go. I know exactly.
What this is about, and this is about them and this isn't about
me. And so now I'm.
Praying for all of my friends who this comes to and who this
deals with, but it never does me right.
What I want us to do in this time is let the story work on
us, because when we come to the King, when we come to Jesus, we
don't come perfect. We don't come without need for
growth. Now listen, we come covered in
grace, right? Like when you stand before the
Lord, the Lord never says you don't have anything to work on.
When you come to the Lord, he looks at you and says, we.
Will take as long as it takes to get that right.
Let's walk together. So don't dismiss this.
And don't run too quickly to apply it and to write it down in
your life and to make a change. Move slowly and let it work on
us. And in order for us to read this
story well, we even have to be aware of our.
Filters. I know right now you're
wondering, like, are you ever just going to tell us the
freaking story? I am.
But listen, what if the truth wrapped up in this is too
seismic to step in tenderly? What if this is not a pool that
you just jump in head first because there's something that
God has been trying to get out into the world and get out into
our lives since the very beginning?
And what if the entire systems that we live in and the entire
systems that we're a part of are aligned against this message
getting in? And what if everything that
we've done and built apart this kind of resists this?
And so we have to like we have to be aware of what's going on
in us as this comes right. So here's the key question for
us to ask as we come to some of these passages, really a lot of
these passages that we get a question that we ask ourselves
when you're dealing with your kids, when you're dealing with
your spouse, when you're dealing with a cranky Co worker or a
cranky boss. Here's a question to contemplate
for your life, for you as you sit at home, when you think
about the fights and the struggles and the arguments that
you get. And here's the question, is it
more important for us to be right or to get?
It right do. You hear what I'm saying?
Are we just trying to win arguments so that we are more
right than the other guy? I'm not saying you do or don't.
I'm asking a question. This is always, this is always a
good thing. Like, is it more important to me
that I just be when when you get stand before somebody and they
have a different perspective on reality or a different view on
something, on different view on economics or on football or on
tennis or on the price of tea in China or whatever it is.
And they come and they have different information for you.
What's your first response? Do you argue with them?
Do you begin presenting your point, or do you consider at the
outset that you could be wrong? I think of this Dumbledore and a
famous line from the book where he said.
I think I'm right. But I could be wrong.
And there's power of. Humility in that perspective
which we come to these things. Because the way that we come to
this passage of Scripture, the way that we read this
magnificent that Mary said, we read this as 21st century
people. We live in a technological,
we're on the other side of the industrial revolution.
We have all of these things that they didn't have.
We are 21st century Americans. The word freedom means something
to us that it doesn't necessarily mean to others.
And we can stand next to each other arguing.
About what freedom means, without ever understanding what
they mean by freedom, or what Jesus means by freedom, or what
you mean by freedom. We're 21st century Americans
from New Braunfels, TX. A town where things grow, a town
where things are flourishing and expanding, but also a place
where it's expensive to live. It's hard to find a house that
is affordable in time. Where do?
We work, we are a recreation place where people come to play
and have fun and have a good time, and that's not a bad
thing, it's just a thing that we have to contend with.
As part of our story and our reality and the tendency as we
read these things, as we tend to go to one kind of or more of
these areas as we errors, as we have our kind of our headset
right. The first thing that we do that
as we come to these things. We tend to interpret these
scriptures. Our filters tend to tell us that
when we come to this stories and the things that it says, these
are things about our private spirituality.
Like it doesn't matter so much out there.
These are just things for me to work on and I can go to to my
job and do what I want. And it doesn't affect my, it
doesn't affect the way that I spend my money or the way that I
that I talk to people or the way that I deal with my neighbors or
the way that when I'm an HEB and somebody does something
unthoughtful towards me, My private spirituality is my own.
And it doesn't have to affect. You in any way, lovingly,
graciously. The reason many people like the
kind of spirituality that doesn't affect other people is
because if we're honest in the dark of night, it doesn't really
affect us that much either, does it?
Spirituality is supposed to make a difference.
It's supposed to change. Our actions have consequences,
and so if we're not following Jesus, we won't begin to look
like Him. If nothing changes in our lives,
then nothing changes. The other side of this is like
the social gospel, right? Like when you talk about.
How do we fix the world? Right?
Like like some people just say, oh, it's just a sin.
Problem. It's in the heart.
Some people will just say, oh, no, like the problem's out
there. Like if you're going to help
people, like you got to solve other problems.
You like you got to feed them and you got to you got to
provide houses for them. You got to go all the way and
say, so is the problem just in the heart?
Or is the problem the programs and the systems and the things
that we do right? Like what?
Like is it just does character the only thing that matters or
does character matter at all? Is it enough to just give people
food? Do you teach a man to fish or do
you give a man a fish? You can do both.
You can give him a fish so he's not hungry, and then you can
teach him a fish so he won't be hungry tomorrow.
And there are all kinds of ways that we can move, that we can
move into this, right? And what I want to say is like,
as you begin to feel these things, like maybe these
convictions or this humility, you read it, you just like,
maybe I'm a part of this thing that I wasn't sure that I was a
part of before. What happens, what we call that
is humility. When you begin to see yourself
in a right relationship to Jesus, when you begin to
realize, like he is holy and I'm not, he is good and I'm not.
He loves my enemy and I don't. As long as I walk around and go,
yeah, me and Jesus, we're almost the same.
He loves all the people that I love and he hates all the people
that I hate. What happens then is our
intentions are right. Our desires are good to be
aligned with Jesus. But the problem is, we can have
great intentions and still subtly try to get Jesus on our
side. Jesus, you don't like these
people either? Look at the bad.
Things that they're about if we're.
I love y'all so much and this is hard.
If we're going to read the scriptures, the prophetic, the
hard ones, the good ones, the ones that transform and change
all that, if we're going to truly follow Jesus from the deep
passages and scriptures, we have to stop using this to affirm my
worldview. I have to stop looking at the TV
1st and then making this fit into that.
I have to start here and go, however uncomfortable it may be
for me in the moment. My purpose in life is to align
my life to this and that's all of it.
My money, my marriage, my kids, my sexuality, my free time, my
hobbies, all of it. Who I am, what I do comes back
to Jesus in this story. And so now that we're halfway.
Through the message and I haven't talked about the passage
yet. Let me pray for us to have open
hearts as we read this passage and let us remember that we are.
Wait a minute, not just we are. May we remember that our enemies
are badly broken. Grace and peace to you Luke
chapter one, verse 46. Remember Mary said or Elizabeth
says that the baby in her womb is left and she's been filled
with the Holy Spirit and Mary says my soul magnifies the Lord.
That's where this that's why we call it the that magnificate
right from the Latin phrase. Now that word magnify, you think
like makes bigger, right? Mary does not make God bigger.
God is already as big as He is. You think about a magnifying
glass, right? If you have a magnifying glass
and you're trying to look at something and it's around the
edges, it's all blurry and stretched out, right?
So how do you use a magnifying lens to magnify something?
You put it right in the center. Mary says my soul magnifies the
Lord. Some translations you have to
say my soul praises the Lord. The idea is Mary sets the
Father, sets the Lord right in front of her, right in the
center of her story. He magnifies the Lord and my
spirit rejoices in God my Savior.
So this is joy. This is that thing that she's
experiencing the presence of God in her in her midst, her cousin
Jesus, John the Baptist, This whole thing she says I
experience joy and now she tells us why, because he has looked
with favor on who on Mary. Now let's Mary.
Describes herself on. The humble condition of his
servant. Mary is a.
Teenager, likely 13 or 14 years old.
Mary lives in the 1st century in Israel, one of the most
religious cultures in the history of the world.
It was not OK in the 1st century Nazareth for a 14 year old
unmarried teenager to be pregnant.
It was not OK. She was.
Subject to death under the Law of Moses.
That's the situation. Where this comes out of I praise
the Lord because he has seen my humble condition.
Now, Mary didn't say she's going to go back to Nazareth and
everybody all of a. Sudden is going to be OK with
it. Nothing about her situation has
changed. But the difference is Mary now
sees this in light of what's in the center, which is the Father,
which is God. She magnifies him and puts him
in the center. See, the problem is we want to
be in the center, and I want to put my experience in the center
of the magnifying glass. And then when all the stuff
around here goes wonky and screwing, oh God, what are you
doing? He's like, that's not how it's
supposed to look. Move it so that he's in the
center, He's looked on, He's looked with favor on the humble
condition of his service. Interestingly enough, in
whatever the place that you are humble in this world and
whatever place you are humble in this moment, wherever you just
acknowledge and recognize that you don't have the strength or
the courage in this moment to get out of it in that place.
I want you to hear the eyes of the Lord are on you.
He sees what is humble. He sees what is.
Yeah, what's going on, right. So it's humble, it's
conditional. Surely she says from now on, all
generations will cause me, call me blessed because the mighty
one has great, has done great things for me and his name is
holy. So Mary, what she's doing now is
defining her life in terms of God's action.
She defines her story now in terms of what God is.
Doing what defines your life. The move, the relationship, the
finances. The picture what, what is it?
Are you able to look in your life at the movement of your
life since the beginning, from the day, from whatever point
that you desire, whatever point that you are you able to look at
the movement of your life and go, I see God here.
If not, listen, I want you to know that's hard.
It's a hard thing to do on your own.
You're not supposed to do it on your own.
Find somebody who has been walking with the Lord and just
ask them, do you see God in my life?
It's a fair question. Now, if you're out there and you
are a follower of Jesus somewhere, start looking.
Wouldn't it suck if someone came up to you and asked you that
question? You're like, I don't really
know. Let me see where do you see it?
What does the activity of God look like?
Does the work of God in our lives look like victory and
lifting us up and making us strong and making us powerful
and let us letting us win and overcome and do all that?
You know, Mary says her humility, her grace, the
position and her position in this story is when she puts got
like a like the hub and a bike wheel where all the spokes.
Where all the things come to that holds the whole thing
together, Mary says. I have done that, says God.
From this point, because of all the things that happened now
God, you're the main character and my story.
God, when I get sick, it's about you.
When I get healthy, it's about you.
When I go to work, it's about you.
When I talk to my neighbors, it's about you.
When I fight with my. Spouse.
It's about you. When I'm afraid for my children,
Lord, it is about you. You are in the center, you are
in the middle, and all of this is ultimately coming back to
you. And it's not about Mary denying
reality. Mary doesn't suddenly go, I'm
not pregnant anymore. Everybody's ideas have changed.
Listen, this is the most important thing that we can
hear. It doesn't matter where your
life is right now. It doesn't matter what you're
wrestling with or walking through.
The power of God is right next to you, waiting to be put in the
middle. Will it look different?
Oh, oh, sure, because. You're not God.
But I know the point is if us, if most of us found ourselves in
the position where Mary was in this situation, we would run and
hide and we wouldn't tell anybody and we would probably
feel guilt and shame and fear and anxiety and a
discouragement. I mean, imagine, put yourself in
that. Place.
But here's where the story gets good, and here's where it
begins. Because this is a truth that's
applicable to you. I want to especially acknowledge
you if you're lonely, if you're afraid right now, if you feel
abandoned and isolated and left alone and discouraged and you're
looking. For a way, for any way to make
your story come alive means something, Have hope.
And what I want to tell you is that God's love fills people and
places that we most often avoid. God gets involved in the life of
Abram before he was anything. And he says, Abram, I'm going to
make you a nation. He found Abram when he was old,
passed the ability to do what he was going to do.
And God met him there and made something of him there.
He went to Moses, Moses who was a criminal, who was a murderer.
He was criminal and he was a foreigner in his land.
And God went to Moses and says, Moses, you are the one that I
want to lead my people out. Moses was a.
Herding sheep. On the backside of a foreign
nation and God went all the way to find him and said, you're my
guy. What about David?
David was the forgotten son of a shepherd out in the field.
The prophet had to remind dad, do you have any other kids?
And dad was like. David, go get David.
David The. King and Mary, humble teenager
in a backwater hamlet of the Roman Empire, carrying the Son
of God. At the time, Mary wasn't the
best person in Nazareth. She wasn't the most.
She didn't sign up for all the pairs.
She wasn't the most righteous, the most holy.
She wasn't we're. Just told that she was young.
And she was there and she was a virgin, and God chose her.
And I just know. Here's the problem.
I do everything in my power in my life not to be seen as poor,
not to be seen as weak, not to be seen as small, not to be seen
as ordinary. You know what we fight about
more often than not? Those things, they said
something mean to me. They're probably meaner than you
can imagine, and they're probably more right than you
like to admit. And what if that's not the
point? We confess every time we get
together. We're what?
We're badly broken. And then people pointed out to
us, we're like. Heck.
No Own it. Put your name on it.
The reason we fight is because we want to be seen as something
other than we are. We want to be seen like God, but
the question that confronts us at Christmas time is that what
if God's love is best understood and appreciated in our needs and
in our weakness? Seeing the West, we value
strength. We value.
Position. It's not just the West, it's.
Everywhere. It's humanity.
We value winning, We value victory.
We value strength. We value being over other
people. And the temptation here, right?
As we talk about Mary and her humility, right?
The temptation that we run into is to like over spiritualize
poverty, right? Like, we have new stuff, big
stuff. We just go, oh, yeah, well, I'm
poor because I don't, I don't like feel very good today.
But just know this Mary was not symbolically poor.
Make no mistake, in the town of New Braunfels, there are people
who live here who are not symbolically poor, and there are
those of us in here who aren't symbolically poor.
We're not poor in any stretch of the imagination except the way
that we often feel about ourselves.
And it's not just about financial poverty.
Jesus said blessed are the poor in spirit.
Those who know that they don't have a prayer, Those who know.
And if I have to stand before Jesus and it's him and me, he
wins every time. He's right and I'm not.
If it comes down to an argument over why I did what I did and
why I should have done what I did, he wins every single time.
That's what humility is. That's what a poverty of spirit
is. To just go.
I don't have enough to stand on my own.
I'm not good. I don't make it.
I'm I'm too harsh. I'm too, whatever it is.
Whether you can see like the, the, the temptation here is you
just go, Oh, well, I'm I'm like actually poor.
Like I don't have enough. Like there's not.
This isn't about me like it is. The.
Question is not at Christmas time.
The question is not whether we have a lot or a little.
The question at Christmas time is, is Jesus in the center of
it? Do you use your riches for the
Kingdom, or do you use your riches for something else?
Do you use your? Poverty to be a victim?
Or do you in your poverty continue to see yourself as
favored by God, not with everything, but with enough to
give? How you relate to your stuff
will affect how you relate to God because Jesus said you can't
love God and they called it Mammon, right?
It's stuff. It's it's your truck and it's
your house and it's your hunting lease and it's your boat and
it's your all of the things, right, Your big purse and it's
and it's. All of the things and he says
like you, you, you, you're, there's, there are different
roads. You got to go down one road or,
or the other. And he doesn't say that you
can't have stuff. He's saying that if you love
your stuff, you will get rid of everything else for that.
Whatever stuff may be and stuff may be, reputation stuff may be
people saying good things and nice things about you, but
whatever it is, however you relate to your stuff outside
will affect how you relate to God.
And then when God is in the center, as God moves to the
middle of that magnifying glass, things start to get clear.
Because here's the reality. God has integrity since the
beginning, since garden, since the moment that he said let
there be light, God's character hasn't changed.
The reason that we trust him isn't because like we think we
figured out. The reason we trust Him is
because He has always proven to be faithful.
Look, verse 50, He says this. His mercy is from generation to
generation. Listen, God's posture towards
human weakness has always been mercy.
God's posture towards human weakness has always been mercy.
Now, here's the problem. If I am the main character in
this, if I am the main character in the story, do you realize
what's going to happen? You're going to spend your whole
life feeling like God is opposing you.
Because if you're in the middle of the story, you go, why can't
I have this vacation? And God says because you've
taken 4 vacations in the last five years and you're not
content, the secret's not in Wyoming.
The secret is in here. Well, God, my car broke.
Down. You abandoned me no, now you're
going to have to like share you're going to have to have a
carpool. My air conditioner went out.
You're going to have to ask for help.
You're going to have to get, oh, we don't have any grocery money.
You're going to have to go to the church and let them help you
and take care of you. You're going to have to share
that with your small group. But if I know that this is his.
Story. If I know that my weakness and
my law and and my lack is an opportunity for Him to show His
benevolence and His goodness for me, then I am able to wait.
And the truth is that God's love doesn't change.
It hasn't changed. We can't redefine it just
because we have a different cultural moment.
We can't redefine what it means to say that God loves us, that
he has care for us, just because things have changed, because we
don't live in the 1st century anymore.
God's love is not angry. God's love is not judgmental.
God's love does not also affirm your every desire and.
Instinct without consequence. God does not say you're OK, I'm
OK, He says. I am God and I am holy, and I
will transform you as you follow me in every generation.
God's love. Looks like faithful, patient,
restorative, merciful love in every generation.
That person that you hate, that person who's your enemy, that
person who hurt you this week, God's love for them is faithful,
patient, restorative, and merciful.
So I guess the question that bears asking in this moment is,
do we believe that that kind of faithful love is being expressed
in God's world? As you walk out and you go to
HEB and you go to the store and you watch the news and you go to
the places, do you believe that God's faithful love like.
That is being act out in the world.
If not, what would happen if that kind of love did start to
get played out? What if all of a sudden got like
Thanos snapped, right? And all of a sudden God's
perfect, faithful, restorative, patient, merciful love was just
everyone. If that kind of love were to
happen, whose life do you think would be disrupted first?
Who would feel that kind of pain and that kind of change?
First? Mary tells us in verse 51, she
says this, He has done a mighty deed with his arm.
Now, when you read about God's arm, right, His strength, His
arm, His might, always, always, always in the Israelite
imagination. They're thinking about Egypt.
With a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.
He delivered his people from the grasp of Pharaoh.
And you know what the point in Pharaoh was?
You know what the problem with Pharaoh was?
Pharaoh worked them like dogs. They were slaves with no break
and no rest. So.
We do the exact same thing. We just call it workaholism.
We just call it on saving to buy more.
Like we just all the time, we never have a rest.
We never do all these things right and so.
In the mighty hands, talking about exodus, about leading out,
he has done a mighty deep. He has scattered the proud
because of the thoughts of their heart.
He has toppled the mighty from their.
Thrones and exalted the lonely he has satisfied the hungry with
good things and he has sent the rich away empty.
So I just want to kind of highlight this and unpack this
out and maybe some of it fits in your life and maybe some of it
doesn't. The first thing that happens
with this love, right? Love changes the way that we see
ourselves right. What does it say in verse 51?
When he has done a mighty deed, he's scattered them because of
me, right? So what he does is he begins to
move us slowly off of the center.
When he talks about the thoughts of the proud, right?
What Pride does is say I'm the story.
Pride is not. It's not thinking more of me
than about you. It's thinking of me more than
thinking of you. So humility isn't thinking less
of myself, it's thinking of myself less.
But when I'm in Pride, I wake up every moment and I think, how is
that going to affect me? When I go to the store and
somebody's walking too slowly, I think about how that's affecting
my day, not about the poor lady's Bursitis.
That is making her right. She's probably in terrible pain
right now. I don't think of that.
And So what God does gently and slowly but persistently, is move
us off of the center. And He does that by revealing
the pride in our hearts, right? So what?
Pride does is it rejects obedience because what pride
does is want to be the boss. And here's the problem.
Here's why pride never works. Here's why I'll handle my money.
I'll make decisions about this Here's the thing.
Because the. World will never cooperate with
you being the boss. Do you know why?
Because they want to be the boss.
You're on their territory. This is why we fight, because
everybody wants to be the boss. The boss of what's good and
what's right and what comes right.
And So what? Humility steps back.
Humility stands out and goes, I am so broken.
Like I don't have any. Business being the boss.
We people are fine. When they just go like, yeah,
well, somebody ought to do it, but it's not me because I'm not,
I'm not good, right? See, that's humility is what
comes when pride collapses. God's desire isn't to humiliate.
People, God's desire isn't to. Humiliate you, But I do want you
to know God's desire is to reveal to you just how
self-sufficient you aren't. Your bootstraps that you have
pulled yourself up by were given to you at birth.
When you were born in the United States, your bootstraps were
handed to you. Thank you Lord for the
bootstraps. I didn't earn them.
They're not mine. And so when we realized that
what we have and what we have to look forward to in the in the
moment like this is the moment that I don't have to worry about
what's coming. I don't have to see.
You know why? Because I know that I can't
control the world. I can't control the economy.
I can't control what happens right now.
What I can do is be in this moment with him, utterly
dependent and lavishly appointed by God.
We have enough. We're be able to get here.
We have friends who can bring us and care for us and tend to us.
But if we insist on being the story, being the center of the
story, we should look just. Like it says here, we should
expect to be scattered, you should expect the world to not
play that game. And So what we do is we let go
of the future. You can have dreams for the
future, but if you try to make God, if you try to insist that
God fulfill all of your dreams, you may be disappointed.
But in humility, we can go. I will live and enjoy this
moment to the fullest of my ability, trusting that when that
day comes. He will be.
Filled with every good things because I've tended to him now.
But the only way that that happens.
Is if we see ourselves as we truly are badly broken.
Are you in that place today? Can you acknowledge that?
Look, I haven't been following God because I've been trying to
be God. That's the second thing.
Love changes how power works, right?
52 says He's toppled the mighty from their Thrones, and he is
exalted, the lonely. This is good for us today to
acknowledge and understand. Are you listening?
God is not neutral in this world to how power is used.
Let me say that again. God is not neutral to how power.
Is used in this world. God lifts up the weak.
God lifts up the poor. I'm not guessing.
He says it. He says it in the Old Testament,
and he says it in the New Testament.
Find that which is weak and ugly and bruised and downcast and
lost and afraid and lonely and ugly and replaceable and
forgettable, and in that place you will find God Almighty
stooping to lift up. It is the God who goes to the
what's the thing? The Manger with a pregnant
teenager to comfort her. There were no Pharisees.
There were no priests. There were no religious leaders
at the birth of Jesus. There were humble teenagers,
blue collar workers and foreigners who had crossed
boundary lines to worship the king.
Everyone else was too busy. God is not neutral.
To how we use power and let me tell you this, you may sit there
feeling like you're weak and like you're small part of God's
image in US is dominion. You remember it says he created
us in his image, male and female.
He created them and then what he said, he says go have dominion,
go lead the earth. So here's the thing, you have
power. You have authority in your
children and your marriage, at your work, wherever you go.
The question and and sometimes you just like that's the victim
thing, like I'm just a nobody. That's not humility, that's
pride. God has said go get to work and
you said I can't. Because I'm small, Because I've
got a bad story. Because I've got you.
Haven't read the book? Find the person whose story is
worse than yours. They're all worse than yours,
and God doesn't use perfect. People.
He uses fallen people. And you have been given dominion
by him. The question isn't whether you
have dominion. The question is whether you are
using it. Some of you are so worried out,
worried about trying to change Congress.
You're ignoring your kids. They're growing up lonely and
afraid. Turn the TV off and go to dinner
with your family. Use your power to do good, to
point to people. Do your words, do your actions.
Does your online presence make small?
People feel valued or do you make other people feel small?
My pastor talked about verse 52 and he said this right.
He got lifts, you know, lifts up and exalts.
He said everybody, this is you and this is me and this is
everybody. Everybody will be exalted and
will be humbled. You get to decide by whom and in
what order. Lift yourself up.
Go for it. I hope you get everything that
you've imagined because it's going to have to last you for an
eternity. My house breaks down.
It's like 4 years old. It's already falling apart,
right? I don't think it's going to last
a million years. And if that's the most important
thing, then that's not. It the people that I got
married, the people that stood next to me at my wedding that
were in my wedding, one of them is still in my life.
Everything changes. What are you building your life?
Around It's not going to be here.
Doesn't last forever. Unless it's Jesus, unless it's
the king, unless it's Christmas, a mighty king and a humble
major, It doesn't work. Love changes how power works.
And I just want us church. The world is watching how we use
power and the power that we celebrate.
They watch. If we tell them that our King is
mighty and sovereign and good and lifts up the humble and
cares for the weak, and that Mary and Joseph, as soon as the
baby was born and the foreigners were left, they became
foreigners and a foreign land, refugees and migrants.
As soon as we realize that and we begin treating people like
that, our power becomes a reflection of the goodness of
the King. Love changes how our power
works. Love changes what?
Satisfies us. Are you content?
Do you have enough? If you don't have enough, you
will never have enough. I'm not saying do you have
everything, I'm saying do you have enough?
You had enough to get here today.
You're going to have enough to get back wherever you're going.
Even if that's a ride from somebody else, you have enough.
But the problem is if we are discontent.
If we walk around thinking I just need a little bit more to
get there, I just need a little bit more money, a little bit
more time, a little bit more relaxation.
I just need a little bit more. If we always just need a little
bit more If we are. Discontent.
You are in the center of your magnifying glass.
Your love is magnifying yourself because you think you are
entitled to something that you don't have.
In this great reversal, Mary says I've got trouble that's
coming, but in this moment I have enough.
Who's the main character in your story?
If you are the main character, you will never have enough.
There will never be enough. But if?
Father is the main character and your life is his opportunity,
your canvas for him to paint goodness on the world.
Then you'll have enough. And you may not have as much as
me, or as much as him, or as much as someone else, but he
will meet you in this moment today, and it will be enough.
This doesn't negotiate ambition. This doesn't negotiate you
wanting to do something and go somewhere.
What this what this negates is greed, but this negates is you
saying I need more to be OK. I need more to feel OK.
It negates consumption and it and it negates the system that
says those things are most important.
And let me just be entirely clear here, verse 54.
He has helped his servant Israel, remembering his mercy to
Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he spoke to our
ancestors. This thing that Mary's
experiencing isn't new. This has been the story since
the beginning. Jesus is the perfect expression
of God's eternally faithful love.
Jesus said it in John chapter 15.
Greater love has no man than he lays down his life for his.
Friends and he said, I call you friends.
And within a few hours he had allowed the Roman Empire and
fundamentalist religion to hang him on a cross and murder him.
And then in Galatians chapter 3, Paul writes.
To the Gentiles who live by faith, all the promises of
Abraham are theirs as well. And So what do we?
What do we get? We get provision, we get
blessing, we get an eternity with Him.
God keeps His promises. Are you ready to receive them?
How do we receive that? How do we walk by faith?
The first thing we have to do is we have to confess I've.
Been at the center of my story. I've made all of this all about
me. And then what we do is what the
word repentance is, is literally it's choosing someone else to be
in the center. Lord, I'm just going to move it
this much now. I'm not in the center.
Lord, You're in the center and keep me in that.
That's what happens. Listen, Mary stayed with
Elizabeth about 3 months and then she returned to her home.
I know what you're thinking. Centering Jesus is hard.
And the reality is, I don't want to.
Me too. I get it.
I don't want to do that either. But look, Mary gets these
promise. She has this experience, and
then she goes back home to the difficult parts where people
don't understand, where they don't see her.
And the point here is that we are transformed as we go, this
realignment. We're talking about putting
Jesus, and it's not a theoretical thing.
It's not just things that you think.
It means actually reorganizing. It means that we have to
actually face our fear if we want to have peace.
It means that we can't, we can't numb it anymore.
It means we have to stand there and look at it and watch God
walk us through it and find the peace.
It means that we have to actually build relationships if
we want to experience joy. It means we have to actually
slow down the things that we do if we want to experience peace
and in all of those. As you do those things, as you
walk by faith, as you say, I'm going to slow.
Down what happens as you begin to experience Jesus in the
after, not before because of not as an invitation to and so my
invitation for you. Here's maybe today you're here
and you've never followed Jesus. You've been around, but you've
never said maybe your story is I've been in the center of my
magnifying glass for my whole life.
Today's the day I want out it. It really is that easy.
Prayer is talking to God as if He's in the room because He is.
And you just say God, I don't want to be in the center
anymore. I have screwed this up and I am
ready for you to restore it and make it all new.
I move out, you move in, I'll do what you say. close your eyes.
Will you close your eyes for me? I just want you to have a moment
of peace to make that decision today.
And maybe you have never made that decision before, but today
you just say I want to be out and I don't know anything else.
I don't know how to do any else, anything else with that.
That's OK. Just make that decision today.
And maybe you've been following Jesus for a long time, but you
realize, but slowly but surely, maybe he's disappointed you,
Maybe he's hurt your feelings. But slowly but surely, you've
gotten into the center of your glass and you need, you need to
move back out. Jesus, I ask that you would love
us well as your church. We thank you for your grace.
We thank you for your peace. We thank you for your goodness
and your hope. We thank you for the way that
you love us. We ask all these things in your
name and for your glory. Amen.
Thank you for joining us today. River City Church is all about
experiencing and expressing God's love in our lives and
community, and we hope that you've been able to experience
that today. As grateful as I am that you've
spent this time listening in this morning, this podcast is no
substitute for full participation in a local church.
I love it when River City people listen to other pastors, but it
is those who show up week after week, faithfully giving their
support and time and resources that make all of this possible.
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Thanks so much for listening. May the Lord bless and keep you
in all grace and peace.