Mary’s Gift

Luke 2:19 NIV

But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.

What Sort of Gift Are You Expecting?

This past week I was talking with some children and one of them asked what I was going to do for Christmas.  I gave her a brief summary of our Christmas day plans and told her also that we would go to a church service on Sunday also.  Quickly one of the children stated she too was a Christian and commented that several others of them there were also Christian and they all nodded their heads and smiled.   The girl pointed at another child and asked her if she was a Christian too and she smiled broadly and said she was.  One of the children then gazed deeply into my eyes and asked me if I would be drinking at Christmas.  I admitted I wouldn’t, that I didn’t drink at all and she then solemnly confessed that both of her parents drank and then paused.  “I wish my dad didn’t drink so much. I have tried to get him to quit but he won’t.  I got my grandpa to stop smoking but my dad won’t stop drinking.”  Dumbfounded by this child’s openness and deep sadness, I gave no reply.  What sadness there is in this world!  What brokenness and heartache!  I wonder, if that little eleven year old girl has a Christmas wish that goes beyond toys and games and cool vacations.  I wonder what sort of gift she wants this Christmas day!

Recently I spent a bit of time pondering the circumstances Mary the mother of Jesus faced as she went through her nine months of pregnancy.  Was she aware of the internal struggle Joseph her betrothed was enduring?  Did she know just how heartbroken he was upon discovering Mary was pregnant?  Of course she must have seen it in his eyes, in his frowning, in the tension that hardened his smile.  Mary got to take a break from the public scrutiny for a while.  She went to be with her pregnant cousin Elizabeth and celebrate the child she would soon have in her old age.  There was a gift awaiting Mary that she would always treasure.  When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.  In a loud voice she exclaimed: "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear!  But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?  As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. (Luke 1:41-45 NIV)

The comfort Mary felt at Elizabeth’s reaction to her walking in the house breathed hope into the young and tenderhearted Mary.  After three months though, she returned to Nazareth, pregnant and unmarried.  Soon the whispers began; the rumors, the gossip, the frowns, the withering stares as she passed.  But then came a second gift, a stunning surprise.  Joseph had a dream and in it an angel told him not to be afraid of Mary’s pregnancy.  “Stay with her,” he was told. “Believe her”, the angel insisted.  It was too good to be true.  Joseph was going to still marry her: he trusted her and believed her story.  But as the day of the baby’s birth grew near, a stupendous demand was made of her.  Mary would have to walk all the way to Bethlehem from Nazareth with nine months of baby in her belly.  In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world… And everyone went to his own town to register.  So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.  He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. (Luke 2:1-6 NIV)

We always picture her riding on a donkey as they trudged along but none of the accounts in the Bible say anything about a donkey…or a horse…or a mule…or even a Shetland pony.  Ninety miles they trudged along.  Up steep hills and along dry and weary valleys they plodded.  This could not have been in any of Mary’s dreams of how this would go.  They say that it is good for women to walk a bit the final days of their pregnancy…but not ninety miles.  It was unreasonable.  Miserable!  Swollen ankles and a heavy belly throwing her balance out of whack added to the wretchedness of it.  They made it though…somehow.

Finally in Bethlehem where Mary was bursting with baby and ready to give birth, no place could found where they could stay.  Famously there was, “no room in the inn.”   Where was Mary’s baby to be born?  We say it was a stable but we don’t really know.  A stable isn’t mentioned, just a feed trough where Jesus was placed after He was delivered by Joseph.  Imagine the disappointment Mary must have felt having to deliver Jesus like a sheep delivers its lamb, like a cow its calf, like a doe its fawn outside or in a stall or some cave somewhere.  Alone with her husband and the baby at her side, it would seem Mary may have felt forgotten, certainly weary, and perhaps unwanted.  At the same time as Mary was giving birth to her baby Jesus in some dirty and forsaken place in Bethlehem, shepherds scattered along the hillsides with their sheep drearily kept track of the flocks they managed.  Every night a lonesome watch!  Shepherds may not have been as despised in Israel as they were in Egypt during Jacob’s time but they were certainly shunned by most people.  Dirty, smelly, poor, uneducated, socially awkward, having all the unique personality traits of those out by themselves for hours and weeks and months at a time, they were no one’s role model, living on the bottom rung of the social order.

But then without warning, the sky exploded with supernatural wonder.  And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night.  An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.  (Luke 2:8-9 NIV)  The angel was not alone though.  Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests." (Luke 2:13-14 NIV)  The message to all those shepherds in shocked amazement was astonishing.  But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.  Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger." (Luke 2:10-12 NIV)

Off the shepherds scampered scattering about the town of Bethlehem in search of this wondrous baby.  When they found him, the mob of filthy shepherds and their dumbfounded expressions as they approached Mary and her newborn baby Jesus must have been quite a confounding sight for the young disheveled mother and her husband.  Can we imagine what alarm and dismay they might have initiated in Mary’s heart?   What else could go badly she may have wondered!  And yet this was the great Christmas gift, an astonishing one.  As the shepherds, perhaps all at once, blurted out the sight of the great host of angels and the message they gave, Mary may have at first listened in stunned disbelief but then, having experience with the supernatural workings of God, realized that it was the Lord who was once more comforting her, once again giving her peace and encouragement.  Over and over the shepherds may have repeated the message.  "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.  Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.   With all the chaos and disappointment and hardship this birth brought, Mary had this amazing gift to consider.  The Scripture says that Mary, " treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19 NIV)

The expression “treasured” is the translation of a Greek word that means “to keep safe” or “to protect carefully in mind”.  “Pondered” likewise means to “continuously cast about in mind.”  In other words, Mary thought about this message from the angels over and over again and never forgot what they said.  In a time of great upheaval, loneliness and troubling thoughts, God presented Mary with a lovely gift that carried her past all her doubt and fear.  God, wrapped in the packaging of dirty shepherds who were outcasts from much of the world, gave Mary something to treasure.  “I am with you.  I am in charge and I will take you through this.”  On this very day and in this one place, do you have a gift that God has given you that you have not noticed, that you have not given much thought, not grasped its great value?  Maybe you have not thought enough of what God has done for you, not yet fully seen what a lovely and great gift He has given you.  Perhaps you could wait just a moment with Christ beside you and consider what gift you have that is precious beyond measure.  Do you see it?  Do you have it fixed in your mind?  What great gift has God given you that you can never repay?

A Strange Revelation

John 4: 26 NIV

 Then Jesus declared, "I who speak to you am he.”

Are You Ready For A Change?

There is in each of us a strong desire to be right.  We want to be the one with the correct answer…to know how it really is when others are just guessing.  Yet how can we be right when we don’t have an answer, when we just have questions?  When I went away to college, I did not know what I was doing.  I had no idea what to expect, what I would gain from going to college, what sort of career I would have when I finished.  If someone asked me, “What do you plan on doing after you graduate”, I had no idea.  I did not go to a small college to get something out of it or to accomplish something; I went because I knew God was sending me there.  Because I had never before stepped foot on the campus or even been to the state where it was located, I had nothing on which to base my opinion of how it would go or even should go.  I had no answers to give to those who wondered what I thought the future held for me.  You might say that I was “clueless”.  Now that I am an old man and have lots of experience to inform my thinking, I still don’t know what to expect nor do I know why I am here.  I am just as “clueless” as I was back then.  All I have to offer anyone about the state of my affairs is that God makes the plans for my life just as He did when I went away to college.

Perhaps you are wondering what God is doing with you.  You may even question His wisdom, the benefit of letting Him be in charge.  It could be that you do not even really believe that He has anything much to do with you and how things go in your life.  Many think of God as an absent father, a dad who is never there for them.  That might be you.  Or you may have put your trust in Him to take care of your big issues but the small ones might be bothering you.  What should you do about dinner?  How can you get your kids to finish their homework?  What should you do about your retirement funds? Can your career get upgraded?  Is there hope for a happy marriage?  Perhaps those sorts of issues you feel like you must solve on your own if anything is to be done.

When Jesus famously chatted with the Samaritan woman looking for water at the village well where Jesus sat and rested; a fascinating conversation ensued.  This lady who had been married and divorced five times and was living with someone new was not exactly a prime candidate for deep theological discussions.  Yet the things that were said there were some of the most important teachings on God and worship found anywhere in the Gospels.  The Jews, Jesus said, had an edge on the Samaritans when it came to worship and living with God. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.  Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. (John 4:22-23 NIV)

An important choice of words is used by Jesus that the NIV version captures.  The Samaritans worship “what” they don’t know rather than “who”.  The Jews worship also “what” they know rather than “who” they know.  Worship for both groups was impersonal and not interactive.  It had nothing to do with the actual person God.  It was like a young man falling in love with the idea of a particular woman rather than a woman herself.  We sometimes criticize those who spend lots of time playing on line games with others because they are not hanging out with actual people.  Yet the truth is that they are talking with and listening to real people.  The Jews and Samaritans had quit trying to worship God Himself and had given themselves over to the forms of worship instead.  There no longer was an interaction between two personalities; it was just thousands of ones acting within themselves hoping that God or “luck” would be in their favor if they performed all the right rituals.  It was worship grounded in superstition rather than relationship.  Jesus came to change that.

Jesus insists that that by coming, He established a link between God and all people.  By Spirit you connect with God.  As real as the wind that blows and the breath that passes through the lungs, the Spirit creates the pathway through which you build your life with God.  How many people give up on God because they are not familiar with the way He connects with people!  It seems surreal, even not real like a fairy tale or a Nordic myth when someone who has never met God by Spirit hears of it.  The Samaritan woman expresses this same skeptical hope when she returns to town and tells the villagers, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?" (John 4: 29 NIV)  The Greek text which was the original language used to transcribe this conversation makes it clear that the woman saw little likelihood that it would be so, that the man she met at the well actually was the long awaited Messiah but she hoped He was.  Many, even today hope God exists and that He cares about them, maybe even loves them, but they don’t really think it could be so.  Like this unnamed woman, the promise of a loving and healing and almighty God who can raise them from the dead seems too good to be true yet they want it to be more than a fable.

Now what happened next is one of the great miracles recorded in the Bible.  It may not seem like much to many who read of it but it really was astounding what took place.  They came out of the town and made their way toward him….Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.”  So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days.  And because of his words many more became believers.  (John 4: 30, 39-41 NIV) How could a woman, who had been divorced five times, who was living with a man not her husband, who did not go to the well to get water at the time when the other women went and socialized, have pulled a crowd together from her own home town and led them out to meet with Jesus, a hated Jew?

If you just give a little thought to human personality and how people are, it was unreasonable for this crowd of villagers to make their way out to Jesus just at the inspiration of their immoral neighbor.  Why would any of them have interest in a despised Jew?  Yet they did.  The text in the Greek tells us that the people left the town but then kept coming and coming to Jesus in a continual coming.  Some force, some supernatural force pulled them out of their huts and away from their fields and over to where a man they should have hated greeted them.  The woman was in such a hurry to tell her neighbors about Jesus that she completely forgot her water jar and the water she came to get.  She rushed off in a flurry of amazement and wonder.  It is not unusual for someone to make us lose track of time and space being around that person.  A celebrity, someone with great creativity or wit or beauty can do it to us.  Yet the Bible tells us that there was nothing about Jesus that made Him attractive…just the force of his life with the Father.  And that force came to bear on the woman looking for water and the people of the town who came to see Him at her invitation.

There is a strangely wonderful shift in the text that must be noted.  This woman, who was a Samaritan woman and a many times married woman and even an immoral woman was relabeled as the account concluded.   Jesus told the disciples that the fields which He probably pointed to nearby were ready to be harvested.   Do you not say, 'Four months more and then the harvest'? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.  Even now the reaper draws his wages, even now he harvests the crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together.  (John 4:35-36 NIV) He was not talking about corn or wheat or barley though.  He was speaking of the need for all the people around Him to have eternal life.  “Look at them”, He was saying.  “They all need a Savior.  You are the ones I want to welcome them into Salvation.”  Yet it is none of the disciples who are used by God to pull the crowd there in the Samaritan village to eternal life.  It was the most unexpected of all people to be the means by which this little town became a pocket of salvation, a well of eternal life.  Pay careful attention to verse 39.  Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony, "He told me everything I ever did." (John 4:39 NIV)

We call her the “Samaritan woman”.  Some label her the “sinful woman”.  Many speak of her as the “woman at the well”.  But here as the account comes toward a conclusion, she is literally termed “the witnessing woman”.  That is a strange revelation.  Someone so off base, so spiritually disoriented, so dysfunctional was named by God, “the witnessing woman”.  How can this have been so?  What force or motivation turned her life around so dramatically that she became someone completely new, someone unknown before meeting Jesus?  It is not a force nor a motivation but rather a person.  When God as Spirit becomes a part of you and works His way through you, a transformation occurs which changes who you are and what you do.  The woman did not understand really who Jesus was and she could not explain what to make of Him but she did know that everyone in her town needed to come find out for themselves and so with God working in her, she gave the rallying cry to go to the well and meet Jesus.  Once God got a hold of her and He worked in her Spirit to spirit, she became someone new to God.  She was the “witnessing woman”.

Are you ready for God’s Spirit to transform you?  What do you think He might make of you?  Is there a name God could give you that would be surprising?  The witnessing woman did not make something of herself or try to rehabilitate her lifestyle.  She simply spent time with Jesus and the Spirit of God worked within her to take what was thoroughly broken and dysfunctional and remake her into someone you might say was a superstar in God’s Kingdom.  She had no great message to offer.  She certainly was not straight theologically.  Her reputation in town was not fixed.  What she did have which made all the difference in the world was time spent with Jesus!  In those brief moments alone with Him, the Spirit of God began to rework her mind so that she got to make something of the life she had been given.  I wonder what the witnessing woman would say now, if you asked her, “Was it worth it spending time with Jesus?”  What could be the benefit to you if you gave Jesus some time alone with Him?  What might happen to you?