All week I have been wrestling with the question "What great things does God want to do through me?" as I have prepared this sermon based on the angel coming to Mary in Luke 1:26-38. Quite honestly I have had a hard time answering that question. Yet into today's sermon conversation when I asked that question, we ended up in a great discussion about living a life that proclaims Christ so that others may know him through us, feeding the hungry physically with food but also those hungry for attention. There are multiple teachers in the congregation who all agreed and can attest to just being the person that asks about the kids day is a powerful ministry. Or by visiting a home-bound person you often not only make their day but their week as they often are alone. And these simple acts may not seem like great things but they are to the person being ministered too and all these little acts add up.
These are things that I never thought of before today sermon, and yet ones that I'm still pondering and reflecting upon hours afterwards.
Truly I am humbled after these conversations. I am no longer the preacher but the one being preached to and for me that is a great thing.
So what great things does God want to do through you?
Enjoy the sermon
This is again one of those bible stories that I just think the reaction of the people have been edited over time. An angel comes to Mary, tells her that she is favored and the Lord is with her and she is just perplexed and ponders what this could mean? And then the angel tells her she is going to have a son who she will name Jesus and he “will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever and his kingdom will have no end.” And after hearing these words, within the course of a few sentences Mary goes from questioning how this could possibly happen to saying “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
I can pretty much guarantee that Mary’s reaction would not be my reaction at least not my initial reaction. I would be more than perplexed and pondering what the angels words could mean. I think terrified and in a flat out state of denial would be closer to my reaction.
So if an angel of the Lord came to you and said that God wants to do great things through you, how many of you think your reaction would be to be terrified and flat out deny what God wants from you? How many of you think it would be closer to Mary’s reaction of “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”? Would your reaction be somewhere in between.
We sometimes think Mary was able to respond this way because she was extraordinary, that she herself was born without sin through immaculate conception or that she was a perpetual virgin or that her body was taken to heaven through the assumption. But Mary was just an ordinary person. She was the wrong gender, from the wrong place, and the wrong economic class than one would assume that God would come to and yet God came to her. And she said yes to God.
And we too and just ordinary people. We are people who don’t live in a major city, none of us are on any lists as the richest people in the world, in fact, as far as I know, none of us would make it on any list for the richest people in our town. We don’t have connections with major power players and yet God is coming to us.
God is coming to us because God wants to do great things through us. God wants to make the world a better place through us. God wants others to hear about him through us. God wants the hungry to be fed, the homeless given a place to rest, the sick cared for, the widow and orphaned support, and imprisoned visited through us.
So what great thing does God want to do through you?
We have all the right to respond to this request by God with terror and denial because we are just ordinary people, but the hope is that we realize that God wants to do these things through us because God has found favor with us and the Holy Spirit will come to us and guide us and work through us for nothing is impossible with God.
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