Pastor Tim continues our series, “the Weary World Rejoices.” This week, we will look at what the story of the Gabriel and his messages for Zechariah and Mary tell us about our own wait to see God’s work in our lives.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad to be here with you tonight as we jump into the next part of our series. We’re going to be exploring a question that gets raised every year by a very popular Christmas song, “What Mary Did You Know?” And we want to ask, what did Mary really know? Because for all the things that we focus on and think about, when we actually think about what she did know, what she tells us that she knows, we learn something ever so important about what we need to know this day and every day.
Would you join me in prayer as we begin tonight? Father, thank you for your goodness and your love. Thank you for being with us. Lord, help us to know what Mary knew, and help us to proclaim it to a world that needs to know it too. Lord, as we approach Christmas week here, would you help us to see the things that you would have us to see, to know you as you would have us to know you. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Well, if you had the opportunity just a short time ago, we had a really special occurrence tonight. Many of us have been looking forward to it for months, and that’s the convergence of Saturn and Jupiter. Something that hasn’t been, at least visible to the human eye, since the Middle Ages. Some people call it the Bethlehem Star, and we’re not going to get into discussions of exactly what the star was tonight, but it is an awfully neat thing on Christmas week. And so, like so many of you, I was outside trying to get some pictures of it. Here’s one. It’s from a long distance away. Here’s a little closer up. And it’s so neat to get to see some of these things.
My picture didn’t turn out that great, but just getting to see it, to see the two planets coming closer and closer together, to see Saturn’s rings, and get to reflect on the wonder of God’s creation is amazing. I have to confess, though, I don’t always get all that excited when the next big movement of the planets, or the sun, or the moon is supposed to be coming. Because it seems like more often than not, when we hear about that, what ends up happening is that it’s a cloudy night, and there’s amazing things happening on the other side of the clouds. And while that’s really still amazing, it doesn’t do any good if you can’t see it. At least, well, I shouldn’t say that. It’s still amazing. It’s a wonderful universe. But it’s disappointing.
And so in some sense, I’d almost just rather assume it’s going to rain, it’s going to be cloudy, we’re not going to get to see it, because that’s the way it feels like it always is. Sometimes it feels better to not have hope than to live in uncertainty. We can add some sort of certainty if we just simply decide we can’t expect anything. But is that what we’re called to do? We see tonight, we’re going to turn to the story of Gabriel and his encounter with Zachariah and Mary.
And as we turn to that, we see two individuals who have profoundly different expectations and outlooks towards what God is doing. And in that we see what I think we often fall into, and what we should do, living in the hope that Jesus has given us. So let’s go ahead and begin by taking a look at Luke chapter 1, starting with verse 8. It says,
“Now, while he was serving as a priest before God, when his division was on duty, according to the custom of the priesthood, he, that’s Zachariah, was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense, and there appeared to him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense. And Zachariah was troubled when he saw him, and fear fell upon him. But the angel said to him, Do not be afraid, Zachariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you should call his name John, and you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth.”
Think about the picture for a moment. Now, this may not sound all that amazing. He’s burning incense, and maybe, for all we know, he was burning incense every day, but that wasn’t actually the case. You see, there were so many eligible priests who could be burning incense that it was actually forbidden for a priest to get to burn incense more than once in his lifetime. This was something you looked forward to. There was no guarantee you would ever get to be the one who would go into the temple and burn the incense before the Lord. And here it is, Zachariah is having the day of his life. He’s doing what he has dreamt about doing.
He’s been a priest all his life, and finally he’s getting to do the most incredible thing. He’s getting to take the holy incense and put it out before the Lord. And then what happens? An angel appears. So, Zachariah is already having what you might call a mountaintop experience. If you can think of the day that you were most excited about God, if you have had such an experience, a day that was just wonderful, a day that everything felt like it was going great, a day that you felt like your prayers were being answered, this is the day that Zachariah has experienced. He’s just won the priestly lottery, so to speak. Actually, not even really metaphorically. They cast lots to decide who would give the incense.
So here he is, he’s experiencing all this, and then an angel appears to him. How incredible. Now, like anyone encountering an angel, he is afraid at first, but the angel says, do not be afraid, Zachariah. And Zachariah is told that this angel comes in peace, comes with good news. Talk about an incredible day. Gabriel goes on and says in verse 13, your prayers have been heard. God knows that you’ve been praying for a son, and guess what? You’re going to get one. You haven’t had children, you’re old now, but your prayers have been heard. God is going to give you that blessing that you have sought for all your life. That’s an amazing day.
But Zachariah does what I think many of us, unfortunately, would do in that situation we see in verse 18. So Zachariah said to the angel, “And how shall I know this? For I am an old man and my wife isn’t advanced in years.” Zachariah starts to probably think in his head, maybe I’m seeing things, or maybe this is some kind of some deceptive being. Maybe this isn’t really an angel of the Lord, because this is crazy talk. Yeah, I’ve been praying for a son, but everyone knows we’re not going to have a child. We’re way too old. It’s not going to happen. Come on, be realistic, whatever you are that’s appearing to me.
And here it is that he’s standing in the presence of an angel of the Lord in the temple, having come in the presence of the Lord to spread the incense. And he says, can you prove it to me? Now we hear that and we know the rest of the story. We were 2,000 years on the other end of this story. Zachariah is going to become the father of John the Baptist. And you kind of want to just say, Zachariah, believe you’re encountering an angel of the Lord. But I kind of suspect that many of us would do the same. We fall into living in what we might call a faithfully doubtful life.
We believe, or maybe you don’t believe at all. Maybe you’re just in a doubtful life. But even many of us that come to believe in Jesus live with way too much doubt. We want to follow him, we pray for things, and then we’re shocked if God actually answers our prayers. If you’re on the outside, you’re not a believer, you may actually notice this. You may see it better than many of us who follow Jesus do, because you say, it seems like these Christians pray, but they don’t actually seem to expect that God is going to be the one that’s going to rescue them. They don’t seem to be the one that actually expects God to answer those prayers.
And some of that comes from the fact that we’ve been going through life, and many times things don’t seem to work out the way we’d hope. And over time, maybe that initial spark of excitement, where we think we get to come before the God of the universe and pray, starts to be covered up with more and more doubt and cynicism and skepticism, where we just expect that, yeah, we’re praying, but those prayers aren’t going to really be answered.
I suspect in the case of Zachariah, he and Elizabeth had continued to pray for his son, but Zachariah had gotten to the point where he was so faithfully doubtful, doing all the motions, going and being a priest in the temple, and yet separating out any expectation of God answering prayer. That when an angel of the Lord appears to him, he thinks, this can’t be. In some sense, it’s comforting, because when we quit actually expecting that God’s going to answer our prayers, that we’re actually going to see anything happen, then we feel like we kind of have control. There’s not that uncertainty. We’re not afraid those clouds are going to obscure the view of the amazing sight up in the sky.
We feel like we’re in control, but we’re missing out on that hope, that expectation that God calls us to, because God is a God who acts in history. God is a God who rescues us in history. You see, Zachariah was missing out on the top of a mountaintop day. He was missing out on the fact that God was getting ready to use him as a key part of the entire plan of salvation.
The problem isn’t that Zachariah asks a question. God allows us to ask questions. The problem is, he says, well, how will I know this is true? He doesn’t actually believe when someone clearly speaking for God, an angel, says it will. And we see that it isn’t the fact that we want to understand things that’s the problem.
We move on to the story of Mary. You see, Mary didn’t know a lot of what was going to happen either. And we can see that as we pick back up in verse 26. That’s the wrong verse 26, so we’re just going to skip past that. That’s actually next week’s passage, so just to preview, we can look forward to that. But Mary encounters Gabriel, and Gabriel says that God is going to make her the mother of the Messiah. That the Holy One is going to actually call her to be the one who will play that pivotal role in history.
And this is incredible, even more incredible than what Zachariah hears, because Zachariah has heard that he’s going to have this son that he’s been praying for, and he’s going to be a very special man of God who’s going to proclaim the coming Messiah. But Mary is actually going to be the mother of the Messiah. And this Messiah is going to be called the Son of God.
What does she ask? She asks a question, too. She wants to understand as well, but her question isn’t a question of doubt. Her question is, how can this be? She’s not married yet. She has no reason to be expecting a child. How is it that she is going to be the mother of the Messiah? You see, there’s a key difference there. She doesn’t doubt. She believes the angel’s message. In fact, the angel doesn’t even say exactly when it’s going to happen.
She assumes when Gabriel appears, this is going to happen right now, that this will be the case, that God is going to do this. She just wants to understand how it’s going to happen. And I think that’s really important to see, because Mary doesn’t know this, but she wants to understand. And it’s okay for us to want to understand.
And so it’s important to understand that while Zachariah, in some sense, fails because he doubts, he covers up his faith with so much skepticism that he can’t believe when a messenger of God comes and says that he’s going to be a father, Mary simply wants to understand better what God is doing in her life. And it’s okay for you and for me to also want to understand that, to ask those questions, to say, God, can you help me better understand what you’re doing? Because sometimes I think we get afraid that if we’re not going to be Zachariah, we can’t ask anything. We just have to have faith and we shouldn’t ask God any questions.
But that’s not how God works. He’s our loving Heavenly Father. And we see that Mary’s question is honored with an answer. And Gabriel explains exactly how it will happen. He doesn’t explain how Jesus is going to go from being born to being the promised Messiah. He doesn’t explain how he will save the world, that he will go to the cross for us. But he does say that the Holy Spirit will come upon her and that she will give birth to a son, and what that son should be named.
And so we see here that there’s a lot that Mary doesn’t know, and yet she’s allowed into the mystery because she hasn’t gotten to that point of living in faithful doubtfulness. She is simply faithful. When she sees that messenger of God come to her, she says, let God’s will be done in my life. That’s a very, very hard attitude.
And imagine as the years rolled on how much harder it would have gotten. Because here it was that Mary says this and then she does in fact give birth to the son. And there’s some other things that she sees early on. She sees the shepherds coming and talking about the angels. She knows that Joseph has had a vision that has told him that it’s okay to go ahead and marry Mary, that all of this is by God’s plan. She might even sort of kind of see what’s happening as they have to flee to Egypt to escape Herod. That God has warned them in a dream to do that. And so God’s hand is clearly in this.
Although I think probably as they’re fleeing to Egypt, she also would have to think, I thought I was giving birth to the Messiah. I thought things were going to be good. This is God’s son here. Things should be going well. But what happened in the years after that? Many people tried to add creative stories over the years outside of Scripture to say all the things that they thought Jesus might have done in His childhood or teenage years. But Scripture doesn’t talk about that. It gives us every reason to believe that Jesus had a relatively normal childhood, relatively normal young adult part of His life, all the way up to His ministry.
And so it wouldn’t be hard to imagine Mary might start to think, whatever happened to what the angel said to me? Where did that go? It seems like everything’s just sort of normal at best after an awful lot of suffering early in life. I don’t know that Mary thought that. But it would certainly be easy to understand that she could have thought that.
John the Baptist, the one who was called to actually proclaim Jesus’ coming, Zachariah and Elizabeth’s son, at one point actually sends messengers, disciples of his, to go talk to Jesus. Because John has found himself in prison. He’s announced that Jesus had come. And the kingdom isn’t happening. He’s in prison under Herod’s reign of terror. He says, are you the one to come or is there another? People have wrestled with that. But it seems that John is simply looking and feeling like not much is happening. It’d be really easy to reach that point. And I think that’s how we reach where Zachariah was.
We start to feel like this box in this video. This video was being posted this week, talking about where people feel like their Christmas packages aren’t showing up. And you wonder, where in the world is it in that distribution center? Why is it just sitting there day after day? And I don’t know how many boxes get caught like this one was, but certainly some seem to get misplaced or lost. And this one isn’t going anywhere.
And that’s how it probably felt for John. It was how it had felt for Zachariah, where he had built up this doubt because it felt like as much as he prayed, the box of his prayers was just stuck in that conveyor belt. It wasn’t going anywhere. It would have been easy for Mary to fall into that same trap. And maybe at times she did.
Maybe that’s how you feel at this moment. Isn’t it a picture of how we often feel in our lives, that we just feel like God isn’t acting the way we thought he would? We’re just that box. All of our hopes and dreams are just that box going around in that conveyor belt. And we start to build up that defense of that doubt that God is actually going to act. That we can really expect anything other than that we should keep fulfilling the motions.
You might even start to think, does God really love me? Does God really care about my life? You say, why is this box just rolling and rolling and rolling? God cares. That’s definitely the sort of mood that John the Baptist would have to be wrestling with as he’s in prison. He’s ultimately going to die at the hands of Herod. And so here it is that this coming Messiah was proclaimed, and Jesus is here. And that box just keeps rolling.
I think at Christmas time, we hear about the miracles of Christmas, and then we start to push them further away again, because we think, well, if Christmas is the completion of this promise of God, but nothing seems to happen, my life still is in different pieces, it isn’t where I want it to be, then maybe it never will be. But Christmas isn’t the completion. Christmas is what allows us to have the hope of the expectation that God is still working. The hope that the promises of God that are still to come will come. The hope that God’s plan isn’t complete, that the book isn’t closed, and that we’re just lost and wandering.
We see that that is ultimately where Mary landed. Now, I don’t know if Mary ever struggled with these things, but I can’t imagine that she didn’t. But Mary trusted and she believed, and we see that in John chapter 2, the wedding feast of Cana, Jesus’ very first miracle. This is into the time of his miracles, and it says,
“On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, They have no wine. And Jesus said to her, Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come. His mother said to the servants, Do whatever he tells you.”
What did Mary know for sure? I don’t know if she fully understood how the plan of Jesus’ life would unfold at that point. I suspect she didn’t. But she did know this. She knew that God was faithful, that Jesus was the Son of God, that she had as her son the Messiah, and she was confident, even though up to this point, he’d lived a relatively quiet life, that he was who that angel had told her he was.
We see that expectation in Mary’s song as she rejoices with Elizabeth so many years before. Luke chapter 1, verse 54. Mary says, “He has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his offspring forever.” Notice that Mary doesn’t say, Someday God is going to do these things. Someday God is going to care about his people and rescue his people and remember his mercy. No, she says he has. And Jesus isn’t even born yet.
So much is going to come. And she’s already had to go through so much with the surprise announcement and trying to work things out with Joseph and him thinking about divorcing her before they were even married. All this has happened, and yet she sings this song. Why? Because she has confidence. She has faith. And we see that again in that wedding feast at Cana. She still has confidence. Jesus is the one she has believed him to be. And, in fact, he performs his first miracle there. She’s confident enough in what God has promised that she doesn’t say, Well, maybe, Jesus, if you can sneak over there and do something, that would be great. No, she calls the servants over and says, Whatever he tells you to do, do it. Because she knows that God is faithful. That even though it’s been a very long wait, that God’s promises will be fulfilled.
Mary knows that God’s salvation that he has promised is finished. It may not be finished in our lives. It may not feel like it’s fully experienced in this moment for us, but it is finished. It is already completed, and it is completed for you, and it’s completed for me. It’s completed for everyone who believes in Jesus. All we have to do is call on the name of the Lord, repent of our sins, follow him. It’s already done. And that’s how Mary approaches this.
I think for many of us, we go back and forth between being a Zachariah and a Mary. Let me ask us this question tonight. Am I focused on wanting to know the if, if God is going to work? Or am I focused on the how? When I pray to God and I ask him questions and I wonder what he’s doing, am I focused on the if or the how? Do I say, God, I know you’ve promised to be with me, but if you are really with me, would I say, God, I don’t understand what you’re doing right now. Can you just help me to better understand?
And if we’re in that first place, what we should do is come before our God and ask him to give us the strength to reach that second place. It’s not the sort of thing we can do on our own. Mary clearly, as she sings her beautiful song in the presence of Elizabeth, clearly seems to be inspired by the Holy Spirit. Her faith comes as a gift from God. And the faith that he offers us comes as a gift from him as well.
Let us run from that faithful doubt where we functionally expect nothing and we just go through the motions and instead turn to a faith in uncertainty. Mary experienced plenty of uncertainty. But we see in the fulfillment of God’s promises throughout the ages that even when we live in uncertainty, God fulfills his promises time and again. He hasn’t stopped. When we do that, we can enjoy even the uncertainty more. It doesn’t make it easy. I think we know that. But we certainly can start to look to see how God is working.
Mary, because she was living in faith in uncertainty, could be at that wedding feast years after the birth that we’re celebrating this week. And she could still have that faith and could still be ready to witness the Son of God perform an incredible miracle of turning water into wine because she still was living with the expectation, the hope that comes from God’s promises.
That’s what we are called to do as well. Where are we tonight? What are we expecting? I was thinking this week of how my grandma would always make these wonderful holiday dinners at different times of the year, and her signature, and certainly my favorite thing she made was her roast. And I had confidence. I believed, even when I was waiting for it, even when there was that agonizing wait where you’d walk into the house and you’d smell the wonderful roast cooking and you couldn’t have it yet, I had faith it was going to be delicious because her cooking had never let me down. I knew it was going to be great.
Now, my grandpa was a retired butcher, and we’d go downstairs with that roast when it was done, and we’d put it on his meat slicer, and he’d slice it, and we’d have to do some quality control. We’d have to taste it. But when we were tasting it, it wasn’t a question of if it was going to be good. It was a question of how wonderful was it going to be? How would we experience the wonder of this roast in that moment?
And because we weren’t going into it thinking, do I really want to stick this in my mouth or not? We were able to enjoy the full delight of that delicious hot roast while everyone else was upstairs waiting for us to finish slicing it. Let us live life like that, that we live with that expectation and that hope that God is working, that the roast of salvation is cooking, that it’s already been completed, that God has everything under control. And when he gives us those opportunities to taste, we can taste with confidence because we know that he will still do what he has promised.
The miracle of Christmas isn’t the completion. It gives us that hope, that expectation of what is still to come. And that’s what we celebrate this week. Will you pray with me, please?
Lord, so often we don’t live with expectation. We don’t live with hope. Whether we simply don’t believe at all because we think, well, nothing seems to happen, or we do believe and yet we put up this wall of doubt and still, even as we pray, we don’t expect you to answer our prayers. Even as we read your promises in scripture, we act as if they’re not really happening because it seems somehow safer and more comfortable.
Lord, would you free us from that doubt? Would you give us the strength to face life with hopeful expectation, to have faith in uncertainty? As we see the story of Mary and how she faced so much uncertainty but believed the promises you had given her, would you help us to believe the promises you’ve given us? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Well, thank you for being here and joining us tonight. I would like to encourage you. We have so much coming up this week. We have Christmas Eve service coming on Thursday, December 24th at 7 p.m. It would be wonderful to have you take part in that. We’re going to be reflecting on the light of the world coming into the world. We’re going to light the Christ candle to complete our Advent wreath lightings. It’s going to be a great time, and I really hope to share it with you.
Also, on Christmas Day, we’re going to begin a devotional series, the 12 Days of Christmas. If you’ve never experienced the 12 Days of Christmas, especially this year, I’d encourage you to take the time to download that booklet, leave the decorations up, and after all the hubbub and rush of Christmas, meditate on God’s promises. How do we overcome that doubt that we often wall ourselves off in? We go and read God’s Word, and we see what He’s doing.
We’re going to be reflecting on the light of the world, Jesus coming into the world, and what He has done for His people throughout history. So please do join us. There will be a downloadable PDF. You can download it and read it every day over the 12 days starting on Christmas Day.
And, of course, next week we will continue our series. I already previewed it earlier. Wasn’t that a great preview? Simeon and Anna, who had spent their lives anticipating the Messiah, we’re going to turn to them and see their joy and how they rejoice in the coming of Jesus next week. So please do join us for that.
There’s all kinds of details about this at littlehills.church.com. Also, we’re partnering with the other Faith Tree churches to do a stream throughout Christmas Day and Christmas weekend where you can see different clips of beautiful Christmas music and fireplaces and old Faith Tree services and some of the Little Hills messages around Christmas and messages from other local pastors. It’s going to be a great time. I hope you’ll take part in some of these things this Christmas week. I look forward to seeing you next week.
Please do share this. If it’s been an encouragement to you, give it a like. You can help us to get the word out about the God who we can hope in because He fulfills His promises. If there’s any way I can be praying for you this week, feel free to shoot me an email. I’d love to hear from you. Or leave a comment below and we can all pray for each other.
Thank you again for joining me. I hope you have a blessed week and a very Merry Christmas.