Christmas Through Mary’s Eyes
God’s Surprises in the Christmas Story
December 21, 2008
Luke 2:1–20
Today, I want to lay out for you several surprising ways in which God advances His salvation plan. If God saves in surprising ways, what might that mean for you and me? Yes, the Lord is dependable and reliable. But if He is a surprising God using surprising ways to save, we need to be ready for His surprising calls on our lives. So the central truth I am going to attempt to prove to you today is this: God saves in surprising ways, so we must be ready for His surprising calls. All this comes from our Advent series on Christmas through Mary’s eyes in the Gospel of Luke.
O Lord, it’s hard to be humble
December 7, 2008
Luke 1:39–56
Now the question is “who does God choose to do His work and carry out His plans; the proud or the humble?”
We approach Christmas this year through the eyes of the Gospel writer Luke. He gives a lot of time to Jesus’ mother Mary. We focused last week on the angel Gabriel’s announcement of God’s plan to use Mary in a super way to accomplish His purposes. She will be with child by the Holy Spirit. The passage ended with Mary humbly accepting this role declaring “I am the Lord’s maidservant.” But what happened after that?
The Announcement
November 30, 2008
Luke 1:26–38
Well God used His own extraordinary resources combined with very ordinary earthly resources to bring Jesus here. God broke every marketing rule in the book to announce Jesus’ coming. Yet it worked. The fact many of us in this room call ourselves Christ followers proves it. So today we begin to explore how God introduced Jesus to the world.
As we enter into the Advent or Christmas season today, we will again focus on the Christmas story from the Bible. Last year, we looked at the account from Matthew. This year, we will be looking at the Gospel of Luke. I’ve decided to focus our study on Christmas through Mary’s eyes. Luke provides the most detail about Mary through his account of the Christmas story.