Let's turn in God's word to Luke's gospel, chapter one, verses 26 to 33. Luke chapter one, verses 26 to 33. And you can find that on page 855 in the Blue Bibles. This Sunday, we're starting an Advent series where we explore the significance of Jesus coming, Christ coming as God in the flesh, and we're going to particularly look at the experience of the Virgin Mary leading up to the birth of Christ from Luke's gospel. As we get ready, let me just mention that Luke starts his gospel describing how John the Baptist's birth gets announced. And at the point where our passage picks up, John's mother Elizabeth is in her sixth month of pregnancy when an even more amazing announcement takes place. Luke chapter 1, starting in the 26th verse, please follow along as I read God's word. In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph of the house of David. And the virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you. But she was greatly troubled at the saying and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father, David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever and of his kingdom There will be no end. This is God's word. Let's pray. Gracious Lord, we ask you now to work among us by your Holy Spirit. Enlighten our minds, we pray, and prepare our hearts to receive with gladness the good news of the coming of Jesus Christ to live among us. And we ask this in his name, amen. It used to somewhat surprise me when our kids were little, how when they got hurt or when they got sick, they would call for mom. Always. 100% of the time, maybe unless they knew she wasn't there. And you know, I consider myself a pretty kind and attentive father. I didn't understand why they always opted for mom. I came to realize in time that I'm not as kind, probably, as Kelly. I'm more likely to insist that we scrub the gravel out of the wound without delay or something like that. So there's that. And then also, It just has more and more dawned on me over time that Kelly just has a closer connection with the kids in certain ways by virtue of being their mom. She carried them for nine months. She, as they were infants, kept them alive, as mothers do. And I was there, and fathers have a very important role. The kids like me, too. But mom has this special relationship with the kids just in the sense of her being a mother in everything I just mentioned. There is a profound bond that exists between mother and child. It's an attachment with significant effects. It's very deep. Christ being conceived in Mary's womb is just full of implications. It has theological implications in it. It also just underscores the way in which Christ has entered into the human condition, even at the profound level of him having a mother and all that that entailed. It says a lot about his determination to attach himself to the human race and bring us all to blessing, to all who will receive him. That is all men and women, all boys and girls who will trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. He comes to be with us and bring us home. And we need to remember that even at times we doubt it. And so what's going on with Mary here kind of leads us to reflect on all of those things. This morning we're going to look at Mary's favor, Jesus' greatness, and then God's nearness. We start off with Mary's favor in verses 26 to 29. And by Mary's favor, I mean the favor or the graciousness of God that he shows to Mary in choosing her to be the mother of Christ. Now, as we start out, I just want to acknowledge the disagreement about the significance of Mary that exists amongst self-professed Christians. So we as Protestants do not give to Mary the same profile as she is given in the Catholic Church or the Eastern Orthodox Church. In those communions, people pray to Mary. They say that she is sinless and even preserved from the taint of original sin in her immaculate conception, that she ascended into heaven, and that she co-mediates with Christ. We wanna go as far as scripture says, but that goes far beyond what scripture says, and we would say that that gives to Mary, in a way, a place and a glory that belongs to Jesus alone. We say with Paul in 1 Timothy, there's one God and one mediator between God and man, the man in Christ Jesus. So we wanna say that really, really clearly, and not give to Mary any honor that belongs to Christ. At the same time, as we seek to be very clear about that, we shouldn't overdo our guardedness in the sense of not acknowledging what Scripture does say about Mary and her specialness. So we're gonna delve into that here in this series. The specialness that Mary does have in the story of Christ and amongst God's people. As we just read, Gabriel calls her favored in verse 28. The fact that God sends this angel to call Mary favored and say the Lord is with you is not trivial. That's a big deal. What does that mean? Elizabeth is going to call Mary the mother of my Lord in verse 43. So there's a sense in which Mary is the title mother of God, rightly understood is biblical and applies to Mary. Now we have to talk about that and be kind of very careful in the way that we understand that, but we'll get to that two messages from here. Mary herself says in verse 48, from now on generations will call me blessed. So we wanna do that. As scripture says, we wanna call Mary blessed and recognize God's favor on her and try to understand the significance of what's going on here. that we should honor Mary as a great figure in the faith is not unusual. In other words, it makes sense if you think about how we We definitely look up to and respect the great figures of faith, like Abraham. God makes a covenant with Abraham. God blesses Abraham by his grace. And yet Abraham has this place. He's the father of faith. And so we definitely look up to him for sure. We can think about Gabriel here mentioned in Luke, and he also comes up in the book of Daniel. He's a mighty angel in God's service. We don't know a whole lot about him, but we have no problem honoring him as a great one in God's service for sure. Mary had something that God granted to her, something that no one else had. which is that the Messiah, Jesus Christ, gets formed of her substance in her body, and she gets to gestate the Son of God and be his mother. And that is something, that is a kind of amazing honor. That is a kind of closeness to Christ, which is very remarkable. The theologian Hermann Bavink writes, in the undeserved favor granted to her, Mary far exceeds all other people and all angels. And then he adds this, whoever denies it is not taking the incarnation of the Son of God seriously. I did a double take when I read that. Bovink's a good Reformed theologian, but what he says there is consistent with what we see in this passage, the incredible honor that God gives to Mary, and the amazing closeness between Mary and Jesus. The early Protestant Reformers, as I read them, seem to, seem to have assimilated this. In other words, when the Protestant Reformation happened, Protestants stopped venerating Mary, praying to Mary, and affirming the other doctrines I just mentioned. And yet, they did hold her in very high regard, and would speak of her very, very respectfully, kind of tenderly, and with a lot of appreciation, as a truly great one in the faith, you know, by God's grace. So we're going to seek to do the same, and we're going to seek to understand not just the favor that God granted to her, but use that, as Scripture does, as a way to understand the closeness of Christ to all of us, and Christ coming into fellowship with the human race. As the hymn says, lo, he abhors not the virgin's womb. And there's a great significance in that, not just for Mary, but for all of us. So we're going to delve into that in this series. Now as we look at verses 26 to 29, there is an awful lot in these verses. We have talked about already how Gabriel greets Mary as a favored one. I want us to notice just a couple other themes in these verses. First of all, there is this theme of the lowliness of the conditions into which Jesus is born. We talk about this every Advent, but it's really important. We note here that Jesus Christ comes into a poor family in an obscure town. Mary, it says, feels troubled at the greeting, verse 29, so no doubt she's somewhat, I would imagine she's somewhat frightened by the angel, but the greeting itself seems to greatly sort of vex and puzzle her. How could this be so? And part of it, it would seem, is due to the lowliness of her condition. Who is she that such a thing should be said to her? It's as if the angel has come to some truck stop, some rusty under, kind of half-vacant truck stop in middle America somewhere on some highway and made some announcement about God's favor to some very obscure person. It's like, what? No, I mean, How can this be? It just stuns her. But in all of what's going on here, for Jesus to appear to this unknown girl, she's probably in her mid-teens, that was a typical betrothal age, in a very obscure town, and call her blessed, it teaches us something about what God is doing The Lord Jesus, as the prophet Isaiah predicted, came to bear our griefs and carry our sorrows. And that is something that is emphasized here in Jesus not being born, as it were, with a silver spoon in his mouth. He comes into this lowly place because he is coming to us in our misery and also in our guilt to rescue us and to bring us to glory. Very much fits what God is doing. And in Christ coming in humility, not only is the great God veiled, but as a man being obedient, humbly obedient to God, coming in his humility, his true glory and the nature of his actual work shines forth. Christ being conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary in Nazareth reminds me of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, which is an ironic thing Because as he rides in on a donkey, they cry, Hosanna to the son of David, and they're exactly right. This is the son of David, and he is the king, and he is coming in on a donkey. To underscore that this man, Jesus, the God-man, is coming in humility, to be humble, we could say, because we're so proud. He comes in our place, bearing our misery, standing for us sinners to be righteous and to offer his life for us and to bring us back to God. He takes his rule then through humility. And that's one theme here. And another theme in this first section is certainly the emphasis on Mary as a virgin. Now, verse 27 says it, and it says it twice, so that's emphasized. Mary being a virgin, fulfills the Old Testament prophecy in Isaiah chapter seven, verse 14, that the Messiah would be born of a virgin. That is, she would be born of a woman without the natural, normal involvement of a man. And this miraculous birth is a sign. It's a sign, pure and simple. It's also a sign that in the nature of the sign signals a fresh start for humanity. In other words, Jesus Christ comes in a different way than everyone else. He is a new kind of human. So we recognize him as truly one of us. The Spirit forms Christ in Mary's womb of her substance. We infer that from verses 31 and 42. We'll talk about that in coming weeks. So Jesus Christ is truly human from human. But the fact that he has no human father underscores that the most high is his father, in verse 32. His conception by the Spirit of God, by the power of the Spirit, then also preserves him from the taint of original sin. Look down at verse 35, which we'll talk about next week. It says the one born will be holy, so he is conceived without the taint of original sin, and that is definitely a break from the past. Christ is a prototype of change. Later on, Paul will call him the second Adam. He's like the new head of a new, or should I say, repaired human race. A new pattern of humanity, people saved by Christ and bound for glory. Jesus Christ is a fresh start. He's the fresh start that we all need. And that is signified in his virgin birth. Verses 30 to 33 tell about the greatness of this king, the Lord Jesus Christ. Look at verse 31, the angel repeats. He says, do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. That's a name that means the Lord saves. And then in verse 32, he says, he will be great. And that great truth is such a great statement, it's hard to describe even all the ways Jesus is great. But this passage refers to the two main ones. First, Christ is great because He is divine. Verse 32 says, He will be called the Son of the Most High. And so we have this reference here, which when we correlate it to the rest of Scripture, We understand that Christ is the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, who in the fullness of time takes to himself human nature. But Jesus Christ is none other than God himself, so that is first of what's spotlighted in his greatness. But then also, as verse 32 goes on, Christ steps into a line of human kings, Verse 32 says, and the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David. Because God promised David that one of his sons would sit on the throne forever. That's in 2 Samuel 7.14, I believe. 7.13, and that's said elsewhere in the Old Testament. So, it was well known that the Messiah would be son of David, and Gabriel is basically saying, here he is, here's the son of David, he has arrived. And this is where Joseph's lineage especially comes into play. We read back in verse 27 that Joseph is of the house of David, and the details are important here. Mary, it says, is betrothed to Joseph at the time that this announcement comes. Betrothal in this time was stronger than the idea of engagement today. Betrothal meant married for all practical purposes except living together. So there was a contract, in other words, that had already been entered into. Mary was, in terms of that contract, Joseph's wife, promised. So firm was that promise, it took a divorce to break it. So it was like Mary had already been brought into a Davidic context, or we could say Joseph as the heir to David's throne, obscure as he was, Mary had already kind of come under his wings and been made part of a Davidic family. And then the Holy Ghost, by the power of the Holy Ghost, a child is conceived in her womb, who will be a son of David. Jesus gets conceived within a Davidic family, and Joseph's right to the throne passes to Christ. So this is the way it came about. And in short, we say, in theological terms, and these terms have been pretty well worked out over 2,000 years, we say, the eternal Son of God takes to himself human nature. That's how we say it. The church fathers talked about the Son of God cloaking himself, as it were, with human nature. And that's a good way to think about it. The eternal Son of God is cloaking himself with our nature as this child is conceived in Mary's womb, and the Son of God takes that child into personal union with himself. That's our King. Jesus is a faithful, human son of man come to stand in our place and be that humble, faithful king in the way that we all fail to do, to die for us, to rise again, and he is God himself, giving power and effectiveness to all that work, and that makes Jesus truly great. He will be great, the angel says. And this is the kind of greatness we need. The ordinary stripe of human leaders kings, presidents, and whatnot. They will seek to signal their greatness through their programs, through their speeches, through their appearances, through their parades sometimes, through their wars. But what kind of ruler does a human race really need? I mean, we're appreciative of the leaders God grants us to the extent they're faithful, they do good. But do we really need more of that in the big picture? Do we need more wars? Do we need more speeches? Do we need more programs? Do we need more parades? Is this gonna be what helps us? Friends, we need a fresh start. And Jesus Christ as King comes with that fresh start for humanity, which is exactly what we need. We need to be repaired at a fundamental level. And that's what Jesus comes to do. by standing in our place, washing us clean, and bringing us back to God. He reconciles us to the Creator, and ultimately, he will reconcile all things, as we've talked about in Corinthians. Jesus comes to repair us and lead us home. That is his greatness. Let's wind up, thirdly, thinking about God's nearness to us That is especially signified or pointed to in what God does here in favoring Mary to be the mother of Christ. God's nearness. Gabriel says, greetings favored one, the Lord is with you. And that's, you know. That's a common greeting in a way between believers. The Lord be with you and also with you. The Lord is with you. But the Lord is with Mary in a very profound and remarkable way. Mary's heartbeat echoes in the ears of the Lord during the time she is in his womb. Mary nourishes the Lord through her umbilical cord and by nursing him as a baby. Christ is with Mary as his mother And that closeness between Jesus and Mary just illustrates and underscores how determined Jesus is to actually come into our midst as a man and truly save us. He doesn't hold us at a distance. He comes to us as our Savior. And it just illustrates to us that in order for the Lord Jesus to save us, he has to come close and share our condition. The thing is, humanity has a mission. As God created us, we're supposed to, God says in Genesis, fill the earth and subdue it. In other words, rule here, be faithful to me. We haven't done it, and it has to be done. Therefore, A man comes, a new man, Jesus, kind of on a different model, and he's going to do it. He's going to be faithful to God. He's going to obey God. He's going to pay for us and set us all free. We become free then in Jesus because he came close to us. He's a restoring leader. So Christ comes close to us as is so vividly pictured by his taking form in the Virgin's womb. For our part, we have to welcome Jesus into our space to save us and to lead us. Because when we trust in him, if you trust in Jesus, you're entrusting yourself to him, and you are also welcoming him in. You can't hold him at a distance. Christ said, I stand at the door and knock. Whoever opens the door, I will come in and dine with him in a really kind of, interesting, intimate, close image. Not everybody wants Jesus coming close as Lord and Savior. Some will say, I'm not so bad as all that, and I'm fine the way I am, and basically stiff-armed, the Lord, I don't want that. Others will say, I admit that I have my faults, but I'm busy addressing them. I follow this faith over here, or I'm taking these measures to improve my life, and it's just another way of holding Jesus at a distance, of not welcoming him to come close. But again, Jesus taking form in Mary's womb illustrates her determination to draw close to those he saves. And when we receive him as Lord and Savior, Scripture actually uses the imagery of Jesus coming to be in our hearts. Paul, rather, said in Ephesians, he was prayed that Christ, he said, may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you may have strength to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. So we see here In Mary's story, Christ's determination to come close to the human race. And just a couple closing reflections on this for those who have trusted the Lord Jesus. And these are kind of, these are just devotional reflections for you to hear this and be comforted by the love of Jesus for you. First, just realize that Jesus earnestly desires to be close to you. The Lord Jesus Christ earnestly desires to be near to all of his people. and his relationship with his family actually illustrates that. Later on in Luke chapter eight, we read that Christ's mother and brothers come to see him, and Jesus is teaching the crowd, and he says, he says, my mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it. And he wasn't downplaying his great affection for his mother and his brothers, of course, but what he was saying is if you will receive me, If you will trust in me, if you will gratefully follow me in grateful obedience, then I will count you as my family. Do you believe that? Do you believe that Jesus wants you close like that? It can be a little hard to believe. I think that for some of us, If we were to think of us being Jesus' family, we would think about maybe being sort of distant, very distant cousins of his or something like that. Because there's things in us that we're not proud of, and we are very much works in progress. Does he really want to be close to us? And that's exactly what he says here. and we have to take him at his word. If you have trusted in him, he washes you clean, and he brings you close, and he welcomes you as if you were like his own mother or his own brothers, and that is the heart of Jesus for you. Another way to just dwell on that same thing, dwell on the nearness of Christ to us, is just to reflect that Jesus comes into our condition and deals with our complications and is not scared off by them. Jesus entering into a family meant that Jesus entered into all the joys, complications, and sorrows of a family. Luke chapter two tells about the time when Mary and Joseph lost him in Jerusalem, remember that? And then when they finally found him in their nervous worry, they misunderstood him and they scolded him. Can you imagine? Could you imagine that? And that's part of what Jesus was into coming into a family. But He took our nature, expecting all of those complications, and in a sense, welcoming them. For He is willing to deal with us as He finds us. He doesn't withdraw from complicated people who make mistakes. This is what He came for. Do you believe that He welcomes sinners? That He does not hold you at a distance? that he calls you close and he wants you to trust him and he wants you to understand that as you do, you are like his mother and his brothers, how much he loves you. This gets at the personal aspect of our response to Christ. When we sing joy to the world, the Lord has come, we sing of the offer to the world. But in that same hymn, we also say, let every heart prepare him room. And that's what we're doing as we think about the coming of Christ. We're preparing Him room today. Entrust to Jesus all of your faith. And in that, your obedience and loyalty to Him as your Savior. He loves you with who you are. He loves you with all of your complexity and the things that aren't quite right about you. You being a work in progress does not scare Him off. He came just to be near to us. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for sending your Son for us, and we praise you that Christ first made his home in the Virgin's womb, that he might be born and live and die to gather us into your family. And Father, since he has come so near to us and drawn close, cause us, we pray, by your grace to also open our hearts to him and receive the comfort of his coming. We ask for these blessings in Jesus' name, amen.