He Has Regarded Our Low Estate

He Has Regarded Our Low Estate: Luke 1:46-48

Introduction:
Mary is a biblical person of great distinction and prominence in the gospels and indeed, in the church. But there are so many dogmatically held misconceptions of Mary that were never taught in scripture. Mary has become one of the most divisive figures in the church; depriving her of the rightful place she deserves both in the gospel and in the church. There are some who think that May is the “Queen of Heaven[1]”- with seemingly all the attributes of deity. Then there are those who, mostly in reaction the former view, overcorrect thinking they are restoring her to her biblical place in the gospels, but they actually betray an outright disdain for any kind of display of fondness for Mary.

I suppose to those who hold Mary in derision, the Angel Gabriel himself would say, “Mary has found favour with God and she is blessed among women” (Lk 1:28-30). And to those who believe Mary was immaculately conceived and equal to Jesus in grace, Mary herself would say, “don’t worship me, I am a lowly maidservant of the Lord.”

Once, after Jesus had healed a demon possessed man, he was approached by a women who said to him, “Blessed is the womb that bore You, and the breasts which nursed You!” But Jesus replied to her, “More than that, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” (Lk 11:27-28). If Mary was blessed, it wasn’t just because God used her womb and shared her flesh and blood; she was blessed because she heard the word and believed it.

Last week we met Mary and her cousin Elizabeth in the Hill country of Judea, where, upon their first encounter, the babe in Elizabeth’s womb leapt as Joy broke out at the sound of the advent of our Lord and Elizabeth blessed her younger relative. Today we will begin to look at Mary’s response to Elizabeth in what has come to be called Mary’s Magnificat. Read 1:46-48.

Mary’s Unction:
I touched on this a little last week: whenever you read that someone is filled with the Holy Spirit it almost always means they are about to say or do something prophetic. We Baptists believe something similar happens to preachers: we call it Unction. It’s an experience in preaching where we sense a special filling of the Holy Spirit so that are words become full of passion and it’s as if we’re carried by the Holy Spirit to magnify the Lord in truth and by the Word of God; (the Holy Spirit) causing our words to fall on people’s ears with such power and affection as though the gospel were being preached to them for the first time. That’s Unction![2] (I wish it happened more often.)

I also believe that what Mary was saying here is also prophecy. Yes, for the obvious reason, that every word of scripture is inspired by God, but also because the inspired narrative is depicting her as speaking prophetically.
“But wait a minute,” you might say, “it doesn’t say she was filled with the Holy Spirit before she spoke like it did with Elizabeth.” True, it doesn’t say that- so how can we know that she is filled with the ‘unction’?
Let’s back up a few months. Look at 1:33-35. If anyone doubts that Mary was filled with the Holy Spirit, they need look no further then the miraculous incarnation which must still have been resonating within her.

Magnify the Lord:
So Mary, speaking prophetically says, “My Soul (glorifies-NIV) magnifies the Lord.” Time won’t allow me to go into a thorough explanation of prophecy, but for this morning, I hope you can accept that Prophecy is more then just fore telling the future, but that it is primarily forth telling[3] the glories of God. Forth telling the glory of God in a prophetic sense is magnifying the Lord so that whenever a Spirit filled believer magnifies the Lord, whether in worship, or in testimony, or in proclamation of the gospel, he or she is acting prophetically.

Now that begs the question, “How do we magnify the Lord?” We are going to look at two things this morning: First, ‘What it is to Magnify the Lord’ and then ‘How we can Magnify the Lord’:

What:
To magnify God isn’t the same as magnifying a thing that is little by making it big, nor is it a matter of looking at something that is small through a lens that makes it appear large. God is in and of Himself big. He doesn’t need us to magnify Him that way; His very essence is self magnifying. It’s kind of like when we say that fire is hot. If fire were not hot, it would not be fire. It like that with God, if he were not magnified, he would not be God.

I suppose the problem comes from the word ‘magnified’- it’s such a mechanical scientific word; but the Greek word means something slightly different, it carries the idea of showing the bigness or the glory of something. In this case it means showing the majesty of God. It’s like if you’ve never seen the Grand Canyon, it’s pretty meaningless to have someone tell you about how big it is- until they show you how big it is.

Show God’s bigness means admitting our smallness. Magnifying Him means humbling ourselves. Job once asked of God, “What is man, that you make so much of him, and that you set your heart on him…” (7:17 ESV). David said, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5). And it’s our sin that compels us to make so much of ourselves and so little of God. But until you, like Job and David after him, recognize your stain and filth and utter corruption and inability, you cannot make much of God, you cannot magnify him. All our religion is a pretense until we are born again because it’s so self serving; even after we’re born again we have to fight against our flesh to magnify the Lord. Even Mary struggled with doubt and forced her will on Jesus!

But Mary humbled herself here; She did it almost intuitively- this is what makes her such a virtuous woman. And let’s be clear about something, Mary’s prominence does not come from the fact that she was a virgin (as important as that was to the incarnation) her distinction came from her virtue and her virtue came from the recognition of her lowliness. Verse 48 says that God has regarded Mary’s exalted state…? No! “He has regarded the lowly state of his maidservant.” She wasn’t talking about her social status or her financial status; she was recognizing her utter dependency upon God and need for Him to save her and that provoked her soul to magnify Him. Magnifying God means humbling self- it means having a realistic view of self rather then a self deluded view.

Just so we don’t turn this word magnify into some propositional set of “how to’s”, let’s not miss the fact that magnifying God, although it involves the mind, is not just an intellectual venture, it’s also an act of affection: a ‘religious affection.’ Magnify the Lord is qualified by Mary to imply that it comes from her soul and that it is expressed in such a way as to provoke joy. Because God has shown and increased his mercy to Mary in her lowly state, she has, in effect, increased her magnification of him through the expression of Joy that comes from her soul. So in verse 47 Mary, using different words, reaffirms just what it is that her soul is doing magnifying the Lord: “And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Saviour.”

To rejoice means to adorn something, to make it resplendent. It is a demonstrative joy. Psalm 125 says “our mouths were filled with laughter.” David calls it the “Joy of his salvation” (Ps 50:14). It is not the false rejoicing that Jesus accused the Pharisees of when he said John was “was a burning lamp, and you were willing to rejoice for a while” (Jn 5:35). Rather it is an exceeding joy because it puts all other pleasure to shame. And it is a deep abiding joy because it originates in the spirit and leaps out to God. It is a Joy which not even persecution can expunge (Mat 5:12; 1 Peter 4:13). It is a joy that surpasses understanding and with which we are guarded until the day of redemption.


Our example is Jesus,
…the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God (Heb 12:2).
When St Augustine, a man renowned for his Hedonism and self indulgence for the first half of his life, and became one the greatest theologians of all times; when he discovered this Joy, he wrote,
How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose…. You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place, you who are sweeter than all pleasure, though not to flesh and blood… (Augustine).
C.S. Lewis described it as being stabbed by God with Joy. I have felt it like that, like a hook in my heart that lifts my soul to heaven. And it hasn’t always come at the times I expected it, just at times when I needed it most.

So, now we have seen that Magnifying the Lord is a Spirit empowered spiritual and intellectual act of joy (a prophetic act) that involves showing the greatness of God by recognizing the smallness of self- let’s look at some practical ways that we can magnify the Lord and express our joy:

How:
Paul was one man whose entire life was lived out for the magnification of the Lord. Listen to how Paul did it from 2 Corinthians 6:
in much patience, in tribulations, in needs, in distresses, in stripes, in imprisonments, in tumults, in labors, in sleeplessness, in fastings; by purity, by knowledge, by longsuffering, by kindness, by the Holy Spirit, by sincere love, by the word of truth, by the power of God, by the armor of righteousness on the right hand and on the left, by honor and dishonor, by evil report and good report; as deceivers, and yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as chastened, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things.

And towards the end of his life, Paul had no regrets. While languishing in a dank Roman prison Paul wrote these words, “…in nothing I shall be ashamed, but with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ will be magnified in my body, whether by life or by death.” Paul was a living sacrifice. Here are three ways (there are more) that we can make our lives to magnify the Lord this Christmas and always (this gives meaning to Christmas).

The answer is to look at what propelled Paul. Three things:
1. It was to preach the gospel. Every time we preach the gospel we magnify the Lord and it also causes our hearers to magnify him.
2. Preaching the gospel means sharing our testimony. We don’t just share our testimony with unbelievers, but with believers too, to encourage them and help build their faith. But every time we share our testimony we preach the gospel and we show the diversity of ways that God deals with us.
3. Finally, the goal of preaching the gospel, the goal of missions, of sharing our testimony- is worship (That’s what Paul was doing in the Roman prison). So that people who once only lived to magnify themselves can make much of God and magnify him.
4. Finally, we magnify God when we remind ourselves and others of our future hope. When The Apostle John in a vision saw the return of Christ, he wrote these words:
“Alleluia! For the Lord God Omnipotent reigns! Let us be glad and rejoice and give Him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His wife has made herself ready” (Rev 19:6-7).

Conclusion:
In closing, I leave you with this poem from John Piper, as I read it, try to imagine what the world will be like when Christ returns and sin and death are no more:
The blind can see a bird on wing,The dumb can lift his voice and sing.The diabetic eats at will,The coronary runs uphill.The lame can walk, the deaf can hear,The cancer-ridden bone is clear.Arthritic joints are lithe and free,And every pain has ceased to be.And every sorrow deep within,And every trace of lingering sinIs gone. And all that's left is joy,And endless ages to employThe mind and heart to understandAnd love the sovereign Lord who plannedThat it should take eternityTo lavish all his grace on me.
O God of wonder, God of might,Grant us some elevated sight,Of endless days. And let us seeThe joy of what is yet to be.And may your future make us free,And guard us by the hope that we,Within the light of candle three,Your glory will forever see.
John Piper

NOTES:
[1] A title for Ashterah in the Old Testament.
[2] If we stand back and compare this to what Pentecostals believe regarding the Second Blessing that results in tongues, we have more in common then we think we do. The major difference is that instead of a “Second Blessing” marked by unintelligible babble, we believe that the Christian life is a series of ongoing fillings that always result in our lips magnifying the Lord in a way that is understandable to those around us.
[3] Foretelling the future is a Charisma that I believe is no longer in use today, however, forthtelling the glories and the riches of God’s grace in a way that magnifies God and causes others to do the same is a grace gift that continues until the end.