From Speachless To Praise

Good morning, brothers and sisters. I'm glad to see all of you. What a beautiful morning we have. Beautiful snow. It's so pretty to see the coverings. As I looked last night and woke up this morning and the bright sunshine. You can't ask for a prettier Christmas time.

Well, if you would like to turn in your copy of God's Word to the book of Luke, where we have been the last weeks and months. And as you look on your bulletin, I got a little overzealous thinking I could get to verse 80, and that's, we'll have to do this in two parts. And so my hope is to get through verse 75 just to let you know. We're coming now to this hymn of praise. Remember we're looking at Zacharias. Zacharias who had been made to not be able to speak because of his unbelief. And we realize at this point in the passage where John has been born and they came to name him. And at the naming, there was a disagreement, if you will, over the relatives and people there. And they thought his name should be Zacharias. And Elizabeth said, no, his name shall be John. And at that point, John wrote and said, his name is John. And they were all astonished. And this is where we pick up and we pick up here at Zacharias, this restored believing one, and he explodes into gratitude and thankfulness and glory to God.

When we consider you as New Testament believers and Old Testament believers that we see in the scriptures, I started to say there's one thing in common, and of course we know the main one thing in common is faith in the Messiah, and faith. But because of the effect of that faith, we see one thing that's in common that I think you could all agree upon, hopefully, and that is that there is a heart of thankfulness and a gratitude that comes out in praise. This is seen, this is common, it should be common in our own hearts that we would be praisers with our mouths.

If you didn't know, when we look at the first two chapters in Luke, there are five songs of praise that are relayed to us in the first two chapters. And we are now upon the third of those. The first being, we remember Elizabeth and her praising of what God had done, and then Mary, known as the Magnificent in the Latin, the word comes as magnify, and so you have the magnificent. In the Latin of where we are today, blessed be, you see the benedictus, the Latin word for that. We're gonna see the Greek word for that too that'll help us, I pray. But this is what this one is known as, is the benedictus. And then we have two more to look at. We have the angel's song of praise. And then we have Simeon, and Simeon who had been waiting in the temple, and here comes the Lord Jesus, presented by the parents, and there is a song from Simeon.

But here in this praising to God, we see this blessed being. In fact, if you look at the New Testament too, much of the writings, especially of Paul, are begun by blessed being, the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. This could be a good introduction, many of us, when we go and speak to other people. Blessed be the Lord Jesus Christ.

I do want to relay a couple of themes, two that are actually one, but these themes of Zacharias Benedictus. And the first theme that we have in here, surprise to all, God. The theme is God. And then the next scene that we'll look at in the next Lord's Day is the theme of God's servant, God's minister, and really God's servant and minister is directing to God's son. So where there's two themes, the two are in one, as we see praise to God. And these are the two sections that we are going to look at today in the preaching today.

This hymn of praise is full of Old Testament scripture, full of Old Testament quotations, full of Old Testament allusions, and as I jotted these down in my margin, there was numerous ones, and I thought, how am I gonna read all these? Well, I'm not, but I am going to, when I come to them, have your pen ready, and I will go fast through them, and you can go back and look. And I've looked at them, and it's a wonderful time to go back and see how this, really Old Testament priest, Zacharias, who's speaking in the New Testament, is just full of Scripture. Remember Mary, when she spoke? I mean, it's full of Scripture. We're going to see that in all of these hymns of praise that we look at in Luke.