A Sunday School teacher once asked her class of children: “What is Christmas a time for?” Many of the kids gave the usual answers – Jesus’ birthday, a time of joy, presents…but one child responded with a unique and unusual answer, “Christmas is a time for sportsmanship.” “Sportsmanship?” asked the teacher.” “Yeah, sportsmanship because it’s like when you lose a game. Sometimes you don’t get what you wanted but you still have to grin and pretend it’s alright.”
This morning, as we continue our look at the beginnings of Jesus’ ministry, we’ll see how Mary and Joseph handled a gift that was probably one they didn’t really want. And as we do that we’ll get some insight into how that impacted Jesus’ life and what it means for us as His followers.
Let’s begin in the gospel of Luke. Turn to chapter 1 and follow along as I begin reading in verse 26:
26 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, 27 to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin's name was Mary. 28 And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” 29 But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. 30 And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. 31 And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. 32 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, 33 and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
34 And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”
35 And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. 36 And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. 37 For nothing will be impossible with God.” 38 And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.
Luke 1:26-38 (ESV)
Not surprisingly Luke provides us with Mary’s perspective on these events which preceded the birth of Jesus. This is consistent with his focus on the humanity of Jesus which is often seen through the eyes of the women in Jesus’ life.
We should also not be surprised that Matthew provides us with Joseph’s perspective of some related events that are occurring at about the same time. So go ahead and turn with me to Matthew’s gospel and follow along as I read from chapter1 beginning with verse 18:
18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19 And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. 20 But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel”
(which means, God with us). 24 When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, 25 but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.
Matthew 1:18-25 (ESV)
Before we’re able to begin to draw some practical principles from these passages, a bit of background is needed.
Jewish wedding customs at the time of Jesus’ birth were much different than what we are familiar with today. A prospective bridegroom would travel from his father’s house to the home of the prospective bride where he would negotiate a bride price with the father of the bride to be. Once the price was agreed upon a marriage covenant was established and it was sealed by the woman drinking from a cup of wine that was offered to her by the man. That began the betrothal period and from that time forward the man and woman were considered to be married and the relationship could only be ended by divorce.
The bridegroom would return to his father’s house where he would prepare a place for him and his bride to live. During that same time the woman would make preparations for the wedding. When the house was ready and his father approved, the bridegroom would return to his bride’s home to take his bride and the marriage ceremony was held and then the marriage could be consummated.
As the events recorded by Luke and Matthew take place, Mary and Joseph are in the betrothal period. Joseph spends his days using his carpenter skills to prepare the home where he and Mary will live. And Mary fills her days preparing for the day when Joseph will return for her and they can celebrate the marriage with their friends and family and finally begin their life together as husband and wife.
But God interrupts those plans because He has different plans for their lives. He is going to give them a gift that at least at first I’m sure they didn’t really want. At a minimum, it was surely an unexpected gift. All the plans that they had made for their life together as husband and wife were about to go right out the window.
Although none of the gospel writers record it for us, Joseph and Mary undoubtedly related the accounts of their visits by an angel to Jesus as He was growing up, in much the same way we recount to our children the accounts of our dating and marriage and their births. And I’m convinced that, at least in His humanity, Jesus was greatly influenced by the character that His earthly parents demonstrated in these events that surrounded His birth.
So certainly these accounts point out the importance of providing a godly heritage to our children and we could certainly focus on that this morning. And if you’re a parent who is still raising young children at home I want to encourage you to spend some time this week looking at these passages from that perspective.
But there is an even broader viewpoint I’d like us to take this morning. And that is this:
How am I to respond when God interrupts my plans?
You’ve probably heard the saying, “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.” That’s essentially the point the writer of the Proverbs made:
Many are the plans in the mind of a man,
but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.
Proverbs 19:21 (ESV)
Mary and Joseph had all kinds of plans for their future. But God had something else in mind – something that Mary and Joseph couldn’t have imagined in their wildest dreams. But how they responded to God’s interruption of their plans is very instructive for us. Let’s look at three principles that we can draw from these two accounts about how to respond when God interrupts our plans.
1. Take time to listen to God
I never really thought about it until this week, but Joseph doesn’t speak one single word that is recorded in any of the gospels. In fact I was thinking about all the Christmas pageants and plays that I’ve ever been to and Joseph rarely speaks even then. Except for one pageant I heard about where a young boy who wanted to play the part of Joseph got stuck playing the innkeeper. So he decided he’d get back at everyone. When Joseph and Mary came to the inn seeking shelter he said, “Sure, folks come right on in, we have plenty of room.” But the boy playing Joseph was up to the task and immediately responded, “Hey, this place is a dump. We’d rather stay in the stable.” With those words the pageant was right back on track.
But the Scriptures paint Joseph as a man who listened to God and then obeyed. Once Joseph discovered that Mary was pregnant and he knew he wasn’t the father, he still planned to protect Mary’s dignity. He would just quietly divorce her so as to call as little attention as possible to her predicament. But God had other plans and fortunately Joseph was willing to listen to God’s plans before he carried out his own.
We find this same character trait in Mary’s life. That’s not to say that Mary didn’t have some questions and some fears about what God revealed to her. But we also get the sense that this teenage girl really desired to hear what God wanted to reveal to her. So she listened to everything the angel had to tell her before making any rash judgments or jumping to any foolish conclusions.
The example of Joseph and Mary in taking time to listen to God is certainly evidenced in the life and ministry of Jesus. As we’ll discover later in our journey, Jesus consistently seeks to hear from His heavenly Father before every major event in His life.
But unfortunately, there are many Christians that seem to take exactly the opposite approach. God interrupts their plans and instead of seeking to listen to God, they avoid Him because they are afraid that they might hear something they don’t want to hear. They so misunderstand the nature of God that they really believe that God might have some horrible plan for their life, like sending them to the jungles of South America as a missionary and they can’t stand snakes and bugs. So they just don’t want to hear from God.
But here is what God reveals about His plans for us:
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.
Jeremiah 29:11 (ESV)
And if for some reason, God’s plan is for us to end up as a missionary in South America, the one thing we can be sure of is that plan is both for our welfare as well as for the good of others.
But the real question for us this morning is this: How do I listen to God? It doesn’t seem that God tends to speak to us real often through angels and visions the way He did with Joseph and Mary, after all. Fortunately, when God does interrupt our plans, we have two places where we can go to listen to Him:
• Through His Word
The first thing we need to do when God interrupts our plans is to turn to His Word. It is through the Scriptures that God can develop our faith, which is exactly what we need at those times in our lives. These familiar words of Paul certainly confirm this principle:
So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.
Romans 10:17 (ESV)
Obviously, we’re not going to get the same type of specific revelation that Joseph and Mary received from God’s angels when we read the Bible. But what we will find there is a revelation of God’s character, His plans and His ways. And all of those attributes are indispensable for us when we are truly seeking to respond properly during those times when God interrupts our plans.
Actually the best way to prepare for those times is not to wait until they occur to start reading God’s Word, but rather to be saturating our lives with the Bible on a daily basis. Again the words of Paul are instructive here:
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.
Colossians 3:16 (ESV)
The only way that God’s Word will ever dwell in us richly is if we take the time to be consistently saturating our minds with it.
• Through prayer
The other main way that we can listen to God is through prayer. When we quiet ourselves down and come into His presence in prayer, we give God greater access to our souls and our spirits.
The Psalmist certainly understood the need to pause and pray in the midst of the difficult times in His life:
In the day of my trouble I call upon you, for you answer me.
Psalm 86:7 (ESV)
Out of my distress I called on the Lord; the Lord answered me and set me free.
Psalm 118:5 (ESV)
When we take time to call upon God in prayer, then He is able to answer us. But not just any kind of prayer brings that result. If we go to God with our laundry list of stuff that we want from God like He is merely some big genie in the sky, then God won’t have much opportunity to speak to us. But if we go with a humble heart, really desiring to hear from God, then God delights in revealing Himself to us.
While taking time to listen to God is an important first step whenever God interrupts our plans, we can’t stop there. Certainly Joseph and Mary didn’t. The next thing they did reveals our second principle:
2. Surrender my will to God’s will
Sometimes the church is guilty of fostering the notion that when God steps into our lives everything will be easy, comfortable and pleasant. “Just come to Jesus,” we say, “and everything will be OK.” But that certainly wasn’t the case for Joseph and Mary was it?
They thought they had everything planned just right. Joseph was busy building a home for them to live in and Mary spent the days preparing for the day when Joseph would come to make her his bride. They would settle down in Nazareth and live a simple life. Joseph would use his skills to build houses and pass that on to his sons. And Mary would keep up the home and prepare her daughters to follow in her footsteps one day.
But then God turned all that upside down. They would now have to live with the shame of a pregnancy prior to their wedding. And then they would spend the first years of their life together travelling between Nazareth, Bethlehem and Egypt – at times fleeing for their lives and for the life of this son that God had given to them as a gift.
Although Joseph and Mary certainly understood that their lives were about to change drastically, there is no evidence that at the time they realized the extent of what they were about to enter into. But they were willing to trust all of this to God and to surrender their own will and their own plans to God’s will and God’s plan.
In Mary’s case, that is indicated first by her words – “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” Mary understood that a servant exercises no will of her own, but rather is fully submitted to the will of the master. She was saying that she was willing to surrender to God’s plan for her life regardless of the danger, the inconvenience and the uncertainties. And, although we won’t have time to focus on the verses that follow in Luke’s account, we find that Mary’s actions were consistent with her words.
As we’ve already noted, Joseph was a man of few words. But his actions certainly demonstrated that he, too, immediately surrendered his will to the will of God.
He would never get to experience the joy of his wedding day. Instead of getting to father a child of his own, he would be relegated to being a step-father to the Son of God. He, too, would suffer the humiliation of being married to a woman who had become pregnant before their wedding day.
But in the midst of all that, Joseph chose to follow God even though that was not the easy path. And as he journeyed down that difficult road, he remained righteous. Even though Mary was now pregnant, he refused to take advantage of that in order to satisfy his own desires. So he waited until after Jesus was born to consummate their relationship.
Again, we see evidence of how Joseph and Mary’s example here impacts the life of Jesus. This is most evident as Jesus prays in the garden just before going to the cross:
And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”
Matthew 26:39 (ESV)
When God interrupts my plans, choosing to surrender my will to His is usually not easy. In fact God has never promised us an easy path if we follow Him. Jesus certainly never made it easy for people to truly follow Him while He was here on earth. When He called the disciples to follow Him, he demanded that they immediately give up their way of life, their occupations and even their families at times. He told them that if they wanted to follow Him, they must daily die to self.
But what God does promise is that if we surrender to His will, He will be with us all the way, no matter how difficult things might get. Listen to these promises of God:
It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed.
Deuteronomy 31:8 (ESV)
For the Lord loves justice; he will not forsake his saints. They are preserved forever, but the children of the wicked shall be cut off.
Psalm 37:28 (ESV)
Jesus even promised that we would face tribulation in this world if we choose to surrender to His will. But in the end it will all be worth it:
I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.
John 16:33 (ESV)
3. Become what God has called me to be
God called Joseph and Mary to be the earthly parents of His very own Son. Can you imagine what a frightening task that must have been for them? Joseph hadn’t even finished their house. Where would they live? And they weren’t prepared to raise a child yet – alone the Son of God. They had never raised a child before. James Dobson had not yet written his books on child rearing so they couldn’t read those.
So why out of all the people in the history of the world did God choose Joseph and Mary to raise His Son? We certainly don’t all the reasons, but certainly one reason is that God knew they would be willing to become what God had called them to be.
In particular, Mary found favor in God’s eyes not because of who she was, but because of what He was going to do through her. She was no different than any other teenage girl of her day. Like them she was a sinner who would only find salvation from those sins through the son she would bear. The fact that the Messiah would be born to her was fully an act of God’s grace in her life, not anything that she merited or deserved.
But what Mary demonstrates is that God’s grace is operational in the lives of those who respond to Him in faith. Although His grace is available to all, it is only effective in the lives of those who choose to trust in Him.
The same was certainly true for Joseph. Although he was a righteous and compassionate man, he, too, was a sinner who needed the salvation that would be provided by a child born to his wife – one that he did not even father.
Neither Joseph nor Mary asked to be the earthly parents of Jesus. It was not something that they aspired to and certainly not something that they were fully equipped for at the time God called them to become what he desired for them to be. But the rest of the gospels bear the evidence that they were very effective in that role because they were willing to allow God to equip them in His timing as they were faithful to carry out His plans for their lives.
I tried to no avail this week to find out who originally came with this quote, but it so succinctly summarizes what I hope we’ll all take away from the message this morning:
God doesn’t call the qualified, he qualifies the called.
We find that principle demonstrated throughout Scripture. Here are just a few examples:
• God calls a murderer with a speech impediment to lead His people out of Egypt.
• God calls a little shepherd boy to become king of Israel and then allows him to be hunted down like a wild animal by his predecessor before he actually takes the throne.
• God calls fishermen and tax collectors to be the ones who will be responsible for perpetuating the kingdom of God after the death and resurrection of Jesus.
• God calls a man who persecuted the followers of Jesus and approved the stoning of Stephen to be the most prolific church planter of all times and to write a good portion of the New Testament.
I don’t claim to know exactly what God wants you to become. But I do know this. You probably aren’t equipped just yet to do that. But if you’ll commit to become what God has called you to be, I can promise you based on the Word of God that He’ll provide whatever you need to do that. Paul, one of those men that God called first and equipped later, put it this way:
I can do all things through him who strengthens me… And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.
Philippians 4:13, 19 (ESV)
When God called me to be a pastor, I was ill-equipped for the task. I had no formal training, no seminary degree. I still remember the first time that I had to make a hospital visit and I had absolutely no idea what to do. And the first time I was asked to officiate at a wedding and a funeral I didn’t have a clue about how to proceed. In many ways, I’m still ill-equipped to be a pastor. Every day I realize just how much I don’t know about that calling.
But at the same time, I can also testify that God has given me what I’ve needed when I needed it in this journey. I survived that first hospital visit and wedding and funeral and God actually used me in each instance to minister in the lives of others. And He still does that every day.
God has a plan for your life, one that existed before He even created this world. Maybe that plan is the same one He had for Joseph and Mary – to be the very best parent that you can be to one or more of His children. Maybe his plan is for you to be the very best teacher or banker or engineer or salesperson that you can be and be an ambassador for Jesus in your work. Maybe He’s calling you to serve in this church in some capacity – to teach or lead Children’s Church or work in the nursery.
This morning, will you commit to take the time to listen to God through His Word and through prayer? Will you surrender your will to His even though that might not be easy or comfortable? And will you commit to become whatever God wants you to be and trust that He will equip you as needed along the way?
