This year, two radio stations in central New York switched over to their all Christmas music formats in early October. By the first part of November, many other radio stations across the country had also followed their lead and began playing Christmas music 24 hours a day. Now, like many of you, I really enjoy Christmas music, but just not quite that early. But now that we’re past Thanksgiving and into December, I’m certainly more in the mood to listen to some Christmas music.
But certainly not all Christmas music is created equal, as demonstrated by this year’s best-selling Christmas album.
[Show video of “Duck the Halls”]
Now I’m not sure how much a song like “Ragin’ Cajun Christmas” or “Hairy Christmas” really contributes to our worship during this Christmas season, but to be fair the album does close with a focus on the incarnation of Jesus and its significance to us and a prayer.
But what really surprises me most about Christmas music is just how hard it is to find Christmas music that is accurate historically and theologically when planning our December worship services. And I’m not just talking about what we would consider “secular” music. Even some of the songs in our hymnals have what I would consider to be some serious shortcomings. Let me give you just a few of examples:
• The second verse of “Away in a Manger” contains these lyrics:
The cattle are lowing, the Baby awakes,
The little Lord Jesus, no crying He makes.
This might not seem like a big deal, but the implication that the baby Jesus never cried actually undermines the important fact that Jesus was fully human as well as fully God.
• “We Three Kings of Orient Are” has several inaccuracies, but let me just point out a couple:
o These men, who by the way didn’t visit Jesus until about 2 years after He was born, were not kings – they were magi who were forerunners of modern day astrologers.
o And we don’t know that there were only three of them. The Bible only reveals that there were more than one. Historically the magi actually tended to travel in groups of 12 to match the 12 signs of the zodiac.
• Although we’re going to sing “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” in a couple of weeks, it is significant that the words of the heavenly host that praised God were spoken and not actually sung. We’ll address that more in just a moment and then again in a couple weeks when we get to that passage.
But fortunately for us, there are some Christmas songs that are very Scriptural and completely sound theologically because they come directly from the pages of the Bible. So over the next four weeks we’ll look at the four songs about the birth of Jesus that we find in Luke’s gospel account.
Before we get to the first of those four songs this morning, let me take a moment to share some general introductory thoughts with you.
Although I’m going to refer to all these passages as “songs”, they are a bit different than what we would think of when we think of a song. As you’ll see, these four songs definitely use poetic language and they have a meter or rhythm to them, especially in their original language, which was probably either Aramaic or Hebrew. But as we’ll also see, each of these songs was spoken and not sung to a melody or musical tune like contemporary songs in our culture. And in each of these cases, there was almost certainly no type of musical accompaniment.
As I’ve already hinted at, these distinctions will be particularly relevant when we come to the song of the angels in a couple of weeks.
We’ll just approach these four songs in the order that we find them in the text, so this morning we’ll begin with Mary’s song, which we find in Luke chapter 1, beginning in verse 46. So go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Luke 1 and follow along as I read that passage:
And Mary said,
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring forever.”
(Luke 1:46-55 ESV)
This song is known, especially among Roman Catholics, as the Magnificat, which comes from the first word of the Latin translation of the song.
Let’s take a moment to put this song in context. The angel Gabriel had first come to Zechariah to reveal to him that his wife Elizabeth was going to have a child who would prepare the way for the Messiah.
Then, as we saw in our Scripture reading earlier this morning, six months later Gabriel came to Mary to reveal that she had found favor with God and that the Holy Spirit would come upon her and that she would bear a son who would be that Messiah. At the time, Mary was just a teenager, perhaps as young as 13 years old, which makes her response to God’s revelation even more impressive.
Shortly thereafter, Mary went to visit Elizabeth and when she entered the house, Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and proclaimed a blessing on Mary as the mother of her Lord and for Mary believing that God would fulfill His promise to her. It is at that point that Mary spoke this song.
It probably took Mary about four days to journey from her home in Nazareth to the home of Zechariah and Elizabeth in Judah. During her journey, Mary had the chance to ponder all that had happened and as she enters the house of her pregnant cousin, she is so overwhelmed with the fact that God has chosen her to bear His Son, that she naturally reacts with an outburst of praise and worship.
That certainly is a sharp contrast to what we see today. What was once a time to celebrate the birth of the Savior of the world has somehow devolved into Black Friday and Cyber Monday, a season of traffic jams and overwhelming stress. And when it is all over, many of us are left with presents that we don’t really want or need or gifts that need to be returned or exchanged, credit card debt that will take months to pay off and saddest of all, an empty feeling that somehow we entirely missed the meaning of Christmas.
When I think about that, I’m reminded of these words of warning from Pastor John MacArthur:
External, shallow observance of the birth of Christ is distasteful to God and most of what goes on at the Christmas season breaks his heart. Superficial worship finds no place of acceptance with Him.
Mary’s song is the antidote to that kind of superficial worship. So this year I want to encourage you and your family to see the birth of Jesus as the world changing event that it truly is, and to make it a season of exuberant, joyful, heartfelt worship that mirror the kind of worship exhibited by Mary in her song.
How to worship like Mary this Christmas…and beyond
Keep my focus on:
• God’s revelation, not my own reason
I’m convinced that one of the main reasons that the celebration of the incarnation of Jesus has become so superficial in our culture is that we have substituted the reasoning and the traditions of man for what God has revealed in His Word.
Now there is nothing inherently wrong with putting up a Christmas tree, or decorating our homes and businesses with lights and ornaments, or singing secular Christmas songs, or exchanging gifts. And a lot of us even grew up believing in Santa Claus without suffering any permanent harm.
But the problem is that often those activities and traditions have become more important than, or even completely replaced, our focus on the significance of God taking on a body of flesh and coming here to earth to live among the people He created.
I know what some of you are probably thinking at this point. Well, it was a lot easier for Mary to keep her focus on God’s revelation. After all, an angel appeared to her. If God’s angel appeared to me, I could keep my focus where it needs to be, too. And your point is well taken.
But the words of Mary’s song show us that there is something else at work here. This teenage girl is intimately familiar with the Word of God. There are at least 15 quotes or allusions to the Old Testament Scriptures in this song, mainly from the Psalms and from Hannah’s song of praise in 1 Samuel 2. So when we read the words of Mary’s song, we are actually reading God’s Word through the eyes of Mary.
The great theologian Linus demonstrates the importance of keeping God’s Word at the forefront during this Christmas season.
[Charlie Brown video]
There is a lesson for us to learn here that transcends the Christmas season. We see here that one of the keys to the kind of worship that Mary exhibits here is to interpret our circumstances through the lens of the Bible rather than through our own human reason.
Christmas is certainly a good time to renew our focus on God’s Word and I want to encourage all of us to find ways to incorporate the Bible into our celebration of Christmas over the next 24 days. But that is a practice that we must not abandon on December 26.
So first of all, if I want to worship like Mary, I must keep my focus on God’s revelation and not on my own reason. Secondly, I must keep my focus on:
• God’s greatness, not my own goodness
Unfortunately, some entire denominations have taken some verses out of context and used them to teach some things about Mary that are actually refuted by Mary herself in the words of this song.
My purpose this morning is not to attack any specific group or denomination, but because so many of us have either believed these things personally or certainly know people who hold these beliefs, I feel like I must address them using the truth of the Scriptures.
These erroneous beliefs come primarily from two verses. The first one quotes the words of Elizabeth as Mary enters her house:
“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!
(Luke 1:42 ESV)
And the second comes right out of Mary’s song:
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed…
These verses, combined with human reasoning and tradition, have been used to develop several erroneous doctrines regarding Mary, including these:
o Immaculate conception
This doctrine maintains that from the moment she was conceived in the womb, Mary was kept free of “original sin”. Mary is also believed to have lived a perfectly sinless life.
o Perpetual virginity
It is claimed that Mary was a virgin, before, during and after the birth of Jesus.
o Co-mediator
Mary is viewed as a co-mediator, along with Jesus, in the process of salvation.
Before we examine Mary’s own words here in her song, let’s first look at the words that Jesus spoke when people tried to give special honor and pre-eminence to Mary:
As he said these things, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts at which you nursed!” But he said, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!”
(Luke 11:27-28 ESV)
Jesus clearly refuted any attempt to make Mary an object of worship. But Mary had already done that herself in her song.
This is a good place to look at the structure of Mary’s song. The song clearly has two stanzas. In the first stanza – verses 46-49 – Mary focuses on what God has done in her life. You’ll notice that in that section, the pronouns are first person – my and me.
The second stanza – verses 50-55 – focuses on what God is doing for the entire world through the birth of Jesus. And the pronouns there are third person – those and their.
It is in the first stanza that we see how Mary focuses on God’s greatness and not her own goodness. Let’s look at those verses again:
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
Mary’s focus immediately turns to the greatness of God. When she uses the word “magnify” she is pointing out that it is the Lord who is going to become larger and larger, which means that her role is going to become less and less important. But the key phrase here is “God my Savior”. Mary is acknowledging here that she who gave birth to the Savior needs a Savior herself. Mary clearly recognizes that she is a sinner who needs a Savior just like everyone else.
In this section of the song, Mary is also acknowledging that God’s decision to choose her to bear Jesus is completely an act of God’s grace. Although Mary is obviously a godly woman, as we see by her knowledge of God’s Word and her obedience, she concedes that there is nothing in her life that would merit God choosing her – she is merely a humble servant.
When God sent His Son into the world, He picked the most unlikely girl He could find to be the mother. He chose a young, unmarried girl from the despised area of Nazareth, to bear His son alone in a stable in Bethlehem where that Son would take his first nap in a feeding trough. Mary knew God hadn’t chosen her because of her education, or background, or social status. So Mary is praising God because God chose her in spite of all the things that made the world overlook her.
That is why all future generations would call her blessed. She was blessed, not because of her own goodness, but because of God’s greatness and the mercy He had exhibited in her life.
Once again, the lessons we learn here are relevant not just at Christmas time, but throughout the year. But certainly this time of year is a great time for us to look upon our own need for a Savior and to praise God for choosing to save us strictly because of His mercy and not because of anything we have done to earn it. So I encourage you t find some ways to focus on that truth as a family this Christmas.
Mary’s worship focused on God’s revelation on not her reason and it focused on God’s greatness and not her goodness. Finally if I want to worship like Mary I need to focus on…
• God’s purposes, not my own plans
I often think about what must have gone through Mary’s mind when the angel Gabriel appeared to her and turned her whole world upside down. Certainly Mary couldn’t anticipate all that was to come, but certainly she knew of the shame she would bear as others talked behind her back about her being pregnant before she got married. And although she probably couldn’t yet imagine that her first son would be born in a stable in a far off land, she probably understood that his birth wouldn’t be the joyous family event that she had dreamed of all her life.
But instead of dwelling on how God has interrupted her plans, she chose instead to focus on God’s purposes. That is the focus of the second stanza of her song. The entire focus of that stanza is on what God is going to do as a result of the birth of His Son. In this section Mary uses what grammarians call the “prophetic aorist”. Although these are all future events, Mary was so certain they would occur that she speaks as if they have already happened.
She is confident that through the baby that would be born to her, God would show His strength and scatter the proud and bring down the mighty and exalt the humble and fill the hungry and send the rich away empty and help his servant Israel. And the reason she could be so confident that God would do that is because, as we saw in Malachi, He is a covenant-keeping God who would fulfill the promise He had made to Abraham many generations earlier.
Not only is God going to change Mary’s life through the birth of His Son – He is going to change the whole world. Mary is praising God because when Jesus comes He is going to start a revolution of love and reconciliation and forgiveness that will eventually spread to the ends of the earth. The revolution He starts will be greater than anything the world has ever seen.
Christmas ought to remind us that God’s purpose in the incarnation was that Jesus came to this earth for all – regardless of their position and status in this world. He values the humble and the oppressed and the weak. And He also makes it possible for the arrogant to humble themselves and for the oppressors to cease their tyranny and for the strong to admit their weakness apart from God.
But we have to come to God on His terms rather than our own. We have to humble ourselves and admit our weaknesses and turn from our sin and turn to God and let Him exalt us and overcome our weaknesses and forgive our sin. We see here that God doesn’t come to the aid of the self-sufficient, those who trust in their own plans, rather than His purposes.
What a great opportunity we have at this time of year to share this good news with others around us. Although most of the world certainly doesn’t recognize the significance of Jesus’ birth, many people are more open to considering spiritual things at this time of year than they are throughout the rest of the year.
That brings us to the central theme from this passage. My prayer is that you’ll take to heart and apply everything that we’ve learned from Mary’s sing this morning. But if you take away just one thing from our time together this morning, here’s what is the most crucial:
A humble Savior
delights in working through
a humble servant
If God could work through an unwed teenage mother, then He can certainly work through each one of us. But He can only do that if we are willing to follow the lead of Jesus and humble ourselves. The apostle Paul expressed that truth with these familiar words:
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
(Philippians 2:5-11 ESV)
For most of us the main thing that gets in the way of us being bold for Jesus is our pride. We’re worried that we’ll be rejected or that others will think less of us. So I want to encourage all of us to humble ourselves this Christmas season so that the humble Savior, Jesus, can work through us.
For some of us that may be a simple as asking someone to attend the Christmas Eve service with us. For others, it might mean taking the risk to engage in some bold action to love the poor and the weak and the needy in the name of Jesus. Maybe it means that instead of buying a bunch of gifts for your friends and family who don’t really need them, you’ll take those same financial resources and use them to bless someone who really does need your help.
Let’s make sure that this Christmas and beyond that we worship like Mary as we focus on:
• God’s revelation and not our own reason
• God’s greatness and not our own goodness
• God’s purposes and not our own plans
