Expectations
Luke 1:26-38
Today is the first day of the year on the Christian calendar, which always starts with the first Sunday of Advent. Advent means “the coming” and Christians have been celebrating Advent since the 4th century. Advent is about looking forward to and working for the return of Jesus as Lord. Advent is more about the second coming than it is the first coming or birth of Jesus. But unfortunately, what the church has done today is to make Advent more about the birth of Jesus rather than his second coming. Advent is meant to be a time of expectation, a time of looking forward to God doing a new thing. It’s not meant to be a time of passively waiting for Christ’s return, it is a time of actively working toward the return of Jesus when he will set all things right and will restore all of creation to its intended order.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Mary's+home+in+Nazareth&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=GgPwUdK6HYWpqQHy94HQBQ&ved=0CCwQsAQ&biw=1143&bih=659#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=G9d16HxOSjNZQM%3A%3BNtI7FX0Oov3TNM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.bibleistrue.com%252Fqna%252Fnazareth3.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.bibleistrue.com%252Fqna%252Fpqna56.htm%3B720%3B540
What you see on the screen is the place believed to be Mary’s home in the town of Nazareth. What we know is that Christians have been worshipping here since the 300’s because they claimed it was Mary’s home where Gabriel made the announcement to Mary about the birth of Jesus. This is in Nazareth. Nazareth was significant, not because it was an important city but because it was a town so small and of such little significance that no one thought the announcement of the Messiah would come to the town or even one of its inhabitants. And yet Nazareth was a place where its inhabitants were looking forward to the coming of the Messiah and were constantly preparing for His arrival. Joseph and Mary’s families and the other descendents of the line of David had left Bethlehem and Judea to move to Nazareth to await the coming Messiah. The region of Judea had become filled with corruption and violence, as well as Roman influence and fear of Herod and his growing erratic and violent behavior. Many of these who moved were part of the priesthood who would serve for short periods of time in the temple each year. Families like those of Mary and Joseph who were dedicated to living the lifestyle God withdrew from the region of Judea to remote villages in Galilee like Nazareth. There, they were insulated from the corrupt Roman culture that had permeated even the walls of the Temple. So they came to Nazareth to wait and to be on the lookout for the arrival of the Messiah who would restore rightful leadership in the land. This was also a personal journey, because it was from the line of David, from their own family lineage, that the Messiah would rise. No one though thought that it would come out of Galilee or even Nazareth. The key is that they lived their lives waiting and preparing for God to do something great.
Like the people Nazareth, Advent should be for us about preparing for God to do a new thing, an unexpected thing. God not only wants to do a new thing in your life, he wants to do a bigger thing than He has ever done before in your life. Isn’t that amazing? What God has done in the past was sufficient but not for what God wants to do in your life now. The problem is that we often expect what God has done in the past is what He will do in the future and when we do, we limit God. God is about the new, not the old, about the future and not the former. What God did in the past was great but it’s not enough for what God wants to do in your life now.
God wants to do a new thing in your life. All throughout Scripture, God talks about wanting to do a new thing. Isaiah 43:19 “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” “Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins” Matthew 9:16-17 Why? Because it will burst the old wineskins! “Sing to the Lord a new song.” Psalm 96:1 “I will sing a new song to you…” Psalm 144:9 “He put a new song in my mouth.” Psalm 40:3 Did you hear it? God loves to do the new! What God did in the past needs to stay in the past because it’s not big enough for what He wants to do in your life and the life of this church in the coming year.
One of the problems is that we become comfortable in our relationship with God and our faith. And when we do, we lose the power of expectation. Remember when you were a kid looking forward to Christmas? All of the excitement and anticipation. I couldn’t sleep at night. When my parents were gone, I would search the house for the hidden gifts. I remember one year, I had looked under all the beds and through all of the closets and had narrowed it down to the attic. The stairway going up to the attic was in my sister’s closet. I went up there, climbed the stairs, went into the attic and after moving a few things around, I found the stash. I was so excited to see I was getting what I wanted. But you what? That was one of the worst Christmas’ I had ever had. Why? Because I had lost the power of expectation. What happens when we grow stale in our faith and our relationship with God is that we lose the expectation of the new thing God wants to do in your life.
So how do we prepare for God to do a new thing? You have to expect it. You have to own and claim it. You have to make sure you are preparing spiritually for it. Second, you have to conceive it. There’s no such thing as pregnancy without first conceiving it. Conceiving is developing a picture or vision of the new thing God wants to do in your life. “For without a picture or vision, Scripture says, the people perish.” Or “as a person thinks within themselves, so they become.” Your thinking determines who you will become and what will happen in your life. Joshua was the man chosen by God to lead the Israelites from the wilderness across the Jordan into the promised land. Several times in that first chapter, God says to Joshua, “What do you see?” Before you can achieve it, you’ve got to conceive it.
Third, you’ve got to nurture it. You’ve got to nurture faith? Without faith, you cannot please God. Jesus said, “Let it be done to you according to your faith.” God wants to birth this thing in my life but you’ve got to nurture that faith. How do you do that? First is through the Word. This is the spoken word of God and I need to learn to hear the Holy Spirit as I read the Word. Second is prayer. If I’m not talking to God daily but more importantly allowing God to talk to me, I become self-reliant. Third is fellowship or community. I need to be connected with other believers who not only grow with me but who hold me accountable for living the faith I profess. Fourth is worship and Holy Communion. Worship is the time when we are reminded who God is and that we are not God. Lastly is through fasting. By denying ourselves, we go against the grain of culture which tells us to fulfill our every need and desire. Following Jesus is about denying yourself and we come no closer to him than when we do just that. We call these the Means of Grace. But we also remember that we are not here just to get from God but to give to other. And so our faith is meant to be expressed through Works of Mercy where we seek to meet the needs and minister to those Jesus came for: the poor, the disenfranchised, the sick, the blind and crippled, and those who are far from God. Jesus said, “The things I do, you will do and even greater things than these.” Why are we here? To do the things that Jesus did.
Fourth, you have to believe it and fifth, you have to deliver that baby. When my wife was pregnant with our son, who was born in the middle of July, she said two things. First, she was never going to carry another baby during the summer. And she lived up to that as my daughter was born in February. And second, by July 1st, she was saying, “Get this out of me!” Now what would have happened if the doctor had said, “I miscalculated, you’re going to have to carry this baby for anther 10 years?” She would have said, “You’re crazy!” But when you think about it, that’s the way it is with a lot of Christians. They’ve been walking around pregnant carrying within them God’s vision for their life and what God wants to do. But they’ve never given birth to God’s dream for their life. A lot of Christians have got spiritually constipation. You’ve been eating all the time but nothing is coming out. Here’s how you’re supposed to be living as followers of Christ: “Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people…” Galatians 6:10 This is how we are to live as Christians. God has these miracles he wants to do through you. It’s time to give birth brothers and sisters, in anticipation of what God wants to do in your life this Advent!
What’s amazing is that God uses ordinary, broken people like you and me to perform miracles. After hearing the announcement of the angel, Mary said, “For he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on, all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me—holy is his name.” That word humble can be better translated as meaning lowly and of poor estate. Mary was an uneducated and illiterate 12 or 13 year old. Girls and women in Jesus’ day were consider property and second class citizens at best. She wasn’t from Jeruslaem or a world class city, she was from a nothing, no class, inconsequential village called Nazareth that didn’t even appear on the Roman maps of the day. Yet God chose her. God births miracles through ordinary, imperfect people, like Mary. And the question is, “How?” That’s Mary’s question to the angel: “How can this be?” God didn’t need Mary to perform a miracle. Just to make it clear for everybody, that when God works through ordinary, broken people like you and me, it’s not us! That’s where the mystery of Christ is revealed. It’s about God and what He can do in spire of us.
Every Spirit-filled Christian has the potential for a God miracle within them. The miracle is conceived and birthed through ordinary people willing to dream God’s dream and act on it. Mary’s cousin Elizabeth says in the 45th verse: “Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!” Do you know what it means to believe? To act on it. Faith is about stepping out and acting on God’s word fro your life. We see faith as the Israelites are getting ready to enter the promised land after 40 years in the wilderness, they have to cross the Jordan River but the problem is that the Jordan River is in flood stage. In Joshua 3:15-16, it says, “Now the Jordan is at flood stage all during harvest. Yet as soon as the priests who carried the ark reached the Jordan and their feet touched the water’s edge, the water from upstream stopped flowing….” To stop the water, you have to step in it. That recalls when Peter stepped out of the boat and walked on water and it recalls a time when he had been fishing all night. He was done and putting the nets away when Jesus told him to throw the nets back in. He told Jesus that they had fished all night and caught nothing. Their nets were now clean and they were ready to call it a day. To throw it back in would means hours more of cleaning the nets. But Jesus told them to throw the nets back in. And in that moment, he had to make a decision to believe or not. But he couldn’t believe and keep the nets in the boat.
For God to do a new thing in your life, you can’t live off the commitment you made in the past or even what God has done in the past. Because the commitment and action you took in the past was good. But it’s not enough for what God wants to do through you now. That’s why we need to prepare for what God wants to do in your midst, in unexpected ways. As we close this morning, I want you to write your prayer of expectation of the new thing God wants to do through you. When you come for communion, place them in the baskets and then you will see them posted next week as you come to worship. What new thingsdoes God want to do through you this Christmas?
