Mothers of Great Faith
(Luke 1)
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The Bible tells us in Luke 8:31-32 how to be true disciples or students of Jesus Christ, by abiding (living, being at home) continually (day by day) in His word;
John 8:31-32
Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
We’re told in 1 Cor. 2:16 that the Bible is the “mind of Christ”. If we really want to know Jesus, we need to walk in fellowship with Him (walk in the light, walk in the Spirit), as God tells us in 1 John 1:7:
1 John 1:7
But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. NIV
The way to know that we are in fellowship with Him, that we are walking in the Spirit, is to confess our known sins to God, as instructed in 1 John 1:9:
1 John 1:9
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. NIV
So let’s take a moment to silently confess our known sins to God, so that as we study His word, it will renew our minds (Romans 12:2), and conform us to the image of God (Col. 3:10). Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for forgiving us our sins and restoring us to fellowship every time we confess them to you. Thank you for such endless grace, much more than we could ever earn or deserve. We ask that your Holy Spirit will make your Word clear to us and use it to transform us closer to the image of our Creator. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.
Since it’s Mother’s Day today, I want to look at two mothers in the Bible who walked with the Lord, who showed great faith in His word in situations that looked, not just overwhelming, but clearly impossible. Those two mothers are Mary the mother of Jesus (not the “mother of God” as some churches blasphemously teach), and Mary’s cousin Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. As many of you here today are mothers yourselves, you’ll hopefully be able to imagine some of the difficulties that these two women faced, while remaining faithful to God and trusting Him.
Since Elizabeth is mentioned first in Luke chapter 1, let’s start with her. Her faith can be found in Luke 1:5-25, and Luke 1:57-66:
Luke 1:5-25
5 In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron.
6 Both of them were upright in the sight of God, observing all the Lord's commandments and regulations blamelessly.
7 But they had no children, because Elizabeth was barren; and they were both well along in years.
8 Once when Zechariah's division was on duty and he was serving as priest before God,
9 he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to go into the temple of the Lord and burn incense.
10 And when the time for the burning of incense came, all the assembled worshipers were praying outside.
11 Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the right side of the altar of incense.
12 When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear.
13 But the angel said to him: "Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to give him the name John.
14 He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth,
15 for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from birth.
16 Many of the people of Israel will he bring back to the Lord their God.
17 And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous-to make ready a people prepared for the Lord."
18 Zechariah asked the angel, "How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years."
19 The angel answered, "I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news.
20 And now you will be silent and not able to speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which will come true at their proper time."
21 Meanwhile, the people were waiting for Zechariah and wondering why he stayed so long in the temple.
22 When he came out, he could not speak to them. They realized he had seen a vision in the temple, for he kept making signs to them but remained unable to speak.
23 When his time of service was completed, he returned home.
24 After this his wife Elizabeth became pregnant and for five months remained in seclusion.
25 "The Lord has done this for me," she said. "In these days he has shown his favor and taken away my disgrace among the people."
Luke 1:57-66
57 When it was time for Elizabeth to have her baby, she gave birth to a son.
58 Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown her great mercy, and they shared her joy.
59 On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him after his father Zechariah,
60 but his mother spoke up and said, "No! He is to be called John."
61 They said to her, "There is no one among your relatives who has that name."
62 Then they made signs to his father, to find out what he would like to name the child.
63 He asked for a writing tablet, and to everyone's astonishment he wrote, "His name is John."
64 Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue was loosed, and he began to speak, praising God.
65 The neighbors were all filled with awe, and throughout the hill country of Judea people were talking about all these things.
66 Everyone who heard this wondered about it, asking, "What then is this child going to be?" For the Lord's hand was with him.
The danger that any pastor-teacher faces when dealing with verses like these, verses that are so familiar to everyone, is that you will tune out, will stop listening, because you think you’ve heard it before. So today I hope to dig a little deeper and maybe point out some of the great things that God has placed in these words, for our blessing.
First, let me share some background on Elizabeth. When I looked into Nelson’s and Unger’s Bible Dictionaries, I was surprised to find lots of pages of information on Mary, but just a couple of paragraphs on Elizabeth. Her name Elizabeth comes from the Hebrew word Elisheba, which means “God is my oath”. She was the wife of the priest Zechariah, and the mother of John the Baptist. Both her and her husband were descended from the priestly line of Aaron, who was Moses’ brother. Aaron’s family line was the line of the Levies, so this qualified Zechariah as a priest (Luke 1:5).
The Bible tells us in Luke 1:6 that “Both of them were upright in the sight of God, observing all the Lord's commandments and regulations blamelessly. In other words, both Elizabeth and her husband knew God’s word, and in faith, obeyed the Scripture’s commands. That’s why in Luke 1, Zechariah is in the temple serving as a priest and burning incense.
We’re told about Elizabeth in verse 7, “But they had no children, because Elizabeth was barren; and they were both well along in years.” In those days, as it sometimes is today in certain churches, it was shameful for a couple not to have children. It was viewed as punishment from God for some kind of heinous sin that one or both of them must have committed. You can imagine at worse, the kind of conjecturing, gossiping, and maligning that went on, behind their backs as well as to their faces. At the very least, people would think, even if God isn’t outright punishing them, that there must be some bad reason that God isn’t “blessing” them with children either.
Many women today have fertility problems, and are faced with some of the same pressures that Elizabeth was. The Church can unintentionally add to these pressures with Bible messages that greatly emphasize how much of a blessing it is from God to be given children. I remember having some of these feelings about being single before I met my wife Liz.
I was sitting in church once, listening to a message about how much a good wife was a “blessing” and “gift from the Lord”. A married friend of mine leaned over to me and teasingly whispered, “So when is God going to bless you with a wife?” I knew he was joking, but it still bothered me. I would ask myself that same question when the church had their "couples" Valentine dinner, or when they advertised their "family dinner" to be held before the New Year’s Eve service.
I was a church trustee at that time, and one New Years Eve, the pastor got upset that the church’s singles group met at the church before the services, but then went elsewhere for their New Years Eve activities. Being single myself, I totally understood why they did what they did.
I asked the pastor, “What were the singles supposed to do, come here to our family dinner and be made to feel lonelier because they have no spouse or children?” I had been tempted to go with the Singles Group to the same New Year's Eve singles dance they attended, and I told the pastor so. In the past, I’ve also seen believers welcoming some young visiting couple to a church by showing them around and emphasizing what a good nursery area they have. This happened to friends of mine who were childless due to infertility problems. I know that a church certainly doesn’t intend to make people feel badly in these types of situations, but maybe a little more sensitivity is needed when we’re dealing with people who are on their own, and couples who are childless.
So these types of examples today can help us understand how Elizabeth and her husband might have felt. But God clearly tells us in Luke 1:6-7 that although Elizabeth was both barren AND old in years, nevertheless “both of them were upright in the sight of God”. God was about to do a great work in their lives, to bless them more than they could ever have imagined.
God’s timing and plan are perfect, and we should learn from Elizabeth not to be bitter, depressed, or hopeless when things don’t go our way. Instead, we need to learn from Elizabeth that God has a perfect plan for us that might be differ from the one we have. We need to continue to walk with God and trust Him until we see that plan of His unfold.
If you’re single, maybe God has the perfect mate for you. Perhaps He hasn’t brought the two of you together yet because He’s still working on one or both of you to make you perfect for each other. Maybe His perfect plan for you requires you to remain single.
If you’re having trouble conceiving a child, maybe God’s plan to give you one has to wait a while for reasons only God knows, as in the case of Elizabeth and her son John. Maybe your having children isn’t in His best plan for you.
Elizabeth and Zechariah continued to grow in their relationship with God, despite not knowing why He wasn’t giving them a child. In the Old Testament, Abraham got impatient waiting for God to give him a child with Sarah, so he had one with her maid Hagar. From that son came all of today’s Arab tribes, and Israel is still suffering from Abraham’s mistake.
It was God’s plan that Elizabeth’s son John would prepare the way for the Messiah. John couldn’t have been born sooner and have done so. He needed to be born around the time that Jesus was to live, in order to be used by God to announce the Messiah to the people. That perfect time was in Elizabeth’s old age. The result of Elizabeth’s patience and faithfulness to God was her son John, of whom Jesus Himself said that there is no one greater among men.
The angel Gabriel appeared to Elizabeth’s husband while he was in the temple performing his priestly duties. Luke 1:12 tells us that Zechariah was “startled and was gripped with fear”. The angel tells him that he will have a son and is to name him John. In verses 14-17, Gabriel further says about John that “He will be a joy and delight to you…many will rejoice because of his birth…he will be great in the sight of the Lord…he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from birth… Many of the people of Israel will he bring back to the Lord their God…He will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous-to make ready a people prepared for the Lord."
In verse 18, Zechariah doesn’t believe what Gabriel tells him, asking “How can I be sure of this?” He points out that he is “old” and his wife “well along in years”. In verse 19 and 20, Gabriel states that he was sent from the very presence of God with this information, and that because of Zechariah’s disbelief, he would be unable to speak until the prophesy actually occurs. He then returns home and Elizabeth becomes pregnant shortly thereafter (verses 23-24).
Elizabeth rejoices in verse 25, acknowledging that God in grace has shown her “favor” and taken away her “disgrace among the people”. We now temporarily jump ahead in Luke 1 to verses 57-66. Elizabeth gives birth to John, and her relatives and neighbors gather to “share her joy” with her. These are likely most of the same people who judged, maligned, and gossiped about her and her husband all those years when she was childless. Now they are at the party to celebrate the child’s birth.
On the 8th day, when it’s time to circumcise the child, these people return and have new trouble to start. They all assume that the child will be named after his father Zechariah, but Elizabeth is faithful to what the angel Gabriel told her. She speaks up and tells her guests firmly, “No! He is to be called John.” Her guests tell her what she already knows, that there is no one else in the family with that name. So the people turn to Zechariah to see what name he wants. He takes a tablet and writes, “His name is John”, and upon this act of faith, Zechariah regains his ability to speak. The first thing he does is praise God, and all the people know that a miracle has taken place. Everyone also starts to realize that John is to have a very special place in God’s plan, as they wondered in verse 66, “What then is this child going to be?”
Throughout Luke’s description of these events, the faith of Elizabeth never waivers, even though her husband Zechariah’s does. She doesn’t blame God, get angry and bitter, or lose hope. As a result, she is spiritually ready for the great work that God performs in her life.
Now that we’ve looked at the faith of Elizabeth, we can go back to Luke 1:26. The Bible gives us an account of the events occurring in the life of Elizabeth’s cousin Mary, who is living in Nazareth. She is a young, unmarried virgin who is engaged to a man named Joseph. Both Mary and Joseph are descendents of King David, the ancestral line from which the Old Testament prophesizes the Messiah.
In verse 28, the angel Gabriel visits Mary, just as he had visited Zechariah, whose wife Elizabeth is now six months pregnant. When Gabriel greets Mary in verse 28, he addresses her as “you who are highly favored”. In verse 30, Gabriel directly tells her “you have found favor with God”. Gabriel’s use of the word favor, often translated grace in the Bible, tells us that Mary is about to be the receiver of favor or grace from God. In other words, God is about to do something in her life that she hasn’t earned nor deserved. The angel did not address her as “full of grace”, or as a source of grace, as certain churches teach, but rather as the recipient of grace.
This would be a good time to mention some things that are NOT true about Mary, some false teachings about her that some churches believe.
She is NOT the mother of God, but rather is the mother of Jesus. The Lord Jesus Christ had two natures, a divine nature and human nature. He was fully God and fully man, not part God or part man. Theologically, this is known as the doctrine of the hypostatic union. Jesus was both fully God and fully man in one person forever. Because Jesus needed a human nature to die on the cross for the sins of the world, Mary was the mother of Jesus’ humanity. She was NOT the mother of His divinity. Humanity cannot biologically create or give birth to the divine or spiritual.
She was not a sinless human being. Only Adam and Eve, and then Jesus Christ, were born without sin natures. Adam and Eve later sinned, and died spiritually. From that point on, all of humanity biologically inherits Adam’s sin nature. Jesus had a human mother but not a human father, so was born with no sin nature. This tells us that the sin nature in a human being is passed down through the father. Although Jesus was tempted, he never sinned, so was qualified to die on the cross as a spotless lamb in payment for our sins. We know Mary had to have sinned, because the Bible says that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God", and the only exception to this in the Bible is Jesus Christ. Also, right here in Luke chapter 1, verse 47, Mary says “and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior”. Mary calls God her Savior, but if Mary had never sinned, she wouldn’t need a Savior.
Mary did not remain a virgin after she married Joseph. She had relations with Joseph during her marriage to him, and she gave birth to other sons and daughters, not just Jesus. We know this because the gospels have references to Jesus’ brothers and sisters.
Mary is not on an even level with God, and certainly not above Him. There is no Biblical basis for praying to her, for believing she appears to people, or that she performs miracles. Such beliefs are the doctrines of men, not the Scriptures, and are pure blasphemy against the sovereignty of God. She is not to be revered in some way because she mothered the Messiah.
For instance, Jesus Himself shows us this, in Luke 11:27-28. When a woman in the crowd screamed out at Jesus, “blessed is the womb that bore thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked”, Jesus rebuked her for her attempt to elevate His mother Mary to a level of reverence. Jesus responded to the woman, “yea, rather blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it”. His initial words, “yea, rather” are a pitiful translation into English from the original Koine Greek, losing a lot of the emphasis that the original words have. To paraphrase how Jesus actually began his reply to the woman who interrupted him, instead of “yea, rather”, it was more like “WRONG!” or “NO WAY”, as we might say it today. Jesus tells us that it’s not the person who bore him that is blessed by reason of biology, but instead, it’s the person who knows God’s word, the Bible.
So the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and began by telling her that God highly favored her. I think that we as Bible-believing Christians often ignore Mary totally, probably as a reaction against the false doctrine that other churches teach about her. But let’s not forget that God did in grace choose her to be the mother of Jesus, the Savior of the entire human race. God entrusted her in raising, protecting, and teaching Jesus.
In verse 31, the angel Gabriel tells Mary the same kind of message he gave Zechariah just six months earlier. He tells her that she will have a child, and what she is to name him, Jesus. In verses 32 and 33, Gabriel describes that Jesus will be the Messiah. Unlike Zechariah when he received a similar message, Mary believes it. Her question in verse 34, “How will this be, since I am a virgin”, was not a statement of unbelief, but rather a question by which she wanted more information, a better understanding.
Gabriel answers Mary’s question in verse 35, and then in verse 36, shares with her the good news of her cousin Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Then in verse 37, Gabriel says something that many believers have hung their deepest hopes upon in time of trouble:
Luke 1:37: “For nothing is impossible with God”. NIV
Mary responded to Gabriel’s message with a great statement of faith:
Luke 1:38: “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May it be to me as you have said.” Then the angel left her. NIV
In verses 39 and 40, excited about her own good news as well as her cousin Elizabeth’s, Mary travels to her cousin’s house and greets her. In verse 41, when Elizabeth hears Mary’s greeting, she is so excited that the unborn child John in her womb jumps as the result of Elizabeth’s strong emotions of joy.
Elizabeth again shows her great faith in verses 42 and 43, by exclaiming how blessed she believes Mary and her unborn child Jesus to be. She also recognizes Mary as “the mother of my Lord,” which shows that Elizabeth knew and believed that Jesus would be the Messiah, her own Savior. Elizabeth tells Mary in verse 44 about how her unborn child jumped in her womb in response to Elizabeth’s great joy from hearing Mary’s greeting.
So in just the first chapter of Luke, we see the great faith in God’s word, by two women who were called upon to believe what to most would seem impossible. Elizabeth was barren and elderly, yet was told that she would bear a son, John, who would prepare the way for the Messiah. Her cousin Mary was a young, unmarried virgin, yet she was told that she would give birth to the Messiah, the Savior of the human race. Elizabeth and Mary both believed that God could and would perform such a miracle for each of them, and of course we know He did.
Finally, I want to look at a verse in Luke that I think sums up both Elizabeth’s and Mary’s great faith in God. That verse is:
Luke 1:45:
“Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished.” NIV
Both cousins believed that what the Lord promised them, would be accomplished. Because Mary and Elizabeth were women of great faith, they both became mothers of great faith.
Copyright © 2000, Frank J. Gallagher,
Abiding In The Word,
http://members.aol.com/abidingitw
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