Ordinary People, Extraordinary Purpose in God's Plan

Devotional

Sermon Summary

Bible Study Guide

Sermon Clips

So many of the characters in the Bible, if they were not involved in the salvation story, they would have been forgotten to history. If David had never become king, he would have just been a shepherd. If Abraham had not been chosen by God to become the father of the nation of Israel, he just would have been another guy from the land of Luz that died. Mary was a nobody. She was a poor lady that was betrothed to a man. She wasn't even—well, legally she was married, but she was not even anybody's wife in an official sense. She was just another person. Elizabeth, Zacharias, again, same thing. These are just ordinary people amongst crowds of people God picked for seemingly no specific reason. [00:05:12] (42 seconds)  #OrdinaryToExtraordinary

When it talks about John receiving the Spirit, I was like, how in the world does a baby receive the Spirit of God? And as I started looking back and just sort of thinking through this, there are many people in the Old Testament that were filled with the Spirit for a reason. Because God picked people, from our perspective, seemingly at random, to fill them with the Spirit of God for the purpose, like an express purpose, for an express time, for his plan to continue to go forward. [00:26:13] (30 seconds)  #BetrothalTruths

This idea of filling of the Spirit is not new. There were many prophets that were filled with the Spirit of God. And I think that I would lump John into the same thing. John was filled with the Spirit of God as a baby, and he is called a prophet in the likeness of Elijah. So I don't think this is a, he believed as a baby, and he was filled with the Spirit of God in the Christian sense, so much as it's sort of the Old Testament sense of filled with the Spirit of God. [00:27:50] (26 seconds)  #FavoredAmongOrdinary

When we think about the word engaged, there's other translations used, the word betrothed, or some other such word. I think that it's important that things are translated as precisely as possible. In my opinion, not as any sort of language scholar at all, I don't actually like the translation using the word engaged, not because it's actually factually inaccurate, but it leads the reader to perhaps arrive at false assumptions. [00:34:15] (29 seconds)  #MiraculousBirths

If you were married, you're a girl from a small town, seemingly a nobody, and then all of a sudden you get greeted with greetings favored one. She ponders, like, that is the weirdest way to greet me. I'm a teenage girl who's betrothed from a small town. I have nothing. Why am I anything important? And he goes on to explain why. And it talks about how she's been found favored, how she's going to conceive in her womb, and she's going to have a son named Jesus, and all these amazing things. [00:37:42] (30 seconds)  #ChurchCalledToServe

God makes these big promises to ordinary people oftentimes. Like, when you think about Abraham, and you're going to be the father of many nations. And I'm like, I don't even have kids. I don't understand. He's saying, you're going to be the mother of this baby. I'm like, but how is that going to happen? Kind of like that God throws those things out there to challenge their mind, and in a sense, challenge their faith. [00:38:41] (23 seconds)  #FaithfulInTheOrdinary

The first thing is you have the proclamations of two miraculous births of two extraordinary people. Now, obviously, Christ is the greater of those two for so many reasons. But as I pointed out in the beginning, and we'll see, I don't know if we'll actually see it in Luke. I didn't, I couldn't see that for certain. That John was no, he was no slouch in the eyes of God, in the eyes of Christ. You have these two men who have so much in common. They are, they share similar family lines, if you will. They're, I realize that's a little bit nuanced, but I think you get what I'm saying. They probably grew up together. I, I, I'm making an assumption here because, I mean, Mary did visit Elizabeth. Is it out of the question that they got together for birthdays and family celebrations? I would not think that that's completely un-possible. They both had their first proclaimed by Gabriel. Both of their conceptions were, in their own ways, miraculous. [00:42:27] (63 seconds)

When we think about the church, we are a group of ordinary people with an extraordinary message. And in the same way, God chose to use all of these ordinary people throughout the Old Testament, into the New Testament, into the Gospels here, to proclaim the message of salvation and to work it out in a very practical sense. He chose to, in the same way, God, Jesus. He chose to, in the church, to do the same thing. [00:45:48] (27 seconds)

Ask a question about this sermon