All right. To get us into this morning's message that will be led by Scott, we're
gonna go ahead and turn to the scriptures right now. We're gonna read
from Luke chapter 1 verse 26 through 38. And we have a tradition here at the
house just to be present with the scriptures, so however you may, some may
stand as we read the scriptures, but we just commit to being present to God's
Word. So Luke chapter 1 verse 26 through 38. Now I'll be reading from the NIV.
In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel of
Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named
Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. The angel went to
her and said, greetings you who are highly favored. The Lord is with you. Mary
was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting
this might be. But the angel said to her, do not be afraid, Mary. You have found
favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call
him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the son of the Most High. The Lord
God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over
Jacob's descendants forever. His kingdom will never end. How will this be? Mary
asked the angel. Since I am a virgin. The angel answered, the Holy Spirit will come
on you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the Holy One to
be born will be called the son of God. Even Elizabeth, your relative, is going to
have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in
her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail. I am the Lord's servant,
Mary answered. May your word to me be fulfilled. Then the angel left her.
You may be seated. Thank you so much, Chris. I enjoy to have other people read
some of the scripture because I'm gonna be talking quite a bit. My name is Scott.
I've been coming here to the house for about three years. I use a power chair, so
I usually stay tilted back pretty far. I take lots of drinks of water, and I stay
bundled up pretty warm, but guess what? I blend in today. Usually even when it's
90 degrees, I'm still wearing a hoodie and have a hat on, but today I fit right
in. So some people have been asking me how I'm doing and with the weather, and I
said, actually I'm okay. I blend in with the crowd and I'm already prepared. I
stay prepared year-round for the cold weather. Well it's good to have you with
us today. At first I want to go back to the two minutes for one question. What
are some of the interests that people have that you may have mentioned?
Bowling. All right, very good. Now most of us know a little bit about bowling. How
many of you, raise your hand if you would, if you know what a turkey is in bowling.
Okay, some of us, some of us probably don't. So where I'm going to go is a lot
of the things that we're interested in. If someone who's really into them is
talking about it, you might get lost. You might not know exactly what they're
talking about. So bowling has its own words, its own interests. How many of you
have your own bowling ball or your own bowling shoes? Yeah, down to just a couple
of us, right? Used to, yes. How about another interest? Adult coloring, yes. Yeah, so you
can have certain pencils, certain shades, all of those things. There's a couple of
people here today that love to bake bread. My father-in-law Bob and his friend
Robert are back there and those guys could talk about bread for hours and
starting your sourdough and all of those things. So it's an interest that's
developed pretty far. If you look at another area of interest, a lot of people,
young people on social media, one of the acronyms on there, I want to see if
anybody over here knows it, OOTD. Outfit of the Day. So if I sent you a picture and
said, oh this is your OOTD inspo, a lot of us would have no clue and I had to look
it up. I'm not that cool. But yes, it has its own, the whole TikTok world in that
has its own language. The last one I'll say is hair. Did you know there's four
different hair types? A lot of you may not, some of you do, and then those four
different hair types, there's three different letters. So you might be a 3B
or a 2C and the reason that becomes important is because for some people
they need to know what hair products to use, what hairstyles to use to keep your
hair healthy, depending on that. That became important for us with our daughter.
She has 4C hair, which means that we really have to be careful and smart how
we take care of it. Now does anyone know what hair type I have? Type beautiful.
I warned my wife I was gonna use that joke and she just rolled her eyes. I could
tell, I could tell in her eyes, please don't, but she knew if she asked me if I'd just be
even more likely. So there it is, there it is. There are lots of different areas of
interest that we enjoy to talk about and we enjoy to read and sometimes it's in
more serious things though where people are using language, you're talking, that's
hard to follow. If you ever been in a doctor's appointment or maybe been
watching something medical on TV and you don't know what they're saying,
sometimes we need to see neurologists and things for our daughter too and
there are a lot of times I have to stop them and say, okay translate please
because you just used a bunch of words and we need to know about the doctor's
office or some of those things, health stuff. Now another place I find that
people can be talking and some people have no real understanding of what's
going on is church. Sometimes it's like you come in and someone's speaking a
different language that you don't know and you know they're speaking the same
language as you but they're using words and talking about places and talking
about things that even if you've been in church for a long time may not seem
familiar or may not make much sense and church is hard because you're supposed
to know all the right answers. If you ask the question you you might feel a little
bit embarrassed so it can be tricky and some of the verses that we read today
could be a little bit tricky. It's called that passage is called the
Annunciation. It's where Gabriel comes to Mary. He announces the hope of Jesus
birth. It's an exciting passage. It's so important but there's a lot of things in
there that if we really think about them we might say huh? Jesus is going to sit
on the throne of David. That might be about as familiar as OOTD to those of us
who don't know what it means. Okay so we have a painting up here that I want you
to look at. This is from the 1440s and this was actually painted on a wall. It's
called the fresco and it's of Gabriel coming and announcing to Mary the good
news about Jesus. It's if those of you who are online you you can't see it right
now or if you'd like to look it up I should have put the name up here but I
didn't it was painted by someone called Fra Evangelico so FRA EVAN GELICO.
There's lots of cool history around it but we won't go there today. If you'd put
up the verse now please Kathy. Alright here's where we're gonna really zone in.
This is what Gabriel said that we just read but this is the part we're gonna
focus on. It says you will conceive and give birth to a son. This is Gabriel
speaking to Mary. He will be great and will be called the son of the
Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David and he will
reign over Jacob's descendants forever. His kingdom will never end. Now for Mary
and for the people reading or hearing this this was really good news. This was
hope but for us there's some things in here. There's Jacob, there's a kingdom,
there's son of the Most High, there's him having the name Jesus is important but I
want to focus in on what arguably is the most important God but the important
part the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David. You could go
ahead and take that down and just put why don't we put the pretty picture back
up there. I'm gonna grab a drink.
Why not take a big drink? Now David, who was David? Now sometimes we get our
characters mixed up in the Bible and almost all of us do this. David is the
same one when you think of the story of David and Goliath. I won't ask for hands
anymore of who knows but probably most of us have heard of David and Goliath.
David was the boy, the shepherd, who threw the rock at the big giant and won the
battle, the underdog. A lot of times in football or in sports you'll hear this
is a David versus Goliath. Okay so you hear that saying in different parts of
our world, of our lives. So that David later became the king which was a very
surprising thing. He did not come from a royal family. Now he became in many
ways a very good king. He was very good at defending Israel and helping Israel
gain more land and he loved God very very much. Now he was far from a perfect
king. He made many very very bad mistakes. He was, he dealt with lust, he committed
adultery and it had terrible consequences on his family. So we don't want to say
that David was all good and the people then knew that but they did choose to
focus on the good. The Psalms that he wrote, he was a great writer, he was a
singer, he played instruments and so as time went on and his son Solomon, some of
us may have heard of him, was also a good king and wrote the book of Proverbs but
after that things really went downhill. There was a war and the kingdom split
into two and they even fought each other. David, the kingdom that he'd been over,
split into two kingdoms and they fought each other and other countries fought
them and they lost a lot of battles. They also, the kings which were David's sons,
many of them, were not good kings. They chose to worship other gods and that had
very negative consequences. So they thought of it in a lot of ways. If King
David was here, these were the good old days if you will and things went
downhill for a long period of time. Now when Mary was there and Mary's time, that
was a thousand years after David. A thousand years later they still remembered
King David and they still remembered the good that he did. Now when we think back
a thousand years, just for fun, can anyone think of anything that happened
between the year 800 and 1200? I'll give us a 400 year window. 400 year window
between 800 and 1200. Can anybody think of something that happened?
Fall of the Roman Empire. Yep, maybe a little bit prior to that, maybe 700s.
Great Schism, yeah, where the church broke apart and I'm not even looking for
specific answers. I'm just, I was just curious what people would come up with
because we with our Google machines and our cell phones and all of those things
would have such a hard time naming something that happened a thousand years
ago, but they still remembered King David. They'd written these things
down and they'd remembered them and at the time of Mary, it was a thing
that someday God would send a Messiah, someone to be king and be on the throne
of David again. Someone would be that good kind of king that would put things
back the way that they were supposed to be. That would bring hope, that would
bring mercy, that would bring generosity. The kind of king that would help the
poor, the kind of king that would not abuse their power and so they hoped for
that. They looked forward to that and that's what we find here in the angel
Gabriel's words to Mary. Her son was going to sit on David's throne. He was
going to be the king that brought the good news and set things right. Now
although she would have known about the throne of David and about that hope, it
also would have been confusing to her. One, she was still a virgin and so the
idea of her being pregnant was a confusing thing to her. The idea of her
son being a king would have been confusing. She was not royalty nor
was her fiance David and so there are a lot of things in there that didn't
exactly add up but the idea that she got was that she was going to have a son who
set things right, who brought hope and I'm going to, one of the ways that we
know that is because after she went and saw her cousin Elizabeth, John the
Baptist's mom, Mary sang a song and it's one of my favorite passages of Scripture
and so I'm going to have my wife Tashiana come up and she's going to read
the song that Mary sung a short time after Gabriel made that announcement.
Let's give Tashiana a hand just because it will annoy her.
Who's paying for marriage counseling? All right so Mary's song is found in Luke 1
46 through 55 and it says, and Mary said, my soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit
rejoices in God my Savior 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. His mercy extends to those who fear
him from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arms
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought
down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the
hungry with good things but he has sent the rich away empty. He has helped his
servant Israel remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants
forever just as he promised our ancestors.
Yeah let's give her more more yeah.
You may have heard of love languages. Tashiana and I's main love language is
annoying each other and we're at 16 years and going strong so 17 in March it's
working somehow some way. So there's three themes there that I want to focus
in on when Mary sings this song of what she understands that this son that she
will have will do. The first one is mercy over revenge. That this son this would
son of David who would sit on this throne who would be king would bring
mercy over revenge. The second one humility over pride. That the humble
would be lifted up and that those in power would be cast down. And the last
one is generous over greed. Generosity over greed. Three things mercy, humility,
generosity. That was the hope that Jesus brought. That is what they had been
looking forward to. Someone who would bring about those things. Now Jesus was a
different king than people expected. He didn't sit on a literal throne. He didn't
have the power of an army. He didn't use those things. He chose to win people's
hearts and he chooses to rule in people's hearts. And how does he choose to
rule? Through mercy, through generosity, and through humility. Those are the
things that Jesus brings. And I want you to start to think for a moment which one
of those speaks to you this morning. I want you to pick one. One thing of that
hope. The humility over pride. The mercy and forgiveness over revenge. Or the
generosity over greed. I recently found myself facing some of these things. Some
decisions that I had made with good intentions hurt someone that I really
cared about and loved. And so I realized that and part of me my pride kept
crept up and said yeah but you didn't mean it. You didn't mean it and it would
be hard. Asking for forgiveness is hard. And who knows this person might choose
this opportunity for revenge or letting me have it back rather than showing
mercy. I could get my feelings hurt back. And isn't it hard when you admit that
you hurt someone's feelings? You have to deal with that awkwardness, those
different things. But I realized in that moment what I needed to do and I needed
to apologize. And I was so grateful even in that moment. Even as I felt some of
the sadness of how I'd hurt this person. And I felt the sadness of having to go
and ask for an apology. Because I knew without Jesus that wouldn't be possible.
Because without Jesus I choose pride over humility. I would rather keep myself
intact. And without Jesus I'm more worried about others taking revenge
than I am hoping for mercy. And knowing that God will have mercy on me whether
the other person does or not. But I knew I knew I was able to do it because of
Jesus. And so I went and I asked for that person's forgiveness and they were so
kind and so loving. And they knew my heart. They know they knew I didn't mean
to be hurtful. But it still meant a lot to them. That I thought about how they
felt. And that I acknowledged that. And that what I had done could have been
hurtful to them. And it was such a sweet moment because that person loves Jesus
too. And so I knew that in that moment even though something that had been
sad in one way had happened. That Jesus was king through it. We could see Jesus
in that moment overcoming pride, overcoming revenge. Last example I'll
give is that I think of the foster kids. That will be blessing through and I are
you doing announcements Pastor Greg? And Pastor Greg will share a little bit more
about that. But that our church chooses to be generous and chooses to give to
bless kids that are in the foster care system around this time as well. If Jesus
had been a king that had sat on a normal throne his kingdom might have lasted for
who knows 30 years 40 years. But as the king that he is 2,000 years later look
what we're doing today. We still remember him. We still read the book. We still see
the art. We still remember. That's hope. And that's the power of the type of king
that he is. Now at your tables and some of you are I see some of you are solos.
Maybe you can join another table or talk to each other. We're just we're gonna do
this very quickly. But I'm gonna pray and I would invite somebody at each table to
share one of those things that's meaningful to you and maybe why. Either
mercy or humility or generosity. One way that that speaks to you. Everyone doesn't
have to go. If your table talks about what you're gonna have for lunch after
church no one will know. But I want to give you the opportunity to do that and
for us to share some of that hope that Jesus gives today. Let's pray. Father I
thank you so much for this day. I thank you for the mercy and hope and
generosity that you bring. I thank you that you're more powerful than revenge
or pride or greed. And I thank you that you help us to grow past those things as
well. I thank you that the throne of David meant making things right. Someone
fulfilling the hope of what could be. And we still remember that throne of David
3,000 years later as Gabriel said it to Mary. That it stood for things changing.
For things being the way that you meant for them to be. Please help us this
moment as we take a moment to share at our tables. To share just for a moment
something that you're doing or that we connect with. In Jesus name, Amen. So maybe
somebody at your table wrote it down or maybe they have a good memory. We have
mercy over revenge, humility over pride, and generosity over greed. And I'll just
give about 60 seconds for somebody to share and then I'll I'll check in. So go
ahead.