12/20/20 Luke 1:39-45 “It’s for You; Joy! Joy! Joy!”

18 Dec 12/20/20 Luke 1:39-45 “It’s for You; Joy! Joy! Joy!”

12/20/20    Luke 1:39-45       “It’s for You; Joy! Joy! Joy!”

So how is everyone doing on their Christmas shopping?  Do you go out on a Saturday and brave the crowds in West Acres or are you shopping online this year to avoid this covid scare?  I was by West Acres the other day and it didn’t even seem that busy.  Whatever way is good and I ask for blessings on your endeavors.  I know that there are a lot of people in the area who think that this is what Christmas is all about, presents.  We have to make sure that we get just the right gifts for everyone.  But I also know that there are a lot of people like you who try to do this with the right frame of mind.  You love Jesus and you are trying to honor Him by giving to someone else.  I think that it is this mind set, this inner feeling of being loved, that help us to be totally satisfied and at peace when all the celebrations are over.  Far too often people who don’t know Christ come into and go out of Christmas with depression.  They end up asking themselves, “Is this all there is?”  We know that there is much, much more and we have to be willing to share this knowledge, this love with others.  Today, we are going to look at the beautiful story of two pregnant women and see if we can find this joy that they have and hang onto it.

The author Daniel Defoe gives us some great advice on this in Robinson Crusoe.  If you remember the story, Crusoe found himself stranded on a deserted island.  Now he could have done a lot of things but the first thing he did was he sat down and made a list.  On one side of the list, he wrote down all of his problems.  On the other side of the list, he wrote down all of his blessings.  On one side he wrote that he didn’t have any clothes.  On the other side he wrote that it was warm and he didn’t need any.  On one side he wrote that all his provisions were lost.  On the other side he wrote that there was plenty of fruit and fresh water on the island.  The list continued.  For every negative situation he wrote, he also wrote something positive about it.  What a wonderful and practical way to handle this problem!!  He was trying to find joy in a bad situation.  We should learn from this as I have seen too many naysayers who only talk gloom.

In our Scripture today, there are a lot of negatives happening.  Let see if we can handle these negatives first.  The first and most obvious thing happening here is that we have two pregnant women.  But these aren’t just any women.  Elizabeth is an old woman.  She is well past her child bearing years.  And yet she is 6 months along.  This has to remind us of the story of Sarah who was close to 90 when she had Isaac.  I want you to think about this for a moment.  These are miracles.  These things do not happen unless God is involved.  There is no science that I know of that can make an elderly woman have a baby.  This is just flat out a miracle.

So, if this is something that is impossible without God, what do you have in your life that is impossible?  We like to carry around all our baggage and we don’t like to give it to God.  We have hurts that are unhealed.  We have relationships that are strained or wrong.  Each one of us has various things that are wrong in our lives.  And the last place we seem to want to go is to God.  But He can fix things.  He can do miracles.  God can do the impossible.  But He will not do anything unless you ask.  This is the key to the whole thing.  You need to ask and so that God will answer.  As we find in James, “You do not have because you do not ask God.”

Now back to our story.  You may think that Elizabeth’s pregnancy is the only product of this miracle.  But she has to live in a culture, which would not be unlike ours in this case, where people will notice that this old woman is having a baby.  She will be the subject of much talk and ridicule.  She will have a tough time explaining what is happening.  This will not be very acceptable socially.  And to top that off, she has to go through all the physical changes that happen during pregnancy!  Life could not have been very easy for Elizabeth at this time.  God had to make her strong to survive.

Then we have Mary who is also pregnant.  Mary is just the opposite of Elizabeth.  She is young.  Chances are she is just a young teenager.  She is somewhere between 13 and 15.  This age was acceptable in those days as long as you had a husband.  But she doesn’t have a husband so by law they could put her to death by stoning.  Not only that but she has this crazy story that she is pregnant by God and is carrying the Savior that the Jews have been long expecting.  This crazy young girl from Nazareth has the audacity to say that she, a lowly young unmarried girl, is carrying the Son of God.  I would bet that things were pretty scary for Mary also.

Some of us have been to this point too.  We have been to the point where there was absolutely no-where to go.  We have been to the wall whether it has been through the death of a dear loved one, an unexpected divorce or a job loss when things seemed to be going rather well.  Sometimes I just want to cry out when I hear some of your stories.  My heart becomes a lump in my chest.  But many of you have had no fear because of your faith in Jesus Christ.  You folks have some great testimonial stories.  And if your faith is lacking, look and ask around for help.  Find some church friends and ask for help.

But it isn’t just the main characters here that are affected by these pregnancies.  Zechariah, the husband of Elizabeth, also had to put up with some social pressure.  He would have been the object of jokes and ridicule.  And when he told the angel Gabriel that he didn’t believe this, he was struck mute until the baby was born.  Also, in those days’ babies were named in a certain fashion that was prescribed.  So, when Elizabeth named the child John, this was totally against their heritage and their culture.  But by this time Zechariah knew better than to interfere or even question God.  Zechariah paid a price.

Now I don’t think that we want to leave Joseph out of this either.  Things cannot be easy for him.  It is hard for us in the 21^st century to imagine what it was like then.  In the ancient society many things were scripted.  If you committed certain acts, you would receive certain punishment.  It was not like today where you can do just about anything and there are few consequences.  Their marriages were arranged.  Most of their personal moral behavior was dictated by the Law.  Now Joseph would feel the heat of all of this as he was supposed to wed Mary.  People would be talking about Joseph.  They would have said all kinds of nasty things.

People today are not much kinder.  Now you may or may not know that I was raised in a very rural area like that surrounding Fargo.  When some kind of scandalous event happened, the gossip mills went to work.  Sometimes the story would get so that you couldn’t recognize it any more.  I think that this is rather universal.  People are always talking about others, stretching the truth and hurting people with their words.  This is very unfortunate but it seems to be a part of this broken world that we live in today.

But the point that I am trying to make here is that we all have troubles and we are all at times victims of bad things.  Often times the world that we live in is not nice.  And that is what the Scripture today is saying.  Or is it?  If we go back and reread this section of Luke, we will find that none of the things I have been talking about so far are mentioned.

What we like to do with passages like this is read them and then adapt them as if the events were happening today.  We like to plug things in here and there and soon we have a nice story that will fit into our world.  The old woman was pregnant so she must have been troubled.  Joseph must have been a victim because of all that was happening.  Well, guess what folks?  It is not there.  Maybe some of these things were happening.  Maybe there was some trouble.  But that is not part of this passage and not part of this message.

Mary went to the hill country of Judea and entered the home of Zechariah and Elizabeth.  It doesn’t say that she fled her hometown in disgrace.  It doesn’t say that she was troubled.  It doesn’t say that anything was wrong.  She just went.  We like to put in this other stuff because it is probably the way that we would feel.

So, if none of this bad stuff was happening, then what did happen?  The first thing that happens is that Elizabeth hears Mary’s greeting and the baby in her womb leaps, and the Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.  This unborn baby, who is John the Baptist, knows already who Jesus is.  He leaps with joy and Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit.

This is a time for joy and this is what the Scripture is saying.  I think that we have a tough time with joy.  This is hard in our modern times as we fight this virus and other things.  We need to be reading in the 5^th chapter of Galatians to be reminded that joy is one of the fruits of the Spirit.  It is a gift from God.  God gives us joy and it can come from no place else.

This is a time of year when we have to be aware of this.  There are many people around us who have no joy.  Life has beaten them up pretty badly.  I really don’t think that it matters much as to how they have beaten themselves, or how they have done wrong things or made wrong decisions.  There is not a person here who has not made wrong choices.  But what most of these people don’t realize is that there is someone in the name of Jesus Christ who doesn’t care about your past if you come to Him.  We are the hands and feet of Jesus so it shouldn’t matter to us either what a person’s past is.  It is important that we are aware of people who are alone or without family or in trouble.  Be aware of these people and invite them to your table.

I think that you might be surprised by the number of people who don’t have a place to go for Christmas dinner.  Generally speaking, many communities are too small to support a dinner for the needy.  But you can take on this duty on your own.  Sharon and I love to invite people for holiday dinners. We often get to know new people better and everyone enjoys it. Don’t be afraid to invite someone who is alone.

When you are doing something like this you will be bringing joy to someone else and also to yourself.  I think that joy is something that we don’t have enough of in our modern world.  When I started pastoring, I didn’t know much about youth ministry or ministry with young people.  But with God’s help, I stumbled through. I praise the Lord for this.  But there is one thing that I think we all notice in children and the youth and that is their ability to experience joy.  It has happened many times that I have seen some of our young people experience pure joy and this in turn brings much joy back to me.

What often times happens is that somewhere along the line of life we seem to lose the capacity for joy.  Let’s see if you can bring this back into your life this Christmas as you watch others open presents or eat a meal or just by being in the presence of loved ones.  I have noticed people are filled with joy as they walk into a sanctuary and see how it is decorated.  Joy is all around us and you can experience it.  You have this fruit of the Spirit so let’s see if you can cultivate it a little more this year.

The other thing that I would like you to notice about this reading is that Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.  There is no way that she could have known that Mary was carrying our Savior unless God is in her and telling her.  She had come to love our Lord through her pregnancy in her old age.  She was receptive to the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit.

As we prepare ourselves for Christmas this year, don’t be afraid of the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit.  Don’t be afraid to buy that gift that just came to you out of the blue.  The Spirit is talking to you.  Don’t be afraid to ask someone to join you for dinner.  Let the Spirit work because He knows far more than you.  Don’t be afraid to let the Spirit lead you in some way to joy.  He will lead you to the joy that John the Baptist had in the womb.  It will be the joy that Elizabeth and Mary had.  You can have it also.

Mike McCartney tells this wonderful story where Pastor Mike was looking at the Nativity Scene outside his church the day after Christmas.  He noticed that it had been vandalized and the baby Jesus was missing.  He was going to call the police when saw little Jimmy coming down the sidewalk pulling a nice, new shiny red wagon with the baby Jesus figurine in it.  So, Pastor Mike walked up to Jimmy and asked where he got the infant.  Jimmy said, “I got it from the church.”  Pastor Mike asked, “Why did you take it?”  Jimmy smiled rather sheepishly and said, “Well, about a week before Christmas I prayed to the little Lord Jesus. I told him if he would bring me a red wagon for Christmas, I would give him a ride around the block in it.”

Sisters and brothers in Christ, there is joy in the Christmas story.  Hopefully you get joy from listening to this story.  This is the joy that is all around you.  This is the joy that you can all have if you just come to Jesus.  Jesus Christ loves you so much that He only wants you to have a joyful Christmas.  Accept His unending love and His joy.  I praise the Lord every day that I did this.  And thank you Jesus for first loving us.  Merry Christmas!  Let’s pray.