Words from WW Blog

“The angel went to her and said, ‘Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” (Luke 1:28)

It seems that so many of the people that we encounter in the Bible that are blessed by God in some significant way are men and women of humble circumstances. Think about it! Peter was crucified upside down because he didn’t consider himself worthy enough to be nailed to the cross the same way Jesus had been crucified.

Ruth was spotted by Boaz as she was gleaning in the field. Gleaning was a way that people who was poor- people trying to survive- could gather grain to feed themselves.

Paul was supported by the generosity of the first churches. He was the one who wrote Philippians 2:3 “Do nothing our of self ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider other better than yourselves.” And then in describing Jesus he wrote, “And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient to death- even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:8) Paul had been humbled by the appearance of Jesus on the road to Damascus, an event that blinded him for a while.

Humbleness is not a quality that gets much print these days. Recently a college football player was thinking too much about his celebration antics for scoring a touchdown and dropped the football prematurely before he crossed the goal line. The defending team picked up the football that was bouncing around on the one yard line and returned it 99 yards for a jaw-dropping score. If the player who had been intent on being in the spotlight had put his selfish ambition to the side and simply crossed the goal line his team would have been ahead 14-0. Instead it was suddenly 7-7 and the momentum changed for the rest of the game.

Mary was called by the angel Gabriel to be the mother of the Christ-child. Her spirit of humility showed in her response to the angel in Luke 1:38.

“I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said.”

Two millennia later we celebrate the humble woman who was blessed by God. In terms of the blessings of God, he often goes against the grain and chooses the insignificant, the poor, the stutterer, the elderly, the common folk to carry out his greatest plans and purposes.

This entry was posted on December 8, 2014 at 1:05 am and is filed under Bible, children, Christianity, Christmas, Jesus, love, Parenting, Story, The Church, Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: blessed, Gabriel, humbled, Luke 1:38, Mary, the angel Gabriel, Virgin Mary