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Plans go awry all the time, and in the moment it feels terrible whether the fault is human weakness or God himself saying no to what we wanted. That’s exactly where Mary finds herself in Luke 1 when Gabriel’s greeting turns her ordinary day—and her entire future—upside down.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The preacher says that when plans fall apart due to human error, it “feels about the same” as when God redirects us—both hurt in the moment. What’s the difference between these two kinds of disruption, and how do we discern which one we’re facing?
Mary asks Gabriel “How will this be?” yet accepts his answer and says yes. The preacher contrasts this with Zechariah, who also asks but seems to be looking for a reason to say no. What does it look like to ask honest questions while still genuinely remaining open to God’s plan?
When have you experienced plans derailed in ways that felt devastating at the time, and how did that experience shape your view of God’s involvement in the disruption?
The preacher says following God’s will can be difficult and painful, but that’s different from difficulty that comes from running against God’s will. How can we tell the difference when we’re in the middle of hardship?
In what areas of life are you most tempted to cling to your own plans rather than remain open to God’s, and why do those areas feel so important to control?
The preacher emphasizes that God doesn’t call us to do things He won’t give us strength to accomplish. When have you experienced God’s strength enabling you to do something you thought was impossible on your own?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
So thank you. Cindy and I want to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Feliz Navidad. Merry Christmas and Feliz Navidad.
How many of you have been busy making plans? We have plans for Christmas and such. We have plans for the New Year, right? We have lots and lots and lots and lots of plans. Does anyone ever have a plan go a bit awry? Just a little bit? Well, we even had one of those this week. Jason was supposed to be here and he and I were going to preach this message together, and his car broke down and he wasn’t able to be here with us. Hopefully he’ll be back in town soon, be able to come in town and we’ll be able to share that with him. But you just have something come at you and it doesn’t happen how you expect.
Talking about that makes me think back to three years ago now, right before we started meeting in person, we were getting ready for an online Christmas service. We talked about trying to start in Advent of 2021 after delaying and delaying all these different plans going wrong. But we were in the middle of yet another spike of COVID and it just seemed like not the right time to actually launch right after all that time. So we were going to do online. Online was coming together. We had our Christmas Eve service in motion. Everything was coming together.
I walked out to my front porch and there’s a FedEx envelope on the front porch. I wasn’t expecting anything. It was like overnight express. Big thing on it. It’s supposed to require a signature. I hadn’t signed for it. So I pick up this envelope and open it up and it’s from our bank and inside the envelope is a check for the entirety of the church’s account. They closed it. We’d sent in some paperwork about a month before. They said they wanted and they not indicated they wanted anything further but they decided because something crossed in all their stuff to close our account. And so less than two weeks before the end of the year, less than like a week and a half before Christmas, suddenly we didn’t have a bank account. No way to pay bills. No way to receive a donation. Nothing. Just gone.
And as you know, if something goes wrong at this time of year, it’s really hard, isn’t it? I was asking Jason about that with his car. I said, so how long do you have any idea what’s going on with anything? He said, well, you know the timing and just trying to get something fixed right now is really hard. So I spent hours on the phone the week before Christmas trying to get our account restored. We don’t need to go into the long, gory details because it ended up being March before we were able to access our account again. The church had no access to funds for almost three months. And it sort of felt like, well, God, it seems like you want us to be doing this and yet now we can’t even get into our funds so we can do things like pay our rent and stuff. What’s going on here?
And it was just a weird typographical error that the bank wouldn’t fix. They could see it. They could admit it. They wouldn’t fix it. A lot of times our plans get derailed. Now, sometimes it’s out of human weakness and error. That was clearly one of those cases. Sometimes God is the one that says, you have this plan, but it’s not my plan for you. The story we’re going to look at tonight is that kind of thing. But the reason I mention the other is because in the moment for us, I think they feel about the same. When a plan goes awry because human beings make a mistake, it feels awful. It really messes everything up. And when God says no to a plan that we really are holding on to, it doesn’t feel much better. We can rationalize it and then after the fact maybe look back on it and feel better. But in the moment, it just feels like our plans have fallen off the tracks. And oftentimes we don’t even think it is of God.
Well, let’s pray that as we encounter Mary’s story tonight, that we would see those places where our plans aren’t going quite right and we don’t feel like rejoicing because our plans aren’t going quite right. And we would feel the peace of knowing that the God who brought Mary through her change of plans is the God who’s with us. Let’s pray.
Father, would you be with us tonight and help us that we would be those who are receptive to what you are doing? Lord, sometimes you want us to charge ahead. Sometimes you want us to face opposition. Certainly, we see that in this story. But Lord, would you help us to be receptive when you’re saying you’re not getting where I want you and help us to be those who are ready to rejoice even when our plans are up in the air because we know that you are the one who is in control. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Let’s go ahead and turn to Luke chapter 1 and we’ll start at verse 26. Luke writes, “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.” And the angel said to her, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be since I am a virgin?”
This is not what Mary is expecting here. It’s not how her day was supposed to go. It’s not how her life was supposed to go. And that’s how it usually goes, right? This is not how my afternoon was supposed to go. Well, what do you know? Now my day is not going how it’s supposed to go. And on the big ones, therefore, that’s not how my life was supposed to go.
We have the benefit of looking back at this. We say, wow, look at Mary. I mean, God chose her to be the mother of God in the flesh. That’s incredible. That’s amazing. Isn’t it wonderful? And that’s the way that Gabriel approaches it. He comes and gives Mary a greeting that is far loftier than what a young woman of her age could ever expect to receive.
See, based on the language, what we think is that Mary was likely somewhere between 12 and 14 years old. She was young. And in that society, being that young, and being a woman of that young age, meant you had basically no social standing, period. And so if someone of import, certainly someone like an angel shows up and speaks to you, you would expect that angel or that important person, that dignitary, whatever it might be. No one’s really expecting an angel, right? But someone of import to greet her as an underling.
Now, today we want to make everyone feel about the same, right? We don’t use last names anymore. We just greet people we don’t know by their first name. We don’t use titles. We don’t do this sort of thing. And so it sounds kind of snobby, but back up to the time. At the time they did all that and more, there was clear social standing, and she didn’t have it.
And so she’s immediately greeted by two things that she may not know where they’re going, but she knows are different than what she would have expected for the day. First, she’s encountering the angel, and the angel is greeting her as if she’s important. An angel, a messenger of God, someone sent by the one who made everything, is greeting her as if she had some significance, that she wasn’t just a 12 or 13 or 14-year-old girl, that no one was really ready to acknowledge she meant anything.
So Gabriel greets her. And then he tells her why he’s greeting her. And then she knows things are really not going the way she expected. Because here’s the funny thing. If you’re married, you don’t expect people to view you as important. You don’t expect people to praise you as somehow important for being a 12 to 14-year-old girl. You expect people to look down on you, but you expect a 12 to 14-year-old unmarried girl who’s expecting a baby to be looked down on even more so.
And maybe we feel a little of that still today. We’ve lost even a lot of that shock. But let’s be clear about this. While it often wasn’t followed, it was certainly perfectly legal to kill her. And sometimes a young woman like Mary would be put to death. So we’ve gone from, why is this angel giving me this incredible greeting to now this angel’s going to tell me everyone else, they’re not going to just ignore me like they always have. They’re going to think I’m the worst of the worst.
And there’s another complication. She’s engaged. She’s betrothed. Now, betrothal in that time period is far more serious than what we mean by engagement today. We see that if we go over to Matthew, because if someone’s engaged today and they decide, I don’t want to be engaged, well, maybe you talk about what happens to the ring, maybe, although there’s etiquette that’s supposed to lay that out, right? But outside of that, it’s just, oh, done. Joseph was going to actually have to divorce her.
Now, we know that’s how Joseph would have to go about it because he considered it. Because Joseph’s first thought when Mary goes and talks to him isn’t that Mary encountered the angel Gabriel and that the Lord God Almighty was going to use her as the mother of the only son of God, the only one born without a father on earth, only a heavenly father. Joseph’s first thought is what anyone’s first thought would be, and it doesn’t look good. And Joseph has to say what he’s going to do with that, right? Because he’s supposed to be marrying Mary, but it looks like Mary hasn’t been faithful. It looks like Mary hasn’t taken this seriously.
Now, Joseph, we’re told, didn’t want to go about it the way he could have. He doesn’t want to put Mary to death. He doesn’t want to humiliate Mary. He just doesn’t want to go forward with some farce of a marriage that doesn’t actually have a commitment to it.
But Mary would have known this before she ever talked to Joseph. She may have hoped that he would say, oh, well, you know, Mary, I’ve known you for however, we don’t know how long they’ve known each other. I’ve known you for a while now. I believe you because you would never say anything like that and make it up. I know you wouldn’t do that. She might have hoped, but she was realistic. If she went to Joseph, she would know that it sounds insane. It doesn’t sound like what happens because it doesn’t normally happen.
And so the moment that Gabriel speaks to Mary, Mary already kind of knows the plot, at least the human plot, how it’s going to go. So she’s now viewed by an angel as important, by society as trash, and by her fiancé as someone who isn’t worth being engaged to any longer. She knows all that right away. She understands that. She’s not dumb. And so think about the weight that suddenly goes on her shoulders, that here is this young woman who gets up and thinks about she’s going to go about her normal chores and duties for the day, and there’ll be just yet another day in her life, normal day, maybe even a good day, and suddenly she’s just bombarded by all this, and it comes crashing down on her, and everything that she might have thought was worth rejoicing in life at this moment, her future marriage to Joseph, her standing with her friends and family and close family, friends in the community, all that is just out the window all at once.
And probably most of us have never experienced that level. I mean, if we really understand what’s happening, none of us have, but even anything close, most of us have not been in a place quite like that. How do you cope with it? I can’t cope with a lot smaller things.
The story I was talking about earlier about the church’s bank account, it’s a lot smaller thing. We’re a little church. It’s a lot smaller thing. But I thought about it, and I thought about how long it had taken to accumulate that account so that we could get this church off the ground. And all the people who had contributed painstakingly to that, and I remember that check, and when you get this straightened out, it was a cashier’s check, so if it was gone, it was gone. And just being almost, it was almost terrifying holding that check because what happens if something happens to it? And then we try to deposit it at a new bank, and something happened to it. And this is too much. And yeah, I knew that even if something happened to it, people weren’t going to hate me. This wasn’t something that was going to cause people to hate me. It was just, wait, this is horrible. This is too weighty a matter. I don’t want this to happen.
Mary had far more weight and importance of what she was doing, and on top of that, she also had that everyone was going to hate her. Can you imagine that combination? How do you make sense of that? How do you handle that? And on the much smaller things that you and I normally are dealing with, when God starts to redirect us, I think the thing that we really want to say is I just want my plans, God. They’re fine plans. They’re nice plans. I’m comfortable with these plans. I know where these plans go. Just let me have my plans, God. I don’t need this other situation. I don’t need it. It’s overwhelming. It’s uncertain. People are going to tell me I’m crazy.
And for all the talk we do about being faithful, of walking in faith, that’s when I think, well, I can talk a really good game, but a lot of times I’m not really ready to live a good game. I’m not ready for God to actually say, okay, you say you want to be faithful to me? Let me just tear up everything you thought you were doing and send you wildly in a different direction because that’s the direction I want for you. I’m not ready for it. It just sounds agonizing. It just sounds painful. It just sounds uncertain. It just sounds like my stomach is going to be churning with wonder and curiosity and fear and responsibility. I just want my plans.
We Americans, for those of us who are, I know maybe some of you who are joining from the rest of the world are handling Christmas better than we are. But I can say that we as Americans, for those of us that are, we do not handle Christmas well. We can’t get through preparing for Christmas without stressing out. And I don’t say that as an accusation. I say that as a confession. But it makes me feel a little better maybe to know that I’m not alone in the stressing out.
A survey came out. A gourmet food company decided to survey Americans about their views on preparations for Christmas. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe to say that you could stress out less by having them prepare your food, maybe. But they found this. They found that 47% of Americans say rather than whatever else they might do on Christmas, they would rather spend the day wearing their pajamas. That would be their preference. Christmas day, pajamas, done. Yeah, it doesn’t sound too bad, does it? No, it really doesn’t.
Well, what would they like to replace? They had a whole list. Top 10 things they’d like to replace. I won’t go through all of them, but one of them was sending Christmas cards. I confess, I’d like to send Christmas cards. If you don’t get one for me, it’s not because I don’t want to send you one. It’s because I’m about four years behind on sending Christmas cards. I really want to. I just haven’t gotten there. That one I get because it’s lovely as it is, and I love the tradition of opening Christmas cards. It takes a great deal of time, and I don’t just want to write out my name. I want to write a note to everybody I send a card to, and so it just piles up and piles up and piles up until I say I don’t have time to do it. Maybe I’ll send New Year’s cards or Epiphany cards. Easter cards, there, that would be good. So I get that.
Other Americans said one of the things they’d like to skip are ugly Christmas sweater parties. That’s too bad. I love ugly Christmas sweaters. They’re the best. But, you know, there we are.
Here’s one that really disturbed me. One of the top ten things people would like to set aside so they could just sit there on Christmas and wear their pajamas is putting up a Christmas tree. You need the Christmas tree so when you’re sitting in your Christmas pajamas, you feel Christmassy. I mean, the two go together. It just doesn’t even make any sense.
But here’s some of the things they’d like to replace it with. They spent, in their pajamas, that’s the top one, a vacation. Christmas is too stressful. I’ll just take a vacation from it, right? I’ll just get out of town. Maybe a themed Christmas somewhere tropical. That kind of goes in with vacation, right? Well, how would you like to spend Christmas? On Christmas Island, perhaps? One of the top ten things was a personal retreat, just alone. Just let it be quiet.
And you think about all this. We can’t handle getting through the celebrating of the birth of the Savior. Mary had to go through actually being the mother of the Savior. What might happen to us? Well, people might be disappointed when we don’t send out a Christmas card. They might be disappointed if we can’t have all the parties. They might be disappointed if we come and we’re not wearing our ugly Christmas sweater, or they didn’t want to and we did. They might be disappointed somehow, one way or another. Another thing they wanted to give up was making Christmas cookies. They might be disappointed if you don’t make the homemade Christmas cookies, right? There might be disappointment. But no one’s going to say, I don’t want to put you to death. I hope. I hope not.
Mary had that. So she had the really good part of it. I’m going to be the mother of the Savior. To the extent that you can process that all as a human being at that point. Amazing, amazing moment. And no one’s going to believe me, and they’re all going to hate me. Both of those weights resting right down upon her.
We can’t get through just celebrating what happened. That’s what Mary was doing. How’d she do it? Was she the one person who knows how to handle all this stuff? If only we could talk to her. She could write an advice column. Here’s how you handle your Christmas stress. Well, no, it’s not that. It’s what we do in response. Are we going to turn to God or not?
Let’s take a look at verse 36 of Luke chapter 1. Gabriel goes on, “And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.”
Mary says one thing that is really, really, really important. She says, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” She doesn’t say, well, let me think about if I can do this. Or, I’m not going to do this. I had a lot of things I wanted to rejoice about over here, Gabriel. Let me take it under advisement. You know, let me talk to Joseph and see if he likes this idea. Let me think about it for a while. Maybe I’ll go on one of those personal retreats that the Americans 2,000 years from now are going to want to go on around Christmastime. I’ll do all that. And then if, you know, I kind of feel it, I can feel that this is a good thing, then I’ll do it.
She doesn’t say that. She recognizes the only way she’s going to be able to do it is if God enables her to do it. And if that is God’s will, she’s going to do it. That’s the thing that God wants us to recognize, that two-pronged thing. It’s a single thing. It’s like a two-pronged fork. On the one hand, if we only have the prong of, if God wants me to do it, I’m going to do it. Mary says, I’m supposed to have the Son of God. Let me figure out how this is going to work here. I’ll get back to you, Gabriel. That would have been a good idea.
And if she’d said, I don’t really care what the Lord’s will is. I need to think about what my will is, that would have worked. It’s that combination. I want the Lord’s will, and I recognize He’s the only one that can make it possible. The two come together, and suddenly you can actually do something. Suddenly you can accomplish something. And God’s going to accomplish a great deal through Mary.
Gabriel tells her the key. It’s a question of if she’s going to take it. Nothing is impossible through God. And Gabriel says, here, let me tell you how you can know this. And I think this shows… We’re going to talk next week about Zechariah. As we think about him, one of the things that always comes up is he asks, how can it be that his wife Elizabeth is going to have a baby? She’s old. She can’t possibly have a baby. And he gets to be mute for nine months. Mary says, how can this be? And Gabriel gives her a sign.
What’s the difference? I think the difference is in how Mary can answer it, which is Mary’s already on board. She just wants to understand. Zechariah is saying, I think, Gabriel, you’re confused. You’re like the Amazon delivery guy that delivers my boxes to the next-door neighbor. It wasn’t me. Let me see here. There are a lot of people in my family. You can look in the Gospel in my genealogy. It’ll be printed out. You can see where I came from. I’m a priest here. Maybe you meant to talk to my second cousin.
Mary says, no, I understand, Gabriel. You’re talking to me. This is for me. I just want to understand. And in that, we see God isn’t looking for us to cease caring how he works. He’s fine with us wanting to engage with him and talk with him. He wants us, though, to trust him. And that’s the key thing. It’s okay to explore. We do things like Sunday School Express, and we talk about, well, how does this work, or why do we believe this, and so on. It’s okay to ask questions. It’s okay to want to know more. Mary asked questions. She wants to know more.
The key thing is, when we ask those questions, are we asking those questions desiring to believe? Are we looking for a loophole? Are we looking to say, maybe God doesn’t really have everything under control? Or are we looking to believe? Because we know that God is the one who empowers his plans. And so if he chooses that plan, if he decides to run with that plan, that plan will be unstoppable. And I believe that’s exactly where Mary is. She believes the plan’s unstoppable. She just wants to understand.
God’s not going to just call on her and throw off her entire life. Mary’s life is never going to be the same. And while it seems like, in some ways, there’s probably a period of time in her life where things are maybe a little more normal, they’re never going to be the same. And some of that will be good, and some of that won’t be good. And some of that will seem good, and then she’s going to have to watch her son go to the cross. It’s not going to be good. It’s never going to be the same. But God’s not going to leave her hanging as she goes to do his will. She’s going to have the Lord with her, and that’s the crucial thing.
God’s not going to say more than what can be done. Critically, he’s not going to say more than he intends to do. God says it, and if he says it, it’s going to happen. We see that, for example, going back, a similar theme, Genesis 18:14. The Lord says that Sarah, Abraham’s wife, is going to have a child, and he says, “Is anything too hard for the Lord? At the appointed time, I will return to you about this time next year, and Sarah will have a son.” We see a theme over and over again of God giving children to those who couldn’t have children. That’s what we see happening for Elizabeth. A little different for Mary here, obviously. But the key thing is the language is the same. Nothing is impossible. And if God can give someone who just hasn’t been able to have children, God can certainly make Mary the one who bears the Savior. He can do anything.
And unlike a lot of people, including us today, Mary knows the truth of who God is and what he’s done in the past, and she believes if he says this, it can be. The key is having certainty that God does what he says. If you have that, then you know that if he tells you that you’re going to do something, that he wants you to do something, it may be difficult, it may be painful, but he will see it through.
We don’t want to confuse those, right? I talk about changing plans, and we say, well, I keep trying to do things, and they’re always difficult, they’re always painful, maybe God doesn’t want me there. And we should ask those sorts of questions. But if Mary had asked those sorts of questions and concluded, well, it’s difficult and painful, so I shouldn’t do it, she would have said, no, I don’t want this, this is not for me, because what we think of as difficult and painful isn’t really difficult and painful compared to what she’s facing here. We don’t really know what difficult and painful is most of the time.
That’s not denying, I know this church, and each of you, and some of the things, at least, that you’ve gone through or are going through, we go through a lot of difficult and painful things. The important reason to say that is the fact that you’re going through difficult and painful things doesn’t mean that you’re outside God’s plan or that he can’t work through you. Following God’s plan is often difficult and painful. The key thing is to make sure that we’re aligned with God’s plan in the difficult and painful. And those are very, very different things, because we can have the best of intentions, and if the reason it’s difficult and painful is because we’re running against God’s will, it’s not going to work. If the reason it’s difficult and painful is because God is sending us out to battle for him, we’re not going to work. If we’re able to battle for him with his strength, with his spirit behind us, it might still be difficult, but it will work. And that’s the critical difference.
There was news this week that Party City was closing. It’s kind of sad right before Christmas, right? The place that’s known for being a party, right? It’s a city of parties, and it’s closing right before Christmas. That’s sad. And then, I have to say, the one that made me even sadder came about three or four hours later. They announced it the same day. Big Lots. I love Big Lots. Big Lots is going out of business. And I knew that they were in Chapter 11 reorganization. Sometimes we call it declaring bankruptcy, but that’s informal. What they were doing, and the reason they have this whole thing called Chapter 11 is the idea is you go into it when you’re having financial trouble as an organization with the hope that you get out of it. And so when Big Lots went into reorganization, their goal was to get out of it and to continue to be a going concern. That was their intent. But they didn’t have the power to do it, clearly.
And so this place, actually, some of the decorations you see here at Little Hills are from Big Lots. This place that has so many wonderful things. I have bookshelves that are decades old that I love that are from Big Lots. It was a great place. It is a great place for the next couple of months. They didn’t have the power, whether the plan seemed good or not, to survive. And sometimes we set out and we’re going to do something for God and we haven’t actually paid attention to his will and we don’t have the power and we end up like Big Lots. We’re just going to close our doors. Sometimes things are just difficult.
And when it’s our idea and it’s our effort, it’s uncertain because we often don’t know if we have the power. And even if we think we have the strength, we have the power, we have the plan, it turns out we don’t really have it. But the key thing here that we see is that Mary isn’t encountering some human being coming up to her and saying, you know what? I think it would be a really good idea if you were the mother of God in the flesh. I think that would be a great idea. Because then Mary should have said, I’m going to back away slowly from you. I don’t want anything more to do with you, because this is not good.
No, Mary was encountering the messenger of the Lord Most High and so because of that she knew someone wasn’t proposing, let’s reorganize this company and keep it afloat and it still might go under like Big Lots. No, this was God himself saying, I have a great plan for you. A great plan for the world. I’m going to be with you. I’m going to walk with you in it. And that’s the plan that she was following. With his help we can do his will. The problem is when we go out without his will. But with his help we can.
And so, what are we going to do? I think this is something that we should be challenged at Christmas time. Are we going to be those who are ready to trust, those who are ready to receive what the Lord is calling us to do even when it’s painful and do it? Or not? Are we ready to be used by God? Because being used by God is not fun a lot of the time. It’s fun to see the kingdom spread and the gospel declared. It’s fun when we know how to help somebody and we have some skill or something and we can aid somebody and we actually see the results immediately. But a lot of times, and I think most if not all of you know this from actual experience, there isn’t that immediate, ah, this is good. There’s a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. And we’ll wear ourselves out if it’s out of human effort. But if we’re ready to be used and we’re ready to trust and we’re seeking to follow God’s will, that pain may still be there. And we are weak and uncertain, but God is strong. And the God who is strong enough to take Mary, this 12 or 13 or 14-year-old girl that was going to be hated by her community and use her to bring the Savior into the world, he’s the God who’s going to take everything he calls you to do and give you the strength to do it as well.
Would you pray with me, please? Father, we pray that you would help us. We need your strength. Lord, we try to do things on our own. We try to figure things out on our own. Sometimes we trust, but we then go and fall right back into trusting our own strength rather than you. Sometimes we stay focused on trusting you, but we forget that the call is too difficult. Sometimes we struggle to trust at all and we think, but God, it might not work, and then it’s going to really, really, really hurt. Lord, would you remind us that you are only calling us to do the things that you will strengthen us to do and that you walk with us each and every step of the way. That’s the beauty of the Incarnation. We know that we have a God who has dwelt amongst us, who has walked where we walk and felt what we felt and now walks alongside us, that we aren’t alone as we face every challenge, big and small, in this life.
Would you remind us of that tonight and this Christmas week and in the new year to come? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Thank you, Chris. The inner circle is gluten-free and the outer part is not. We always say when we take these elements that if you haven’t yet trusted in Jesus, would you please let the elements pass you by. And that’s not because we want to be exclusive. It’s because taking these elements without trusting in Jesus is like taking even a good plan from God and trying to do it on your own strength. It won’t work.
Take this and you don’t know Jesus. The best you can hope is to get a small wafer of, well, not especially great bread, and a little bit of grape juice. That’s the best you can hope. And the worst, Scripture tells us, that you’re actually insulting God because you’re saying, I don’t need him. But here’s the good news. This isn’t something where you have to apply and see if we’ll accept you. It’s not something where you have to earn a certain number of points so you can become a member or something or pay a fee. No, all you need to do is trust in Jesus, and you can do that tonight. If you’re online, you can go to one of our online church family members. They’d love to pray with you. You just need to pray, Jesus, I need a savior. I am not strong enough to do what’s ahead of me tomorrow, much less the rest of my life. I need you. And you know what? He’ll answer that prayer. And then come back next week and take these elements not as some empty ritual, but rather as a very personal reminder from your God that he loves you and that he is with you and that he will never forsake you.
So it was as Jesus gave these elements to his disciples. On the night he was betrayed, he took bread and he broke it and he gave it to them saying, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In like manner, after supper, he took the cup and he said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood poured out for you under the remission of sins.”
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