Surrendering to God

12-7-22 Surrendering to God

Last spring I had the privilege of seeing the painting “The Annunciation” by Tanner at the Philadelphia Art Museum. Unlike many paintings of the occasion, it depicts the youth, humility, and vulnerability of Mary as the angel Gabriel appears and says, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David (Luke 1:28-32). 

I am always touched by the humility of this young teenager from the small town of Nazareth. She has no remarkable education or experience. She brings nothing on her resume other than her availability and willingness to serve. So God puts her to use in his plan, taking her though a process for which she has had no training or preparation. The passage reveals the kind of character God is looking for in his people in order to work out his will in the world.

This is a very countercultural idea. We live in a highly competitive and sometimes even cutthroat culture. We are conditioned to think that what we need most is more education, more experience, more financial security in order to get the best job or secure the best future. And while that may be true in part, we must be careful that we do not allow ourselves to become compulsively driven or so conformed to the cultural expectation of comfort that we forget that what matters most to God is our character. What we do or accomplish in terms of worldly standards of success are not what matter most to God. Who we are in relationship to God and others, who we are becoming in Christ is what matters most. God uses the external struggles and success to conform our inner heart and soul into the image of Christ.

If someone told us we were highly favored, we might be tempted to think this means a comfortable life style, social standing, wealth, and good health. Most of us have this American, culturally conditioned conception of acceptability, prosperity, and comfort. But these have never been the essence of God’s blessing.

Mary wondered what this meant too. Mary is blessed because God is with her. She is favored because she is the object of God’s grace, as he accomplishes for her what she could not accomplish on her own. Mary had a unique role to play in the redemption of the world as the mother of Jesus. With God’s grace behind her, she could do whatever God asked.

But the truth is, we are all highly favored by God because he sent his only Son into the world that we might be saved through him. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us. God longs for us to live in the reality of being highly favored, of being his beloved, and relying on his grace to do for us what we cannot to for ourselves in living out the unique calling he has given each one of us.

And like Mary, we will need to hold on to a bigger picture of our life than just the particularities of circumstances that come to us, especially when they are trying and difficult. With Christ in our life, we can see ourselves as highly favored by God. “If God is for us, who can be against us. He who did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8: 31-32).

Apparently, Mary was fearful because the angel says. “Do not be afraid.” Fear is a natural and human response to unusual or difficult circumstances, but the angel goes on to tell Mary the particulars of what is going to happen. She will become pregnant and give birth to a son. Mary is then told of the greatness of the child to come. His identity is important. As the Son of God, he is divine in his very nature because he is literally the child of God. As the Son of David, he is the one promised long before who would come from the line of David. He will be unique as the God/man fully divine and fully human. And as such, he is the perfect human, sinless sacrifice for our sins.

It strikes me that as a devout Jew, Mary would have found the angel’s announcement startling to be sure but also familiar. This was good news, but it wasn’t entirely new news. She grew up hearing the stories of God’s people and how he had worked through history giving promises to Abraham, Moses, David, and the prophets. And she with all Israel had been waiting for God to fulfill the promises through the Messiah, the one who would be great. So this good news of the Hope of the world coming was familiar. Mary knew God’s word and God’s promises. So she could tie her experience to the larger picture of God’s redemption in the world through history.

As we prepare to celebrate the birth of Christ, are we hoping for God’s redemption of the world? Are we waiting for and anticipating the second coming of Christ in glory? Are we familiar with God’s redemptive history as revealed in the word? If an angel came and told us something God was going to do, would this news of God’s action in the world sound familiar? If not, what will we do to change that?

Advent is a good time to name our place in the journey. It’s a time to prepare for the celebration of Jesus’ birth, but it can also be a time of paying attention to our lives and what God is doing and to make plans for how we can make changes to align our lives with what God is doing in us, our families, our church, community, and the world. What do we need to let go of so that we can let God do what only God can do in and through us?

Mary is a virgin and wonders how this can be. The angel replies, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God” (Luke 1:35).  I love Gabriel’s parting words because they are so reassuring: “Nothing will be impossible with God.” They echo Jesus’ later declaration, “What is impossible for mortals is possible for God. A barren woman (Mary’s cousin Elizabeth) can bear a child. A virgin can conceive. The Lord can enter into human history as a child. From a tomb can come resurrection, and the Holy Spirit can empower the church for its worldwide mission. This promise is in the future tense: With God nothing will be impossible.

Mary’s response is so beautiful: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” God promises to be with her in the journey, and she responds by being willing to go on the ride—the risky adventure of following God wherever he leads. In his book Desiring God’s Will, David Benner writes, “Among the many reasons Christians honor Mary is the fact that as the first Christian—the first to accept Jesus within her—she models perfect surrender. “Mary was the first to accept that redemption should take place in the way we do not want it to take place; ruining all our plans, all our expectations, causing them to fail.’ Mary agreed to allow God to deprive her of the one thing we count most basic among our natural rights—the right of self-control. Mary simply trusts God knew best.

“With only one basic biological question and without argument, she placed her trust in God…. The demands on Mary’s trust in God did not end at the annunciation. It got even worse. For the first thirty years, the grand promises made to Mary seemed to be unfulfilled. There were only the vaguest of signs that this son by such mysterious means was destined to reign over the house of Jacob forever as the Son of the Most High. Her absolute trust in God could equip her to receive the rebuff that Jesus seemed to offer her on several occasions. At every point, even standing at the foot of his cross and giving her son back to God, Mary freely offered her unequivocal consent to God’s will.

“Her constant life posture was one of surrender to God and his good will for her life and the world. This is what we see in the life of Jesus. And it is what we see in the life of his mother, Mary—because she dared to trust the promise that God was with her and for her.”

Mary is such a beautiful example of surrendering to God’s love. Her example has been inspired me in many seasons of life and ministry as it does again this Advent season as I transition to a new and uncertain future. Wherever you find yourself, believe that God loves you, his grace is sufficient, his power is perfected in weakness, and he wants to use you to love and bless others as you faithfully follow him and surrender to his will. It will require humility, vulnerability, and trust in God’ perfect love. As Mary knew well, surrendering to God’s will is not always easy or painless, but it is always good.