Mary of Nazareth (E3)

0:00Like Mary of Nazareth, are you content to be a hidden servant of the Lord? Here's Nancy Damaswalgamuth. Some of us move so quickly through life as I have a tendency to do, from one appointment to the next, from one city to the next, from one responsibility to the next, from one meeting to the next, from one day to the next, that we don't stop to ponder, where is the hand of God acting in my life? This is the Revival Hearts podcast with Nancy Damaswalgamuth, author of Surrender, the Heart, God controls. For September 16th, 2026, I'm Dana Grash. Nancy's continuing in the series, Mary of Nazareth. One of the greatest hymns ever written in the history of the Christian Church is found in the passage that we're looking at today. We're in the Gospel of Luke chapter 1. We're looking at characteristics out of the life of Mary of Nazareth.

1:01And these are the same characteristics that God is looking for in our lives. They're the qualities of the woman that God uses to fulfill his purposes in our world. In our last session, we looked at the account beginning in verse 39 of Luke chapter 1, of Mary going to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who has also just found out that she, who was considered barren, is going to have a child, of that child, of course, being John the Baptist. And when Mary reached Elizabeth's house, Elizabeth said to her, blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished. And we saw in our last session that the woman who believes God is a blessed woman. That's a woman that God can use. And then Mary responds beginning in verse 46 with this great hymn of praise. We know it as the magnificat. Mary said, my soul magnifies. My soul glorifies the Lord. And my spirit rejoices in God, my Savior.

2:02For 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 arm. And then you go down to verse 53, 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 to his descendants forever, even as he said to our fathers. So Mary launches out into this great hymn of praise. And that's what I want you to notice is that Mary was a praising woman, a woman of worship, a woman who gave thanks to God and recognized that this was the work of God and determined to magnify God. In every circumstance of life, the good ones and the negative ones,

3:04we choose how we will respond. Some of you have heard me say before that basically we either worship or we wine. And Mary in the face of this great circumstance is going to be a worshiper. She's a woman of praise. She's a woman with a grateful spirit. And she expresses to God in front of her cousin Elizabeth, her great praise and adoration of the Lord. She speaks words of prayer, praise, and even music song to the Lord. Mary worships God through this passage for his wonderful acts, for his mercy, and for choosing her. She's just overwhelmed, humbled that God would choose her and use her in, and that sense of wonder finds itself flowing out of her life in praise. She's conscious that this is something God has done, that she is a recipient of God's grace and his mercy, and it's as if she can't help it. What comes overflowing out of this full life

4:05is a song, a hymn of praise. What comes overflowing out of your life when you experience the goodness, the grace, and the mercy of God? She just go on as if nothing had happened, or do you find yourself taking time to stop and to say, God is great. God is good, and I thank him, I bless him, for his goodness. Praise was not just something that Mary felt inside, though she certainly did that, but it's something that she expressed verbally, so that others could hear it and could be blessed. I know there are times in my own life when I feel thankfulness for the goodness of God, but so many times I just hurry on and don't stop to say it. To say it to others, to say to the Lord, you have been so good, and I worship you, I thank you. And so let me ask this question, is your life characterized by a spirit of praise?

5:06Do you respond to the circumstances and challenges of each day by expressing gratitude for the greatness and mercy of God? And do your responses give the world a proper opinion of God? As you respond to those circumstances, can the world hear what you say, and be drawn to a God who is good, and who is great, the God that you praise? As we read this passage, we see something else about Mary, and that is that she was a woman of the word. She was a woman of the word. In Mary's prayer that we've just read, there are at least 12 quotations from Old Testament scriptures. Now most of us, if pressed, would have a hard time in a prayer coming up by memory with a dozen Old Testament quotations to work into our prayer, but she used the word of God with which she was obviously very familiar as a part of her worship, her prayer, and her praise.

6:08Those quotations are all woven together. It's not something she had to say, wait a minute, let me go get my Bible so I can read a Psalm of praise to the Lord. That's what I would probably have to do. But instead she knew these Psalms. She knew these passages. They were embedded in her heart. They were part of her thinking. What makes us all the more remarkable is that Mary probably was not able to read. She probably did not have any kind of formal education as a young woman growing up in that culture. And furthermore, even if she had been able to read, she didn't have a copy of the Old Testament at her house. She would have had to have heard the word of God read at the synagogue as she had gone to worship. But she obviously loved the word. She had listened to it. She had retained it. How often do you and I sit in search and hear the word of God being read? And just as if with glazed eyes let it go over us. We've heard that, we've done that, we've seen that,

7:09we've been there, and it's nothing remarkable to us. And we leave and maybe forget what we actually heard at all. In fact, I've had that experience in my own quiet time where I can read through chapters of the scripture and don't have a clue what it is I just read. I see and marry someone who listened to the word of God a ten of Lee who reverenced it, who made it a part of her life, made it a part of her heart. And out of then the overflow of that word came this prayer as she prayed the word back to God. Ladies, if we're going to be used of God in our generation, we've got to become women of God's word, women who know the word of God. Twice in the last week, I've been exposed to some sobering illustrations of what happens when women don't know the word of God. Lady wrote me recently and said that she'd been in a conversation at a church retreat,

8:10a well-known evangelical church, a Bible preaching church. And over the lunch table, she had talked with one of the other women who was attending this conference. And my friend who wrote to me had just recently lost her mother. So she said, we began talking, she began talking with this other woman who had just lost her mother. And she said, for the second time in six months, someone said to me, you need to talk to your mother and communicate with her. You're now the ceased mother and try and get her to communicate with you. Now my friend wisely said to the lady she had just met, where do you get this in God's word? And that's the right question to be asking. The problem is today, even some of us who've been in the church for years being exposed to biblical teaching and preaching, we don't know the word of God for ourselves. This past week, I read an article about a cult in a part of the United States that has had some disastrous consequences because the founders claimed

9:12that what they were teaching was the word of God. They claimed that this is what the Bible taught, but their followers never bothered to check it out for themselves. As a result, they believed what someone else said the word of God said. They followed the leader rather than following the word of God. Now if we women want to be used of God in our day, we need to get this word into us. We need to get into it, get it into our minds, get it into our hearts so that when we are challenged, when we're having to respond to the circumstances of life, what comes out will be the word and the ways of God. That is the only reliable, unchanging source of authority for our lives. And so I ask you this question, do you love the word of God? Do you really? Do you make it a part of your everyday life or is it just a category of your life? Do you read the scripture? Do you memorize it as Mary evidently had?

10:14Do you meditate on it? Do you mull it over? Do you apply it to real life circumstances and situations? And do you share it with others? Do you pray it back to God and do you share it with others who may be in your pathway? Do you use the word in practical ways in real life situations? As we move into Luke chapter two, we're going to see some more characteristics of the woman that God uses. We read in verse 19 of Luke chapter two, that after the shepherds left the manger scene after the birth of Christ, the scripture says that Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart, Luke chapter two, verse 19. She treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. Then 12 years later, as we go to the end of Luke chapter two, we read another incident in Mary's life. This is after Mary and Joseph have found Jesus

11:17at the age of 12 talking with the teachers in the temple. And once again, verse 51 of Luke chapter two, we read Mary treasured all these things in her heart. These verses tell me that Mary was a reflective woman. She was a reflective woman. That's something that I don't know a lot about to tell you the truth. And it's something that very few people today experience on a consistent basis. What is this passage telling us about Mary? The word treasured, where it says she treasured these things in her heart, it means to keep them there, to guard them, to preserve, to keep them safe, to keep them close, to keep them carefully. What picture does that give you of Mary? It says to me that Mary took time to meditate on what God had done. Shortly after the birth of her child, and even years later when he was an adolescent, and they were experiencing these unusual things

12:18happening in their lives, Mary took time to think about what God was doing, to ponder, to meditate, to treasure these things in her heart. Mary had a quiet spirit. She contemplated what was happening. I don't know about you, but I find that oftentimes when something exciting is happening in my life, something that God is doing, the first thing I want to do is tell everybody about it. And there is a time to tell everybody about it. In fact, one of the verses we didn't read says that the shepherds left the manger scene and they went into the town, and they told everybody all about it. And that's a great example that at times we need to follow as well. But sometimes we're much quicker to speak than we are to meditate, to ponder, to treasure these things in our hearts. We need time to reflect on what God is doing. And if we don't reflect, we're often going to miss

13:20what God is doing. Some of us move so quickly through life as I have a tendency to do, from one appointment to the next, from one city to the next, from one responsibility to the next, from one meeting to the next, from one day to the next, that we don't stop to ponder, where is the hand of God active in my life? What is God saying and doing in my circumstances? If we don't stop and think about it, we're just going to run pale mail through life and not see the hand of God, not recognize the involvement of God in our lives. And so we need time in this very hurried world to be quiet. And some of you may be thinking, when in the world am I going to get time to be quiet? Well, let me say this, it won't just happen. You've got to make time. You've got to take time. You've got to be willing to be away from the people and away from the crowds at times and say, I'm just going to be, along with the Lord,

14:22to be quiet, to listen to Him, to reflect on what He is doing in my life. When he time to sit still, that's not a behavior that most of us are very experienced with, particularly if you have children, some of you never sit still during the course of a whole day. And from a human standpoint, that's understandable. But I will say your spiritual life and usefulness will suffer if you don't take time to sit still. Now, the other extreme would be those who want to sit still all day long and want to be as it were, the Mary in the Mary and Martha combination of sisters. And to some of those women, God would say, you need to get up from sitting still and begin to serve, begin to be active. But I find for most of us as women today, our problem is not that we're sitting still too much. Our problem is that we're too active. Mentally, physically, always having to do something, always having to be with people, always having to have noise on around us.

15:23We need time to consider, time to think. The tendency today and so many of our lives is to fill all the empty spaces with noise. So we get into the car, what do we do? We turn on the radio. We walk in the house, what do we do? We turn on the television. Let me just say, ladies, if you want to be a woman, God uses, you can't always have noise around you. Get in your car. And if you have one of those times when you can be alone in your car, don't turn on the radio. Be still. Be quiet. Listen to God, reflect on what he's saying and doing even in the seemingly mundane circumstances of your life. Say, God, where are you at work here? What are you up to? What are you trying to accomplish in me and through me? Meditating on who God is. So here's the question for this characteristic. Do I take time to remember what God has done and to meditate on what he is doing in my life

16:25and in my circumstances? Mary was a reflective woman. And we need to learn to reflect and meditate on what God is doing in our lives. Now I see also that Mary was a humble woman, a humble woman. It's interesting to me that very little is set of Mary in the scripture after the birth of the Lord Jesus. And that suggests to me that she was content to be in the background. She was content not to be a well-known woman. Now she's well-known to us today, but she didn't know that she was going to be well-known. She was content not to have others know who she was. I believe that's because the deep, driving motivation of her life was to make Jesus known. What mattered to her was that people would know who he was. In her humility of spirit, she said, it's okay if nobody knows who I am. What matters is that they know him.

17:26You see, when the angel came to tell Mary that she was going to have a child, the angel had said of that son, he will be great. He will be the son of the most high God. And Mary just embraced the will of God. The angel didn't say, you will be great. The angel said, he will be great. You know, even among those of us who wouldn't think we aspire to fame or to be well-known, there's something inside all of our hearts that wants to be recognized, that wants to have others notice what we do. But the woman God uses is a woman who is content, not to be recognized, not to be appreciated, not to be noticed. Some of you day after day are being faithful, intending to matters of your home. You're being keepers at home. You're extending hospitality through your home. You're extending mercy to the poor and needy as we're told that the virtuous woman does. But in some of your cases, no one knows what you're doing.

18:28Are you content, not to be recognized, not to be appreciated, not to have people make a big deal about what you're doing because you've accepted the goal for your life, that you will make him to be known. Your goal is that he will be seen to be great. And it really doesn't matter then what others think about you. When Mary prayed her great prayer in Luke chapter 1, verse 48, she said, God has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. She did not see herself as worthy the favor of God. She knew that it was all of God's goodness and his grace that he was using her. She really had the spirit of John the Baptist. You remember how he said, he must increase. And I must decrease. Are you willing to decrease, to be less known, to take the place of humility in order that he can increase? You know, you can never go wrong on the pathway of humility.

19:29Because it's not about us, it's all about him. It's about what God is doing through his son, Jesus, in our world. And we are just instruments. Some time ago, I remember meeting a woman who was a well-known violinist in an Eastern European country. And she talked about this matter of humility and she held up her violin and she said, it would be foolish for this violin to think that it is anything. She said, what makes it something is when someone who knows how to play it begins to play it. And she said, we are as that block of wood in the hands of God. And if any beautiful music comes through our lives, it's not because we were anything. It's because the master knew what to do with us and how to use us as simply an instrument in his hands. So we realize it's not about this block of wood. It's about the Lord who wants to make beautiful music through us, reflecting His glory to others.

20:29Are you content to serve God without human recognition? If no one ever knew or saw or applauded, the things that you're doing to serve your family, to love your mate, to serve the body of Christ, to minister in your church or in your community, if no one ever saw or knew or said thank you, would you keep doing it anyway? Is it your goal that He might increase and that you might decrease? That's the pathway to joy. That's the pathway to being a woman that God can use, a humble woman walking in the pathway of humility so that He can be seen to be great through us. Nancy DeMaswagamuth has been encouraging you to follow Mary's example. Do you want to be this kind of woman, the humble kind, who steps back joyfully so God's glory can take center stage? The kind who says yes, Lord, in uncertain circumstances,

21:31because she trusts that God will be faithful, who surrenders her ordinary life and watches God do the extraordinary through her. That's what our new study devoted is all about. Six women of the Bible who lived devoted to the Lord despite challenging circumstances, their stories invite us to do the same. You can find this resource at ReviverHearts.com or you can make a donation of any amount and we'll send it to you as our thanks to give and request your copy, visit ReviverHearts.com or call us at 1-800-569-5959. If a husband wants to show spiritual leadership in a home, what exactly does that look like? How can his wife encourage him to take those steps? You know, men are not likely to insist that they provide leadership if we make it difficult for them to do so. So when that husband, when that spiritual leader, when that human authority gives direction, do you find yourself being responsive, yielding,

22:35having a submissive spirit or do you find yourself being sometimes resistant, stubborn, difficult to work with? Now that doesn't mean that the authority is always right. In fact, sometimes they won't be. And that's when we make our appeal first to God who is big enough to change the heart of that authority. Reviver's 21 tells us that the king's heart is in the Lord's hand and God turns that heart in whatever way he wants to do. So do you find yourself first going to God and saying, Lord, it doesn't seem to me that this direction is in accordance with your will? But I trust you to work in the heart of this authority, this king, if you will, to move his heart in accordance with your will. And then in a spirit of humility, to go to that authority after you've given God time to move and to act in the changes heart and to make an appeal to that human authority and a spirit of humility and a spirit of cooperation

23:35with a heart that says, I want us to be one. I want us to walk in harmony. I don't want to be resistant. I want to be a woman who is willing to follow. And I'll just be quick to say that this is not a natural way of thinking and living. This does not come naturally for me to yield and bend and be flexible to the direction of others. The Holy Spirit working within us can give us the power and the desire, the enabling to live this submitted trusting life. Nancy will address that as we continue looking at Mary of Nazareth tomorrow on Revive Our Hearts.

24:44This program is a listener supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness and fruitfulness in Christ.