Following God’s Lead

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December 13

Wednesday, December 13th, 2023

The past two days of devotions here and here, I have written about 4 women who were in the lineage of Jesus.

  1. Tamar- a deceiver
  2. Rahab- a Gentile and a prostitute
  3. Ruth- a Gentile and a Moabitess
  4. Bathsheba- an adulteress

The conclusion has been that the lineage of Jesus has some sketchy people in it. The 5th woman mentioned is none of those. She is a Jew. A virgin. And one unlikely individual to be spotlighted. I call her an outlier because she is so different. You know her as…

Mary, the mother of Jesus.

We have to be careful with her. Some put too much emphasis on her and revere her. Some say we have to go through her to get to God. Others, perhaps as a knee-jerk reaction against both of those ideas, write her off as unimportant.

Mary is special because she realized the dream of every Jewish girl: to be the mother of the Messiah. To me, Mary stands out head and shoulders above the rest of the other mentioned. Besides the obvious moral and ethnic differences, when presented with the truth that she was pregnant (“How can this be since I am a virgin?”), and after receiving Gabriel’s explanation of the process, she didn’t ask for an instruction manual; she didn’t ask for his credentials; she didn’t ask for his driver’s license and Social Security number; she didn’t ask, “Are you absolutely, 100% sure?”; she didn’t ask for proof that he wasn’t joshing her. No…she said the “magic” word, the same “magic” word God wants to hear from each of us when called: “YES.” Her exact words were “I am the Lord’s servant. May everything you have said about me come true.” (Luke 1:38)

God wants to hear those same words from us.  He heard them from Isaiah: “Here am I. Send me.” (Is. 6:8). He heard them from Samuel: “Speak, your servant is listening.” (I Sam. 3:10)

Will he hear them from me? From you?

{Note: All Scripture quotations from New Living Translation}

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I’d like to remind you to check out my review of Glynn Young’s 5 book series on the Dancing Priest on my other blog. You can find it here.