Mary’s Moment: A Devotional
“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?’” Luke 1:34
Mary’s Moment – Incredible News
This moment… Mary’s moment. As a young woman, engaged to be married and faithful to her religion and her family, Mary was given incredible news. Months before Mary’s promise, Zechariah was given the news that his wife, Elizabeth would conceive in her old age. He doubted it and was silenced until his son, John the Baptist, was born. Yet Mary responded much differently to her astonishing news. She believed.
Mary’s Moment – Mary Believes
Only one of the four gospels records the encounter Mary had with the angel Gabriel. It is thought that the accounts written by Luke may have been taken from the testimony of Mary herself, the mother of Jesus.[i] Luke pays special attention to women, recording stories of female social outcasts, and of Mary, Elizabeth and Anna in the nativity story (1:5-2:39), among many others. He records that Gabriel told Mary that she was highly favored, and she most certainly was! She’d just been told that she was chosen to carry the Son of God within her—that she’d be the God-carrier. What a magnificent, breath-taking moment! Mary believed and conceived.
Mary’s Moment – God Chose to Relate to Us All
God created man and woman out of the dust, yet He allowed Himself to be incarnate within a woman, born just like the rest of us. God certainly could have created Jesus out of the dust, fully formed as an adult (like Adam), but He didn’t. Instead, God chose miraculous conception within Mary, even in her sinful state. This is the stamp of approval, in my humble opinion, that God gave to His ladies—that He would choose to be born from within a woman’s womb into meager circumstances. This shows that He can relate even to the lowliest of us all.
Think Divinely: God chose to be birthed of a woman,
just like the rest of us, so He could experience what we go through and become our best mediator because of it.
Lisa Quintana is a Christian Apologist and blogs at ThinkDivinely.com. She is a former broadcast reporter and left her career to stay home and raise her two children. She also homeschooled her son during his middle school years, while earning a Master’s degree in Apologetics at Biola University (Dec. 2017). She now teaches classes at her church in Madison, Wisconsin, and has been happily married for over 26 years.
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If you enjoyed reading this post, you might enjoy reading Your Christmas Schedule – Flustered or Flexible? an article by Davis Carman.
[i] Robert H. Gundry (A Survey of the New Testament, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012), 247.