Sunday message · Luke: Jesus For Everyone series
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Message Summary
In the second message of the series Luke: Jesus For Everyone, Jared Sells reads Mary’s visit to Elizabeth and her song in Luke 1:39–55 through the lens of struggle. He recently found the ten-year vision he wrote as a high school senior; with a year left, he has checked off two of five, teaching music and doing ministry. The gap between vision and reality is what he calls the struggle, and everyone knows it, whether in an unfulfilling job, a strained relationship, chronic pain or even the pressures that come with good things.
Jared sees three ways to respond. The first is trying to control the struggle, which stems from a desire to be God: denying it, like the cartoon dog sipping coffee in a burning room, or prescribing solutions for ourselves or others. Job, in the Old Testament, loses his wealth, children and health, and his friends insist he must have sinned. The book of Job was written against their worldview, that the quality of your results is tied directly to the quality of your conduct. Some things cannot be explained or controlled.
The second response is to be consumed by the struggle, losing hope and escaping through overwork or even addictions. Job shared his friends’ worldview, which is why he was so confused, and in Job 3 he wishes he had never been born. There is a time to grieve, Jared says, but we need not live in despair. The third response is to see the struggle honestly as the product of a broken world, and then to see God at work in the midst of it.
Mary, an unmarried teenager told she would bear a king, faced a struggle no one plans for. She hurried to her relative Elizabeth, who blessed her for believing the Lord would do what he said. In her song, Jared notes, Mary refers to herself only as God’s lowly servant girl, then praises the God who lifts the humble, fills the hungry and keeps his promise to Abraham that all nations would be blessed through his descendants. That promise introduces Luke’s case that Jesus is king of a kingdom that invites everyone. Job, too, finally heard from God and admitted he had only heard of him but now had seen him; his real prize was a new relationship with God.
“The struggle is real, but trusting God brings blessing,” Jared says. Jesus invites those who have never followed him into a new life, and longtime followers to live it daily, for as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, anyone who belongs to Christ is a new person. For Jared, that means surrendering his timetable; he is not entitled to anything on his list. When an early-morning text from a friend in need upended his plans to prepare this talk, he felt God leading him to respond, and their conversation gave him the heart of his message. The struggle never goes away, but each day we can face it and trust God to be at work in it. He closes in prayer.
