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Message at 26:48. Mary, Jesus’s mom, may have been all but certain that her life–all the low people like her–had gone basically unnoticed by…everyone? In her world, there were people with honor, with power, with money, with fame, with status, with meaning and importance. She wasn’t one of them. To most people and maybe even to herself, Mary’s life honestly meant nothing. Her life was a sure path to nothingness. Except God saw her the exact opposite way. It’s Mary story that set up the whole story of great reversal that Jesus and the story of God’s love for the lowly is all about.

From Series: Seeing God Again After You've Given Up | More Messages from Ross Stackhouse

From Series: "Seeing God Again After You've Given Up"

We’re entering a season called Advent in the Church in which we prepare our hearts for Christmas. Yes, it’s a season of joy, but we don’t get to the joy–the truest joy of this story–by leaving our pain, sorrow and sins unaddressed. After all, this isn’t how the story of Jesus goes anyhow. We’re going to take a deep dive into the two chapters of the Bible that deal with Jesus’s birth (in Luke’s Gospel), and we’ll see from the beginning that people like Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary and others had perhaps given up on the possibility of God actually existing, or, at the very least, that God was yet going to do something in the world and in their lives that would honor the despair and disgrace they had experienced (along with others). Until one day, there’s a glimmer of light, a glimpse of something God was doing…and was preparing to do all along.