Mary’s Song
46 And Mary said:
“My soul glorifies the Lord
47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
48 for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed,
49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me— holy is his name.
50 His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation.
51 He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
52 He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble.
53 He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.
54 He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful
55 to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he promised our ancestors.”
Luke 1:46~55, NIV
The Christmas Message
I read Martin Lloyd Jones’ Magnificat lecture before Christmas every year. This is a collection of strong sermons with the text of “The Magnificat,” well known to us as “The Mary’s Song.” The Praise of Mary
comes to me as “The Confession of Any Girl,” or “The Confession of Any Lord.”
Rev. Martin Lloyd Jones calls this Magnificat a “very typical process that is characterized by the way the Gospel treats all of us.” Magnificat best represented a simple but profound way of the Gospel. So Professor David Wells explains the two sides of simplicity and profoundness in the gospel as follows.
The Gospel is simple enough for anyone to understand, but it is so profound that no one can fathom its depth. If you want to preserve the Christian faith in a biblical way, you need to maintain simplicity and profoundness in great harmony.
David Wells
Evangelicals, who have only taken the simplicity of the gospel and abandoned the profoundness, are now witnessing the Christian faith itself starting to break in their hands. David Wells,
1st, Magnificat shows that bringing true faith is not just emotional consent, but that Spirit and Soul are personal enlightenment inside a human being.
This is one of the stories that I want to tell you in this article.
Faith is not just a matter of emotion. Human emotions are faint. But God’s promise is clear and certain. The Bible urges us to “learn and do what you are sure of.”
In Luke 1:46 and 47, the King James English Bible translated into “My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.“
As this text says, several other bibles separate the spirit and the soul. The text of the NIV Bible also translated these two phrases into “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.“
In the words of the Reverend Lloyd Jones, soul generally refers to rational abilities. When a soul is used to distinguish it from a spirit, it refers to intelligence and emotion.
It refers to the way we interact, socialize, and have relationships with each other. The soul is essentially a rational part of a person. The soul is what connects us to the beings that are around us.
The part that allows the soul to identify and perceive the invisible spiritual is in the soul. On the other hand, spirit refers to perception.
Ability and understanding are different, and knowledge and perception are different. Young is the higher thing, the higher side of being that we all own.
The ability to worship belongs here. Maria confesses in the text of the Bible that the depth and center of her own existence are touched through two expressions, “My soul” and “my spirit.” The Gospel reacted to Mary in the heart, the center of the entire human personality of spirit and soul. Martin Lloyd Jones,
The amazing changes that take place in her body as a virgin brought enlightenment to the center of her personality in wonder and fear.
The disposition of the mind
John Owen explains the disposition of this mind through the words Romans 8:6 the thoughts of the body are peace, and the thoughts of the spirit are life and peace. In this Bible text, the Greek word “pronema,” which means “thinking,” is translated in a wide variety of ways.
The word ‘phronesis‘ represents the leading ability and action of the mind. I mean the light, wisdom, prudence, knowledge, intelligence, and discernment of the mind.
The term “phronesis” refers to the ability of the mind, the ability of the practice will, which includes the habitual path of the mind or the disposition of emotion.
It refers to the work of the mind to have inner pleasures, to think about things, to be obsessed with them, to make every effort to think about them, but to put them at ease.
The Bible sometimes calls intelligence a spirit. In Romans 1:9, psychics are a distinct concept from the soul, which mainly refers to affection, one of the components of the mind. In other words, in 2 Thessalonians 5:23, Soul and Spirit refer to mind and affection.
The word “Soul” is used to express spiritual gifts, and when it comes to their gifts, it’s used in conflict with the word “understanding.”
In 1 Corinthians 14:15, the mind does the first act of intelligence as a rational perception of things. But when the word is applied to a function of our soul, meaning refers to intelligence.
Intelligence is the function of the soul that leads and guides. Intelligence proceeds to discern, judge, and decide first in order to pave the way for will and emotion to do the right and desirable moral action.
According to John Owen, what God gave man intelligence was to think and discover God, and to be loved by God who gave him emotions.
Mary understood God’s Will
It was what God was doing that Maria was touched. In the text, Maria is grateful, thinking that the amazing events in the Old Testament come through her.
She takes a moment to look at the whole purpose of salvation and has a faint understanding of it. She was never biased toward emotions as she is these days, and she had a perception of God.
Her enlightenment can be divided into five things. God deserves praise, becomes our “Savior,” is “Almighty“, “Holy”, and has a lot of “Mercy.” As such, a clear perception of God filled her whole personality.
We must not separate the mind from intelligence in these two phases. They go together. You can be very sentimentally moved by something so trivial. But I’m not interested in sentimentality. We are interested in the movement of true faith and affection. Sentimentality is fiction, and emotion belongs to the real realm. We must never be satisfied just because we have fulfilled our emotional obligations. We must always try to recognize the depth of the truth. It is only possible if we take the apostles’ approach and become logical and analytical.
Martin Lloyd Jones
But rather than seeking to change the mind through the realization of reason and perception, modern evangelicalism prefers to just immerse itself in emotion.
Rather than trying to know God by giving myself, I think all about my faith is that I come to church comfortably and feel like I am in ecstasy for a moment.
It is both intellectual laziness and avoidance. I understand intellectual laziness, but you might ask what avoidance is. It’s a fear of being reluctant to face face-to-face with human beings.
2nd, Magnificat shows that the Gospel of Salvation is not about ourselves, but about God himself.
And this is the essence of Christian worship and praise.
The way the Bible teaches us is to start with this Jehovah and to make him extremely high. Every single thing that happens on Christmas Day is Jehovah’s work.
Therefore, it is God who ultimately needs to be praised. God is almighty, limitless, in the midst of holiness and dignity, and in glory. And He is generous and full of mercy. Ladies and gentlemen, this is what saves us.
But the meaning of modern Christmas has faded a lot. This intellectual realization has turned into a vague feeling of blessing, courage, and happiness.
I think the central purpose of Christmas is just to encourage people to do something and to wish them luck. Our attitude towards Christmas illustrates how we think and treat the Gospel today.
Christmas asks us to see God again and think of the Gospel, a declaration of amazing things God has done. What does it look like when we fail to show that the center of faith is not about ourselves, but about God himself?
The absolute certainty and finality of salvation are shaken. The absolute certainty and finality of our salvation lie in the peace of our relationship with God through the righteousness given through Christ’s inheritance.
However, it is not because it still puts hope and possibility on human good deeds. In it, the position of God and Jesus Christ narrows.
If faith is not rooted in the relationship between God and man, it is not faith. The Gospel tells us what kind of state man is in front of God and what must happen to get out of this situation.
Reverend Martin Lloyd Jones said, “Before you say anything about the benefits of Christian salvation and the lives of Christians, you must first tell them that people are under the wrath of God and that they cannot avoid that anger as they wish.”
There can be no peace with God without Jesus Christ, the Lord. As long as there is no peace with God, there is only false peace.
3rd, through Magnificat, we see God’s wisdom that completely reverses human wisdom.
God’s wisdom seen through Magnificat, the Gospel, is not only to completely reverse everything man has thought but also to condemn, destroy and scatter everything that people trust by nature.
“Those who are proud of their minds” in verse 51 are people like the Greek philosophers of their time who tried to understand and explain life and the universe with their knowledge and understanding.
The Gospel scattered those who boast their intellectual abilities and blocked the way to God. In other words, the world cannot know God with their wisdom.
This is not to abandon all knowledge, wisdom, and philosophy in the world. When human knowledge abandons pride and makes a sense of its limitations and makes him think of God, who is the source of all knowledge. That knowledge has fulfilled God’s will.
If the knowledge does not reach God, he commits the sin of arrogance that God hates the most. Because it
did not reach the purpose of knowledge.
But with faith, Maria knew that everything a man could boast about would be completely destroyed by the son of God who was about to be born.
4th, Magnificat is a miniature version of the Sermon on the Mount.
Reverend Martin Lloyd Jones says that Magnificat is, in a sense, a big summary of Sermon on the Mount, specifically a big summary of eight blessings.
In my view, there is no better teaching than “Servon on the Mount” in teaching that corrects misunderstandings about the law. Rather, before preaching the Sermon on the Mount, Reverend Martin Lloyd-Jones first described three traits unique to Christians.
1. Christians are inevitably related to God’s law.
2. One of the most essential and clear things about Christians is the fact that he is always conscious of being before God.
3. Christians are those who always do things out of fear of God.
The Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount are not a lesson that you cannot complete in life. Only those who are born again can follow it
Above all, Jesus has never lowered the standard of the law and requires a moral life more than a barista. It is also a violation of the law if it was done without love for God in the heart beyond simply practicing the law.
But humans cannot because they naturally have hostility toward God. In addition, because the law was not written in the plural, it was written in singular form, so any violation of any of the commandments would violate the entire law. So we, the sinners, are dead Even if you wake up, you can’t follow the law.
As such, since we do not have the right concept of the Bible, there is no change or development through the Gospel even if we live a long religious life.
But the problem is that people already think they know the Gospel, so they’re only listening to orders. Actually, we don’t know the gospel.
Knowing the Gospel may have many meanings,
The first what I want to say here is that you know the concept of the Gospel, and to be more specific, it means that you know the concept used in the Gospel.
In other words, we must have a deep, broad, high epignosis- of detailed, full, practical knowledge of the Gospel and the concepts used in the Gospel — but we can fully know the Gospel and live the life of the torch according to the Gospel. You need a concept to live a conceptual life.
What appears in the life of Jesus Christ, the holy body of Jesus Christ was a life of teaching to correct the wrong ideas that people had at that time. His teaching involved a lot of correcting concepts that were then misrepresented by the wrong teachers.
In particular, today, it corrected the notion of the underprivileged, the people around the mainstream of that era.
It seems to me that modern philosophers are looking at the decentralization of European, male, and white people trying to get out of the central thinking system until modern times. In that respect, the Lord Jesus Christ was the first person to practice decentralization.
When Christ showed the true meaning of the law through Sermon on the Mount, Pharisees’ legal arrogance accumulated until then was shattered.
He raised the level of the law by saying that even if he did not commit a crime with his own body, he was guilty just by having hostility or sexual desire in his heart.
The sermon on the Mount’s teachings is in line with the Bible’s teachings. Paul the Apostle realized that greed is a sin through the law. He realized that the law he owned and boasted of reveals that he has greed in himself and that it makes Paul himself stand as a sinner before God.
In that realization, he realized that there were no lives to be called righteous by the law. That’s why I saw myself having no choice but to hold on to the grace of Jesus Christ’s restraint.
But even today, there is a disposition to take him and the solemnity of the law and the Sermon on the Mount lightly among today’s saints.
I think this stems from a misunderstanding about Sermon on the Mount. Our Lord knew that they were misinterpreting the law God gave to the people through Moses.
So Jesus sermoned higher spiritual content to the Jews by refining and interpreting the law of Moses in the Sermon on the Mount. The Beatitudes immediately lead us to an area that completely transcends Moses’ law.
“Only people who can practice Sermon on the Mount’s orders are clearly aware of the basic nature of a Christian,” said Martin Lloyd Jones. Here’s the centrality of Christ.
None of the teachings of the Sermon of Mount refer to the nature of life. Each feature is a single disposition” that can only be produced by grace by the ministry of the Holy Spirit.
What we know from this is that, without the wisdom of a believer, you can’t live by the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount.
5th, Magnificat lets us know that the fulfillment of God’s promise is Incarnation.
In my father, eternal life with my father appeared to us through Incarnation. It can be argued that nothing else is needed to represent him because the Bible itself is sufficient to achieve the purpose of declaring God to us, and these claims risk making people find everything only in the person of Christ without learning the mind and will of God in the Bible.
However, the true purpose of this argument is to allow people to diligently study the Bible, which is revealed and proclaimed. And the Bible is a perfect and sufficient book when used for the right purpose. It is “the word of God”.
However, it is not God’s internal and essential word, but the external word declared by him. Therefore, it is not the shape of God, whether it is essential or appears, and it cannot be the shape. It is the revelation and proclamation of the image of God to us, so without it, we cannot know about the image of God.
Christ is the invisible figure of God and the expressed figure of his father’s dignity. And the primary goal of all the Bibles, especially the Gospel, is to declare how he is and how he is. In the Holy Bible, God promised his son, Christ, who was fully proclaimed in the Gospel through his prophets. The Gospel is to declare God as a person who clearly represents us through Christ’s dignity and condolences.
John Owen
John Owen says the following three things should be considered here.
1. The real and essential object of our beliefs must be taken into account. This object is the person of Christ, the son of God, who is also the Incarnation, and the symbol of God’s glory to us.
2. The means of revelation or objective light in which awareness and knowledge of this object are transmitted to our minds should be taken into account. This is the Gospel. This is compared to a mirror because we know about the image of God in it. But without this, we can’t do anything about this image of our God by using another division, not by this.
3. We have to think about the light that makes us ready, enhances, and moves. This is the inner light of the mind that occurs in us through the light that saves the Holy Spirit, which allows us to spiritually see and identify the glory of God in the face of Christ.
The Soul and Spirit
Through this light or through the activity of this light, we have the ability to transform our souls into the real object of our faith, from Christ, in the form of God, and to match it. And that is what we are pre-planned, says John Owen.
We can have an honorable understanding of God and his wisdom, kindness and grace, and all his glorious excellence by faith. Belief in Christ is the only means of having true knowledge of God.
And only by doing so can we make sure that the things that are discovered about him and his brilliance are consistent with his shape and shape.
Only what appears about God in Christ through faith, that is, what is declared in the Gospel, has a real impact on the human soul.
So people trying to satisfy themselves by finding God’s essence and excellence in the Gospel, without finding them in the person of Christ, but by finding them in nature, as declared, is very far from the mysteries of the Christian religion, says John Owen. We can find these mysteries of truth in the Bible.
When the Saints read the Bible, the personality and duties of Christ and the doctrine of its revelation are the foundations that support all the lessons of the prophets and apostles taught to build the church.
In that very doctrine and revelation, the lessons of all the other prophets and apostles are dissolved. So our Lord Jesus Christ personally made that point clear….
The Bible reveals the personality and glory of Christ from beginning to end, in order to inspire the faith and meditation of believers in the world.
While those revelations about the glory and personality of Christ are in the world, nothing will be fully understood or realized. So it’s holy meditation on those revelations that is a big part of the life of faith.
John Owen
As John Owen says, there are three ways of expressing the glory of Christ in the Bible, first through the
direct depiction of the glorious character and the holy body of Christ, the first meditating on its glory through the prophecies and promises, and clear teachings of Christ, and the third through the various holy services given in the Old Testament.
The Greatness of the Incarnation
Martin Lloyd Jones says the Incarnation of Christ is the greatest example of such a prophecy. This is the key to understanding the Gospels as well as the letters, especially the Romans.
All believers who believe in Jesus Christ will be descendants of Abraham. Through Jesus Christ, we can harmonize with God and know God.
Through Jesus Christ, God showed the achievement, generosity, and ability of the covenant at your time. It is also a guarantee that the torch and the film allowed to us in the future will be the birth of Christ.
Some people view, there are people believe that the most difficult tenet of Christianity will be resurrection.
Dr. James Parker is different, however. He says that the real challenge of the Gospel, the best mystery it presents to us, is never in this regard.
It says it’s not in Passion Day’s message of atones, it’s not in Easter’s message of resurrection, it’s in the Christmas message of Incarnation.
What really surprises us is the fact that Jesus of Nazareth has become a man like God. In other words, the second person of divinity became the second man who determines the fate of man, the second head who represents mankind.
And because he took a personality without losing his divinity, Jesus of Nazareth was truly a complete human being and a completely divine being.
In the words of James Parker, there is a twofold mystery. It is that there are several persons in God’s unity, and that divinity and personality are combined in Jesus’ personality.
I say that there is the deepest and most inestimable depth of the Christian revelation in what is about to happen on Christmas Day.
The Word became flesh and God. This is a real obstacle to Christianity, so in church history, we see a few heresies denying the doctrines of the Holy Body of Christianity, such as the Unitarians and Gnosticism.
That’s why it’s not the resurrection of Jesus that surprises us when we believe that God has become holy. If Jesus is really the Saint God, it is much more surprising that he died than that he was revived.
So Dr. James Packer says that “The universe is immeasurable, and moreover, everything else in medicine is intelligible.“
The Holy Body represents the peak of God’s self-revelation. To explain this philosophically, God, the spirit, is a person who contains infinite Logos that humans cannot recognize.
He has entered human time and space by becoming a logo wearing a human body, a logo that can be seen by humans, without damaging its original divinity or character.
This is indeed God’s wisdom and God’s way, which cannot be thought of and imagined by the heads of great philosophers like Plato.
That’s why Jesus Christ is God’s wisdom. It speaks more clearly of the absolute certainty and finality of salvation. All blessings come from our Lord, Jesus Christ, so we must first be at peace with God.
6th, Magnificat shows that Christianity is a religion of experience.
The basic definition of Christianity is what God does to us, and we experience it, says Reverend Martin Lloyd Jones.
In this regard, Maria’s experience is the first purely Christian experience in many ways. What’s important here is that the Bible doesn’t teach you a standard experience.
Pastor Martin Lloyd Jones divides the elements of Mary’s experience into several.
1. The element is the awakening that God deals with himself.
2. The second is the surprise and wonder that comes from the first element.
3. The third is humility and lowness. God’s greatness, dignity, holiness, presence, and glory make us realize that we are evil and worthless.
4. Gratitude and praise. Those who realize and know God are bound to praise God. And the next step is awe. This fear refers not to fear of punishment, but to ‘godly fear. Finally, he says that Christians are those who rejoice in Jesus Christ.
But it’s important to note that experience has two sides. Dr. Martin Lloyd Jones warns that “It causes devil’s confusion everywhere in the area of experience.”
The devil has destroyed the lives of numerous Christians by making Christians live by experience, pursue and find experience, always talk about experience, and rely solely on experience.
So it’s destroying their value as living witnesses. Martin Lloyd Jones says, “The life of a Christian is an elaborately balanced life. It’s one of the most extraordinary.”
Healthy Christians have a balanced view of truth and experience. A person who says that truth is the only important, or a person who thinks experience is the only important, makes the same mistake.
God’s truth is something you have to experience. It’s not a philosophical theory. It’s not just an ethical lesson. The full goal and purpose of Christianity are to let us know God.
We have to test the experience in two ways. There is nothing without experience. If knowledge doesn’t complete you and it doesn’t let you know God, it’s not worth having full knowledge.
The goal and purpose of all knowledge are to let us know the living God and his son, Jesus Christ. I can say that the attitude that Christians should take in terms of experience is as follows.
Experience is necessary and important. Christians are new people, not like everyone else. But he is a new man in Jesus Christ, our Savior, and through him, by God’s grace. If you have an experience but you still don’t believe in God, it’s not a real experience. If you do not receive the Lord Jesus, who relies on experience but has a deity, and his glory and his atonement, it is not a true experience of the father and his son Jesus, not a relationship in the Spirit of grace.
Martin Lloyd Jones
Warn your emotion in faith
Emotion is manipulation, and there is always a lack of confidence in the truth. There is overexposure to the excitement, fuss, and emotion in it. It exhausts us and does not affect our lives and lives.
On the other hand, the true gospel requires intelligence, emotion, and will to immerse themselves in the faith of Christ.
Likewise, faith must be translated into practice and action. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a great word that acts on the whole personality of man. It is possible because the Gospel has a holistic character.
It is a good indication of why it must be the gospel, which is bound to be a gospel that neither philosophy nor any other idea can follow.
In conclusion: what believers should pursue; Spiritual Thinking
If thinking about what is visible is called the “thinking of the body,” thinking of the invisible is the “thinking of the spirit.” So the middle ground doesn’t exist in humans, and they’re dominated by either of these ideas.
Spirit is also used to refer to the principle of spiritual life that works in the character of the Holy Spirit itself and in everyone who has been reborn by the Holy Spirit, whereas the body refers to the corrupt principles inherent to the corrupt nature that causes all evil. All the wicked are corrupt along with the corrupt principles of their very nature.
What happens if young people seek what their minds want and what their eyes enjoy? You’re overwhelmed by the forces of the structure of the mind if you let people do whatever they want, and each time, their permanent state is harmed and people go into that danger in so many different ways, John Owen says.
The Emergence of the Institute of Christian Religion
In April 1536, at age 26 by John Calvin, <The Institute of Christian Religion> was published. It was the most precious and enduring book of Christian literature, a masterpiece of intellectual and spiritual depth and ability.
He says there is God’s voice in the event of disciplinary action. Through that, God proclaims your name and declares your sanctity, ability, and greatness. Therefore, John Owen says that if we are to do what we deserve in the present situation, we must ponder the providence of God.
Owen says that the saints should not listen to the sounds of those who interpret God’s bicycle. So what is the way for the saints to keep their faith without being swept away by such a supply of virtual reality that the world pours out? John Owen suggests the way.
And even if you don’t understand all of its glory, if you put your mind constantly to thinking about what is above and what belongs to the sky, the plausible beauty of what is in the world will all dim and weaken interest in what is in the world. So if we do not constantly meditate on the things that belong to the sky that we adore and pay attention to, we will never be free in a reasonable way. John Owen
So we rather conclude that for young people, through John Owen’s teachings, to think about what the most thing to do for youth is to live with the soul, the invisible rather than what is to be seen.
Knowledge of God, as far as I know, is not only thinking about the existence of God but understanding how beneficial it is to his glory and how helpful it is to us.
John Calvin
Even though the evidence of God’s creation and salvation is clear, our stupidity makes us more stupid in the evidence and gains nothing.
And I commit the sin of exchanging God’s honor that will not rot with images that will rot. No matter how much humans experience such clear evidence of God’s existence, humans fall into stupidity and emptiness and distort the truth by pursuing false divinity unless they go out to worship God.
Whether humans pursue false divinity or philosophy, all of this is, according to Calvin, “They’re creating a smokescreen of human ignorance to hide their profanity.”
Man lacks the ability to reach pure and indisputable knowledge of God Even so, no excuse for this is acceptable because we are guilty of that insensitivity.
