Magnify

Magnify

"My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior." (Luke 1:46-47) We live in an age of shrinking souls.   

Which is the perfect reason to take Christmas seriously as our best hope for our minds and hearts to be enlarged with God's greatness.

Mary's response to the message that she would bear the one who would be the savior was a remarkable song of praise, sometimes known as the Magnificat (Luke 1:46.55).

It begins with "my soul magnifies the Lord," which means that because God's announcement opened her heart to God in a way that she couldn't have imagined, now her soul was beginning to grasp the bigness of God.

 I remember as a kid the first time I looked through a telescope at the open sky on a cold winter evening. When I pointed it at the half-lit moon and focussed, I was stunned, almost rocked back on my heels, to see mountains and plains--not like looking at picture books of the moon--but at the real thing in real time. It was the reality of it that struck me.

 A familiar bright dime hanging in the sky was now a real place to me. The telescope magnified it's reality. The moon didn't become bigger, but my comprehension of it did.

Sometimes human beings look at God as if he were a distant point of light. But then his word comes along, a sober statement of his intent to do something in our history, and--if we accept it by faith--our lives become larger.

We see that we are living in a greater reality, with a greater God than we had imagined, and with greater possibilities in our future.

Mary knew her life would never be the same. Not just her life, but the lives of countless others, because of what God was going to do. And it stretched her soul.

Prayer for today: Lord, this Christmas give me a larger vision of who you are. May you be magnified in my soul, and may others see that you are the focus of my celebration