Christmas Prayers

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Call 866-WINASIA or to see chickens and other animals to donate, go to CritterCampaign.org. Hello, this is Matt Slick from the Matt Slick Live Podcast, where I defend the Christian faith and lay out our foundations of the truth of God's Word. Your chosen Truth Network podcast is starting in just a few seconds.

Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. On Encouraging Prayer, Dr. James Banks, author of the bestselling Prayers for Prodigals and many other books on prayer, provides weekly biblical insight to help you learn to love to pray. And now, here's James. Here we are on the last Encouraging Prayer Before Christmas, and today we're going to talk about three Christmas prayers from the Bible that can be a huge help for us.

Boy, I'm personally excited about it, so James, take us away. Okay, well, there are three special Christmas prayers, two from Mary and one from her older cousin Elizabeth, and each one of them has a lot to teach us. We're going to start with one of Mary's prayers, and at first you might not think of it as a prayer because it's what she says to an angel. But because an angel is a messenger of God, she's just sending a message back, and that makes it a prayer.

It's a simple statement, okay? It's found in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 1, verse 38. She says, I am the Lord's servant.

May your word to me be fulfilled. Wow, and that word to her sure was not easy. I mean, she would conceive a child through the Holy Spirit, and certainly people could think the worst, but what others thought didn't matter to her, she was being obedient to God. Right, and that's what makes it such a powerful prayer. She just wanted to be obedient to God, and it's a good one for us to pray as well, especially the first part, I'm the Lord's servant. This is really an important prayer. We can't overlook it because sometimes we can use the word Lord without realizing what it really means. You know, it's just sort of part of Christian speak, if you will. But it means that everything we have and all that we are belongs to him, including our lives, and the word servant encompasses that, really. What a great prayer to pray every day as we try to live for him.

I mean, it really is. What a great reminder as well. So, that was really good.

How about the second one? Okay, well, the second prayer might not sound like a prayer either, because it's a blessing prayer. But you have to understand that blessings were always made with the mindfulness of the presence of God, who was right there as the blessing was given, because he was the one who had the power to bring the blessing about. So, after Mary visits her older cousin Elizabeth, and Elizabeth is overjoyed, and she says, Why am I so favored that the mother of my Lord should come to me? Which is itself an amazing statement, because Jesus isn't born yet, and Luke points out that the Holy Spirit has shown this to her. But what she does after that is she blesses Mary and says, Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her. And that's pretty cool, because it's another reminder from God's Word that we can say to him in his presence.

Oh, man, right. It's a reminder that we're blessed when we believe God's promises to us. And because he's the one who blesses us, it's a great promise to pray and really to take to heart. So, that's two down.

We can't help but be excited about the next one. Okay, well, this one is the best of all. It's from a prayer that's so special, it's been given a particular name, the Magnificat. And this is Mary's prayer in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 1, verses 46 through 55.

But today, we're going to only look at one part of it in verses 46 and 47. And this is why it's called the Magnificat, from the word to magnify. My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.

Okay, that's amazing. So let's talk about that. I mean, someone might ask, what does it mean to magnify the Lord? I thought he was already, you know, pretty big. I mean, why would we need to make him bigger? Yeah, actually, I love that question.

I'm so glad you bring it up. Because, again, this is one of those places where we could fall into sort of Christian speak. And the quick answer to why do we need to make him any bigger is, yes, he is big. And no, we can't make him any bigger in one place.

But listen, Ben Patterson explains it this way. There are two kinds of magnification. The kind that makes the small seem big is a microscope, and the kind that shows what seems small to actually be big is through a telescope. The world's glories are of the microscopic variety. What is really tiny is made to look big.

God's glory is the telescopic variety. As with the pinpoints of light in the night sky, so would the embryo in Mary's womb. What seems small is discovered to be gigantic when seen through the lens of faith. What Mary is doing by magnifying the Lord or glorifying, as some Bibles have it, is showing him to be huge in such a small world. The more I think about that one, James, I'm just blown away.

Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. When you think about how great our God is, who spoke this vast universe into existence with just a word, it helps you see how small this world is and how small its ways really are. And Mary was just making a statement of fact. God is so much bigger and so much better than anything else we know. And because he is, oh, we need to praise him. Especially when the world feels like it's closing in on us, right? My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.

It's like saying, what I have in him is so much bigger than all this I'm trying to deal with. Yeah, I mean, that's why I love that prayer. And all the more because he is Immanuel, God with us.

And that's maybe where the telescope analogy, as helpful as it is, breaks down a bit. Because God isn't far away. You know, through Jesus, he's come close to us.

He's right here. So maybe a better analogy would be really thick glasses. The problem isn't that God is so far away. It's that we can't see him as we should because of our brokenness and our sinfulness. But when we magnify him, it's like saying, okay, now I'm seeing things right.

Oh, I love that. So there you have it. Three prayers.

Let's go back over them briefly one more time. Okay, the first is, I am the Lord's servant. Second is, blessed is she, or we could say, who believes what God has promised? Right. It's like saying, I'm already blessed God because of your promises to me.

And I believe them, you know. And the third one is, my soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. That's so awesome, really. That's a way of making much of him in a world that has its priorities mixed up. It's a way of telling him we love him, really. A way of praising him. And when we do that, he has a way of giving us so much more.

Oh, yes, he does. And on this last Saturday before Christmas, let's close with a prayer to just thank him and praise him for Jesus. All he is. And really, all he's done, which is almost hard to even think about, but nonetheless, Jesus, Father, thank you. Thank you for sending Jesus, proving your love for us by making a way that we could have a relationship with you, with Jesus, with the Holy Spirit. Lord, I pray in this season that our souls would magnify you that we might see your face and that you would shine down upon us and that we would see so much of you that we would be a light like Moses was.

Our faces would be bright and shining that others would also enjoy this season like they never have before. And I thank you for that. I thank you for my friend and his studies. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen. Amen. You can hear more from Pastor James by visiting his website, jamesbanks.org, or by visiting Peace Church in Durham, North Carolina. May God bless you and encourage you as you pray.