At His Feet // Mary of Bethany

Join us as Andrea walks through Mary of Bethany's relationship with Jesus, and how it should inform ours!

Transcript

A Song Sparks A Question

SPEAKER_00 0:31

I want to tell you something that that worship psalm really prepared my heart for this tonight. So I'm going to tell you a little something. So this year I got to attend my second passion conference, which I went into it a little excited, super excited about all the worship music. I was hoping maybe to get a rest, some relaxation. Nope, that's not going to happen because we're up for three straight nights, it feels like, and no sleep. Eating a lot of junk food, going from here and there, but I was hoping to just come back recharged and refreshed. Because definitely there was not going to be sleep. Well, we went through the three days, and each spoker, each speaker spoke to me in different ways. When the last session, I noticed the words to a song. Holy and pleasing is the name of the song. I'm sorry, but it will not come out on Spotify till late Friday night, so you cannot find the song anywhere. As we went through the three days, each speaker spoke, and it kind of led to this point. And as I listened to the words, it said, Let it all be incense, rising to the heavens. This will be my worship, Jesus, you are worth it. Let it all be incense. Let this be my worship, Jesus, you are worth it. What brings a person to a place in their relationship with Jesus to point to the point where you are able to truly pray those words? I want everything, all of it, to worship Jesus. Well, God decided to answer that question for me through the relationship of Jesus with Mary of Bethany. As we walk through some of the different stories of their relationship, I'm going to ask you to take the time to not think of them as just stories, but think of them as like what would you do in your relationship with Jesus? Now you may not be familiar with this Mary because I'm going to say Mary of Bethany, but um, because there are many Marys in the Bible. Well, the first time we hear about this Mary is in Luke 10, 38 through 42. And she ends up at the feet of Jesus. Mary is from a small town. She's from a small town named Bethany, hence the name. We don't know her age. We do know that she lives with her sister in her sister's home. Her name is Martha, and she has a brother named Lazarus, so that probably kind of is helping you catch on to maybe where this story is going. Jesus visited their home, and Martha, her sister, was busy serving. You know, the kind of time like when you have a special guest or a family member coming to your house and your mother's running around and you really don't want to do anything, and she goes, Come on, help, help, help, and you just really don't want to. And maybe your dad or your brother and sister give you the evil eye and they're like, get up off your bottom and go help, right? Well, that's probably what was sort of this was like. Because Martha then goes to Jesus and says, Tell her to come help me, right? And so he looks at her. Do you think he says what your brother or your father would say? No, he instead tells her, she has chosen the better thing. Well, that's not exactly probably what Martha thought would happen. In this moment, we see Mary sitting at Jesus' feet, which makes me think usually the only people I know that kneel at other people's feet are royalty. It's not usually just some random person, right? I don't really want to sit at somebody's feet at all. They're usually kind of stinky. Well, Mary knows that her respect for who he is doesn't just do things for him. She wants to actually slow down and she wants to get to know him. We live in a fast-paced world. And it can be hard to give anyone our attention. Undivided attention, anyway. Uninterrupted focus, focusing on them while we take the time to really get to know them. Not just what others say or who they think they are. How many of you spend times with your friends, but yet you're on your phone? How many times are you with them in their home? Maybe you're going out to eat? Maybe you're sitting at the dinner table, but you're not really getting to know the person you're hanging out with. Maybe you're a good helper, maybe you're a good gift giver, maybe you love doing things for people. But when it comes time to just listening and sitting and listening and to hear what they have to say, you just don't take the time. Well, in the same way, we can sometimes choose to do things for Jesus instead of focusing on getting to know who he is. We can be at church, we can be volunteering, we can be near Jesus and what he's doing, but we're not really paying attention to what he wants to say to us. Jesus does not want a one-way relationship with you. He does love you and he wants you to love him. And how can you really truly do that if you don't know who he is? He wants you to step away from the busy and to get to know him, to be in his word, look for who he is and edit his character, pray to him and actually take the time to allow him to answer you. As you do this, you will begin to develop that closer relationship. One that when things get difficult, it will be stronger. When people try to tell you the wrong things about him, you'll know that what they say is false. Well, why does that matter? Why should I take the time to get to know him? He already loves me. Well, spending time close to Jesus and getting to know him can be difficult without having a deeper relationship with him. It'll be hard to get that deeper relationship if you aren't actually spending the time to get to know him. So now we're gonna follow Mary to a different section from John 11, 1 through 44. And it's a long portion, but we're gonna kind of cut it down a little bit, and it's one you're probably a little bit familiar with. Here we're gonna find Jesus in another town. Lazarus has become ill. And the scissors sisters asked Jesus, Mary and Martha, to come heal him. They know that Jesus loves them. So why wouldn't he come and heal him? When Jesus hears the message about him being ill, he says that the illness is for God's glory, and it will bring glory to the Son of Man, and that it isn't unto death. Well, that sounded pretty encouraging, I think they probably thought, so he's not gonna die. So Jesus hangs around in that town a little longer, and guess what? Lazarus dies. And it isn't what anyone probably thought would happen, because it's not what they expected from what they'd been told. And then Jesus tells the disciples he is glad. I don't know. He wasn't there, and that it happened so that he says that it would happen so that they would come to believe. I don't know, but I feel like the disciples had to be pretty confused. I know when I read that, it was seemed like it would be pretty confusing. He loved their family, yet he let one of them die, and he is glad so that they would believe. That doesn't make any sense. Who knows what they had to be thinking? So after that, they hear he hears that Jesus he hears that Lazarus dies, and Jesus tend he hints back to Bethany. Meanwhile, Mary is in her home being consoled by others. And Martha, her sister, calls her and says, Go see Jesus. She quickly heads to him, and all the people that are with her in her home, cutting, trying to comfort her, follow her, thinking she's going to the tomb to mourn her brother. But instead, she falls at Jesus' feet for the second time. This time, though, it's in sadness. She says, Lord, if you had been here, he wouldn't have died. Jesus saw her and those who were there were weeping with her, and he was moved. And we see there that Jesus wept. Following this, he does go to the tomb of Lazarus and brings him back to life. It then says that many of those who came with Mary then believed in him. Mary still returned to Jesus' feet, and she doesn't change her mind about who he is, but this time Jesus's feet, at Jesus' feet, she allows herself to trust who she knows he is, and she is very vulnerable. When was the last time you cried? I mean, most of us don't want to cry in front of strangers. I don't. Some of us, not even in front of our closest friends. We reserve this for the closest family, the people we trust with our tears. Mary trusted Jesus with her sadness, with her tears, and even with the life of her brother. Why? Because she knew who he was from spending time with him, from getting to know him. She walked his character and action. She heard and saw who he was by what he said and by what he did. She loved and trusted him and believed he was the Son of God. None of that changed just because she didn't understand the reason she was in pain. She knew he could have healed him and yet trusted his purpose even in the sadness. She also knew him well enough to trust letting him see she was sad and hurt. She didn't have to hide it. Jesus then showed himself to her even more with his tears. Love and compassion for her, even though he knew the end of the story would get better. He paused from his own mission, displaying his power among all these people by pausing to weep with her. Jesus then took her pain and allowed her to see others believe in him through her story. And through that, her pain, even though it was great, was given a bigger purpose. The purpose of pointing to God. It says that those who had been weeping with her, they didn't believe in, they that hadn't believed in Jesus, saw Lazarus rise from the dead, and then they believed. So I'm going to ask you, are you able to trust who Jesus says he is? That he will use everything in your life for good, even when it's difficult and maybe even painful. Are you able to be vulnerable with him in your pain? Tell him you're hurting and not try to cover it up? He wants to weep with you and comfort you, but you have to let him. From here, we're going to actually follow Mary one more time to the feet of Jesus. She got to know him, she was vulnerable with him, and now she said thinks it's time to worship. In John 12, 1 through 8, shortly after Lazarus was brought back to life, Jesus is back in Bethany, and they're having dinner. This time, it is shortly before he would go to the cross. This was just before Passover, and Mary goes into the room with a jar of expensive ointment. It was worth a year's worth of salary. She is at Jesus' feet, and she uses the ointment to anoint his feet and then wipes it with her hair. Judas watches this. A lot of you are familiar with Judas, and he tells her that she should have gone and sold the oil in order to give the money to the poor. And Jesus says, Leave her alone, for the poor you have always with you, but you do not always have me. This time Mary trusts bec trust brought her to the feet of Jesus in sacrifice. We see Mary's sacrifice in two different ways here. She gave her costly ointment, and then she also wiped the feet with her hair. Both represented something costly at that time. As a woman, Mary probably was very dependent on her family for her financial gain and her needs to be taken care of. So something this is expensive would be very sacrificial. Mary not only gave Jesus her monetary offering, but he also she she also gave him her reputation. Hair back then on a woman was considered a honor. It was something that you should keep covered and not let down in front of other people, much less, probably let down in order to wipe someone's feet. All of her money, her reputation, her unknown future, she laid before him. She gave him everything. She was worshiping him for who he was with everything she had. Maybe in that moment she knew he would be going to the cross. She had heard him tell about that, and the Pharisees had ramped up wanting to get rid of him even more after seeing Lazarus raised from the dead. She wanted to give him something in whatever time she had left with him. It also, she didn't do this in secret. She could have, but she didn't. It was done in front of people at the dinner, even those that would harass her for it. The oil had a strong smell, it wasn't faint, it wasn't covered up, it wouldn't just dissipate quickly. It was a fragrance that filled the home. The smell probably even lingered on her hair, reminding her of how she had honored him and anybody that she passed and smelled it. Remember the place at the beginning of this story where I left you and I was listening to the song at Passion? Let it all be incense, rising to the heavens. This will be my worship, Jesus, you are worth it. Let it all be incense, let this be my worship, Jesus, you are worth it. What brings a relationship with Jesus to the point where you can truly pray those words? I was asking myself that same thing at Passion as I continued to listen. I had this overwhelming sense of gratefulness as I listened to the words. It was as though God reminded me of everything He had given me. This job, it's amazing. The ability to be worshiping in this uh arena of thousands of people. I was with my family, I have a family, I'm being taken care of. I am forgiven of my sins. I saw him visibly. It was like as I close my eyes in this worship song, I could see him on the cross. Not just for everyone, but for me. And all I could say was, God, I also want you to give me, I want to give you my everything. I want my life to be that incense that points to you. Even the things that have been difficult, that I'm not sure how they'll turn out. And he asked me, he goes, Do you? That seemed kind of out of the blue in the middle of that song. I figured he'd just be like, sure, give it to me, but no, it wasn't that way. He said I seem to hear him say, because you keep trying to control the outcome and you keep trying to control the things around you. Are you sure you really mean that? All I could say is, I do, I know I do. I keep trying. What should I do? And the words of the song as they were playing, it was like the vision of Mary with her ointment just popped into my head. And he said, Just like her, you have spent time getting to know me. You have allowed me to mourn with you when you're in pain and comfort you when you're hurting. Now worship me with everything in your life. It won't be wasted. It will point to me if you let me have it. And I realized in that moment I could keep trying to hold on to it and not point to God, or I could let it go. I don't know what God has in my future or in yours, but whatever it is, I know he has a plan, one that is greater than anything that I could do, and my own plans wouldn't point to him. We may not know what dreams or future God is going to put in our path, but we should know that if we live it in sacrifice to him, he will use it for his glory. And that is much better than anything we can do with our own lives. No matter how much money, what kind of house you may have, how many friends you have, or wherever you may go. It doesn't matter what others may say or try to discourage you like the disciple did to Mary, because it isn't about us. It's about Jesus. So I'm going to ask you, what are you holding back and not trusting God with? Mary had good things, they weren't sinful things, and God didn't force her to give them up. Do you have things in your life that you're struggling to let go of? Things that God could have a better plan for than you ever could? Are you pointing to him and all the gifts that he's given you, all the talents in the locker room, in your job, in the car, with your parents? Does your life reflect him or does it look like everyone else? Where is God calling you to sacrifice? And I would say it is probably in everything. And isn't he worth it? He gave you everything on the cross. Even if others don't understand and even harass you about it because the disciples did that. Are you willing to sit at Jesus' feet to get to know him, to trust and be vulnerable with him, and to sacrifice your life and worship to him? I'm gonna ask y'all to bow your heads with me and we're just gonna pray through this because y'all may be in different places. This is not a thing that just goes away and you just do all the steps and it's gone, and you're just like, I did it, I'm done. I've now have this amazing relationship with Christ. It's a steady process and process that you're gonna bounce around from, you're gonna know him and trust him, be vulnerable and sacrifice, then you're gonna go back to one and then bounce around to the other. But I'm gonna tell you this can't be done by yourself. And it is not a list of to-dos. It requires surrender of yourself to someone else. Before Mary got to know Jesus, she had surrendered to him and wanted to have a relationship with him as the Son of God. She sat herself at his feet, putting him in the place as king of her life. And if you don't have that relationship with Jesus, none of this is gonna make sense, and you will try in vain to create something from nothing. So talk to someone tonight if that's the relationship you want to have with Jesus. If you do have a relationship with Jesus, the second thing you need to ask yourself is am I ready to sit at his feet and build a two-way relationship? He already knows you from the inside out, and so now is the time for you to get to know him. Sit and focus on him, listen to him. If you're in a hard place, give it to him, all your emotions. He isn't afraid of them, nothing is too difficult for him, and he already knows. He just wants to love you, and he wants you to trust him enough to let him comfort you. Give him your hurt, give him your worry, give him the yuckiness of whatever it is you're going through, the sadness, the pain, even the distrust you have in him. Let him comfort you and let him use it to his glory, and then you'll know that it was for a better thing. It will get better. Lastly, as you ready to worship him, and are you ready to worship him and sacrifice? Think about what you're holding back. Give it to him, whatever it is you're holding back, no matter what it is. Talents, things, people that you have. Worship him with all of it because he wants to make himself known to others through you. Do everything unto him. Lord, right now, I just want to give you each student and that is in this room, Lord. We're all dealing with different things, and sometimes we can be harsh with each other and um expect them to just um behave or get on the same track as each other, Lord. But we know that there's more behind that than anything else, Lord. But the only way that we can get through anything is with you, Lord, and we need to know you. So as these students are here and just um asking these questions tonight with their leaders and they're gonna go back and discuss, Lord, I help them, I want them to know that they know that they have a relationship with you. And if Lord, if not, Lord, I pray that they would not hold back in that. And if they have questions to talk to a leader, Lord, I just pray that you would just have your way and your will tonight in each one of these students. And as we um come to an end here in this end of this worship song, Lord, if there's kids that need to talk to someone, they may get it, can get up and do that. If you want to sit and pray and just ask God how to comfort you, Lord, just sit there and just tell him you're you're weary, you're tired. Give him all your pain. If you want to get up and sacrifice and worship and raise your hands, do that too, Lord, and just tell him how thank youful you are. So, Lord, I pray that they would talk with you tonight. And I just thank you for all that you've done for each of us. In Jesus' name. Amen.