Your and my humble estate is far more attracting to God than anything we think we really have to offer him.

That of all the gifts you may have, of all the skills you may have, and God bless you for them, and God will use them mightily.

But do you want to know what really, really attracts him to work through us?

He looks for the humble. Luke chapter two will be picking up a little bit later than we left off in our previous lesson.

Number one, we're learning this. God loves turning things downside up as we do

a bit of a biblical profile of this woman named Mary. And we're finding out that from the

moment she knew he was coming, her life was turned upside down and downside up because God sent his son down to bring

them up.

Number two is this, it takes guts to agree to be part of what God's doing.

Remember, we're learning. Now, this Mary is not the Flat Mary that some of us thought she was.

We are asking the Holy Spirit to blow some air into Flat Mary and bring to life the kind

of young woman she really was, because we're seeing how courageous

she was.

We're seeing that she had a mind of her own, that she could think in theological terms.

And I want you to hear, when I knew that God was heading me this direction, I didn't even

know where it was going.

I just knew that he began to impress upon me strongly that we were going to be studying Mary. And I thought, I got to be

just wide open, where is it going? But I knew that I had never taken an entire event to ever

study her life before, where we just went from passage to passage to passage. So I found, I went and looked to see how many books had been written on her,

her life as a figure all its own, and I could find very few.

But this one is by scholar Scott McKnight called The Real Mary.

And I want you to hear this paragraph. And it would be in his comments

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