Do you want to really worship, according to Nancy Lee DeMoss?

Here's where to start.

Surrender precedes worship and gladness.

You can't go into the presence of God to worship, truly worship, if your heart is not surrendered and clean.

This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast for Friday, December 19, 2014.

The Christmas season is a great time to worship.

In fact, worship accompanied the first Christmas,

even though the people there were involved in some challenging circumstances. We'll study that

today, continuing in the series Songs of the First Christmas. If you've been around me for any

length of time, you know that Elizabeth and Mary are two of my very favorite Bible characters, two women who teach us so much about the heart and the ways of God.

We've actually done a whole series on Revive Our Hearts on Elizabeth and a whole series on Mary.

But in this series, we're just looking at their songs in Luke chapter 1, two of the songs of the first

Christmas. And now we come to Mary's song, marry, a teenage girl, unmarried, engaged to be

married, but pregnant by the child that the Holy Spirit has placed within her, the Lord Jesus.

And we find her in a situation of life where we glamorize how wonderful it was to be the mother or the Messiah.

And I'm sure she felt that, and that comes out in her song.

But if she'd been like many of us, she could have found a dozen reasons to be unhappy,

or to groan or to murmur or pout or protest.

I like what G. Campbell Morgan, who was a great Bible expositor in the last century, had to say in his commentary on Luke, he says, however darked the outlook, however much the sword was piercing her soul, however much she was entering into fellowship with God as she bore misunderstanding, reproach, and suspicion, the mighty, mighty secret, capital S, was there.

Speaking of Jesus. And Mary could do none other than celebrate God. Praise God that he had acted

from generation to generation and for all that he was now doing for coming generations.

And it all goes back to where your focus is, doesn't it? What are you concentrating on? What are you looking at?

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