We just wrapped up a 3-week message series called Mary the Mother of Jesus. We live in a predominately traditionally religious area and we thought it would be a great idea to address some of the differences between Evangelicalism and Traditional Religion as it relates to Mary. We promoted it as a series honoring Mary and her role in the gospel story and used excerpts from the gospels that demonstrated things we can learn from Mary - What she said, what she did, etc. We encouraged our people to pass out invites to their Traditionally Religious friends, neighbors, coworkers and family and actually distributed 12,000 invitations. We ended up averaging typical attendance and visitors during the three weeks so our effort to get new people in the door fell short of our expectations. However, I feel good about the fact that our people got a chance to see how you can point out the differences between Evangelicalism and Traditional Religion without being rude or condescending and we had over 100 salvations during the series!
The thing we focused on most was the extraordinary faith that Mary had. She was willing to lay aside her own plans to carry out God's plan for her life. We must be willing to do the same. She went directly to Jesus with her needs and so should we. However, when bringing her needs to Jesus, she didn't try and tell Him how to meet the need but trusted that His solution would be the right one!
Although Mary was the one chosen to literally bring Jesus into the world, we all can "deliver" Him to that part of this broken, hurting, messed up world that we have influence over! All we have to do is submit to His plan and trust Him to use us any way He see fit!
