Zechariah's Song

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Singing is one of the most proper human responses that we have to the gospel. It's just the way, I mean, what else do you do? Maybe fall down, maybe just be in awe, but to sing. And it doesn't really matter, people, how you sound, okay? Let it rip some time. Be just totally taken up by the gospel. And that's kind of the hope always with a message. What do I want anybody to ever get out of? What does a preacher, a proclaimer of the gospel ever want people to actually get from a message? Not a few laughs, although that's always kind of fun. But, you know, that at the end of it, the best response we can have is, Wow, what a Savior we have. What a Savior we have. Wow. And to sing, just to respond to that. So, why the Songs of Christmas? Because, actually, if you read the gospel of Luke, specifically, chapter 1 and 2, it's a musical. I don't know if you realize that or not. We have songs from Elizabeth, from Zechariah, from Mary, from the angels, and from Simeon. All, that's how they respond in poetry and in song. Rejoicing, celebrating, amazed at what God is doing in this world through the birth of the Messiah, Jesus. And so, that's what you find. And what you find also in the scriptures, if you read it from Genesis through all the way through, even if you can get through things like Leviticus, you will find there's a lot of singing going on. At any time when God is doing something amazing, when God intervenes, when God comes and visits this world, visits our human condition, the response is rejoicing. We saw that last week. We talked about this in the book of Job. God says when he was creating the world, it was the sons of God, the angels, shouted out for joy. And when God rescued Israel, the slaves, from Egypt through the Red Sea, the first thing Miriam and Moses do is sing. I will sing unto the Lord, and he has triumphed gloriously. And we see again and again and again through scripture, breaking out into songs. Whenever we hear the gospel, experience the good news, see what God is doing. So today, we are going to do a little more of that. We are now going to visit and be with someone who was, well, who was made mute by his unbelief. He didn't quite believe the angel Gabriel, and he was mute for nine months, Zechariah. He was mute until he finally wrote down the name of his son as the angel told him, the name John. I'm a little partial to that name. But according to God's word, and immediately, what does Zechariah do when his lips are opened up? He is able to speak. He sings. He prophesies. He proclaims. Our text this morning, Luke chapter 1, verses 67 through 79. And his father, Zechariah, was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied, saying, Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we should be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us, to show the mercy promised to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our father Abraham to grant us that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, child, will be called a prophet of the Most High. You will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people and the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet in the way of peace. This poetry that Zechariah sings, proclaims, is called the Benedictus, which is Latin for the first word of it, blessed. And it's an amazing passage, actually. You can basically see the entire history of the world in it, in a sense. The history of God's plan of salvation from the beginning all the way to the present time and to the birth of Jesus Christ and what God is doing through him in this little poem. And so today we're going to look at three highlights in it. We can't go into every word and every detail. That I get our New Testament classes to do, right? They do an exegetical paper in the New Testament at FGCU and have to actually take a passage like this and go through all of that work in the Greek. Yeah, I know, it's crazy, isn't it? But they like it. Maybe, I don't know. But today we're just going to look at three parts of it. And what we find in these three parts are we have a God who visits, a God who redeems, and a God who shines. And I picked these out partly because of some of the unique words and unique things about this passage that Zechariah is talking about. First of all, we're going to look at the God who visits. William Belley has said it. A number of people have said ...