Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
She is the greatest mother of all time--and I don't refer to Eve. She is the mother to whom the angel Gabriel announced, "Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women" (Luke 1:28).
Most people interpret the "highly favoured" to mean that the virgin Mary was a beautiful Hollywood super-star. But the Bible makes plain that "favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth [reverences] the Lord, she shall be praised" (Prov. 31:30). For an angel to tell Mary that she was "highly favoured" of the Lord did not mean cosmetics, but "the hidden adorning of the heart," a beautiful spirit (see 1 Peter 3:3, 4).
Mary herself discloses that she had a problem involving humiliation for she sings in her poem that the Lord "hath regarded the low estate of His handmaiden" (Luke 1:48; the Greek word is translated "humiliation" in Acts 8:33, and as "vile" in Phil. 3:21). Mary evidently knew sorrow and rejection, even as her Son was "despised and rejected of men" (Isa. 53:3).
At last, Joseph married her to be the stepmother to at least six motherless children, four boys and no one knows how many girls (Matt. 13:55, 56). The aged Simeon predicted that a sword as big as Goliath's would pierce her soul (Luke 2:35; "romphaia," LXX). No mother in all history has ever been called to endure the terrible pain that Mary went through, even though it is probable that many pagan mothers in the Roman Empire were forced to watch their sons being crucified; but none was forced to watch the Son whom she knew to be the Son of God, crucified! The sight tore at her soul, for with His death she thought she saw the death of all mankind.
In our few moments devoted to Mother's Day, can we learn a lesson from this story? Yes, those words, "The Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women," are God's Mother's Day message to every mother in the world who will simply believe the Good News. Why? Her Son is "the Saviour of the world" (John 4:42), and that includes YOU. God has a special regard for EVERY struggling mother; and her prayers have a special place at His throne.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: May 9, 1998.
Copyright © 2012 by "Dial Daily Bread."
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