Faithfulness

9-29-24

 

            There are certain events in life where we have great anticipation and great expectations.  Children really look forward with great anticipation to Christmas.  They also sometimes have great expectations about an upcoming birthday party.  Some of us older adults don't get quite so excited about celebrating another birthday, but we do develop some great expectations as to what retirement might bring.  Kids also have great expectations about the end of the school day, especially if it's a Friday because that also means the end of the school week.  Most kids have high expectations of the weekend. 

            In first century Israel, the people had great expectations about the imminent coming of the Messiah.  In fact, messianic expectations in the early first century were higher than at any other time in the nation's history.  They were so expectant of His coming that when John the Baptist began his ministry many people wondered if he was the Christ.  Several of the disciples first became followers of John's.  But as the forerunner to the Messiah, John dutifully pointed them to the true Messiah, Jesus. 

            Yet, even with such high expectations that the Messiah was about to appear, it's remarkable that so few people in Israel even recognized it when He was born.  That's largely because He met none of what they were expecting the Messiah to be.  They were looking for a mighty political and military leader who would become a conquering king.  He was a religious leader who would be lord and king of their hearts.  They were expecting someone born into royalty.  He was born into a peasant family.  They were expecting Him to arrive with great fanfare and pageantry.  He was born in a stable, almost in secret.

            The only people in Israel who did recognize Christ at His birth were humble, relatively unremarkable people.  The magi who came to worship Jesus were very rich, powerful and influential men in their own culture.  But they weren't Israelites; they were foreigners and Gentiles.  The list of Israelites who understood that Jesus was the Messiah at His birth is very short.  There was Mary and Joseph of course.  The shepherds were told about His birth and they knew who He was.  Then there was an old man in the temple named Simeon.  He was the one who helped dedicate baby Jesus when His parents brought Him to the temple after He was born.  The only other person who was aware of the true identity of Jesus when He was born is the woman we are going to look at this morning.  Her name is Anna. 

            All of the folks we just mentioned were relative nobodies as far as the culture was concerned.  They were all poor, uneducated people who had no real influence.  All of them recognized Jesus because God revealed to them who His Son truly was.  A number of them were told about Jesus by angels; others by some other form of special revelation.  In his gospel, Luke mentions each of these people as if he is calling multiple witnesses, one at a time, to help us understand the truth about who Jesus really and truly is.  We can and do know the truth about Jesus through God's Spirit and His Word.

            The final witness Luke calls is Anna.  Everything that Scripture has to say about her is revealed to us in just three short verses.  She is never mentioned anywhere else in the Bible.  But from those verses, we can gather enough information to establish her reputation as a genuinely outstanding woman.  Luke 2:36-38. 

            There is actually quite a bit we can learn about Anna from these three short verses.  For one, she was a prophetess.  We need to understand what that means.  Most people usually jump to the wrong conclusion when they hear the word prophet or prophetess.  By prophetess, Luke is not suggesting that she predicted the future.  She was not a fortune teller.  It also doesn't mean that she received special revelation from the Lord.  In fact, there is no indication that any special revelation ever came to her directly. 

            There are prophets mentioned in the Bible who did receive special revelation from the Lord and then passed that on to the people.  But in this case and in a very general sense, a prophet is simply someone who faithfully proclaims the Word of God.  A prophetess then would simply be a woman uniquely devoted to declaring the Word of God.  That describes Anna.  When she spoke, it was about the Word of God.  She had spent a lifetime hiding God's Word in her heart.

            There are only five other women in the OT who were described as a prophetess.  Rarely did God speak to His people through women.  Never did a woman have an ongoing prophetic ministry like that of Elijah or Isaiah.  In other words, there is nowhere in Scripture to indicate that any women ever held a prophetic office.

            We don't know exactly how Anna's role as a prophetess was manifest.  She may have been a teacher of the OT to other women.  Maybe she had a private ministry in the temple offering words of encouragement and instruction to other women who came to worship.  Whatever she did, we can accurately ascertain that she habitually declared the truth of God's Word to others.  Calling her a prophetess gives insight into her character and also about what occupied her mind and her conversations. 

            We also know from this passage that Anna was old.  By the time of Jesus' birth, Anna was already advanced in years.  Not only was she old, but she had also experienced a difficult life.  Her husband died seven years after their marriage; she apparently had no children and she had remained single ever since. 

            The Greek wording of her age is a little ambiguous.  It might mean literally that she had been a widow for 84 years.  If she was engaged at 13 which was common at that time, and then married for seven years and widowed for 84, she would have been 104 when Jesus was born.  That is old, but possible.  More likely, she was an 84-year old widow, which is how it reads in the NASB.  "Lived as a widow to the age of 84."  If she was married for seven years and never remarried she would have lived as a widow for more than six decades.

            Being a widow in that society was extremely difficult.  It basically guaranteed a life of extreme poverty.  Anna probably lived on charity or possibly supported herself out of the remnants of her family's inheritance, if she even had any and we have no idea if she did or didn't.  Either way, she would have lived a very frugal, chaste and sober life. 

            Evidently she literally lived right there on the temple grounds.  There were some modest chambers in the outer courts of the temple that were probably used as temporary dwelling places for priests who lived on the temple grounds while doing their annual two weeks of service.

            We don't know where exactly she lived or why.  Maybe because of her devotion, temple officials had given her one of those small chambers to live in.  When we meet her, she was too old to take care of anything but maybe at one time she had served as a caretaker and her living quarters had been given to her for life.  We do know that it was ultimately the Lord who had graciously provided her a place in His house to live.

            Anna was also a woman of prayer.  Luke tells us she served God with fasting and prayers night and day.  It is obvious that Anna was an outstanding woman in the eyes of everyone who knew her.  She lived the simplest kind of life.  She could always be found at the temple.  She was completely devoted to the service and worship of God, mostly through her prayers and fasting.  

            Like every other outstanding woman we have looked at so far, Anna's hopes and dreams were full of messianic expectations.  Her amazing faith stemmed from the fact that she believed all of the promises that filled the OT.  She knew that the OT promised that salvation from sin and the future blessing of Israel depended on the coming of the Messiah.  She took the Word of God seriously.  She knew in her heart that the Messiah was coming.  She had no doubts whatsoever about that and her first and foremost prayer was that it would happen soon. 

            God gave her an answer to those prayers in a very dramatic fashion.  Anna's longing to see the Messiah was suddenly and surprisingly fulfilled on that specific day as she went about her normal routine in the temple.  We mentioned last week in our look at the mother of Jesus, that when Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to be dedicated at the temple, an old priest named Simeon picked Him up and pronounced a prophetic blessing on Him.

            Verse 38 tells us that just when Simeon pronounced that blessing on the infant Jesus, in that instant, Anna came along to hear it.  Herod's temple was a massive building.  The temple complex was huge.  It was surrounded by a courtyard with thousands of people milling around at almost any given time.  We see God's providence at work in the fact that just as Simeon was pronouncing his blessing on Jesus, Anna just happened to walk by.  

            It's possible that Anna knew Simeon before this.  Both of them were very old and it's probable that their paths had crossed at some point while they each ministered at the temple.  She may have known of Simeon's reputation as a righteous man and that his one expectation in life was to see the Messiah with his own eyes before he died. Simeon and Anna are forever linked together because of this short passage in Luke and their encounter with the newborn Messiah.   

            We also see her prophetic giftedness come through in this story.  Suddenly at that moment, everything she had been praying about and fasting for was right there in front of her.  By faith, she knew instantly that Simeon's prophecy was true and that God had answered her prayers.  She immediately began giving thanks to God and all those years of praying then turned into praise. 

            The way this reads in the Greek, it says that she was continually speaking of Him to all who were looking for the Redeemer.  This became the one message for the rest of her life.  She became one of the very first and most enduring witnesses of Christ.

            What became of Anna after this is not recorded for us.  She was undoubtedly in heaven by the time Jesus began His public ministry some 30 years later.  The day of His dedication was probably her one and only glimpse of Him.  But it was enough for her.  She literally could not stop talking about Him. 

            So what can we learn from the life of Anna?  There are actually a number of truths that we could take away from her example that we find in this short passage.  We should all be committed to being teachers of God's Word.  Whether we hold a formal position of teacher or preacher or not, we all communicate something about God and His Word to other people by how we live and what we say.

            We could also learn to be prayer warriors.  Prayer should be a basic life skill that all of us engage regularly in.  Praying for a Christian should be as natural and normal as breathing is to our physical lives.  There shouldn't just be prayer warriors among us; we should all be prayer warriors and other than laziness and sinful disobedience there is no reason for us not to be.

            But what I want to emphasize this morning is that we all need to be faithful.  First of all, we are to be faithful because God is faithful.  Lam. 3:22-23.  His faithfulness to us isn't an on again off again type of thing.  He is always faithful.  He is faithful to our salvation; He will never leave us or forsake us; He will never abandon us or lose us.  He is faithful to Himself and to His Word and His truth.  What He says we can depend on and rely on because it is His Word and He will always remain faithful to it. 

            Because God is faithful to us, we also need to live lives of faithfulness.  This is not an exhaustive list, but there are a number of areas where we need to be faithful.  First of all, we need to be faithful servants.  Matt. 25:21.  This is the parable of the talents that Jesus told.  A master went away and gave three of his servants a certain amount of talents.  The one who received five talents made five more.  The master praised the servant for his faithfulness in how he used the talents he had been given.

            You have been given talents by God.  I don't know what that specifically and personally means for you because it's different for everyone.  But whatever God wants you to do, He has given you the resources and everything you need to do it.  You need to be faithful.  You need to serve and minister and witness and do whatever you can with who you are and what you've been given to glorify God's name and advance His kingdom.  Be a faithful servant.

            Second, we also need to be faithful learners and teachers.  2 Tim. 2:2.  This is Paul's second letter to his young pastor friend Timothy.  Paul is writing to encourage and exhort him in his role as a young pastor.  In this passage, he is telling Timothy to be strong and to pass on what he has learned to others so that they can then faithfully do the same.

            We all learn, or we should all be learning more and more about God all of the time.  If you're not growing, you're dying.  What has God taught you lately?  What has He been saying to you through His Word?  Whatever it is, you have a responsibility to be faithful to pass that learning onto others.  God's plan for growing His church involves multiplication.  We are all a part of that process.  We faithfully learn then faithfully pass it on to others who will then be faithful and continue doing the same.  Be a faithful teacher and learner.

            Lastly, we need to be faithful forgivers.  1 John 1:9.  This verse is specifically talking about God's faithfulness in forgiving us of our sins.  Jesus took care of that on the cross.  Because of His faithfulness, we are forever forgiven of all of the sins we have committed and will ever commit as long as we are alive on this earth.

            Since we are followers and learners of the Lord, we also need to have that kind of forgiveness towards others.  If you are truly saved and born again, you will have a desire in your heart to forgive people.  It's not easy.  It's not a feeling or an emotion.  It is a decision and a commitment.  Sometimes we need to forgive when we don't feel like it and don't want to.  But Jesus was faithful to us and we need to be faithful to Him and sometimes that will involve the hard work of offering forgiveness to someone who has wronged us.  Be a faithful forgiver.

            Anna was faithful to her role in God's kingdom; we need to be faithful as well.  As our singer and musician come now, we invite you to be faithful in all areas of your life.  If there is some decision or profession that you need to make this morning in regards to anything that God is doing in your life, we invite you to come up here and talk to me about it now as we stand and sing.

 

            Prayer.

 

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