Unusual Devotion

Open your Bibles to Luke 2:21ff this morning. That is on page 909 of the pew Bible.

As we enter into that quiet week between Christmas and New Years, let’s look at a couple of often-overlooked characters that Luke mentions in the rest of chapter 2.

Last week, we left off with verse 20, where we had a group of shepherds who had been to see Jesus and were telling everyone about him while they went back to work.

In verses 21-24, we find Mary and Joseph doing all that God commanded these new parents to do. They named him Jesus, just like the angel told them to. Then, about 40 days after he was born, they took him to the temple to obey God’s command.

When God protected the firstborn of Israel on the night of the Passover, he declared that every firstborn son had to be redeemed. That’s what is going on in verses 22-24—they are going through the ritual God prescribed for the redemption of the firstborn.

They are also offering a sacrifice that God required Israel to bring after a woman gave birth.

There is something interesting, though. What did Joseph and Mary bring? Turtledoves or pigeons, right?

That is another indication to us that they were not a wealthy family. The Law actually called for them to offer a sheep, but it had this provision:

Leviticus 12:8 CSB

But if she doesn’t have sufficient means for a sheep, she may take two turtledoves or two young pigeons, one for a burnt offering and the other for a sin offering. Then the priest will make atonement on her behalf, and she will be clean.”

Do you see the layers of beauty and irony in this? The earthly family Jesus was born into didn’t even have enough money to offer a lamb when Mary was purified.

If you know the rest of the story, though, you know the irony here—the baby they brought is the Lamb of God who would one day take away the sin of the world!

As we have seen, he is the King who will one day rule over the entire world.

While they are doing all the things God called them to do, they encounter two rather unusual people: an older gentleman named Simeon, and a really old woman named Anna.

They probably knew each other, but they weren’t together.

However, as we look at their reaction to Jesus, we see that they both modeled an unusual devotion to the unusual king we have been talking about recently.

In fact, this morning, I want to challenge us to have that same level of unusual devotion to our unusual king.

We are going to examine three main components of their lives that demonstrated their devotion. As we do, I want to challenge you to do the same.

Let’s read the passage together, and then we will come back through and make these observations. Start in verses 25-38...

You know what is one of the first things that sticks out to me in these verses? Simeon and Anna’s age.

We don’t know how old Simeon is, but he was waiting on the Messiah before he died, so that implies he is nearing the last years of life.

In verses 36-37, we find that Anna had been married for 7 years and was a widow for 84, so she had to be well over 100 years old at this point!

These incredible people were still faithfully serving the Lord, maintaining holy lives with the expectation that God would keep his promises and with hearts that were responsive to his leading.

How many stories do we hear of people who start out well but end up either falling away or making terrible choices so they end up bitter and alone?

We don’t have many biographical details on either of these people, and maybe they were ungodly people when they were younger.

However, we do know that by this stage of their life, they had chosen to finish well.

In their fourth quarter of life, in light of all the joys and pain of life, Simeon and Anna stayed devoted to their God. May we do the same!

If we are, we need to develop and maintain at least these three components of an unusually devoted life.

First, we must...

1) Stay righteous.

Go back to verse 25 where Simeon is described.

The first word Luke uses to describe him is “righteous”.

“Righteousness” is the idea of justice, of doing the right thing at the right time in the right way for the right motives.

When the Bible describes a person as righteous, he or she is a person who is in a right relationship with God and is “conforming to the standard, will, or character of God.” [1]

In other words, Simeon could be described as a man who did what God commands us to do and avoided what God commands us to avoid, and all of that came from an internal change that made his heart right with God.

If you and I are going to be unusually devoted to this incredible king, we need to strive to live like Simeon—to live a righteous life!

This isn’t a very popular idea because of how it has been abused in the past.

Some of you may have grown up in churches or heard pastors preach, and you felt like all you heard was, “Do this and don’t do that.”

For you, Christianity became about checking the right boxes. It feels smothering to think about righteous living because you felt like you could never live up to those standards and you weren’t sure if you wanted to in the first place.

If that’s all Christianity is about, then your dog must be a pretty good Christian, right? He doesn’t cuss, he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t drink…he checks off all the major boxes!

Listen: Christianity is about more than just checking boxes on a list.

In fact, you and I can’t check off all the boxes because our hearts are stained with sin.

That’s why this baby came! As Simeon said in verse 30, he is the salvation that God had prepared for all the earth!

He was able to do everything God commanded, and when he grew up, he took the punishment for all the times I do what God says I shouldn’t and don’t do what God says I should.

He gave his life to pay for everything I have and will do wrong and offers salvation from sin.

He offers the same to you: He died in your place and rose from the dead to give you life and to break the power of sin in the world he made.

Today, if you have never turned to Christ, you need to surrender and ask him to forgive you and give you life.

You can’t be right by just checking off boxes; you need him to save you.

However, if you and I have been saved, if he has taken my sin and given me his life in its place, then it has to change the way I act.

Jesus has made me righteous before God with his sacrifice, and that cannot change.

If I am righteous before God, though, I should live differently. The way I talk, the way I act, even the way I think and feel should start looking like God’s character.

I should be avoiding certain things, and I should be doing others. I should be growing and living more like God’s nature, his standards, and his will would have me to live.

Simeon lived this way! He lived out the righteousness God had worked in him through the faith he put in the promises God made.

Don’t disregard the “do’s and don’t’s.” Instead, cultivate a devotion to God that the world thinks is unusual because of the way you stay holy.

In case you need some quick lists that describe some of these attitudes and actions to cultivate, jot down these Bible references to look up later:

Romans 12:9-21; Galatians 5:19-26; Ephesians 4:20-31; Colossians 3:12-17

Again, following these lists does not make you a Christian! However, if you are a Christian, you should strive to live with these kinds of attitudes and behaviors.

It can be difficult to keep living according to God’s righteous standards.

Life gets hard, other people seem to disregard God and have it easier than you, and our passion for Christ can wane.

If you and I are going to be like Simeon, though, we must also...

2) Stay hopeful.

In our first week of this series, we mentioned that God had made a number of promises to his people about an unusual king he was going to send.

We saw last week that Jesus’ birth fulfilled many of these promises, and he would fulfill many more throughout his earthly life and ministry.

As we will see next week, there are many still yet to be fulfilled.

However, Simeon and Anna were both looking for God to fulfill these promises.

In fact, as we see in verse 26, God had promised Simeon that he would live to see the promised Messiah.

We don’t know how many years Simeon had been waiting, but we do know that it was such a big deal to him that when God fulfilled the promise, Simeon felt his life was complete and he was ready to go to heaven and be with God.

Anna seems to have a similar story.

She experienced tragedy when she was younger, becoming a widow at a young age and never remarrying.

Instead of becoming bitter, though, at some point, she became devoted and served God day and night in the temple as she fasted and prayed for the nation and its people.

These two individuals lived life with a certain hope that God was going to fulfill his promises.

I don’t want to spend too much time on this topic this week because we are going to look at it more next week.

However, an inescapable part of their devotion to Christ was their unwavering trust that God was going to keep his word.

They lived to see the first coming of this king, and perhaps we will have the privilege of seeing his second.

However, even if we don’t, there are so many promises God has made in his word that we can hold on to.

In fact, Dr. H.L. Willmington listed 41 different promises God has made to believers <<show slide>>

If you want to take a closer look at these, click the “Read More” button in the virtual bulletin. That will take you to a post on our church website that has this list where you can take a closer look.

Notice that God doesn’t promise that everything will be easy and pain-free in this life.

However, he gives us incredible promises about peace in this life and in the life we will enjoy after our physical death.

Next week, we are going to get into more detail about the great promise of Jesus’s return.

For today, though, are you holding onto the promises God has made? Promises to protect you, to give you rest, to guide you with wisdom?

Simeon and Anna’s unusual devotion was based on their certain assurance that God would keep his promises.

Are you wavering in that today?

If you and I are walking in righteousness and certain hope, then we will find it easier to fulfill this last aspect of devotion:

3) Stay responsive.

Read verse 27 with me again.

Simeon’s devotion to God led him to be responsive.

Since he was walking in righteousness, he was thinking about and doing what God said.

He knew the promises God had made, and he was watching for God to fulfill them.

That meant he was in the right place and in the right frame of mind so that God’s Spirit could guide him and he could be one of the first to recognize who Jesus was.

He had been watching and listening for God to keep his word, and that made his heart tender enough for God to guide it.

When you look at Anna’s life, you see that she had devoted herself to being at the temple as much as she could. Like Simeon, she was in the right place at the right time to see God at work.

How about you? Do you live your life with the expectation that God may be doing something around you today?

When you look throughout the Bible, you find that God is always at work around us. He may not choose to use you or I in an outwardly extraordinary way today, but he is always working.

Are you cultivating an awareness and sensitivity to him? This isn’t the same as mindfulness or meditation like so many teach today.

Cultivating an awareness of God means that you and I will study the Bible and learn who he is, we will think about it throughout the day, we will talk to him in prayer about big and small things, and we will ask him to guide our every conversation or action or reaction.

There are lots of days that are normal, and we don’t feel or see something all that incredible.

However, as we serve God in the mundane, in the daily, then we cultivate responsive hearts that allow us to be like Simeon and Anna - responsive and strategically positioned to see God move when he works to do something extraordinary.

I am sure Simeon and Anna were far from perfect people.

They had days of doubt and frustration.

However, they got it right on this day—they displayed an unusual devotion through righteous living, steadfast hope, and responsiveness to God’s leading.

You know who is an even better example of this?

The baby they were talking about.

Jesus, this baby, never sinned. He always did exactly what God commanded him to do.

He lived with certainty that all of God’s promises would be fulfilled, even when that meant his own death on the cross.

As we see throughout the book of John that we have been studying this fall, he was responsive to how the Father was working, even to the point of extending forgiveness while he hung on the cross dying.

Because he was perfectly devoted to the Father’s plan, he was able to defeat death and rise from the grave.

Now, he is our unusual king.

How devoted are you to him?

Endnote

[1] Barclay M. Newman Jr., A Concise Greek-English Dictionary of the New Testament. (Stuttgart, Germany: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft; United Bible Societies, 1993), 46.