21st December, 2006

LLOYD HARKNESS

"I will magnify the Lord,
For He is worthy to be praised."

So goes the somewhat dated chorus whose lyrics, drawn from the Psalms, elicit a realisation that God is God and we are His creation. But the reality of magnifying God should never date despite the fact that using the word in the sense of "glorifying" is now almost archaic.

PICTURE: cstar55 (www.iStockphoto.com) "What was happening to Mary was heart-racing, mind-boggling, eye-popping stuff. God was present in her life and her faith was beginning to grow into her experience of Him. The result is to magnify God."

To magnify God is to see Him through eyes whose pupils have dilated in awe. He is "enlarged" in the sense that we have begun to see Him more clearly.

This is the experience of Mary. Her hymn of joy, traditionally titled The Magnificat, taken from the first word she utters, is a celebratory song extolling God, salvation and life. (Luke 1:46-55)

Her eyes had dilated with Gabriel's visitation and the promise of a Holy Spirit conceived child. Amid the confusion and anxiety such a visitation would have engendered, Mary's faith rose up and she declared: "May it be to me as you have said."

Then, in the loneliness of her situation, some time after the angelic appearance, Mary retreated to the hills seeking out her cousin Elizabeth. Elizabeth's greeting of: "Blessed are you among women and blessed is the child that you will bear! But why am I so favoured that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" struck such a chord in Mary that she declared: "My soul magnifies the Lord".

Mary had no idea how this Immaculate Conception was going to work out nor what price there would be to pay. What Mary knew was that God is good and she was seeing His goodness unfold in her life.

Consequently, her lyrics "magnified" God as her saviour, as mindful of the lowly, as merciful, as satisfying the hungry and as the one who did not forget his promise to Abraham and his descendants.

What was happening to Mary was heart-racing, mind-boggling, eye-popping stuff. God was present in her life and her faith was beginning to grow into her experience of Him. The result is to magnify God.

God is great. God is strong. No human construct of power, of value, of wealth, of significance, of dignity can begin to measure God. It takes a revelation of Him, a personal encounter with him, for our spirits to rise up and magnify him.

To magnify God is to speak out of your heart at that point in time when your pupils have grown wide. It's the freshness of the experience which causes your spirit to overflow.

Paul prayed that Jesus would be magnified in his body (Philippians 1:10). He was asking God to, in some way, use his life to pop open people's eyes with a life-changing revelation of who Jesus is. It's a prayer which is just as relevant for this generation.

May the spirit of this age, whose scales blind, be stripped of its power by God's light flooding and invigorating people's lives.

Then we, like Mary, will declare: "My soul magnifies the Lord".

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