Mary- learning character from her heavenly Father

Mary's song in Luke chapter 1 v. 46-55 is well known.

My soul magnifies the LORD
and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour

The entire song looks away from Mary herself, towards God. She praises Him for who He is, highlighting His character.

He has looked with favour on the lowliness of His servant...
holy is His name
His mercy.....His strength....
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.

He helps....He remembers His promises

Taking truth and turning it into a song can be very powerful. As Mary sang, was she reminding herself about the God who she worshipped, the God who had just visited her in the form of an angel to give her a most remarkable job to do? Was her song a way of repeating to herself, and all who heard her, just what this God was like? Mary sang of how the ways of God are so often opposite to the ways of the world- and she must have been thinking that she herself was such an unlikely choice to be the mother of God's Son. She sang of how those who think they have power, and are proud of it,  can be scattered in an instant by her God. We know how soon Herod, one of the most powerful men in Mary's world, would be so threatened by news of Jesus' birth that he would order terrible violence against innocent babies to attempt to keep hold of his power. She sang of the rich being sent away empty and the hungry being filled- echoes of what her son himself would say thirty years later as He stood on a hill in Galilee preaching his Sermon on the Mount.

We have seen that character is formed by the things we believe to be important- and Mary's own character was being formed and strengthened by the God whom she worshipped.

I have quoted James K. A. Smith before, but he bears repeating. He writes about the importance of worship as formational to character:

Christian worship, we should recognize, is essentially a counterformation to those rival liturgies we are often immersed in, cultural practices that covertly capture our loves and longings, miscalibrating them, orienting us to rival versions of the good life. That is why worship is the heart of discipleship. (p. 25)

If the biblical narrative of God's redemption were just information we needed to know, the Lord could have simply given us a book and a whole lot of homework. But since the ascension of Christ, the people of God have been called to gather together as a body around the Word and the Lord's Table, to pray and to sing, to confess and give thanks, to lift up our hearts so that they can be taken up and re-formed by the formative grace of God that is carried in the rites of Christian worship. (p. 106)

Smith, "You are What You Love"

Mary shows us that if we are seeking to cultivate character, it is a good idea to make time to sing- and not to sing about ourselves, but to lift our eyes up to the One who created us in His image and praise Him for who He is. This weekend, as we join together with other believers in worship, let's recognise that what we are part of is a recalibration, a detox from the values of the world that we have been immersed in all week, and a willingness to sing our way into the image of God.