Holly Furtick uses the Annunciation story about Mary to argue that the first foundation for receiving God’s favor is awareness — being ready to receive God in ordinary moments. She contrasts formal spiritual routines with the idea of finding small "pockets" of time (commute, waiting during kids' activities, chores, before sleep) that can be filled with sermons, worship, audiobooks, or prayer using a phone. She warns that without a plan people default to scrolling social feeds, which leaves them spiritually hungry, and closes with encouragement to intentionally use spare moments for spiritual nourishment.
Chapters
So Mary has this massive calling on her life. She is going to be the mother of the Messiah. She's going to raise God. And we know nothing about her prior to this passage of scripture. But as the story unfolds, we find out that she's a girl from Nazareth, she's engaged to be married. The angel comes to her and says greetings. Have you ever thought about all the ways that God spoke to people in the Bible up until this point? It's pretty cool. He spoke through dreams. He spoke to Moses in a burning bush. He spoke through a talking donkey one time. The writing on the wall. And oftentimes God spoke to people in actual out loud audible voices. Where was Mary when the angel came to her? What was she doing? The passage doesn't say. It doesn't say that she was in church or that she was kneeling in prayer or even that she was sleeping and that the angel came to her in a dream. It simply says that the angel came to her and got me wondering if God knew that he could just interrupt any old day in Mary's life that she had such an awareness of God's presence that she was ready to receive from him during her everyday life. The first foundation for Mary's favor is awareness. Are you aware of God's presence in your everyday life? Or is your life so, so loud and so crowded and so back to back to back that God would have to strike lightning to get your attention because you are so busy? If you think that being aware of God's presence means that, well, maybe I just get up at 5am that's wonderful. You should do it. If that's what you think it is great. I think getting up early is awesome. I just can't do it. And yes, I do think that it's important to set aside time to read and to study God's word and to pray and to listen to music. It's essential to my growth and to my strength. But I can't get up early and I live a very full life. And so I told the ladies at Reflect that one of the things that I do is I look for pockets. Look at the person next to you or put it in the chat. What's in your pockets? You may not have an hour of time to spend each day, but I bet you have pockets. Like what do you do during your commute to work? What do you do when you're sitting at your kid's sports practice? What's playing in the background while you're mowing the lawn or doing the laundry? Or what do you do on your lunch break at work? What's the last thing that you do before you fall asleep at night? These are pockets. Mary had space in her life for God. And we live in a day and time where this one little device, I actually have my phone in my pocket. This one little device can enable us to fill the space in our life with sermons and worship music and audiobooks and podcasts. But if you don't have a plan, you just start scrolling and you'll scroll feeds during every extra second that you have in your day. And if you spend your day scrolling, you're gonna end it starving. Starving for encouragement because you were looking in the wrong place. Starving for purpose because you are comparing your calling to someone else's calling, lacking the peace and the joy that are ours for the taking. But we wasted that precious pocket of time that could have been used for God to just whisper a word of encouragement. Fill that little empty space in your life. Hey, thanks for watching. I hope that that encouraged you today. Hopefully make sure that you subscribe so that you don't miss out on other videos like this and I'll see you back here next time.
