Devotional: As Blessed as Mary

[I have enjoyed the Morning and Evening devotionals of the late 1800’s Particular Baptist preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, but find them a bit archaic in presentation. So I have re-written them in more modern fashion for modern ears, in some cases even modifying them.

²⁷ As Jesus was saying these things, a woman in the crowd called out, “Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you.” ²⁸ He replied, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.”  (Luke 11:27,28)

It is fondly imagined by some that it must have involved very special privileges to have been the mother of our Lord, because they supposed that she had the benefit of looking into his very heart in a way in which we cannot hope to do. There may be an appearance of plausibility in the supposition, but not much. We do not know that Mary knew more than others; what she did know she did well to lay up in her heart; but she does not appear from anything we read in the Evangelists to have been a better-instructed believer than any other of Christ’s disciples. All that she knew we also may discover.

Do you wonder that we should say so? Here is a text to prove it: “Yahweh confides in those who fear him; he makes his covenant known to them” (Psalm 25:14). Remember the Master’s words, ”I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). So blessedly does this Divine Revealer of secrets tell us his heart, that he keeps back nothing which is profitable to us; his own assurance is, “If it were not so, I would have told you” (John 14:2). Does he not this day show himself to us as he does not to the world? It is even so; and therefore we will not ignorantly cry out, “ Blessed is the mother who gave you birth,” but we will intelligently bless God that, having heard the Word and kept it, we have first of all as true a communion with the Savior as the Virgin had, and in the second place as true an acquaintance with the secrets of his heart as she can be supposed to have obtained. Happy soul to be thus privileged!