Sermon For Young Ladies

Called and Crafted: A Word for Young Women Who Wonder What They Are For

There is a young woman in Luke chapter one who receives a visit she did not ask for, a calling she did not apply for, and a word from God that turned her whole life in a direction she could not have planned. She is probably a teenager. She lives in a small town. She has no platform, no title, no following. And yet the angel Gabriel walks into her ordinary day and says something that changes everything, not just for her, but for the entire world.

Let us read from Luke 1, beginning at verse 26, in the Christian Standard Bible.

"In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man named Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, 'Greetings, favored woman! The Lord is with you.' But she was deeply troubled by this statement, wondering what kind of greeting this could be. Then the angel told her, 'Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Now listen: You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will have no end.' Mary asked the angel, 'How can this be, since I have not been intimate with a man?' The angel replied to her: 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. And consider your relative Elizabeth, even she has conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her who was called childless. For nothing will be impossible with God.' 'I am the Lord's servant,' said Mary. 'May it happen to me as you have said.' Then the angel left her."

Now I want to be honest with you about something. When we read this passage, we can rush past Mary so quickly that we miss what is actually happening here. We are so familiar with the Christmas story that we forget this is a real young woman, standing in a real moment, being asked to carry something genuinely costly and genuinely glorious. So let us slow down and pay attention, because there is something here that speaks directly to every young woman in this room, and honestly to every person who has ever wondered whether God could really use someone like them.

The first thing I want you to notice is how Gabriel addresses Mary. He does not say, "Greetings, future mother." He does not say, "Greetings, obedient girl." He says, "Favored woman. The Lord is with you." The word translated favored here carries the idea of grace freely given. Mary has not earned this. She has not accumulated enough spiritual points to qualify. She is not standing at the front of a line of candidates. She is simply a young woman in Nazareth, and God has chosen to extend grace to her. Her identity in this moment is not built on what she has accomplished. It is built on what God has already decided about her.

That matters enormously. Because one of the most persistent lies that young women hear, from a thousand different directions, is that their value is something they have to earn, perform, or maintain. That they are only as worthy as their grades, their appearance, their achievements, their usefulness to others. And the Bible walks right into that pressure and says, no. The foundation of who you are is not what you produce. It is what God has declared. You are known. You are seen. You are called by grace.

Now, Mary does not just float along in passive acceptance. She asks a real question. "How can this be?" That is not unbelief. That is honest, clear-eyed engagement with a word that does not yet make sense. And Gabriel does not scold her for asking. He answers her. He explains what God is doing. And then he gives her this anchor: "For nothing will be impossible with God."

And here is where Mary does something that is worth sitting with for a moment. She says, "I am the Lord's servant. May it happen to me as you have said." That sentence is one of the most courageous things anyone has ever spoken in Scripture. She is not pretending this is easy. She is not performing enthusiasm she does not feel. She is making a choice, a deliberate, costly, faith-filled choice, to trust God with her life even when she cannot see how it will unfold.

That is what courageous faith looks like. It is not the absence of questions. It is not the absence of fear. It is the decision to say yes to God anyway, because you have come to believe that he is trustworthy.

Now let us hold that alongside what Paul writes in Ephesians 2:10. "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do." The word translated workmanship in the Greek is the word from which we get our word poem. We are God's crafted work. We are not accidents. We are not afterthoughts. We are not raw material waiting to become something. We are already something, already shaped, already placed, already called.

And notice what Paul says God prepared those works. Ahead of time. Before you showed up to this Sunday. Before you knew what your gifts were. Before you figured out what you wanted to do with your life. God was already at work, shaping a path of faithful action that fits who he made you to be.

This does not mean your life is scripted and you have no real choices. Mary had a real choice. She made it. What it means is that you are not scrambling to find significance in a universe that does not care about you. You are a person God has made, placed, and equipped, and he has purposes for you that are worth pursuing.

So what does this mean in practice? It means that the question "What am I for?" is not a question you have to answer alone, and it is not a question whose answer depends entirely on figuring out the right career or the right path before you turn a certain age. It means you can bring that question to God honestly, the way Mary brought her question to Gabriel, and trust that he is not annoyed by it. He is at work in it.

It means that wisdom matters. Mary did not just act impulsively. She listened, she asked, she considered, and then she responded. Wisdom is not the same as having all the answers. Wisdom is the willingness to engage seriously with God's word, to ask real questions, to sit with hard things, and to keep walking in faithfulness even when the full picture is not yet clear.

It means that your calling is not one single dramatic moment. It is a life of faithful agency, of choosing again and again to say, "I am the Lord's servant," in the small decisions and the large ones, in the ordinary days and the surprising ones.

And it means that the gospel is the ground under all of this. Mary needed a Savior. The child she carried was born to be exactly that, for her and for us. Whatever you are carrying today, whatever questions you are holding, whatever you are unsure of about yourself or your future, the gospel says that Jesus came into the world to reconcile you to the God who made you. Your identity is not in question before him. You are loved. You are known. You are called.

So here is the question to carry into this week: Where in your ordinary life is God asking you to say yes? Not a dramatic yes, necessarily. Maybe a quiet one. A faithful one. A courageous one. The kind Mary said in a small town in Galilee, before anyone was watching, before anyone knew what it would mean.

She said yes. And the world was never the same.

May God give each of us, whatever our age, that same grace-rooted, clear-eyed, courageous faith.

Sources Consulted

Bock, Darrell L. Luke 1:1-9:50. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Baker Academic, 1994.

Fee, Gordon D. God's Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul. Hendrickson, 1994.

Green, Joel B. The Gospel of Luke. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Eerdmans, 1997.

Hoehner, Harold W. Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary. Baker Academic, 2002.

Thielman, Frank. Ephesians. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Baker Academic, 2010.