The birth story is so familiar, I wondered if reading it would be the ‘same old’ but it wasn’t. It was as if the Lord had something new for me to see in His Word.
It is the idea of treasuring…
But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart (19).
But his mother treasured all these things in her heart (51b).
Twice in this chapter Mary takes the amazing and wonderful events of Jesus’ life and treasures them in her heart.
I found myself drawn into the idea of treasuring the things of God.
To treasure… to honor, to treat with great respect, to keep safe so as not to lose them, to delight and esteem with great value.
By putting them in her heart Mary is pondering them, chewing and ruminating on them. Again she is valuing them but valuing them in a manner that they get folded into her life. These events were not simply ‘things that happened one day.’ She kept them alive by thinking about them, probing them for meaning and significance and holding them in a way that as time goes by their significance is tied to and grows with the new experiences of Jesus she is treasuring.
Recently I read A. W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. In chapter 7 he talks about ‘the continuous gaze of the heart at the Triune God… lifting the mind to ‘behold the Lamb of God,’ and never ceasing that beholding for the rest of our lives.”
This I sense is what Mary did. She never stopped beholding the things her son Jesus did and said and she stored them, as a treasured possession, in the vault of her life.
Oh, to treasure Jesus and the things of Jesus. To be able to recognize His works in the world and to consciously store them so that they give strength and meaning and context to my life. To be able to draw upon them for faith, for substance, for beauty, for wonder and for awe all my life long… such is the wonder of treasuring and pondering the things of Jesus.
May it be so, Lord. May I grow in my treasuring and pondering of Your great works and ways. Through Jesus, I pray. Amen.
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