Summary
Borrowed Words: Mary's Magnificat as Scripture-Saturated Speech
The average person speaks roughly 860 million words in a lifetime. Most of those words are ordinary, but a few soar—words that rise from the depths of the soul and almost become poetry. Mary's Magnificat in Luke 1:46–55 is one of those rare utterances. It is praise that lifts off the page, and it teaches us not only what to believe about God but how a believing heart actually speaks.
The first thing Mary's song reveals is Mary herself. "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior." That last word matters. Mary calls God my Savior, which means Mary is a sinner like us, a human being like us, an ordinary person who needs rescue like us. There is nothing inherently special about her. She is chosen by sheer grace to bear the Messiah, and she knows it. Her song then turns outward to the character of God: He shows mercy to those who fear Him, scatters the proud, brings down the powerful, lifts up the lowly, fills the hungry, and sends the rich away empty. The repeated drumbeat is "He has, He has, He has." This is the God who keeps His promise to Abraham (see Genesis 12:1–3)—the promise of land, offspring, and blessing now coming to fruition in the child she carries.
But there is a deeper familiarity to Mary's words than the cadence of Advent. Listen to Hannah in 1 Samuel 2:1–10: "My heart exults in the LORD… there is no Holy One like the LORD… the bows of the mighty are broken… those who were hungry have ceased to hunger." Set Hannah beside Mary and the parallels are unmistakable. Mary's song is, in large measure, Hannah's song. Mary, a young woman steeped in the Scriptures of Israel, reaches for the words of another faithful mother who once received an impossible child from the Lord, and she makes those words her own.
This is the heart of the matter, because Jesus teaches that "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks" Matthew 12:34. The tongue is tied to the heart. James warns that no one can tame this restless evil; from the same mouth come blessing and cursing, and "this ought not to be so" James 3:7–10. Scripture catalogs the failures honestly: evil talk and slander Ephesians 4:29–31, obscene and silly and vulgar speech Ephesians 5:4, lying lips Proverbs 12:22, hasty words Proverbs 29:20, evil spoken against one another James 4:11, and even truth spoken without love Ephesians 4:15. Of these millions of words, far too many fall in those categories.
The good news is that there is a blood-bought word of forgiveness for every sinful word, won at the cross by the Lord Jesus, who died for our sins—including our sins of speech. In Christ, our mouths are not condemned but cleansed, and they can be retrained. That is what Mary models. Her words were heart-words, and her heart had been filled with God's words long before the angel ever appeared. When the moment of greatest joy came, what came out of her was Scripture—Hannah's song, the Psalms, the promise to Abraham—shaped into fresh praise.
May the same be said of us. Of those 860 million words, let many be borrowed words: Scripture-saturated, heart-formed, God-given speech that magnifies the Lord. This is the simple lesson of Words "Natural Words" 12-15-24—that what fills the heart fills the mouth, and a heart filled with God's Word will speak words that soar.
Video citations
- Words "Natural Words" 12-15-24 — Put your open your Bibles, please, with me to the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke. If you're using a Pue edition of Holy Scripture, you're going to find that New Testament page 49. Luke the…