Watch Now

In the Advent series Expecting, Pastor Tyler Lynde invited us to see worship not as something to get through, but as a doorway into a real encounter with God. Preaching from Mary’s Magnificat, he traced a simple but disruptive pattern: God reveals Himself; we respond with fitting praise; a living relationship grows in the exchange. The message, titled Feel God, wasn’t a call to chase emotion for its own sake. It was an invitation to reverent, sincere worship that engages the whole person—mind, body, and heart—because the God who draws near is not a theory but a presence.

Tyler began with Mary’s song in Luke 1: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” From that crescendo, he rewound the story to show how Mary arrived there. The angel’s greeting—“O favored one, the Lord is with you”—meets her first feeling: fear. It is understandable fear, the kind that trembles when heaven breaks into an ordinary afternoon. Tyler reminded us that Scripture interprets that trembling. For the unbeliever, fear rightly anticipates judgment; for the believer, fear becomes awe and reverence. Hebrews calls this “acceptable worship” because our God is a consuming fire. Tyler pressed this point with pastoral clarity: a healthy fear of God is severely lacking in the church, and where awe is thin, worship becomes something to endure rather than the wonder of being welcomed into God’s presence.

From fear, the story moves to uncertainty. Gabriel announces that Mary will conceive and bear the Son of the Most High, and she asks a good question: “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” God is not threatened by the honest question. The answer is not a lecture but a promise: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” Tyler lingered there, drawing a line back to the cloud of glory that filled the house of God when priests and musicians raised unified praise in 2 Chronicles 5. The same overshadowing presence that once laid ministers low in the temple now lays hold of Mary in Nazareth. What God reveals is not merely information; it is power that transforms.

From that overshadowing comes a miracle both precise and personal. Tyler walked us through why the virgin conception matters: if every human since Adam is born into sin, then a Savior who bears our nature without inheriting our guilt must come from the Holy Spirit’s initiative, not the seed of man. It is the divine workaround promised from the beginning—the seed of the woman who will crush the serpent’s head. God is not only brilliant in His designs; He is kind toward the vessel He chooses. Before He asks anything of Mary, He grounds her identity: favored, seen, accompanied. He is not hunting for a tool; He is caring for a daughter.

As revelation builds, the story widens to community. Elizabeth bursts into Spirit-filled confirmation when Mary arrives, and John leaps in her womb. Tyler called this one of God’s gifts to the uncertain heart: faith gathers witnesses. The Lord stitches community into our formation so that what He speaks in secret is confirmed in fellowship. Nothing is impossible with God is not a slogan but a shared testimony. It is as if God says to Mary, “You are not alone in the impossible. I am doing the unlikely in more places than you can see.”

Mary’s third feeling, then, is faith. “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” There is a place in worship where surrender becomes the most rational act in the world. Trust walks through the open door. Tyler was candid about the cost embedded here. Mary will carry the weight of whispers. She will also carry a Son destined for a cross. Simeon’s prophecy names this cost—“a sword will pierce your own soul also”—and yet does not cancel joy. Real joy does not deny pain; it puts pain within a larger horizon. The manger is aimed at Calvary, and resurrection is God’s final word.

If worship is revelation and response, how do we enter it? Tyler returned to a practical framework the church has been using in Expecting: P.R.I.M.E.—prepare, repent, invest, minister to God, and enter in quickly. Prepare by starting the conversation before you enter the room. Repent by letting the sight of a holy God re-sensitize your heart. Invest by coming ready to give—to encourage, to sing, to carry someone else’s burden in prayer. Minister to God first, remembering He seeks worshipers before He sends workers. And enter in quickly. Tyler’s counsel was disarmingly simple: don’t wait for the third song to feel ready. Let your commute become a runway for praise. Align your attention with the God who is already near.

That alignment reframes how we think about feeling God. Tyler acknowledged the tension some of us feel around emotion. We have learned, for good reason, to distrust hype. But worship that denies feeling is just as misshapen as worship that chases it. Scripture shows God’s own emotional life—love that gives, joy that delights, holy anger at sin, compassion that moves Him to heal. If we bear His image, why be surprised when His presence moves us? The key, he said, is sincerity over performance. God is not looking for show-offs but for true worshipers.

To that end, Tyler named two broad patterns of response that Scripture affirms and the Spirit animates. Some responses are quiet and internal: a deep peace that feels like a shield around the heart, a warmth like liquid sunshine poured into weary places, a stillness that knows He is God. Other responses are expressive and physical: tears of relief, laughter at grace, kneeling, raised hands, shouts of praise, dance, prophetic song. None of these are marks of maturity by themselves; all of them can be holy when they are honest. The posture of the heart guides the posture of the body. Tyler’s point was not to prescribe a template, but to normalize the breadth of biblical response when the living God draws near.

Mary’s Magnificat becomes a blueprint here. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” Her song is thick with anchors for modern worshipers. God looks upon the humble. He scatters the proud and lifts the lowly. His name is holy, and reverence is not optional—it is the soil where real joy grows. His mercy runs from generation to generation. He remembers His covenant and fills the hungry with good things. Tyler urged us to hear these lines as more than poetry. They are a counter-story to our fatigue and performance anxiety. They bar the door against shallow joy. When worship is authentic, a great exchange happens: heaviness yields to hope, anxiety yields to awe, confusion yields to clarity. We do not pretend away pain; we bring it into the presence that reorders our vantage point.

In that light, Tyler returned to the simple arc with which he began: worship is a revelation of who God is, a response that is fitting for such a God, and a relationship that deepens in the exchange. In Mary’s case, the revelation is Immanuel—God with us. The response is faith and joy-filled worship. The relationship becomes unshakeable trust, tested by sorrow and upheld by promise. The same arc holds for us. Whether our response is a whisper of peace or a shout of praise, let it be real.

To make this tangible, Tyler brought the conversation down to our week, not just our Sunday. If we only learn to respond in a crowded room, we risk treating worship as a routine to survive rather than a relationship to enjoy. Start small. Sing in the car. Pray before the meeting. Turn down the noise and sit before God with nothing to prove. The Lord who overshadowed Mary still rests upon ordinary people in ordinary places. He loves to show up and, as Tyler put it, show off—not for spectacle, but for salvation and sanctification.

It matters that Christmas does not end in a manger. The Child Mary carried is the Savior who carried our sin to the cross. He was torn that we might be mended. Tyler closed with the line Lucy Shaw penned, letting poetry carry the weight of the mystery: “Blind in my womb to know my darkness ended, brought to this birth for me to be new-born, and for him to see me mended I must see him torn.” Advent invites us to expect—to expect God’s presence to be more than an idea, His holiness to restore wonder, His mercy to awaken joy. In this season of Expecting, Tyler called us to prime the praise pump and enter in quickly, confident that the God who reveals Himself will meet us with the great exchange. Fear will give way to faith. Uncertainty will be met by presence. And joy—the kind that outlasts the song—will rise again.