Luke 1:34-35,38 NASB
Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” [35] The angel answered and said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and for that reason the holy Child shall be called the Son of God. [38] And Mary said, “Behold, the bondslave of the Lord; may it be done to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.
Song of Solomon 1:9 NASB
“To me, my darling, you are like My mare among the chariots of Pharaoh.
Ephesians 1:22-23 NASB
And He put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him as head over all things to the church, [23] which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.
When Gabriel made his announcement to Mary, it was actually a proposal, and Mary’s response was one of complete surrender, even though she knew clearly what the consequences of this favor would bring. She had no promise from the angel that Joseph would understand, and she knew that the story she would tell to friends, family, and neighbors would mostly be rejected, and that she would be viewed as an immoral person the rest of her life. In light of all that, her response was so Christlike when she referred to herself as the bond slave of the Lord, and in her words “be it done to me according to your word.” Sounds a lot like Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane doesn’t it?
I love that passage in the Song of Solomon because it reminds me so much of Mary’s completely yielded heart. Unlike wild untamed horses, the horses that pulled the chariots of Pharaoh had only one will, and that was the will of their master, and they only had one objective, and that was to carry their master wherever he wanted to go.
This attitude of radical surrender to the will of God, postures us to carry the life of Christ wherever he wants to go, and to give birth to his miraculous purposes again and again. Only the radically yielded heart can steward the very life of Christ in and through them, because the life that Jesus lives is a radical one, in contrast to the spirit of this world.
I added those two verses in Ephesians, because the normal way of looking at that Scripture is to say that the church, as his body, carries The fullness of Jesus, (which is gloriously true) who is in every believer and who fills all; but another way of looking at that Scripture, which is equally correct, is to see that the church is the fullness of Him. In other words, we the church corporately, and individually fulfill his incarnational purposes. We bring fullness to him in that sense; not to say that Jesus is lacking anything, but if he is going to manifest his life incarnationally on the earth, then he needs a body through which to do that, and in that sense we bring fullness to him.
For Jesus to be born, and for the word therefor to be made flesh, there had to be the borrowed body of a virgin Jewish girl, through which the purposes of God could be accomplished. Jesus is our inheritance, but our humanity is also his inheritance, and therefor carrying his fullness, we can also celebrate the fact that every time we say yes to his will, we complete Him, by being the yielded body, one yes at a time, to which he can manifest himself incarnationally on this earth again.