Happy Birthday Jesus!

 Christmas devotion shared at our LIFE Group Christmas party this year, based on Matthew 1. 

We will focus on the genealogy of Jesus, especially the first 6 verses; and I want to draw out 3 observations for us.

The first is that Jesus is not ashamed of where He came from or His family tree.

Many of us will spend time with our extended family this Christmas. And some of us have extended family who are far away. No matter where they are or how we are connecting with them this Christmas season – in person or virtually, our family can remind us of everything that we love about them, and everything that frustrates us about them. And when we go further back into our family tree, there are probably ancestors that we are so proud of and we talk about them often; and other stories that we would rather bury or dirty laundry that we wish we could wash clean – and I’m not talking about the laundry in the laundry basket..

When we look at Jesus’ family tree documented for us here, we see that there are both characters too. We start strong at the beginning with Matthew pointing out that Jesus is the son of David. David, who is man after God’s own heart and Israel’s best king in the OT, or Abraham – father of faith, and we have Isaac, Jacob, Solomon a wise king, Hezekiah and Josiah who were godly kings…

But yet, there are also unsavory characters and stories even for the best of them. We have evil kings like Ahaz.. Or Solomon who was born out of his father David’s adultery. Or the interesting reference to Judah, son of Jacob – who is hardly the most stellar son that Jacob had, and who committed incest with his daughter in law.

In this genealogy, we see the good and the bad. The names that stir pride and also the names that we would rather sweep under the rug and never be spoken of again. Yet here they are, recorded in Holy Scripture. They were not “conveniently” left out of history books. All of them in the line of Jesus the Messiah. He is not ashamed of where He came from nor His family tree. My encouragement to all of us here is that not even Jesus had the perfect family or pristine pedigree, and we do not have to carry the weight or shame of not having the “picture perfect family”.

The second observation is the idea that God writes straight with crooked lines.

This quote is sometimes attributed to St. Teresa of Avila – “God writes straight with crooked lines”. It is hard to miss that there are only a few women mentioned here in this genealogy. But the fact that they were, is highly significant especially in the patriarchal society during that time.

Tamar married such a wicked man that the Lord put him to death. Then her brother in law did wrong by her by not willing to give her a son, and was also put to death by the Lord. And her father-in-law sent her away back to her family, and then slept with her not knowing that it was her. Being widowed twice, disgraced and betrayed by her family.. Yet she persevered to do what is right, and through her bold righteous act that Perez was born.

And then there is Rahab the prostitute who lived in Jericho when the spies came to check out the city. What was her life like that forced her into prostitution? How might she have felt hearing about a holy God coming to take her city, when her life was reeked with sin. She risked her life to hide the spies, pleaded for salvation and was spared when her city was conquered. And so she lived in the city that she grew up in, amongst the people who attacked it.

And there’s Ruth, the Moabite who did not know God growing up, entered an “unequally yoked marriage” and was widowed at a young age. She stuck by her bitter mother-in-law Naomi, left her people and went to live in a foreign land and amongst a people she did not know. Through Boaz’s kindness and redemption, she got grafted into the line of the Messiah and became King David’s great grandmother.

Last but not least, Bathsheba who was only referred to as Uriah’s wife. She was taken by the king, witness the king plotting her husband’s death to cover up his sin, married her husband’s murderer and endured the death of her child.

They all had different stories, endured much twists and turns in their lives – grief, sorrow, brokenness, sin they committed and wrong done to them. They were viewed as property in their time, foreigners and unworthy to be associated with God’s holy people. Yet through their broken crooked lives, God wrote a straight line to His Son. There is no one too far, no life too broken, no situation too dire; for God to redeem and bring beauty out of ashes. This is the God we worship and who is still at work in our lives and the lives of the people we know today.

The last observation is that our God knows the unknown and lives amongst the lowly.

We have talked about many of the well known names so far. But there are many other names in the genealogy whose names we hardly know and whose stories we do not know about. Yet they are here, their names in the Holy Scriptures, passed down from generation to generation.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve often struggled with the desire to be known, to be heard and seen. I want to matter, invite me to the table, ask me my opinion.. And in today’s social media age, it is easy to satiate that through Facebook or Tik Tok or Snapchat or whatever platform to have our 5 minutes of fame. Look at me, listen to me, because I matter!

But yet through these unknown names by man and history, our Lord came. He knows each one of them by name, and each of them matters to them. And so this is my encouragement to us – that when you ever wonder if you matter, if you are known. Know that the Lord knows you. He sees you and hears you. He has your name written in His name and in His Book of Life. And that is what matters most.

And bringing it back to the birth of Jesus.. Our Lord came quietly to the town of Bethlehem to be born in a lowly manger. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him. Nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him. He lived as a carpenter, gentle and lowly in spirit.  

We have been studying the beatitudes this year. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the ones who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness – so it is my prayer that as we look to the new year, this is the place we will start – celebrating the humble birth of our king, and seeking to be like Him.