Family Tree Series

Title: Family Tree

Text: Matthew 1

Bottom Line: God takes us in our brokenness to show the world how good and powerful He really is.

Intro

Good morning Real Life, Not sure about you but I’m ready for Spring! I walked out the door this morning and was greeted by some brisk air and I thought just a few more weeks! But regardless it’s great to be here with you this morning…

We’ve been in this series called Tension… looking at what it means to be full of grace and truth. How we can live in the tension between. If you missed one of the past 2 weeks, or both, I would encourage you to go download our podcast or check out our website. This series is a great reminder for us because we aren’t naturally build to live full of Grace and Truth. We lean one way or the other. And this series is a good reminder and challenge for us to be full of both.

We’ve been using this RUBBER BAND We’ve been looking at our actions towards others and evaluating are we full of grace and truth? Throughout this series we’ve been looking at this idea that The best expression of love is found in the tension between grace and truth. So far most of what we have looked at has been our interactions with others and our interaction with God. And how we need to approach those relationships with Grace and Truth. And today we are going to look at what it means that God is full of Grace and Truth and how that impacts us today.

Now to get there we are going to have to do some set up work. So it might seem like we aren’t talking about tension. But bare with me and it will all tie together.

How many of you have looked up your genealogy? We are all interested finding that one famous, powerful, or rich person we are related too. But I think there’s a little apprehension too. Because what if we found out we are related to a terrible person. What if there’s a murder or dictator in our linage? What if we came from bad stock.

I’ve tried looking into my genealogy a few times. But it’s not as easy as you’d think. I know my family tree a couple generations back. I have a few native Americans genes and mostly European genes. And no famous people or really bad people in my family tree. All in all, a pretty normal looking family. Which I guess is not a bad thing…

But we all want to come from good stock. We all want that famous person in our lineage. And when talking about our genealogies we are going to highlight those people. This isn’t new to our culture today. In Ancient times they place a huge value on where you came from. Genealogies were a big deal. They were seen almost as your resume. Where you came from and the potential you had. You could leverage your families genealogy to gain credibility. Look at where I came from, check out my stock. And you wanted strong, powerful, rich, and famous people in your genealogy.

And in ancient times to ensure you had a good genealogy they would often follow these two practices. First they would hide the bad people in your family tree. They would just leave them out. That strange uncle. Gone. That great granddad that did horrible things. Don’t bring him up. They would just prefer no one knew about them. And the second thing they did was they would never record a women. This was a very patriarchal culture and women were not held in the same value as men, so they didn’t make into many genealogies.

In Matthew 1 we have Jesus’ genealogy. And his looks drastically different then the rest of the day. He didn’t go out of his way to hide messy people, in fact he included them. And even the good people in his genealogy had some series skeletons in the closet. His genealogy included lots of bad people and it included 5 women. An other interesting thing is 3 of those women weren’t even Jewish. Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth weren't even Jewish.

This is crazy, this is something you would not do. People in Jesus’ day must have thought why would you include THAT person? Do you not know what they’ve done?

When we look at our family tree we are trying to find a good person so that we look better. We might not go to the same extreme today, but we still do this. How many of you as a kid would argue with other kids about how’s dad was stronger, or who’s parents had a better job? We were trying to use our families to make us look better.