Hope For People With A Past Series

The Thrill of Hope #1

Hope for People with a Past

Dr. Marty Baker / December 7, 2025 / Matthew 1

Welcome to Stevens Creek Church. We are so glad that you are here. I want to welcome our campuses: Grovetown, North Augusta, South Campus, Atrium and those of you watching online.

Today, we are starting a brand-new Christmas series called: The Thrill of Hope. Christmas can feel busy and complicated, but at its heart, it’s a season of hope. Our world is weary — and Jesus came right into the middle of it to bring real hope. That’s the heartbeat of this series.

I like to start with something funny.

Did you hear about the little boy who wanted a new bicycle for Christmas?

He told his mama, “I’m gonna write Santa and tell him what I want.” She said, “Go ahead.” But as he thought about it, he changed his mind. He told his mother, “I think I’m gonna write the baby Jesus instead.”

So he sat down and wrote: “Dear Jesus, I have been very good this year. Please bring me a bike.”

He read it and said, “Now… Jesus knows better than that.”

Second try: “Dear Jesus, I’ve been good most of the time…” Nope.

Third try: “Dear Jesus, I could be a good boy… especially if I had a bike.” Still didn’t believe it.

So he went for a walk. Passed a neighbor’s Nativity scene, saw the statue of Mary, looked around… grabbed it and ran home… hid it under his bed. Then, he wrote:

“Dear Jesus, If You ever want to see Your mama again… You better send me that bike.”

I know some of you are making a list and checking it twice. And even with all the stress of the season, Christmas still pulls you back to simpler days.

When I was a kid, we had a family tradition of going to my grandparents’ house on Christmas Day. It was one of the longest trips we’d take all year—a whole two and a half hours.

This was before phones, tablets, or anything to keep you entertained. No streaming, no playlists… just AM radio fading in and out as we drove through every little town between Abbeville and Winnsboro.

But when we finally pulled up, it was worth it every time. My grandparents had nine children — my dad was the oldest — and the youngest was my age. Cousins everywhere, laughter in every room, food on every table… and my granddaddy quietly sat right in the middle of it all.

He was a big man. He was steady. He worked hard in the cotton mill. A lint head. He was a man of faith who taught Sunday School every week in the basement of the Winnsboro Church of God.

As I got older, I became interested in our family history. I asked questions but the answers were vague. After my granddaddy passed, I asked my grandmother about his story. She said, “Your granddaddy got saved after we were married, and his life was never the same.” And that was it.

A couple of years later, someone said, “Uncle John died.” I said, “What? Who’s Uncle John?” I have never heard of him before. It turns out he was my granddaddy’s brother, but nobody ever talked about him. Apparently, he and my granddaddy had a falling out and after that, it was like he never existed.

You know almost every family has something like that. A name we skip. A decision we avoid. A story we’d rather not mention.

And that’s exactly why I love how Matthew begins the Christmas story.

Before the manger… before the angels… before the shepherds… Matthew starts with a long, messy, complicated list of names—a family tree filled with imperfect people. People with a past.

Most of us read Luke’s Christmas story—the manger, the star, shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night.

But Matthew takes a different angle. He wants his readers to see the big picture—that what God was doing through Jesus wasn’t just another event in history. It was the moment that changed history.

And Matthew understands this personally. He was a tax collector—despised by his own people, shut out of the Temple, treated like he didn’t belong anywhere.

But Jesus saw him. Jesus called him by name… and everything changed.

The man nobody wanted ended up with a front-row seat to the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. He wrote the first book of the New Testament.

When Matthew started writing the story of Jesus, he began with the genealogy. In the ancient world, genealogies were reserved for kings. Ordinary people didn’t have them.

So the fact that we even have the family line of a carpenter from Nazareth tells us something — Jesus was no ordinary man. His story carries royal significance.