Joseph - The Dilemma Of Interruptions Series

NOTE:

This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.

ENGAGE

Back in 1984 when Mary and I were living in Albuquerque, we came back here to Tucson to visit our families at Thanksgiving. So we weren’t really planning on returning at Christmas. But since my grandmother was in poor health, we decided that this might be the last Christmas that we would get to spend with her so we made the trip again at Christmas.

A little over a week after we returned home to Albuquerque, I got an unexpected phone call at work to tell me that my dad had just had a heart attack at work and died.

In the space of less than a month, God brought a couple of significant interruptions into our lives. The first, which required another trip back to Tucson less than a month after we had just been there, turned out to be a great blessing as we had one more time to spend with my dad. The second, the death of my dad, was certainly much more difficult to deal with. But afterwards, we were so grateful that we had been willing to make time for that first interruption.

TENSION

As I think back to that time now, over 30 years later, I am reminded that God can bring interruptions into our lives at any time. And that seems to be particularly true at Christmas. Most of us have some high expectations at this time of year. We have pictures in our mind of the perfect Christmas. We want it to be, as the song proclaims, “the most wonderful time of the year”. But certainly the first Christmas didn’t live up to that and so maybe we ought to temper our expectations as well.

Last week, we saw that for Mary, the visit of Gabriel represented a huge interruption for her. While she was busy making plans for a wedding and a life together with Joseph, God interrupted her life in a pretty significant way.

This morning, we’re going to see that the same thing happens for Joseph. While he is busy building a home for his bride and his family, his plans are interrupted when he finds out that Mary is pregnant. There is much that we can learn about how to handle interruptions in our lives from seeing how Joseph handled his.

TRUTH

As I mentioned last week, Matthew and Luke give us distinct accounts of the birth of Jesu because they approach it from different perspectives. Last week we began with Luke’s account which is written from Mary’s perspective. This week, we’ll look at the birth of Jesus from Joseph’s perspective, which is found in Matthew’s gospel account.

[Read Matthew 1:18-25]

Before we get into the details of this account, I want to ask you to do the same thing we did with Mary last week and try to put yourself in Joseph’s shoes for a few moments and imagine what this whole situation must have been like for him. Just like we saw with Mary, we don’t know a whole lot about Joseph. In fact we know even less about him than we do about Mary because he doesn’t appear in any of the accounts of Jesus’ life once He begins His ministry. That has led some to speculate that perhaps Joseph had died by that time and that therefore he was probably substantially older than Mary. But, as I said, that is merely speculation.

Knowing what we know about the culture at that time, it’s certainly more likely that Joseph was just a teenager or maybe in his early 20’s. He is identified later in Matthew as a carpenter – the word that is used there describes anyone who worked in the construction of buildings. So he was a blue collar kind of guy there in the little town of Nazareth. As a builder, he likely was a planner who measured twice and cut once as a way of life. If he lived today, he would probably be one of those people who could follow the instructions for assembling any Ikea product and not have parts left over when he was done.

After the betrothal, he had gone back to his father’s house and started to build an addition to that house where he and Mary would live and one day raise a family. And everything was going according to plan until the day he found out Mary was pregnant. Joseph knew the child wasn’t his because he had not been with Mary, a point that both Luke and Matthew are careful to emphasize in their accounts.