Matthew 1 - Hope For Your Family?

What if God put us in our family line to bring healing to those older than us and hope to those to come?

Matthew 1

Jesus’ family tree was filled with good guys and bad guys and people who were both! He came as a fulfillment of the prophecies of the One who will come to rescue us all.

What is one way you can apply what you’ve read in Matthew 1?
How does God want to work in your life?
How does God want to work through your life?
Share in the comments: what else stood out to you?

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Matthew 1 Video:

Matthew 1 Notes:

What if God put you in your family because he wants to bring healing through you to everyone older than you and all those who come after you?

We don’t get to choose our family of origin, but we can choose how we relate to them and serve them and bring the light of God’s love to them.

Matthew was writing to the Jews that Jesus was the long awaited Messiah! “This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham:” – ‭‭Matthew‬ ‭1‬:‭1‬ ‭NIV

Messiah means the promised one, the anointed one. Often translated into English as “Christ.” So Jesus Christ is a name and a title like King Charles.

The reason Matthew shares a geneology is to reveal how Jesus comes through the people of Israel – the ones blessed and chosen by God to bring a blessing to all nations.

The Jewish people have blessed all nations in so many ways. Matthew first and foremost is pointing out that through the people of Israel, the Messiah was born!

The Jewish people also preserved, protected, and revealed the Creator God to us through their Scriptures in spite of intense hardship, disappointing failures, and awful persecution. With sometimes shocking authenticity the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament tells so many stories of people who connected with God, brought a message from God, and so many who struggled to live up to God’s standard. Often these were the same people – like Abraham and David.

Abraham’s “faith made him right with God” and to whom Jews, Muslims, and Christians point to as a founding father but he also followed his wife’s bad idea and had sex with his wife’s servant in order to continue his family line.

David was “a man after God’s own heart” who became a king who was promised an heir whose Kingdom would never end but he was also a warrior who had killed so many people God would not allow him to build a temple, and he had an affair and had a man killed to cover it up as Matthew reminds us in the geneology by mentioning David was the father of Solomon “whose mother had been Uriah’s wife.”

Jesus’ family tree includes kings, prostitutes, foreigners, immigrants, heroes, and failures. There are infamous people like Tamar who tricked her father in law Judah into sleeping with her (he wasn’t innocent as thought he was sleeping with a prostitute). There were some evil kings, and a man who had hundreds of wives and a harem in Solomon. His family tree includes foreigners and immigrants who were not Jewish like a Canaanite prostitute in Rahab and a Midianite in Ruth.

Jesus came into our messy world through a messy bloodline, yet in the midst of that mess He came as a light to show us the way by teaching with authority, healing the outcast, bringing justice to the oppressed, living a perfect life, dying on a cross, and rising from the dead.

Jesus in Hebrew is Yeshua means “God saves” or “God’s salvation.” Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament the word “yeshua” appears over and over.

God with us, a baby miraculously born of a virgin – fully God in human form.

And now when we follow Him, His Spirit empowers us and enables us to bring more of heaven to earth, light into the darkness, hope and life change into our families and our family tree also filled with heroes and villains – most whom were a little bit of both.

What is one way you can apply what you’ve read in Matthew 1?

How does God want to work in your life?

How does God want to work through your life?

Share in the comments: what else stood out to you?