So we turn to God's word this morning and we turn to Matthew.
And it's probably one of those passages where a few of you have
been very honest with me over these past number of years and said
you read that passage and I had absolutely no idea what you were
going to do with it.
Well, let's begin by thinking of what Matthew is about.
Matthew is about the life of Jesus, which is good news for everyone.
And so from this word, that good news goes out to the ends of
the earth.
That's what we know Matthew to do.
And so to help us understand exactly what this first section is,
these first 17 verses, I want you to think about home for a moment.
And I imagine that for every one of us here today or watching,
online, lists of are a big part of our lives.
We make them in one way or another.
Our young people.
You make lists, you make lists about your homework, you make lists
about your timetable, what you need to pack in your bag.
It may not be a written down list, but it's in your mind.
The rest of us make to do lists or shopping lists.
We know what we want from the shop and we have it down so that
we methodically go through not in forgetting anything and also not
picking up things that we really didn't go into the shop for.
Now, if it's only two or three, we'll probably have that list
in our mind.
But one way or another, we have a list.
And our lists tell us a lot about who we are.
Because a shopping list will tell us what our likes and what our
dislikes are.
It'll tell us what we will buy, but it also reveals what we
won't buy to do.
Lists give insights into our priorities and they also tell us
about our passions as we rank the importance of jobs, the more
important ones at the top and possibly the less important ones
closer to the bottom.
Well, one list that I remember well in our house growing up was
my parents Christmas card list.
Now I'm sure there were well over 150 names listed.
And at that time, of course, postage was affordable, so that was
very manageable.
But it communicated to me who our family are, how we're connected.
And there were of course names that were familiar to me because
they were my aunties and uncles and there were names of friends
that I knew just simply being around the area.
But every so often as I'd go down the list, you'd come across
a name that I didn't recognize.
And these names would be either distant relatives in America
or Canada, or they'd be people that my parents had met on a holiday
to speak in the early 1970s, never spoke to each other since,
except for 20 years of exchanging Christmas cards.
And I know there's a certain generation of people that that's
still true for you today.
For us in younger generations speaking to someone on holiday, that's
a big no for us, never mind asking them for their address.
So lists do reveal a lot about us.
And as we begin this morning with a new series in Matthew's Gospel,
we begin with a list.
Now, we can be quick to skip over this list because like my parents
Christmas card list, there's names here that we either do not
know or there's ones that we do.
But this list, known as the Genealogy of Jesus, is a fascinating
look at not only his family line, but at how God worked in human
history and how he used our human history to make ready for the
coming of his one true son.
But before we launch into it this morning, we need to get a bit
of an overview of this book.
The Gospel of Matthew is technically anonymous.
Matthew doesn't tell us that he wrote it.
It's not like an epistle that Paul or Peter would write.
But yet every Greek copy of Matthew bears the heading according
to Matthew.
And so we firmly believe that it was written by Matthew, who is
one of the disciples known as the tax collector.
This is an eyewitness account of a man who comes from a particular
perspective.
Although he was a Jew, he worked in the civil service of the
Roman Empire.
So he has seen both worlds.
He's grown up a Jew, but he benefits from the enemies of the
Jews, the Romans.
And in fact, he might have to undertake certain hard orders from
the Romans against his own people.
So as Matthew writes, he's an eyewitness who understands the Jews
because they are his people, but he also understands the Romans
who, who are his employers.
And very much the culture in which he is drawn into very different
from Jewish culture.
So he's seen both worlds and he does bring a certain perspective
because of that.
Now, Matthew is written for Christians.
It's written for Christian readers who had both Jewish sensibilities
or were former Jews or were sensitive to to the Jews, and also
an interest in the mission that was ongoing by the time it was
written to the Gentile nations.
Now it's believed that it was written for Christians in Syrian
Antioch, which had a sizable Jewish population.
And it was also there, at Syrian Antioch that the first missionaries
to the Gentiles were commissioned in Acts chapter 13.
So it's a very Jewish book in its approach so that they too can
come to understand who Jesus is and the salvation he brings.
But today we read it understanding that in the Jewish
mind there were prophecies to be fulfilled from the Old Testament
and how Matthew presents them to us, demonstrating that Jesus is
the fulfillment of those prophecies.
So Matthew wants to present this to us in a clear but also in
a convincing way.
So it's then no accident or simply a paper filler that he begins
with the family line of Jesus.
Not only would this have been an important thing in ancient tradition
for people to know their lineage, but it helps us understand
how God has been sovereign in his work.
So the focus on Jesus is for one purpose, and that is that the
church would be always looking beyond itself and to the world around
it, knowing God at work, but also knowing that the proclamation
of the Gospel would go far and wide based on the names that we have
here.
And so as Matthew leads us through the accounts of Jesus, he's
actually building the church to a call to action.
Matthew's gospel is about doing something with what we learn.
Not only does he want his readers to understand the gospel
message, and not only does he want them to believe it deeply, but
he wants them to do something with it.
Because at the end of chapter 28, in the closing words of this
gospel, Matthew records the command and the commission of Jesus.
Therefore, go and make disciples, Jesus says, of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of
the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded
you and and surely I am with you always to the very end of the
age.
This gospel wasn't supposed to be for a small focus group or for
the church to hold onto for itself.
It was the message that was to be brought to the nations, just as
the children of Israel.
Abraham's seed had been told to be a blessing to the nations.
And that's where Matthew begins in the lineage of Jesus.
He starts with Great Father Abraham.
Now, we're aware that there were people before Abraham, and we
know that he in fact, was a man beyond the borders that Israel
would inherit.
But Matthew doesn't start with Adam.
He doesn't start with Noah, but he starts with the one whom God
made his covenant of salvation with, because this is what we read
in Genesis 12, 2, 3, as the Lord says to Abraham, I will make
you into a great nation, and I will bless you.
I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you and whoever Curses you, I will
curse.
And all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.
And so, if this covenant promise is to be revealed and.
And fulfilled, then Matthew shows us how, beginning with Abraham
and taking us through the generations, he comes to the Christ.
And so the ultimate blessing that the children of Israel were
to be to the nations around them is so that they would know salvation,
which for us today can only come through Jesus showing us that
the promises from Genesis 12 still have importance for us today
as they point us to their fulfillment in Jesus.
And that's what Matthew's communicating to the people of his
time, that all the promises find their fulfillment in Jesus and
are relevant for them.
So Matthew begins his journey with the patriarchal family of Abraham
and his sons Isaac and Jacob, all through whom the covenant was
confirmed.
And, you know, if you glanced through the list, we'd see names
that we recognize, great names, all of people who did great
things.
We see Boaz, who became the kinsman Redeemer of Ruth.
We see King David, the man after God's own heart.
We see his son Solomon, the wisest man ever to live.
We see Josiah, the young king, who rediscovered the law of God and
led the great religious reforms described in 2nd Kings 22:23.
And then there's Joseph, right at the very end, the humble carpenter
of Nazareth, who took seriously what the angel said to
him and was obedient unto the Lord.
This is what we read of him.
And Jacob, the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom
was born Jesus, who is called the Christ.
He's not left out, he's not insignificant.
He's the humble carpenter because his obedience is marked here
for us.
But his obedience can only be displayed because of Mary's faithfulness
in the task that she had been given to carry and give birth to
the Son of God.
She is here at the end of the list because it is with her that
the prophecies of the Old Testaments, of the Old Testament
prophets are fulfilled.
She's just a young, humble girl, but she takes seriously the
comforting words of the angel and, and does what is unknown to
her and to the outside world what is, or what was culturally a
taboo.
And she gave birth to the Savior.
Now, I think any of us, Boaz, David, Solomon, Joseph, Mary, we'd
be happy to be among this as part of our family list, a list of
those who took seriously the law of God and followed his way.
But when we read the list, there are those in the list who are
more suspect.
Even with Abraham's grandson Jacob, we're Aware of his deceitfulness
and his feelings of how his sin infected his whole family.
And looking at the list, we see names like Rahab, who was a prostitute.
David had a man killed to cover up his sin.
Rehoboam foolishly rejected the advice of the older counselors,
and he contributed to the division of the kingdom.
Manasseh promoted idolatry, occult practices, and violence in
2nd Kings 21, although he did later repent.
And Ammon followed Manasseh's wickedness and was assassinated after
only two years as king.
Jeconiah or Jehoiakim, who reigned as king, that reign was characterized
by evil.
And so these are names that we would perhaps rather weren't in our
family line.
And, you know, Matthew could easily have constructed a genealogy
that made Jesus ancestry look impressive.
Instead, he gives us a family tree full of sinners, failures, morally
compromised people, and people in need of grace.
And the reason for the inclusion of the good and the bad
is given to us in verse 21 of chapter 1, where the angel says she
will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus.
Why?
Because he will save his people from their sins.
You see, from the outset of this gospel, from the outset of the
Gospel message, we are told that each and every one of us is
a person who needs the Savior.
Now, we may consider ourselves to be like Boaz, that we always do
the right thing in what is honest, true and good.
Or perhaps we consider ourselves like Tamar, whose situation
was morally complicated but was trying to do what was right.
Or we think we're like Joseph, quiet and in the background, doing
good and doing what was right.
Because we don't want to think of ourselves as the Manassehs or
the Ammons of this world who rejected God and were evil.
We don't want to be thought of as the Rehoboams or even the Jacobs.
Yet from this list of the good and the bad, we see one message.
And that message bookends this section, because in verse one, we're
told that this is a record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the
son of David, the son of Abraham.
And this is repeated for us in verses 16 and 17.
So three times in the opening of this Gospel, we are told the vital
piece of information that we need.
What is Christ's title?
It's not Pastor.
It's not Rev.
It's not Mr.
It's not sir, but it is Christ.
The word Christ comes from the Greek word Christos, which means
anointed one.
It's the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Mashiach, which gives
us the word Messiah.
Israel was waiting for a deliverer.
They were waiting for the Mashiach.
They were waiting for the Christos, the one who would truly
save them.
And they had waited tirelessly for generations.
And as the generations continued, they became, they began
to give this Savior a name, that being Messiah, the one sent
from God.
And so as Matthew now gives this to us three times in these opening
verses, it's Matthew here who is saying that the Promised One has
arrived.
He is here.
Now sit up, wake up and pay attention.
Matthew is the herald of great news, that there is now a way for
humanity to be saved.
And it is this salvation that we all need.
We need to be assured of this salvation in the midst of our day
to day lives.
You may have trusted in Christ as your Savior.
It might have been months ago, years ago or decades ago, but he
still must have a place in, in your daily life.
Being a Christian is not simply giving yourself a name, nor
is it simply something that happened way back when, but has no
impact on your day today.
Knowing today you have a Savior tells you that all will be
okay.
That through the trials and temptations of life, you have one
who will keep you to the end.
So you need to look to that salvation daily, to sustain you and
to keep you.
Because I don't know how you get through life if you don't.
Jesus is not a badge.
Jesus is not a convenient label that we can brandish and say,
oh, I'm a Christian.
If you're not living for him day and daily, if you're not thinking
of him day and daily, then the question has to be what kind of faith
do you have and who is it in?
We must know this Savior because how can you go through work
life?
How can you go through the hassles of work or the stresses of
business?
If you don't know Jesus daily, how can you cope with what's going
on in home?
You'll be maybe dealing with things in a very quiet way, but they're
upsetting, they're concerning.
How are you going to get through that?
You can only do it because of Jesus.
Never, never, never allow the name of Jesus to simply be a label
or a badge.
And please don't walk around telling people you're a Christian.
If that day you have not thought once of Jesus and, and his
great salvation for you.
But you say, oh, it's too much, it's too much.
No it's not.
How quickly will we talk about our favorite football team or football
player?
How Quickly will we talk about what's in the charts or what's played
on the radio?
How quickly will we talk about what's in the news that is here today
and gone tomorrow?
Yet we refuse to talk about the One who lasts forever.
We're into September.
There's a shift in gear.
We need to be people who are sincere about who Jesus is to us
so that we can live for him today.
That's why near to the end of the Bible, we have the Book of Jude,
that is just verses, no chapter.
And in verses 24, 25, Jude says to him who is able to keep you
from falling and to present you before his glorious presence
without fail and with great joy to the only God our Savior, be
glory, majesty, power and authority through Jesus Christ our
Lord, before all ages now and forevermore.
Amen.
Do you see what Jude says?
He will keep you.
He will keep you from falling, and he will keep you to the end to
present you before his glorious presence.
But that's not going to happen if all you're doing is walking around
saying, I'm a Christian.
There must be true conversion.
There must be a true life lived for the Savior daily so that
we can get through this life, not based on past efforts or our
perceived good works, only in and through the salvation that he
brings.
Salvation is active every day and we must keep living in it because
we are being kept from a multitude of sin.
I wonder, do you realize it?
You see, we're being kept, but it's not of our own doing.
It is of the one whom we have covenanted to in salvation.
So we must daily acknowledge him and the salvation that he gives
us, that keeps us.
But you also need salvation if somewhere in your mind you think
you're good enough.
Because the reality is that none of us are ever good enough.
If you were good enough, then Jesus needn't have come and gone
through the darkness of Calvary, the cross and the grave.
If your goodness could save you, it would.
But it can't.
And so that's why we need a Savior.
And the genealogy of Jesus tells us that each of our lives,
that in each of our lives we have something that we can't solve.
There's a problem that we can never satisfy God's righteous anger
towards our sin because it is he who has provided a way through
Christ.
And so today I can never be good enough to save myself, and neither
can you.
This may be a truth that you don't want to hear, but that doesn't
make it any less true as we Begin Matthew's Gospel and see Jesus
presented to us.
Even in this long list of names, we are assured that he is
enough for all our needs and our greatest need of salvation.
This is why Paul writes what he does in Romans 3, verses 23 to
24.
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are
justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came
by Christ Jesus.
We're told four things in this verse.
In Romans 3, we're told there's a problem.
We've all sinned, every single one of us, myself included.
We have sinned.
That is the problem.
And our failure then, because of sin, is that we fall far short.
We do not rise to God's glory, the standard that he gives us.
We fall short of it, but we have no answer for it because we
can never be good enough.
So it's God's answer that we must obey, which is that we're justified
freely by his grace.
God has done something and he gives it to us freely.
And what this means then?
That we trust in Jesus because it is through him and through him
alone.
You have the good and you have the bad.
In the list of Christ's family telling us that each of us need the
same Saviour that they did and the generations that followed.
I cannot save myself.
I can never be good enough.
I must trust in the Savior, and so must you.
And now that I know that salvation well, I need to keep looking
to him every day, because he is the only one who can keep me.
He's the only one who will keep me to the end.
And so each of us today, the good news for everyone is that we
are to trust in Jesus and to be assured of his great salvation,
because he gave his life so that we could go free.
We need to commit this to heart and memory for each day.
But we need to come in the first instance to Christ for that
salvation.
For there is nothing else that will save us and nothing else that
will take us home to heaven.
Allow God's word to fill your heart, even in a long list of names
that are hard to pronounce because they tell the story of who
our Messiah came to save.
He came to save sinners like them.
And like me and like you.
Trust in Him.
Don't walk away from him and know the complete life that he brings.
Let's pray.
Our Father God.
We have a list of names, people that were known to you, people
who we have no idea of everything of their lives, but yet
they're given to us so that we can learn what it means to why there's
a Savior for we're not good enough.
But Lord, it's not shameful to come to Jesus.
It's not weakness to come to Jesus.
In fact, it's great strength and great trust.
So may we not leave this building thinking that we're simply
okay because of our own merits and our own works.
Maybe not leave here too afraid or too embarrassed.
For the loving, kind and good Savior gave His life so that indeed
we can come to Him.
So whether there's young people here who are not even in their
teenage years, or those who are teens, Those in their 20s, right
through to their 80s, this is a message for us all.
Maybe wake up and pay attention to what this truth is,
for it changes us now forever.
And we ask these things in Jesus name, Amen.