Introduction

Today, we're not only talking about a God who is with us, but also a God who redeems us. I want to talk to those who feel helpless and hopeless in life. Maybe you feel that you're at the end of your rope. I believe that God brought you here for a reason, and I'm asking you to step across a line of faith as you listen to why Jesus came. There is hope if you're hopeless and helpless. And you're not alone; most of the world is in that place of emptiness and struggle. That is why Jesus came—so that we might have redemption.

One of the wonderful churches I have pastored was a church that was started around a kitchen table in Beaumont, Texas. There were about ten other people, and me and my wife, and we just sat down and talked about getting a church going. This church grew by leaps and bounds. We kept outgrowing places and having to move into bigger buildings. We finally moved into a converted auto mall and turned it into a worship center. More and more people were coming in and being baptized, so we brought in this small indoor display model swimming pool one night. There were about 30 people who were planning to be baptized. But we realized just before the service that we didn't have a hose! We had a leaky one at home, so I asked other staff members, but no one had a hose! I decided to just go buy one.

As I'm walking out to get the hose, this guy named John stopped me. He said, "I'm glad I caught you, pastor. I need to talk to you." So I try to have this conversation with him where I'm kind of aiming toward my car, and he said, "No, I need to talk in private." "Alright," I said, "let's go into my office." We went to my office and started talking. He said, "I want to know if you're for real. You've been talking in your sermons about grace." I had been talking about how God says to each and every one of us that there is nothing we can do or say to make him not love us. Because of that, God says to his people that we need to have that same attitude toward people who are hopeless and helpless. We need to say to them, "There is nothing you can say or do to make us not love you." We don't have to love the behavior, but we have to love the person. So John was questioning me: Is this really true? I said, "Absolutely, John. It is for real." He said, "Well, let me tell you about what I'm struggling with. I'm struggling with homosexual desires and behavior. I'm in and out of gay relationships. I understand what the Bible says, and I want to do this right—I want to do what God wants me to do—but I'm losing this battle. Several months ago, I tried to go to another church, but when I came clean with my struggles, they told me never to come back again. So I want to know if you're for real." "Absolutely, John. We're for real. Let's talk."

We stayed and talked, and I connected him right there by phone with Exodus International. I also connected him with a small group that ended up embracing him and loving him through life, and it was really cool. Before he left my office, he said, "Now pastor, I want to tell you one more thing." At this point I'm thinking, OK, we're definitely sprinkling tonight. The hose isn't happening. "When I pulled into the parking lot today, I felt like I had to, but I wasn't aiming my car in this direction. I was going to kill myself when I pulled into this parking lot." I know people well enough to ask if they're threatening suicide, "Do you have a plan?" So I asked John if he had a plan for ending his life. He said, "Yes, I did. It was already in motion. I went to the hardware store and bought a garden hose earlier today, and I bought some duct tape. My plan was to drive down this little rural road and tape the hose to my muffler and feed it into my car window." I said, "John, for real, you bought a hose?"

It was so cool, because I got a glimpse of redemption that day. I saw John cross the line of faith and let Christ put his feel on a different path. And I saw God take something that was intended for death—that hose—and use it to fill up something that means life—the baptismal pool. From then on we told that story every time we did baptisms in that church. God is a God who redeems.

You might be here today feeling kind of like that hose. Maybe your life has been spent in the wrong purposes. You've been used to doing things that you know are off the path that God would want you to be on. God says: I want to redeem you. I want to put your feet on the right path. I want to change your purpose in life. I want what was intended for harm to be intended for good. I want to redeem your life. God is all about redemption. The Christmas story begins with the story of redemption.

Today I'm going to walk through Matthew chapter 1 in an interesting way. When we open up the New Testament, many of us kind of gloss over the first 17 verses of Matthew. It's a genealogy, and the names are hard to pronounce. Most of us find it boring. But there's something really exciting about this list, and I'm going to tell you about it.

This list basically comes in three stages, and it represents the three stages of Israel's history. Stage one: God promises great things to Abraham and says that great things are going to come through Abraham. Stage two: People mess it all up royally—and I mean that literally, because stage two is the stage of the kings. Stage three: God's people go into captivity, but this stage ends with Jesus coming as the Redeemer. What you might not know is that these three stages are the stages of our lives! God promises us great things. His grace is poured out on all of us. We mess up royally, because of sin and because of our choices, but then Jesus redeems us. God promises, we mess it up, Jesus redeems.

Some of us are in the second category today. We're messing it up, and we know it. We're empty, hopeless, and helpless, and we need to see why and how Jesus redeems us. Others of us need to understand that this is how God wants the church to operate, that we might love other people into stage three—people who need to be loved past a whole lot of junk.

Matthew chapter 1 says this: "The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham," and then it goes on with these three different lists I've given to you. If you read through to verse 17, you read this: "So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations." Those are the three stages.

God is faithful to all of his promises.

What do we learn from this Christmas list, this list of names? There are five things I want to lay out for you today. The first thing we learn is this: God is faithful to all of his promises, in spite of extreme unfaithfulness on behalf of his people. You and I can never get to a point where we say, "I wonder if God has turned his back on me because of what I've done." The answer is "no," because God is still faithful—in spite of my unfaithfulness—to all of his promises. That's something we can bank on. As we look through this list of people and know their unfaithfulness, it's exciting to see that God maintained his faithfulness to them.

Let's take a broad brush look at some of God's promises. Two thousand years before Jesus was born, God promises a guy named Abraham this: "I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing." A thousand years later, God promises something to King David. He says these words:

The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
on them has light shined ….
For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:2, 6).

These are just three of 7,000 promises in the Bible. The Bible is full of promises not just of who Jesus would be, but promises that apply directly to our own lives. God promises to save you, to deliver you, to rescue you, to provide for you, to heal you. God promises to empower you, to never leave you. All of these promises are poured out on you, and we understand that God is faithful to every one of them. That's what we're told here in Psalm 145: "The Lord is faithful to all his promises." All 7,000 of them. We can take that to the bank.

God's mercy is greater than our sin.

The second thing we learn as we get into this Christmas list is this: God's mercy is greater than our sin. As we go through these lists of names, we see some pretty messed up people living in some pretty messed up situations. In some way or another, I think we all come from dysfunctional homes. Often, we look at the Bible and we have this perspective that the spiritual giants in the stories we read didn't have the struggles we have. They didn't come from the dysfunction that we do. But let's look at some of the names on this list.

Abraham and Sarah have a son, Isaac. Isaac's wife is Rebecca. Isaac and Rebecca start playing their twin boys against each other—each parent favoring one son—similar to how Abraham favored Isaac over Ishmael. Isaac favors Esau; Rebecca favors Jacob. Jacob ends up having a bunch of kids and favors Joseph over the other ten. So there's some really dysfunctional favoritism going on in this family. There is also marital dysfunction and patterns of deceit. Abraham lies about his wife; Isaac lies about his wife; Jacob lies about pretty much everything. Then Jacob has kids who lie to him about their brother, Joseph, saying that he was killed by wild animals, when in fact, they had sold him into slavery. There is major dysfunction in the first list of names.

In the second column, you've got patterns of sexual sin, beginning with this guy named David. David ends up taking another man's wife and impregnating her. Then he takes her husband and puts him on the front lines of battle so that he's killed and David can take the women as his own wife. He thinks he's gotten away with everything, but he's confronted by Nathan the prophet who knows what David has done. David's home is amazingly dysfunctional. He ends up having a son named Amnon, who ends up having sexual interest in his sister, Tamar. Amnon rapes his sister, and David does absolutely nothing about it. Chances are it's because Amnon knows what David had done with Bathsheba. David has another son named Absolom who was seething with anger that David did nothing about Amnon. Absolom kills Amnon himself and runs away and hides from his father. He ends up getting an army together to try and overthrow David's reign. This is a very messed up family.

I list all of these things to show that you're not alone in your helplessness and hopelessness. Here's a list of people who have gone through similar things, and in it all God redeems. God promises great things, we mess it up, and Jesus redeems. That's the way it is. God's mercy is certainly greater than our sin.

Jesus said this when he talked about his purpose in life: "Go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.' For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners" (Matthew 9:13). Jesus didn't come to build a hotel for saints. He came to build a hospital for sinners. That is what the church is supposed to be—a place where sinners come and are redeemed. That's where Jesus' heart was. Our hearts should have the same passion.

When Jesus says that he came not to call the righteous, but sinners, he's basically saying that he's come to call those who own up to the fact that they are sinners. We all are sinners. Scripture says that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. We all have messed up, and we are all in need of his redemption. God's mercy is greater than our sin, no matter how big that sin might be.

God values the overlooked and forgotten.

The third thing we learn from this Christmas list is this: God values the overlooked and the forgotten. You'll notice that there are women included in this list in Matthew. Matthew was writing in a day and age when women were not included in genealogical lists. Not only that, but women weren't allowed to give testimony in court because they didn't have the rights that men have. But in this passage the women were included. There are five women in this list, ending with Mary, the mother of Jesus. What do we make of that?

We see that in Jesus, those barriers that once divided male and female are torn down. Not only women, but Gentiles are included in this account, like Ruth. Ruth is not even Jewish, but she's included. This is revolutionary in Matthew's time, but that's precisely what Christ came to do. God values the overlooked and forgotten. He values women; he values non-Jewish people; he values people with pretty messed up lives. In Galatians 3:28, Paul writes: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." We are all one in him.

Let's take a look at some of the women mentioned here. There's Tamar—not the daughter of David, but the daughter-in-law of Judah, the brother of Joseph, the son of Jacob. Tamar dresses like a prostitute and seduces her father-in-law. This is really very strange. She ends up conceiving a child, and she makes it on the list. All of her skeletons are laid out.

Who else is in the list? Rahab. Rahab was a prostitute when Joshua came in with the children of Israel into the Promised Land to scope out Jericho. They all stayed with Rahab, in the house of a prostitute. Rahab is in the list.

Ruth is mentioned. Now, Ruth was of upstanding moral character, but she was a Moabite. In Scripture, the Moabite people were under a curse because of incest and godlessness. But Ruth left the Moabite gods and started worshiping the one true God. She's in the list.

The fourth women in the list is Uriah's wife. Why is she not called by her name, Bathsheba? Because in God's eyes, she's Uriah's wife. In God's eyes, David invaded another man's bedroom, another man's marriage, and took another man's wife. David may have thought that Bathsheba was his own wife, but she was still Uriah's. This gives us a glimpse of how God sees marriage. If you're divorced and remarried, you may be thinking, Well, what does that mean for me? Thank God there's forgiveness, and thank God he can give us new beginnings. If you're on the other side of it, understand that you don't need to go there. Understand how highly God views marriage.

God values the overlooked and forgotten. Maybe you feel alone, devalued in life, overlooked. God values you. Maybe you feel unforgivable or irredeemable. God's mercy is greater than your sin.

Godliness is not inherited; it's a choice.

The fourth thing we learn from this list of names is this: Godliness is not inherited; it's a choice. In a sense, you can't pass your faith on to your children. Children aren't Christians simply because their parents are. We all have to choose for ourselves. I grew up in a home where my parents had strong faith. They were missionaries in downtown Mexico City. But I ended up walking away. I actually moved into agnosticism. There was a period of my life when I considered myself a Buddhist. I drifted that far before I came back and ultimately surrendered my life to Jesus Christ. My parents' faith gave me a framework for faith, but they couldn't give me the faith itself. I had to choose. You have to choose. Are you still relying on someone else's faith to get you through?

I want to address the parents here. It's so important for you to understand that godly parents don't necessarily produce godly kids. Ultimately we see that each generation has to choose. This is what we see in the list. It's interesting to see how from generation to generation, godlessness creeps in and escalates. David, Solomon, Rehoboam, Abijah, Asah, Jehoshaphat, Johoram, Uzziah—all of these people compromised generation to generation. Then you've got King Ahaz. He's incredibly evil. He sacrifices his own son to a foreign god, Baal. He gives himself over to idolatry. After him comes the generation of Hezekiah, who is an awesome king. He removes all the idol worship from the land and brings the people back to worshiping the one true God. But right after Hezekiah, we have Menasha, who rebuilds the high places of idol worship and gets into witchcraft. Just because you have a godly dad doesn't mean you're going to be godly. Just because you have an awful dad doesn't mean you're going to be awful. We each have to choose.

Now, go to the beginning of the third list. There's a guy named Yeconiah. He is a young king and the last king of Judah before they're taken off into captivity in Babylon. Yoconiah is also called Yehoakim in Scripture, and God makes a promise to him in Jeremiah: "Write this man down as childless, a man who shall not succeed in his days, for none of his offspring shall succeed in sitting on the throne of David and ruling again in Judah (Jeremiah 22:30). None shall sit on David's throne, that is, until King Jesus. Why? Because Jesus breaks every curse. Jesus makes everything new. Jesus can redeem even what is so desperately far from God. Jesus comes on the scene and redeems it all. No matter how far we drift, God can redeem us in Christ. God can turn our lives into something beautiful.

With Jesus, I can have a new beginning.

What is the fifth thing we learn from this Christmas list? That with Jesus I can have a new beginning. I don't have to stay where I am. I can have a fresh start. Looking at this list, we can perhaps identify with a whole lot of things. We can identify with the patters of sexual sin that we see in David's life or the patterns of dysfunction that we see in Abraham and Isaac and Jacob's homes. Perhaps we can identify with the patterns of deception or the patterns of godlessness we see. But those patterns don't have to define us. Wherever we've been, God says: I have come to redeem you. I have come to make all things new.

First Peter says this: "For you know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot" (1 Peter 1:18-19). God's redemption comes through what Jesus did. You might be wondering, How do I get this redemption? How do I get this new beginning? Well, there is nothing you can do to get it, ultimately, other than receiving what God has done for you. It's not based on your goodness; it's based on God's goodness. It's not based on your work; it's based on the work Jesus did on that cross. The Cross where God can ultimately take what was intended for harm—like that hose—and turn it into something that glorifies what is good.

Take a look at this verse in 2 Corinthians: "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come." In Greek there are two words for new. One is neo, which means a new stage or new phase in something. The other word is kaine, which means off the assembly line new, never been used new, virgin new. Guess which word is used here? "If anyone is in Christ, he is a kaine creation." This means that if you have yet to place your faith in Christ, you can be redeemed completely, and the life you are now living does not define the life he takes you into. If you've already crossed that line of faith, this verse means that you are not defined by the mistakes you once made. You are now defined by Jesus' redemption of you. You are defined by the patterns he's having you build now into your life. Ultimately, that is what Christmas is all about: God promises great things, we mess it up royally, and Jesus redeems. Do you have that redemption? Do you have that brand new life in Christ?

Conclusion

I saw a sign once that I love—a lost dog sign. There was a big cash reward for whoever found the lost dog, and a description of the dog. It said, "He's only got three legs, he's blind in the left eye, he's missing a right ear, his tail has been broken off, he was neutered accidentally by a fence—ouch!—he's almost deaf, and he answers by the name 'Lucky.'" That's what redemption is all about! That dog isn't lucky! He's been through a whole lot of mess. But he's lucky because he's got an owner who loves him and wants him back. Do you know that you and I have a God who loves us, is seeking us out, and wants us back?

If you want to come home to him, if you want to give your life over to him, I invite you to cross that line of faith today.

Philip Griffin is the Senior Pastor of the Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin.